Rev. Bill Crawford
speaker
60 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Rev. Bill Crawford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So you have to set a rhythm of life. You know, my rhythm of life right now, and it adapts it from time to time, is that I do work a six day week. I don't really get obsessed about how many hours I'm working. Some weeks it's more, some weeks it's less, but that you have a rhythm of life. I try to be home for dinner as much as I can. Church events tend to happen at night.
And so you have to be aware of that. And so as a pastor, you need to be dialed into, especially if you're a younger pastor with a younger family, you need to be home. You need to be with your wife and your children. in an appropriate manner. And so you need to have frank conversations with your elders about, I want to be at all these meetings, but I also need to be with my family.
Your children do not understand fully what's going on. They don't have a sense of your role. They just know that they miss their dad. And so rhythm of life. So it used to be, I would take a
every friday off and saturday mornings was soccer and then i would come in on saturday afternoon and get ready for worship that's just me that's the way i'm wired but saturday's a a day that i can either take off or show up and but it's a rhythm see it's the same rhythm it's a routine rhythm if i move off a friday then i take a different day off that's fine but so that that rhythm has changed a little bit now because i work almost a 12-hour day on sundays
And so I take kind of Monday morning off. I come in late. If I work late, often it's on a Monday. And so I kind of shift that back. But then it's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off. And then Saturday I work as much as I need to. And that's my rhythm because I like to come in to worship having just finished my last run through with everything. your rhythm may be different.
You may be a five day a week kind of person. Um, I'm adamant about taking a Sabbath and having a day off. And I think it needs to be a routine day off. It gives your congregation the ability to know, leave pastor alone. My phone almost never rings on Friday, uh,
There's a couple people with the superpower who call me on Friday almost every other week, but that's okay because I politely say I'm still off on Fridays and they laugh. And it's not a hostile thing. It's just a rhythm and rhythms change as they need to. But I think that is your moral obligation because pastor, your church needs you there. Small churches in particular need you there a long time.
And so you want to build a rhythm so that you can run the marathon of ministry, not the race of the next year or two. So, again, I've been here 23 years. I think this rhythm has been effective and a very important part of my sustainability in ministry. I think I answered your question maybe a little differently than you expected.
So the EPC has this material called 50 Days of Vitality, and they have another set of materials that are kind of companions to that. I'm blanking out on the name. Church health coordinators can help you find that if your presbytery has one. Almost every presbytery has one. And in that, they talk about the elders praying for your church's ministry or mission through the church.
And at first, that really bugged me. It sounded very manipulative. But that's what in a small church you have to do is, who are your members? Those are your ambassadors to Christ. How are they wired? That's why you got to know everybody. You got to know them personally and How are they wired? What are they capable of?
How do you use that to engage the community instead of trying to pull some kind of program out of thin air and pay for it to happen? It's already there. You just have to discover it. I like that.
Yeah, well, um, I'm not going to demean that because it can be hard and it may have nothing to do with your love for the people, uh, relationships in that congregation and maybe any number of other things. Um, I would encourage you to pray very hard about it. Um,
check your own self check what you can control have you done anything wrong do you need to unwind some things do you need to unpack some past wrongs maybe you've been there a while and you've built yourself into a situation but then you need to really do some self-evaluation am i am i in the right place am i called here
um and if you are in the right place then you need to do whatever it takes um and that's that sounds trite but um you know there there are times where it gets hard and it's often more about you than it is about the circumstance um and so you have to pray through those times i think um
having an accountability partner, having a mentor that you can pick up the phone and call and talk to about what's going on. In my case, I'm very fortunate. I have very good relationships with the eldership and can call them and talk to them.
I have several of them that I'll just go and visit with them and just talk things through, not in a trying to sort out the problem way, but like, this is what I'm struggling with. What do you think about that? And so I think a lot of our struggle is that we tend to be kind of cloistered in our office dreaming about where the church can go, and we're missing what's there.
But again, Brandon, that situational awareness. So again, back to our original conversation, we're closing 100 churches a week in America. Small churches in particular are not paying their bills. They're underpaid, underutilized. Even if they are paid correctly and people love them, there's not enough work. And so they don't feel satisfied that they're even earning what they're getting.
There's all kinds of complexity to those emotions. And I can't answer for all of that. It's a hard season to be a small church pastor. There's no question about it. So it's back to the statement, how do you grow a church? You do the old things, whether they work or not, because you're supposed to do them. You need to pray. Yeah. You need to reflect and meditate on the word.
You need to think about what God's called you to and why. And then you need to assess, are you doing that? And really those are the things you have to do. And sometimes it'll take years to get through it. And maybe you don't, maybe you have to leave that church and that's very painful. And maybe you don't know what the next step is and that's very painful, but
I think if you keep praying and if you keep choosing faithfulness, then that's what really ultimately matters.
Showing 41–60 of 60 · page 3 of 3
← Previous