Introduction

‘Oh no, what have I done?’

I’m sure most of us have had that thought crash in on us at some point or other. That moment when the reality sets in and something that previously seemed like a good idea now feels like an enormous mistake. Signing up to the London Marathon; volunteering to serve on kids’ team at a festival; the prawn vindaloo from the cheap curry house round the corner – all great decisions at the time, right?

But when you’re a month away from the start line and you haven’t done any training yet; when you walk through the door to 500 screaming six-year-olds; when you hear that first tummy gurgle, you realise that, perhaps, you hadn’t properly considered all the ramifications of your decision.

My ‘what have I done?’ moment came on Day One as the senior leader of my current church in the small working-class town of Wigston, just south of Leicester. It seemed like a great idea at the time. I’d been assistant pastor for five years at a much bigger evangelical church round the corner. Things had largely gone really well there – I’d been learning how to lead people, how to preach, how to care for people – and I was quite good at it. More than that, I’d been reliably informed that I was ‘called’ to lead a church.

How hard could it be?

I was moving to a church that was both hungry for and ready for change. They needed someone with energy, vision and drive to lead the church into a new season.

Energy? Tick.

Vision? Tick.

Drive? Tick.

Match made in heaven, right?

So my wife, Lou, and I went through the process. We met with the elders and wider leadership team, were interviewed by the whole church and voted on (not as scary as it sounds), and started to meet some of the key players on their own. And everything just felt… great. It felt natural. It felt like God was clearly leading us.

And then we get to Day One. I walked into the church building for the first time as the senior church leader, and it all hit home:

I have no idea what I’m doing.

I don’t know how to lead a church! How can I be spiritually responsible for a group of people I don’t know? How can they be looking to me to lead them, to counsel them, to feed them? I’m twenty-nine! I don’t know nearly enough for this.

Do you know what I did? I found the smallest room in the church building, and I (literally) got on my knees and said something along the lines of, ‘Well, God, I’m here now, so You’d better help me out, because I’m stuffed if You don’t.’

Fast-forward nearly seven years and things, thankfully, are slightly different. It was a good move. Hope Community Church in Wigston is a great church, full of great people. I have a (slightly) better understanding of myself and my role here; of what I can and can’t do; of what I should or shouldn’t be giving my time to. We’re ‘going steady’, as they used to say.

But I’ve made some pretty big mistakes over the last seven years (more on that later). I’ve learned an awful lot about myself, and about what it means to lead a church. And I expect that to continue. I’ve only been in full-time paid ministry for twelve years now – five as assistant pastor and seven as senior leader – I have a lot more growing to do.

And in that sense, there are people much more qualified than I am to write this book. After all, I am relatively new to the game. I don’t have decades of ministry experience to draw on.

Nonetheless, I keep on getting asked by people going into (or thinking about going into) paid Christian ministry questions like:

‘What do I need to be aware of?’

‘What surprised you about going into ministry?’

‘What have you found hard?’

‘What tips would you give me?’

And so, perhaps it is actually helpful that I’m in the early stages of this journey. After all, the things I struggled (and often still struggle) with are not distant memories but recent battles. The mistakes I have made are still fresh. The issues I have faced and the effects of them are, in a sense, hot off the press.

My prayer is that this book will be helpful to people exploring a call into ministry in this season. And as you explore that call, I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into; I want you to know some of the things I wish I’d known before saying ‘Yes!’ to this call. Not because I want you to be put off or to scare you away – far from it! But because to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I want you to be able to start preparing yourself for a life of leadership now, so that when you start in leadership you start further along than I did. And because I want to have an opportunity to tell you how exciting, fulfilling and, well, fun it is to be called to help other people love and serve Jesus.

However, I’m aware that this book may well have a wider reach than merely people weighing a call to leadership. Maybe you have been a church leader for a number of years and are struggling in areas of your leadership. My hope is that this book will help you see that your battles are not unique to you, and help you to reflect on how to face them.

Maybe you are a member of a local church and want to understand what church leadership is really like in order to be able to support your leadership team better. Hopefully, this book will help with that too!

Perhaps you are not a leader in the church at all, but have a leadership responsibility in the ‘real’ world. My prayer is that this book will present some principles and values that will help you lead in whatever context the Lord has placed you.

The danger of a book like this is that it can focus simply on all the negatives of leadership. The reality is that there are many challenges of leading in any context. But what I’ve found is that for every challenge, there are encouragements outweighing them. So I’m going to split this book in half. In the first half, I want to tell you about what I wish I’d known about how much fun church leadership can be – the blessings of church leadership. And in the second half, I’ll move on to explore some of the challenges that I wish I’d known about before taking on the leadership of Hope Church – the battles of church leadership.

So, then… deep breath. Here are ten things I wish I’d known before leading a church.

PART ONE

THE BLESSINGS OF CHURCH LEADERSHIP

1

It’s OK to play cricket

Or, the blessing of getting your priorities straight

‘Matt, I think you probably need to do something fun. When was the last time you played cricket?’

That’s what Kathy said to me over a cup of tea in a local coffee shop. Kathy’s one of the leaders in our church, and we’d decided to have our leaders’ meeting in my favourite coffee house this week. We were taking time to share how we were doing personally, aside from ministry and leadership, and Kathy had picked up that I was run down, tired and possibly a little jaded.

It’s not that anything disastrous had happened. It’s just that it had been a busy season, there had been some tough stuff going on at home, and it was winter. And (someone’s got to say it) the English winter really sucks. It’s cold (but not cold enough to snow), wet and grey for about four months each year. And as those four months slowly trundle on, I find my energy, joy and positivity increasingly sucked out of me.

Kathy’s solution? Play cricket.^[1]

Now, I accept that that’s probably not great advice to a lot of people. But to me, it was a lightbulb moment. I love cricket. I watch it; I listen to the dulcet tones of the cricket radio commentary; I listen to podcasts about it and, growing up, I played it. A lot. For me, playing cricket is one of those times where I am truly happy. I’m doing something I love, with no responsibilities other than running around a field for a few hours with mates and then eating cucumber sandwiches.

Do you have something like that? Something you do – or somewhere you go – that is your ‘happy place’? Maybe it’s curling up with a good book or movie, going for a long walk in nature, or making something with your hands.

The problem is, these things that give us so much joy and happiness are often the first things that get dropped in the busy life of church leadership. You’re working long hours (I read an article recently that suggested a church leader needed to work 114 hours a week, including evenings and weekends, to satisfy the expectations of their congregation!^[2]). You may have family with young kids. You have friendships to keep up, parents to check in on, relationships with siblings to maintain. So doing something ‘just for you’can easily seem like something to do if you get round to it. And often you don’t.

I wonder how many church leaders struggle because their entire life is focused on serving others. And, of course, we are called to a life of service. Jesus calls us to lose our life for Him and the gospel, thereby saving it.^[3] But He also made so much in this world to be enjoyed. Jesus came that we would have life ‘to the full’ (John 10:10). And yes, true life is primarily found in Jesus. But our restored relationship with our Maker transforms how we see everything else.

Imagine, for example, a person who doesn’t follow Jesus. When they experience some of the joys of life – holidays, good food, wine, a gripping story, hugs with friends and family – their enjoyment of these things ends with the thing itself. They enjoy the holiday because the holiday is enjoyable.

The Christian, however, is different. We see all those things not simply as things to be enjoyed in and of themselves, but as good gifts from a creator who loves us. And because of this, our enjoyment of the gift moves past the gift itself and on to the one who gave us the gift – our heavenly Father. Every holiday, every meal with friends, every moment of friendship and intimacy and fun is an opportunity to worship the One who lavishes these good gifts on us for us to enjoy with Him.

Sometimes we can focus so much on the cost of following Jesus that we forget the sheer joy of doing life in relationship with our Maker. I believe it is not an either/or. It’s not ‘spend your life for the gospel’ or ‘enjoy God’s good gifts here on earth’. It’s both. While we will not perfectly enjoy this world until the new creation, we can (and indeed should) enjoy it now.

The question is a question of priority. What comes first in life? What are my priorities?

Priority one – the Lord

I know you’re not supposed to have favourites, but I think Ephesians is my favourite book of the Bible. It’s become incredibly precious to me in so many ways and is simply dripping with gospel truth. It’s one of those letters where you get an insight into Paul’s prayer life, into the things he is praying for the churches he’s writing to.

I don’t know what kind of things you pray for. Often my prayers can be incredibly me-focused. And often my prayers for my church can be quite me-focused – I pray for the ministries I’m involved in, for the needs we have in terms of resourcing, financing, wisdom and all the rest. And these aren’t wrong things to pray for at all. But look at the very first thing Paul prays for the Ephesian church:

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
(Ephesians 1:17)

Woah! That’s a bit different, isn’t it?

It starts off perhaps as expected. I pray that God will ‘give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation …’ Oooh yeah, I like that. That sounds fun, doesn’t it? But to what end? ‘… that you may know him better.’

This is Paul’s number one prayer for the Ephesian church – that they would know God better. And that word ‘know’ isn’t ‘know’ as in know about. I know about King Charles and Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson. But I know my family, my friends and people in my church. It’s an experiential knowledge, a knowledge of relationship, where you just ‘get’ someone.^[4]

This is the kind of knowledge Paul wants us to have of God. Not that we simply know facts about God. Not that we know lots of theological concepts that help us to describe Him, or write essays about Him. But that we would actually, tangibly, know Him.

And just pause for a second. Because isn’t this incredible? Our God – the One who launched the stars into the sky and spoke the cosmos into being – wants you to know Him. He is knowable, not in the sense that we can ever know everything about Him, but in the sense that He reveals himself to us both on a macro level through creation and His Word, and on a micro level in personal encounters.

Your primary calling is to grow in your knowledge of, and love for, God. Relationship with God is not a means to an end. The temptation you will face in church leadership is that you spend time with God in order to have good material for your next sermon (so many times I’ve been having my quiet time in the morning only to realise I was absent-mindedly applying the passage for my congregation, not for me). We get close to Him when we’ve got a difficult meeting or a tricky pastoral situation, maybe. But if that’s the extent of our relationship with God, and we never spend time with Him just for the joy of being with our heavenly Father, then we risk turning God into a divine vending machine we go to when we want something from Him, not the Lover of our souls, the Faithful Friend and our Abba Father. How we rob God of glory, and ourselves of the joy of relationship Him, when we turn time with Him into a means to an end!

Our first priority must be relationship with God.

Priority two – family and friends

I had the privilege in my late teens and early twenties to make several trips to volunteer in a school in Zambia, in Southern Central Africa. These were genuinely life-changing experiences where I got to cut my teeth in terms of doing ministry. But by my third trip, this time with Lou, we noticed something (or rather, Lou did). A number of people out there were struggling in their marriages. In fact, one of the couples we had started to get close to had just decided to move back to the UK, in part because the pressure their ministry commitments were putting on their marriage was too great.

We asked about this with some of the older team working in this school, and the general attitude felt very much like ministry needed to come first, even if marriage suffered as a result. It was seen as a sad but occasionally necessary byproduct of following the call of God.

This has historically been all too common in Christian leadership. How many people have been neglected by their spouse, who would move heaven and earth to make time for a pastoral meeting with a church member, yet they haven’t had a date night in years (or even decades)? How many children have essentially been brought up by one parent because the other one is out every evening, working on the sermon on Saturday and at church multiple times on Sunday?

For a long time, your ‘calling’ was seen as the most important thing in your life. But history tells us that the relational cost of that way of thinking is high. And when I read the Bible, I only ever see Paul elevate the importance of our family relationships. In Ephesians 5, marriage is clearly portrayed as a picture of Christ’s relationship with the Church.^[5] The husband is called to love his Bride like Christ loves the Church, which means doing everything possible to see her flourish and removing each and every obstacle to her flourishing. It is a sad fact that the responsibilities of church leadership can become one of those obstacles to a spouse’s flourishing.

Similarly, a parent is supposed to bring a child up ‘in the training and instruction of the Lord’ (Ephesians 6:4). Crucially, in order to be able to do that well, the parent needs to be present. How many church leaders have invested more spiritually in the life of children attending their church than the ones living in their house?

Of course, not all church leaders are married. Many are unmarried by calling, by choice or by circumstance. There is a danger for unmarried people in church leadership to spend every waking minute ‘doing ministry’ too. After all, they have ‘no family commitments’, right?

Yet the relational cost for the unmarried person in leadership can be just as high. If it is presumed they are able to work longer hours and more days because they are ‘unattached’, then what opportunity is there to build deep and lasting relationships of mutual support, love and trust with friends and family?

Don’t hear me wrong. I’m not saying that family is able to come first every time. No, there is a cost to ministry. There are costs to family life. Evening and weekend work, time away for conferences or visiting mission partners, unavoidable crisis pastoral visits bleeding into family time – the price of these is paid by the families of those in church leadership.

But there are also incredible blessings. I get significant control over my own diary. This means I get to choose what I say yes and no to. I can choose to be around for school drop-offs and sports days, and I can meet a friend during the day because he is a teacher who is free during school holidays.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want to be a church leader whose family pays all the costs of my being in leadership without also taking advantage of all the benefits.

Priority three – your church

There are three main images used of church leaders in the New Testament, which correspond to the three words used for them. You have elder,^[6] which was the Jewish concept used for those on the ruling council. It was a position of rank, responsibility, maturity. Then you have pastor,^[7] or shepherd – one who cares for the wellbeing of the flock; feeding, leading, caring for them. Then you have overseer^[8] – which was the word used of someone managing a household to make sure everything was running smoothly.

Interestingly, these words appear to be used interchangeably. In some cases (for example, 1 Peter 5:1-2^[9]) the Bible uses all three words in the same passage to refer to the same person. In other words, a church leader is to function as elder, pastor and overseer.

And all three of these roles take time. Faithfully executing the office of church leader is a time-consuming task. But more than the amount of time it takes, it takes up a lot of emotional and spiritual energy. It needs to be given space.

There are times where you will have to miss out on family evenings or friendship meet-ups because of a pastoral crisis or leadership meeting. There have been times when I have got home from work and it’s become immediately obvious to Lou that my brain is still stuck on a sermon not yet completed or a pastoral issue unresolved. And sometimes Lou has encouraged me to go back into the office for half an hour to get my brain straight. This is entirely normal, and will vary between contexts, but it is a necessary part of the calling to church leadership. We do not want to treat this calling or office lightly through flakiness or half-heartedness. In Romans 12, as the apostle Paul fleshes out what it means to live a life of worship, he exhorts his readers that if their role is ‘to lead, do it diligently’ (Romans 12:8).

We want to give everything we can to church leadership. But at the same time, we must remember that it is not our top priority.

Priority four – other stuff you love

What do you do for fun?

I love to ask people this question. You get so many different responses. Some people climb mountains, or do woodwork, or go to the cinema, or enjoy knitting or going to the pub with friends. I have one friend whose ideal treat evening is an album on vinyl and a glass of whisky.

Here’s the thing. These things are important. Like, really important.

But so many church leaders do not prioritise them. How are they supposed to find time to play in the local five-a-side league when they’ve got a church membership of 150 whose spiritual health rests entirely on them? As ridiculous as that statement is, it’s often how we feel.

But you are not a vending machine that is constantly available for people.

You are not the fourth emergency service.

You are not a robot.

And you are certainly not the Messiah.

You are a person. An actual human being made in the image of God. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed time off. You are allowed time to yourself. You are (whisper it) allowed time away from your family.

I’m not saying you should neglect your family by going out and playing golf every minute you’re not working. I’m not saying you should make yourself unavailable for meetings each week because you’ve got a monthly subscription to a cinema chain and you need to get your money’s worth.

I’m saying you need something fun. Something that you do for the sheer enjoyment of it. And you need to plan it in. If you don’t, it will be swallowed up with the endless cycle of ‘stuff that needs doing’.

Here’s how it works for me:

I want to play cricket. But cricket is a tricky one, because most forms of cricket take a very long time. So it would be entirely feasible for me to a) work Monday to Friday, including several evenings, b) play cricket all day on Saturday, c) be at church all day Sunday, d) never actually see my family.

This would be prioritising cricket over family.

It would also be possible to prioritise cricket over work, pulling out of meetings to go to training, or play practice matches, or play on a Sunday.

So I’ve joined a midweek team. Once a week, I play an evening match – indoor in winter, outdoor in summer – leaving me free to spend Saturdays with my family. I organise my diary so that those evenings are largely kept free. But where there is an unavoidable conflict (usually a leaders’ meeting once a month), the church meeting takes priority.

I cannot explain to you how much joy it gives me to be able to do play cricket regularly. It’s a little ray of sunshine – something to look forward to each week.

But it would be so easy to deny myself that pleasure. So many church leaders do. Why? What stops us from pursuing some of the things that aren’t ‘spiritual’ yet give us joy? Well, I think it’s because we tend to believe certain key lies.

First, we can believe that God is a slave-driver. He has high standards and we need to live up to those high standards and the high vocation He has called us to – or we are letting Him down. We might not frame it like this, but ask yourself: have you ever found yourself feeling guilty about taking time off? About finishing for the day on time and leaving something undone? Of course you have! But as we look at the life of Jesus, we see Jesus enjoying life. A wedding in Cana with a lot of drink, endless meals with friends, retreats with His disciples. Jesus didn’t seem to have a problem taking time to relax away from His formal ministry. In fact, He viewed these downtimes as opportunities for a different kind of ministry – more informal, more relational. Who’s to say that being part of the local book club or gym isn’t part of God’s calling on your life and an opportunity to build significant relationships with the people you meet there?

Second, we can believe that God isn’t sovereign. Why do we overwork? Because, deep down, we believe that the success of the church is down to us. Therefore, we need to put in ridiculous hours to make sure that things don’t go down the pan. But we’ve forgotten that ‘the Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all’ (Psalm 103:19). In other words, God is on His throne! It’s OK, you can breathe, you can relax – the rise and fall of your church is not entirely on you. After all, it’s not really your church in the first place, is it? Yes, you are a shepherd, but there is a ‘Chief Shepherd’ who is standing guard (1 Peter 5:4). While you’re at the cinema with friends, Jesus is still in charge of His Church.

Third, it is incredibly easy to believe that we are not doing enough. We look at leaders in other local churches – or even at other people in our church – and see that they seem to be working harder than us. Or perhaps we feel an unsaid pressure from the congregation, who are paying our salary, after all, and we’re worried that if we are seen to be enjoying things that are regarded as frivolous we may set tongues wagging.

But the reality is that everyone has a different capacity. We are not responsible for the work–life balance of other people, or for other people’s views on what counts as a legitimate way to spend our time. We are responsible for ourselves. And if we only break from work when we have done ‘enough’, then we will never stop because the work is never truly ‘done’. What we do is not easily quantifiable and is frequently unpredictable. A short meeting with one individual can be as exhausting as a whole-day meeting with another, and a long meeting may be energising, depending on who it is with.

Believing these lies – that God is a slave-driver, that He isn’t sovereign and that you are not doing enough – is a first-rate way to head towards burnout.

The truth is this – leadership, as all of life, is about finding balance. But getting these priorities in order is paramount. God comes first, family and friends second, ministry third, and then it is right to prioritise doing stuff you love.

All that is to say: It’s OK to play cricket.

Questions for reflection

1. How does it make you feel that God cares about you personally, not simply your ministry?

2. What will you do to ensure that you carve out quality time with your family and friends?

3. What do you do for fun? How can you ensure you make time to do those things, while also honouring family and work?

If you’re feeling brave:

4. Ask your close friends or family how well they see these priorities ordered in your life.

^[1] For the cricket-aware among you, you’ll know that cricket isn’t played in the winter (which is one of the reasons winter is the worst season). Kathy didn’t know this when she suggested I played cricket, of course. But it turns out that there was a local ‘indoor’ league which I could play in. So that’s what I did!

^[2] Thom S Rainer, ‘How many hours must a pastor work to satisfy the congregation?’, www.churchanswers.com/blog/how-many-hours-must-a-pastor-work-to-satisfy-the-congregation (accessed 27th February 2026). Thankfully Rainer’s survey was aimed at highlighting unhelpful congregational expectations, rather than suggesting church leaders forego sleeping!

^[3] Mark 8:35.

^[4] The original Greek word is epignōsei, which has to do with a first-hand knowledge, or a knowledge with experience.

^[5] Ephesians 5:21-33.

^[6] Greek: presbuteros (for example, Titus 1:5).

^[7] Greek: poimen (for example, Ephesians 4:11).

^[8] Greek: episkopos (for example, 1 Timothy 3:2).

^[9] ‘To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them – not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve’ (1 Peter 5:1-2, emphasis mine).