Just read an excellent post from Thom Rainer called “Confessions of an Obese Christian.” It jogged my memory of a health related post I wrote in 2012 about the importance of ministry leaders getting in and staying in shape. In a month full of resolutions that swirl around losing all that egg-nog, Christmas-cupcake, candy-cane-induced food comas, I thought it was timely…
“I don’t run triathalons or marathons. Nor am I a fitness freak. But, as a 47-year-old preacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of my mortality and the ever sagging effects of gravity.
It was early on in my ministry experience that I began to realize that I had better start working out or bad stuff was going to happen to me. Heart attacks, diabetes and strokes happen to preachers too.
It was easy for me to dismiss my out-of-shapeness in ministry because for years I was in excellent shape. In my late teens and early twenties, I was a roofer by trade. The results of 10-12 hour days of manual labor was me being slim, tan and quasi-ripped. In college, I had 8 percent body fat and could hang with the best of them when it came to push ups, sit ups and the like. But then something strange happened. I went into ministry full-time.
My roofing hammer was exchanged for a commentary, my ladder for a desk and my once rigorous manual labor job for a sedintary calling. To add injury to insult, I tore my ACL while dancing to a Michael Jackson video (don’t ask). My injury gave me an excuse to be even less active.
Soon I ballooned from 155 to 223. The closest I came to working out was sprinting to the kitchen and curling a fork full of food to my face. But worse than that, my blood pressure spiked up while my energy shot down. In the middle of the day, I began scheduling what I nicknamed “fat naps” to try to compensate for my lack of energy.
To be honest, I felt guilty ever time I preached on self-control because it was obvious that I wasn’t controlling my own appetites. I coped with stress by eating. I coped with ministry frustrations by eating. I coped with the guilt I felt from eating by eating.
Although I came from a very health conscious family who worked out with weights, ate healthy and took vitamins, I had kind of dismissed all that as “unspiritual.” The body, I reasoned, was temporal. Why would I spend time going through the pain and strain of working it out when I was going to get a new one in heaven someday?
But what I came to realize was that if I didn’t do something really soon, my body was going to be really temporal. If I didn’t do something drastic, I was going to die sooner rather than later.
As 1 Timothy 4:8 reminds us, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” As church leaders, we rightfully focus on the importance of eternal values. But if we don’t stay in basic shape, we may enter into eternity sooner than we think.
So, with all this as a backdrop, here are three reasons for church leaders to get/stay in shape physically:
