Eight Reasons a Pastor Isn't Ready to Lead a Revitalization

Revitalizations stall on the readiness of the pastor long before anyone gets to strategy. Mark Clifton, Mark Hallock and Dan Hurst spend an episode of Revitalize & Replant on that claim, working through a list from Chuck Lawless of eight reasons a pastor is not ready to lead one.

Read it as a self-assessment. Can you:

• hold a vision that runs longer than your patience for it
• look at the church's actual condition and say it out loud
• wait years without reading slowness as failure
• pray more than you plan
• ask for help from people who have already done this
• persist when the early results do not come
• absorb relational pain from people you love
• take a risk you have honestly counted the cost of

Iowa has more replant candidates than it has replanters, and that creates real pressure to say yes to a dying church because somebody has to. Give this an honest hour before you do. Not yet is a legitimate answer, and giving it at 34 is often how a man becomes useful at 44.