Rebuild the Pastors
Context...
Rebuild the Pastors is a project that is uniting church leaders across Europe to support, encourage and help each other avoid or recover from burn out. The leaders involved in this project have each spent years investing in people and have supported many who have experienced pain caused in the church context. We are united in believing that both the leaders and the people who join churches can experience mistreatment and pain in these communities, despite every effort to grow healthy churches. The project is focused on facilitating support for exhausted leaders and bringing training about the subject of mistreatment and burnout in a church context.
We are passionate to see healing for all who suffer mistreatment and believe this can happen to leaders or congregation members. This is a website that specifically aims to raise the subject and provide information about the need to support pastors and church leaders who have been mistreated. There is some information available on this site as a resource for people who may be struggling in this area and we have events planned in the coming months. You can find articles on our Links page.
It’s a tough world for a pastor today and we want to try and give them a voice as we of course, also continue to support those who have been mistreated, hurt or misunderstood in churches too. We also want to help others who follow Jesus begin to understand the complexity of the leaders' role so that together, we can build churches that have a healthy culture for everyone to flourish.
One of the greatest challenges that churches face is that there is no other organization in the world like it and there is a hugely diverse expectation of the role of pastor held by many and discussed by few.
There are too many hundreds of pastors silently broken down and exhausted by the impossibility of their roles. The demand for healing places such as the ones that we are partnering with here is rising because of the increase of pastors and leaders stress burning out.
A research project in 2005 found that burn out is highest in this nation for dentists and church leaders! Yet church leaders have to remain silent in the face of further accusation, slander and gossip.
We do hope and pray that the blogs that are on this website which have been written by many different individuals, will both encourage and educate those who read them and lead them to a greater understanding and restoration of those who are trying to follow God’s call in helping others know and follow Jesus.