Anne Marie Miller

Category: Church

Beating Burnout Interview #1 with Dr. Thom Rainer – Beginnings of Burnout

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dr. Thom Rainer, President of LifeWay Resources, and discuss burnout.

Before heading into the interview, I never met Dr. Rainer. And I painted an image in my mind of a very Type-A, CEO, workaholic type guy. Why did I want to talk to him about burnout?

He leads thousands of employees…surely he must be on the brink of burnout himself.

But, I knew that for over the last year, I consistently saw him share information and write on staying healthy in church ministry – paid or not. Just being in church. The duality between my assumptions of him and the things I knew he shared intrigued me.

Well, color me embarrassed. The adage about assuming was true for me. Dr. Rainer was kind, vulnerable (as you will see from the videos this week), and his heart for pastors and the church just emanates from him. What was one interview turned into five. His wisdom and compassion is just so good, and so needed.

This is the first of five videos I’ll share with you this week.

We talk about the beginnings of burnout, how someone intervened for him when he could have gone down that road, and the big question: how do you approach someone you think is burning out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8mmnZpJLkI

I hope he insight adds a little encouragement into your life today!

You can find resources on burnout on my website, including Beating Burnout: A 30-Day Guide to Hope and Health that released last week.

It found a home at the #1 spot in devotionals on Amazon for a few days, and I’m so grateful to those of you who believe in the book, its message, and want to get healthy! If you want to get it on Amazon, just email me the receipt and I’ll send you the free audio book!

Hope and Health,

Anne

February 10, 2014
Are You Easily Distracted Like Me? (Quick, Check Twitter One More Time Before Reading This. I Probably Am).

Tim and I live in an apartment in Historic Franklin, Tennessee.

If I had to guess, there are probably 300 units in our development. 600 people, give or take. When I pull in to the driveway, I pass a few buildings. When I take our puppy on walks, I pass even more. Each apartment (or townhouse) is built exactly the same.

Same windows.

Same curtains.

Same sliding glass door.

Because of the way the living room is laid out, everyone’s TVs is cornered in between a wall and the patio door.

Rectangles glow out of living room after living room after living room. Grids of LEDs and plasmas and flickering pixels illuminate every unit, including my own.*

(*under the glow of twinkle lights on the patio, of course.)

There are two people in my house. Six apple products. One TV.

Screens, screens, screens.

How long have TVs been around? Sixty years? Seventy? Smart phones. Six? Seven?

In between episodes of Friday Night Lights (yes, I’m bringing that back up again), my eyes go from the big screen in the corner to the little screen on the ottoman. They move from Coach Taylor to Candy Crush.

Our puppy whines. Even she knows a screen subtracts from the attention we give her. When I pick up my phone, she whimpers. Every. Time.

***

I had the flu, or pneumonia, or both, for three weeks this month. I am still fighting off lingering symptoms of fatigue and aches and coughing. For one of those three weeks, I was too tired or medicated to look at any screen.

My mind raced and crossed the finish line in rural America. Rural churches. Churches in the places like where I grew up in west Texas; where it’s so remote you hit SCAN on the radio and it doesn’t stop because there are no stations. Where, if you have a cell phone now, it bounces between an American and a Mexican carrier. I think of rural churches I’ve heard of in Ohio.

Or I think of my friend who pastors a small church in South Dakota. No time for Facebook. Her days are full of funerals and hospital visits.

And I wonder…

Is distraction one of Satan’s biggest tools?

Are these screens we use to relax and to communicate pulling us away from doing the hard work of reaching out, flesh to flesh, to people who haven’t even heard of the saving grace of Jesus?

I realize there are always distractions; if it’s not a screen it’s something else. But night after night these glowing grids of screens haunt me with their soft light.

***

It’s a long story with a lot of complexities, far too long to type here (maybe I’ll tell you over coffee one day?), but my dad is in one of these rural towns. It’s in between two state highways in the barren flat land of the west Texas plains. You’d pass through it on Dry Hollow Road, if that paints any picture for you.

Population? 200 or so. Murders in the last three years? Two, including the original pastor of the church where my dad presently shepherds.

20 people or so attend his church on Sundays, maybe five to ten youth and a smattering of children. People hunger: physically and spiritually. Build it and they will come? In his case, feed them and they will come.

Honestly? It’s difficult for me to see multi-million dollar building campaigns for churches in middle-class suburbia. But I get it. I sometimes go to one of these churches and almost have panic attacks because it’s so crowded. They need more space. They really do.

But then I look at my dad’s church. It needs air conditioning so people don’t have heat strokes in service in the middle of a dry Texas summer. It needs the cracked wall fixed so insects/rodents/snakes/rain/freak snow storms don’t come in.

These are all needs – I don’t want to present it otherwise.

But some needs go forgotten.

Some needs are lost each time I log in to Twitter.

My eyes get turned back on me when I find my triggers of insecurity and envy after checking Instagram.

I get so mesmerized by my screens, by not getting the things I think I deserve, by my misplaced identity that I can’t see anyone else.

I’m distracted. And I think it’s hurting me.

But more importantly, I think it’s hurting the world.

February 4, 2014
Do You Feel Tired? Do You Need Some Joy? Maybe This Will Help.
I was shocked by her reply.

“I’m beyond burned out. I’m apathetic. I don’t even care if I can get healthy anymore.”

I’ve researched and studied about church health since 2007. I’m still requested to speak about staying healthy when you’re in the church. It should be easy: the church is the safest place in the world, right?

But when I step off a stage and talk to people, I’m learning that more and more people are going through the motions.

They’ve lost joy, they’re afraid, they’re tired, they’re sick. And it breaks my heart more than ever.

As much as I talk about staying healthy, I often find myself walking the fine line between being balanced, consistent and falling off a cliff into a hole of apathy myself.

When the holidays approached last year, my anxiety skyrocketed. I tripled my anxiety medicine. I went on a strict diet. I did all the right things just so I wouldn’t have a breakdown. Lots of time with God. Lots of time with others. And I survived.

In that season, I felt compelled to write a devotional. Something short but deep. Something based on scripture and the grace that we don’t need to DO anything for God. Practical application of what the Bible says about our health: spiritual, relational, emotional and physical.

What does the Word say about rest? About prayer? What is one teeny, tiny thing we can do each day to help us focus and return to a healthy path?

Beating Burnout: A 30-Day Guide to Hope and Health is what resulted. Mostly written in our car as we drove from Tennessee to Texas, Texas to Iowa, Iowa to Tennessee over Christmas and New Years.

It was written in real-time. The day I struggled with anger and apathy, I dug into Scripture and wrote what I felt God pressing into my heart about anger and apathy.

Today, this book officially releases. It’s my very first self-published attempt. (Side note: Self publishing is not for the faint of heart. Thank you to those who carried me through the last month when I wanted to give up seventeen times.)

But here’s what this book is:
- It’s 30 days of short reflections on all aspects of your health and a focused prayer time each week.
- It’s founded fully in scripture, and I believe that spending time in the Bible each day can only strengthen our relationship with God.
- It’s my heart to see those who have been hurt or who are hurting for and by the church healed and full of joy.
You can buy the book three ways:
- For $4.99, you get all the eBook formats: Kindle, Nook, PDF, iBook…PLUS you get the book FREE on audio. I read all the chapters so you can listen to each one for 30 days if you’d rather listen than read. This is an immediate download after you pay.
- For $7.99, you get a paperback copy (which will ship in a couple of weeks) and an immediate download of the free audio book.
- Or, for $9.99, you get all the above: the paperback in a few weeks, and instant access to the eBooks and the audio book.
All of the proceeds from the book directly go to support Tim’s and my ministry efforts of speaking, writing, and storytelling.

Thanks for letting me share this with you. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back. If you love it, I hope you’ll share it with anyone you know who could maybe use a little joy and rest.

(A special thanks to Tim Miller, Lindsey Hartz, Justin Paschal, Rebecca Cooper and Alex Moore for the time you poured into this with me!)
February 4, 2014
When Joy is Hard to Come By
I’m a little late in the game (no pun intended).

My husband and I just started watching Friday Night Lights. For the longest time, I refused to lay eyes on the show. I grew up in West Texas, and the Odessa Permian Panthers (the Dillon Panthers in the show) were probably our biggest rival. My sophomore year, at a basketball game, as I was going up for a lay up, a very fast Panther power forward threw her arm into my back and slammed me into a cinderblock wall which messed my knee up badly enough I had to go to physical therapy for a year and couldn’t play basketball competitively anymore. Not watching Friday Night Lights was my boycott, my personal commitment to not give anything Panther related a second of my time.

But then we started. And you guys, if you haven’t watched Friday Night Lights and you have Amazon Prime or Netflix, just go. Take a six-week leave of absence and dive in.

Enough of that.

(But really, go watch it).

Last night, one of the characters (the QB1, or starting quarter back), Matt, had a really bad day. I won’t go into it all, but everything that could possibly go wrong, did. I think we’ve all had days like that. You maybe don’t feel the best, you get the phone call that something bad has happened, you don’t get any sleep, you were so late for church you ended up staying home, you drop everything on the floor, you lose your keys, a friend isn’t responding to you, your dog is sick, you feel like you’re a fake at your work, you take it all out on your spouse with angry crossed arms and irrational accusations.

If that isn’t you, I can assure you that the things I just described happened to me in the last three days.

Please don’t hear that as a pity party. I had my pity party. I’m okay.

But you are not alone when you’re so stressed, you want to change your name and move to Malaysia.

My mini-crises ended up with my husband loving me so beyond what I deserved, that my façade of toughness and meanness broke. Tears spilled out with words of my perceived truth. And I use the phrase “my perceived truth” because once I actually spoke my fears, my hurts, and what the voices in my head were telling me, I started to see them as the lies they were. And if I didn’t see something as a lie, Tim was there to gently direct me back to find truth again.

I was lucky. I haven’t had someone with me every time I’ve found myself so far away from joy, but in the last few years, I’ve learned something about when this happens.
- Don’t ever drink more than a couple of glasses of wine
- Talk to someone anyway
The death of a brilliant actor looms over us all, a life cut too short by an addiction to something that brings a deep sense of peace. That’s why we escape. When we look in our faces and minds and spirits and hearts and we’re far away from the God who loves us and His truth, when the pain feels like a red-hot black hole inside our chest, we want to escape it. Some do it with needles, others run into the arms of a one-night stand. I’ve used alcohol and food and sleep to run away before.

In 2011, I was physically sick from my anxiety. I layed down on cool tiles of a hotel bathroom floor in Orlando at 3 am, finally finding the courage to reach out a couple hours later. A few weeks earlier, I asked a small group of people to be my friends. It sounds clunky and unsexy, but it’s one of the best decisions I made.

Asking someone to be a friend is one thing. Telling them when you’re lost and hurting is another.

Pushing through awkward words and my greatest fear of rejection, I reached out. I got help. I was a weighty, heavy, burdened and hurt girl and I needed to be carried. My friends carried me. I could lean on them.

If you’re in that place today where you can tangibly feel the pain of lost joy searing you, or perhaps you’re so far beyond hurting that you’ve numbed yourself into apathy, please reach out.

We worry that we’re going to be a burden to someone. Here’s the catch. Not one of us is a burden.

Are the things we’re going through burdens? Maybe. But you, a person, are not a burden. You are flesh and blood and skin and bone and pain and hurt and yes, even joy. There is joy for you and you may have to fight through ten thousand armies of evil to see it again.

But you don’t have to fight alone.

***

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[Tweet “When the pain feels like a red-hot black hole inside our chest, we want to escape it.”]

[Tweet “Asking someone to be a friend is one thing. Telling them when you’re lost and hurting is another.”]

[Tweet “We worry that we’re going to be a burden to someone. Here’s the catch. Not one of us is a burden.”]

[Tweet “There is joy for you. You may have to fight through armies to see it. You don’t have to fight alone.”]
February 3, 2014
Struggle with Shutting Other People Out?

“God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).

Stress and burnout can cause us to project our pain and exhaustion on others — usually those closest to us. Some people respond to burnout by lashing out in anger and storming around in a rage as their lives are falling apart.

Exhaustion can cause us to shut down and stop communicating with our spouse or our friends. And by “communicating,” I mean both talking and listening. We no longer feel connected to those around us, and we begin not to care about nurturing those relationships that God has placed in our lives.

After not communicating for a while, resentment can develop. Our spouses or friends may not feel comfortable opening up to us anymore, and bitterness can be formed and directed toward us, toward the church, and even toward God.

Reflect:

In Matthew 5:9, Jesus directs us to be “peacemakers.” It will take effort and intentionality on our part to bring balance back into our relationships. We are to make peace and strive for unity.

Have you cut off communication with people because you’re feeling burned out? Write down their names and a trait you admire about each one of them. Then write down a date you will contact them, making amends if necessary.

***

The above post is an excerpt (Day 9) of my book Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope and Health. It releases next Tuesday, and I’m crazy excited to share it with you!

January 31, 2014
What Questions do You Have about Church Burnout or Staying Healthy?
As many of you know, the next month or two promises to be exciting!

I’m releasing a thirty-day devotional called Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope and Health (which will be an eBook, a paperback, and a free audio book) in addition to releasing an expanded edition of my first book, Mad Church Disease: Healing from Church Burnout (as an eBook and a paperback).

It’s been so great (and yet, so heartbreaking) to write the new material.

I continue seeing how burnout is affecting sons and daughters of God.

In no way are either of these books focused on church bashing, negativity, or cynicism.

It’s my hope that they’re full of light, practical steps, and overflowing with how much God loves you and you don’t need to earn His love.

The expanded material includes:
- new chapters
- an expanded study guide
- a more in-depth burnout assessment
- plans you can print to help you get healthy
- …lots of fun things!
If you’d like to find out when Beating Burnout and Mad Church Disease are available to buy, just sign up here! (use the link if you don’t see the form below).

Healing from Burnout

*(I won’t use your email address for anything else!)

As part of the resources I’m providing, we’re shooting video interviews with pastors and leaders (and not just the ones who speak at conferences!) but local pastors here in Nashville and the surrounding area. If you are a pastor or have served in a church and have a story about burnout and health, we’d love to chat and potentially interview you, if you’d like to share your story. I married a professional videographer (lucky!) so we can come to you or you can come here, whatever works best! Just contact us.

We have a couple of interviews this week, including one with Dr. Thom Rainer, who’s the president of LifeWay Resources and has often shared about staying healthy in ministry in his own communication.

If you have a question about church burnout you’d like to have answered, or have questions about getting or staying healthy (spiritually, relationally, emotionally, or physically), it would be great if you’d leave your thoughts in the comments here.

I realize it is not easy to talk about burnout, but here’s the thing. If you’re close to it or in it, you need to talk to someone. If you know someone who’s close, you need to talk to them, support them, offer help. It’s amazing to me how, when I go somewhere to talk about burnout, people come up to me before or after my session and say, “I can’t come to your session. I’m here with my team and I don’t want them to know how close I am to losing it.”

As Christians, we feel like we have to have everything together in order to be effective for the Kingdom. This is not the case.

If we had everything together, we wouldn’t need the Cross. We wouldn’t need Jesus. When we say, “I need help,” we’re inviting in more of His love, and we’re reaching out in faith for others to help carry us.

I need you to help set this example.

May you have an amazing day and just know how much our Lord loves you!

***
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[Tweet “God loves you and you don’t need to earn His love.”]

[Tweet “We feel like we have to have everything together to be effective for God. This is not the case”]

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January 29, 2014
Is Burnout Beating You?
I’ve been in the process of adding some helpful stuff to the 5th Anniversary Expanded Edition of my first book, Mad Church Disease which launches next month (woot!)

In that journey, I realized people were needing something NOW. Something to help NOW.

The emails I get daily show me that burnout is still epidemic in ministry and in the church world and if anything has become more taboo in the last five years, which breaks my heart.

Over Christmas, I sat down and wrote Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope and Health that covers
- rest
- spiritual health
- emotional health
- relational health
- physical health
- and prayer.
Rinse and repeat for five weeks and you’ve got yourself a 70-something page book.

Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope and Health releases as an eBook this week! (The print will follow shortly!)

Each day has
- scripture
- a short and meaningful reflection
- and a section for practical application and a page for notes.
It reads fast because I know you don’t have much time, but I pray it takes you directly to the heart of our Father with no fluff, only grace, and gives you enough action when, after thirty days are over, you find yourself in a healthier and more intentional place than you are now.

Can you do me a favor?

If this book sounds like something you need, can you give me your email address so I can ping you when it comes out? I won’t bother you for anything else. And, if you’d like to spread the word ahead of time, I’ve made some tweets to help you do that!

You can sign up for the email notification here!

Share about it below!

[Tweet “Burned out? THIS > @girlnamedanne’s “Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope & Health” #BeatingBurnout”]

[Tweet “Had enough? > @girlnamedanne’s”Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope & Health” #BeatingBurnout”]

[Tweet “2014 = HEALTH! @girlnamedanne’s “Beating Burnout: A 30 Day Guide to Hope & Health” #BeatingBurnout”]

I am SO GRATEFUL for your support and I truly pray this devotional can help you find hope and health!
January 14, 2014
Are You at Risk for Church Burnout? 2 Free Resources!

I just bought the domain names “ChurchBurnout.com” and “MinistryBurnout.com.” I was ecstatic and shocked they were still available.

Then I realized why.

Even with the increase of ministerial burnout awareness, with more books being written on pastoral and church health, burning out is just not something we – in the church culture – talk about often. Or Freely.

My book Mad Church Disease published almost five years ago. FIVE. It was awarded the Vital Church Resource Award by Outreach Magazine and it’s still one of the most requested talks I’m asked to give. [Tweet “Burnout is still an epidemic and it’s killing our souls, our hope, our light.”]

That’s why when I received the rights back to my book, I decided to expand it, to add more practical plans and paths and devotionals and personal coaching for people to find help and health, on their own or in teams.

Next week, I’ll have a very exciting opportunity for anyone interested in fighting burnout with me to get the new book and all the new stuff for free. If you want to get in, just pop your email address in the form here and you’ll get to have the chance to sign up first. But for now, I want to give you a couple of things.

[Tweet “Want a free chapter from the first edition of Mad Church Disease on burnout risk factors?”]

Click here!

[Tweet “How close are you to burning out? Download a free burnout assessment.”]

Click here!

There are no points or scores. You just fill out the form and judging on how it looks, you can see if you’re burning out, close to it, or staying healthy.

I can’t emphasize enough how much of a fight we have ahead of us. [Tweet “Satan wants to take us down so we can’t proclaim the hope of the world.”] With the new year approaching, there’s no better time to get ready to start this fight. Let’s not be silent!

Sign up to learn about getting free stuff here. I can’t wait to share this stuff with you next week!

December 8, 2013
Four Ways to Keep the Christmas Season from Ruining Christmas
The holidays are stressful. Shopping. Parties. Family. Finances. Weather. As I finish up the manuscript for my book Mad Church Disease: Healing from Church Burnout, I am reminded how much difference a little intentionality makes as we journey across the days of December.

These four things help me to daily the postures I’ll take this season and in doing so, maybe make things a lot less stressful in the process.
1. Friends: Engage your friends. People travel, everyone seems busy, but reaching out to your friends during the holidays isn’t just good for you, it’s good for them. Even a simple text message to say hi and ask how someone is doing can be the only light someone sees on a really cloudy day.
2. Rest: Rest is my favorite thing to do. After I stressed myself out so terribly eight years ago (so much that I was hospitalized for a week), resting is priority for me and my family. Even if this means emails, phone calls and texts go unanswered for a day or two, rest. In the Christmas season, it’s hard to have a Sabbath day, but do it anyway. And rest in the fact that you’re being obedient in the process. [Tweet “So much more gets done when we’re resting in the fact God has already done everything.”]
3. Pray: It’s an obvious discipline, but one that can fall to the wayside in my life when I’m busy. Even though it may feel rote, commit to certain times to pray every day. For Tim and me, we pray before every meal and then we have an intercessory time before we go to bed. Every single day. One sentence prayers are also a big thing: “Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”…”God, change me!” ….”Lord, help…” Meditating on scripture in the stillness of our own mind keeps us constantly in touch with what God might have for us to do.
4. Be Thankful: It can’t be said enough: Keeping an attitude of thankfulness takes the focus off our circumstances and places it back on the God who gave us His son. In light of the coming of Christ to save us for our sins, long check out lines, annoying family members, even the bigger things like finances and health disappear into the shadows. What if you wrote down one thing you’re thankful for every day? And what if you shared it with a friend? I have a feeling the hope and joy would spill out and encourage both of you.
It is so very much in my DNA to desire health and peace and joy for those who minister either by profession or in everyday life. We are all called to it and there’s nothing more Satan would like to do than to distract us from celebrating and sharing this miraculous and sacred time of the year.

I would like to help you stay encouraged from now until the new year. I woke up this morning and felt compelled to start something that could encourage you daily, so I logged into my email account and made a new list for surviving Christmas.

By signing up, starting tomorrow, each day I’ll send you a very short note of encouragement, tips to stay healthy, some scripture and prayer…something new each day. I’ll also include a link to a talk (either video or audio – your choice) I recently gave on choosing joy this advent season that goes further into these four ideas.

It doesn’t cost you anything and I won’t try to sell you anything. But if you’d like to sign up, you can do so using the form below. If your browser doesn’t show a form or you have problems, just click this link to sign up.

Do you have any tips on how to stay healthy and proactive during the Christmas season?

Subscribe to Surviving Christmas
December 6, 2013