Throughout much of my time working and worshipping in church and ministry settings, I found a question consistently bouncing around in the back of my head. “Who is pastoring the pastors? Where can the leaders go for support, wisdom, encouragement, and direction?” This question returned to me in countless settings. In churches. In schools. In para-church ministries. I found myself in conversation with burnt out leaders and pastors who were confused and overwhelmed. I encountered people who were seeking to serve God faithfully, but desperately needed space for themselves— to be a whole person who is growing and changing. I’ve worked, ministered, and worshipped with communities that are exhausted by change, weary of conflict, wary about the future, or who are just feeling stuck. The more often I wondered about this question, the more I felt God’s gentle and insistent nudging, and I have discovered in it a deep sense of vocation.
To make a long story short, here I am. Wellspring is a space where I can offer myself as a resource, a conversation partner, and a source of support, whether directly or simply on the pages of this blog. I’m here because I believe that God has more for us— that there is more freedom, more healing, more grace available to us as pastors and leaders than we can begin to know. I’m not here to say we need to work harder at caring for ourselves, or adopt some new and innovative model of pastoring that will magically fill us with energy and enthusiasm and prevent all forms of burnout and fatigue. Quite the opposite, in fact. I want to hold space for the subtle, the sustainable, and the unfinished. I want us to consider that perhaps your own growth, healing, and transformation are not an addendum to your work, but are perhaps at the very core of it. I want to consider together not just what we do, but also how we do it.
In John 4, when Jesus offers living water to the Samaritan woman, she immediately longs deeply for it, while at the same time misunderstanding what exactly Jesus is offering. He says to her: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” We have within each of us a wellspring. Surely this is a mystery that we, like the Samaritan woman before us, are bound to misunderstand. I don’t think this wellspring means that we will never grow weary, never suffer, never find ourselves burned out or depressed or angry. But it does speak to something profound, a deep sustenance that we can never exhaust. There is a small detail that I love in the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. At the end of their conversation, she leaves her water jar at the well.
I don’t purport to be some kind of expert on what it means to live in reliance on this wellspring we are all offered. But I do know from my own life that there are an awful lot of ways that I am continuing to haul my own bucket to the well instead of tapping into it. This living water speaks of thriving. It speaks of sustainability. It speaks to growing in wholeness. I long for that kind of living, that kind of leading. In Revelation 22, we find this beautiful picture:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (v. 1-2)
We do not yet find ourselves in this picture, but it shows us an awful lot about what God wants for us. What I hope for Wellspring is that it provides space— to learn to live in the flow of the living water, to heal beneath the trees on its banks. Not just to survive in our ministries, but to connect deeply to God, to grow in wholeness, and to consider retiring our buckets. That’s what I long for, what I pray for— living water for the healing of our communities, for the transformation of our churches, for the renewal of our world.
Wellspring 