Caring for ministry staffs

Dan Edelen has hit a long-ball with his post on ministering to those who minister. In Dan's experience, ministries with multiple staff members operate under one of two sets of priorities: God first, those being ministered to second, and staff third; or God first, staff second, and those being ministered to third. The first set of priorities, Dan notes, is a formula for burnout:

When you work at a Christian ministry that puts everyone else before staff, you discover that about halfway through your ministry objective timeline the well’s run dry. So much time has been spent pouring the life of the staff into the lives of the people they’re ministering to that in a few months time your staff’s inner lives resemble the Sahara Desert—during a drought. And with a plague of locusts, too.

It's easy to wear out ministers and ministry staff, especially when those doing the ministry sincerely care about the souls they serve. But it's bad economy of soul.

Let’s be honest here. The amount of personal time we devote to interacting with the actual subjects of our ministry may pale compared with the amount of time we spend with other staff. Any wise person leading a ministry realizes that the lives most likely to be changed by the ministry are those who actually work for it. Yes, a ministry that works with the poor may very well touch the lives of the poor to whom they minister, but it’s far more likely that the ministry will forever change the staff that works in that ministry.

That's a good point, and Dan's article is worth reading.