Joshua Reich Archives » GProCommission

March 19, 2020

Disappointment in ministry is inevitable but

5 Ways to Handle Disappointment in Ministry

If you are in leadership or ministry long enough, you will have seasons and moments of disappointment. It might be someone you are counseling that walks away and doesn’t want your help. It might be a leader who decides they aren’t on board anymore, and they leave. Some will create division or hurt in your life. Maybe someone is mean to your wife or kids. The list is endless. What do you do in those moments? For many, these moments are when someone leaves for a new job — explaining how God has called them to a church that will […]

February 6, 2020

The True Cost of Ministry

reshared with kind permission from Josh Reich. Picture this, your church just pulled off a big event, and you are sitting in a room evaluating it and deciding if it was a success. The answers are often dependent on how excited you were before the event and during it — the number of people who attended, people who became Christians, or how you experienced the event. Then someone asks, “Do we do this again next year?” Now, if you are smart, you would stop the conversation at this point. Churches are notorious for throwing money after things they’ve done before […]

October 17, 2019

Healthy Church Systems

Many leaders and couples get into church planting or leading in a church because we care about people and want to see their lives changed; marriages healed, past hurts redeemed, addictions broken. This is why we labor, pray, vision cast, have meetings, preach sermons and sacrifice like we do. But how does that happen? The work of the Holy Spirit is one, but the other part of that is through relationships and systems. God is a God of systems and relationships. We see in Genesis 1 both of these. God creates man and woman in His image, and we see […]

May 21, 2019

The Weight & Joy of Being a Pastor: Loneliness

reshared with kind permission from Joshua Reich. If you talk to any pastor or his wife and ask them about friends, more than likely you will get a sad, longing look. Many pastors and their wives are lonely. They have been betrayed, hurt, and left out. As I’ve been sharing the weights and joys (Preaching God’s word every week, You can’t change people, God’s call on your life, Seeing life change, People under you are counting on you, God using you, What God thinks of you and Communicating God’s word) of being a pastor, the loneliness a pastor and his wife experience can be unique to this […]

April 16, 2019

How to Grow as a Leader as Your Church Grows

There has been a lot written about church growth barriers, what they are, how to break them and get past them. The reality, though, is a church will only grow as much as the leader grows. Every church experiences barriers at different points, but they are usually around the same size: 60, 100, 200, 400, 800, etc. While barriers can happen at other times, these are usually the ones discussed. I was talking to someone the other day about how things change at different times in a church, and it got me thinking about the barriers and what changes at […]

February 7, 2019

How to Recover from Preaching

Sharing with kind permission from Josh Reich. If I got to rank what I love about my job, preaching would be in the top two. I love the prep, working through a passage, a series, thinking through how to best present an idea, and praying about those who will be there, that God would work in their lives and draw them to Himself through my meager attempts at presenting His Word. There is a downside to this love. It is what happens after preaching. The recovery. I remember when Katie and I met with a doctor to talk about how […]

November 15, 2018

When Someone Doesn’t Pull Their Weight

Post reshared with kind permission from Josh Reich. One of the realities of leadership and relationships is that someone will always do more work than the other person. When you are the person who is taken advantage of it can be hurtful. When you are the person who is taking advantage, it doesn’t feel as bad. For many, this can be devastating in a relationship or job. The closer a person is to us, the more hurtful it is. As I preached through the book of Nehemiah this year, I was struck by a verse in chapter 3. Verse 5 says: The nobles, […]

July 24, 2018

The Sins of a Pastor || Your Bible is for More than Sermon Prep

Guest Post by Pastor Joshua Reich, reshared with kind permission. Pastors, like any person sin. While this may be surprising for some people as they put their pastors and their wife on a pedestal, it is true. Because of the nature of being a pastor and the life they live, their sins are often not obvious and ones that no one will ever know about. In fact, some of the most hurtful and dangerous sins are ones that a church and elders can unknowingly encourage. These sins are not in any particular order, just the order I wrote them in. This […]

May 29, 2018

21 Skills of Great Preachers

Reposting with kind permission of Josh Reich. After listening to preachers of many different denominations and having been a preacher for over sixty years, I find the following observations by Keith Drury to be particularly cogent. According to him, these are the twenty-one skills of great preachers: The one thing most of us would rather do than preach is hear another great preacher. I mean a “Great” preacher. I’ve learned plenty from hearing the best preachers, especially in a live setting. For most of my life, when sitting under a great preacher, I’ve taken dual sets of notes, including content […]