Jimmy Dodd was a pastor for 20 years and is the Founder and CEO of PastorServe, which provides encouragement and guidance for pastors across the world. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary, as well as the author of Survive or Thrive: 6 Relationships Every Pastor Needs and Pastors Are People Too: What They Won’t Tell You but You Need to Know. Jimmy and his wife Sally have five children, one daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.
Key Questions
-If pastors who are listening have become self-aware about their need for “soul care,” what should their next step be?
-How do pastors go about creating healthy boundaries in different areas of life?
-What have you seen to be the biggest challenges pastors are facing?
-What does healthy pastoral restoration look like, and is the church more open to that today than it has been in the past?
Key Quotes
“Here’s a person, and they’re very gifted and they’re well-spoken and they’re well-dressed and they’re funny and all of these things, and we [think] they must be really, really mature, and there must be character and I bet they have a great marriage and they’re generous…and you know what, you saw them for a small time on the front stage and you made massive assumptions about their backstage.”
“I came to a point where I was just emotionally, spiritually, physically exhausted.”
“One of the major signs of ‘the gap,’ is there is lots of isolation in [pastors’] lives…they’ve got to have friends in their lives that they can speak with in a way that is very honest and direct.”
“Extreme isolation is a recipe for disaster for every pastor.”
“If you share your secrets with even just one person, the amount of the weight that is just released is staggering….there is a risk in that, but we have to take that risk because we were created to have relationships, and we have to fight for those.”
“We have to take time to actually confess the sin behind the sin, and that would just one practice that for me has been life-changing.”
“It is so rare to just be still and to contemplate…but I think it’s just unbelievably important that our souls have that time to just listen because I believe that God is speaking.”
“If you have these gifts and there’s this big, big opportunity, that does not always mean that God wants you to meet that need because that’s not the way that Jesus lived.”
