Forever Love

Kevin Abbott: I'm getting into it. You have to pay a monthly fee for it, I guess.

Calvin Copeland: I think it's once a year and it's not that expensive. I'll look up some information and send it to you.

Kevin Abbott: Send it to Chad and me as we explore best ways to do this because we're stuck with whatever Texas Baptist purchases for the year. I think they moved totally to Google, so we use Google Meet now, although we were using Zoom.

Calvin Copeland: Is that what we were on yesterday?

Kevin Abbott: I think that was Zoom. We still have access to Zoom for the rest of the year, but they're trying to get us all to use that Google Meet platform because it's already part of the entire paid package of the Google platform.

Calvin Copeland: I sit on a board that did the same thing, and we're still trying to get used to that Google Meet thing.

Kevin Abbott: I love technology, though. It's a blessing. It allows us to do this from three hours apart.

Calvin Copeland: I absolutely love it. Let me go back to the top of the script. I'm going to tap you out and I'll bring you back in just a second.

Welcome to another episode of *How Love Can Last Forever After All*. I am so excited about today's episode because we're going to be dealing with something I'm entitling "Resilient Rhythms." We're going to deal with how ministers stay in love with Jesus.

If you don't keep that love alive, it can affect so many other things. What if the greatest threat to your ministry isn't failure, opposition, or even burnout, but slowly falling out of love with Jesus? Not all at once, but over time, when ministry becomes routine, responsibilities replace intimacy, and serving Him replaces walking with Him.

It's a deep conversation we're going to have. I'm so excited about the guest we have here. It is Kevin Abbott. When you see and hear about the work he's doing, which I am so grateful to be a student of and a part of, I think it's really going to change your world. If that relationship with Christ remains alive, everything else follows, but everything else will suffer if that relationship doesn't stay alive—your marriages, your leadership, your calling, and your joy. Join me in welcoming Kevin Abbott. Hey there, Kev.

Kevin Abbott: Hey. Thanks for having me, Calvin. I'm excited.

Calvin Copeland: I'm excited too. Let me tell them just a little bit about all of your many accolades. Kevin Abbott serves as the Director of Pastoral Health Network for Texas Baptist Center for Ministerial Health, where he helps pastors across the state build habits and relationships that strengthen their lives and their ministries.

He brings a unique perspective shaped by his years as a pastor, a spiritual formation leader, and even service in the U.S. Army as a chaplain. Kevin's passion is to help pastors not just be strong, but to stay strong spiritually, emotionally, and relationally. Kevin, I'm so glad to have you on the show. Did I miss anything? Did you want to add anything to that?

Kevin Abbott: That was a lot. I'm sure there's something I could add, but I was impressed with what God's allowed me to do in my life and my journey. It's been an exciting ride. Not always easy, as you can imagine, but a blessing to be on this ride with Jesus for so many years.

Calvin Copeland: How many years have you been doing this?

Kevin Abbott: I've been doing ministry right at three decades. In 1996, I graduated from a little small Bible college you've heard of up in Lynchburg, Virginia, called Liberty University, one of Jerry Falwell's kids back in the day. I started seminary at a little place called Dallas Theological up in Dallas and started vocational ministry that same year.

I’ve had 30 years of various ministry positions, cutting my teeth in ministry in all kinds of staff positions, all kinds of a buffet of experiences like a lot of young men and women get to experience in their ministries and their careers. What I'm doing now, I've specifically been doing with the Texas Baptists for just about two years across the state of Texas, journeying with pastors toward full-orbed health: mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

Even before that, about four or four and a half years before that, I was at the Union Baptist Association in Houston, Texas, one of the larger Baptist associations in the country. I was blessed to journey with pastors there as well through a ministry called Resilient. What we do with Texas Baptists was birthed out of that process at the incubator and pilot programs there at the UBA in Houston, as well as doctoral work that I was able to do alongside my mentor Terry Walling at Fuller Seminary.

It's been a journey, but these last six or seven years, I've been able to move into this shepherd-of-shepherds type role with kingdom leaders and pastors, and it's been amazing. I was doing the numbers, not in a weird, egotistical way, but just more of a look-at-God way. I think there have been 16 cohorts and 300 leaders intentionally walking alongside them over the last three and a half years. It's blown my mind that I get to do this. It's an honor and a privilege.

Calvin Copeland: As one who has been honored to go through one of the legs of it, one of the things that has been so encouraging to me is the way you attack ministry. Oftentimes, when people talk about ministry, they're talking about the calling or the impact or the effectiveness. But let me ask you, what does it really mean when you say "finishing well?"

Kevin Abbott: That's the billion-trillion-dollar question. What does it mean to finish well? We talk about these in our cohorts with pastors and really try to dive in with them. When we think of a pastor, we're not just thinking about their ministry in the four walls of a church or what they do outside in the hospital visits. We think about their family. Their first ministry is their spouse and, if they're blessed to have kids, their children.

It's a full-orbed health that we talk about. I can't help but go back to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. You've all preached it, or many of you have sat under sermons that have been awesome by the greatest preachers in the world that preach the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. When it gets down to those two that did well, that took their talents and multiplied them and stewarded them well, what they were given by God to steward, He said, "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

In fact, I have it here. It says, "Well done, my good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in handling the small amount, so now I will give you many more responsibilities. Let's celebrate together." I love that version in the New Living Translation. Let's celebrate together. That's not just your church and the people you shepherd in the building. It's your spouse. It's your children, your grandkids. He's given you those to steward well. In the end, we want to hear him say "well done" with what I gave you to steward.

Calvin Copeland: I just think about the excitement you shared as you talked about how your numbers are increasing. What I imagine is you've got simplistic in your focus and now that simplicity in your focus, you are taking it not just in Texas, but you're taking it over the seas. You look like you're enjoying this thing.

Kevin Abbott: Very much so. It's been a long process, probably longer than to tell in an hour podcast, but I tell guys and ladies, if you ever want to have coffee, I'll tell you where I'm at. God has given me clarity of my mission, which is one of those things we talk to leaders about. They need to be clear about their kingdom purpose, and I'm sure later on this podcast, we'll probably get to that.

I've got more clarity in these last seven or eight years of my ministry and I'm able to know what one thing I must say yes to every time I swing my feet out of that bed and put them to the floor. One thing I say yes to, and I make a beeline to go find every opportunity to do that. It gives me the freedom to say no to a lot of good things that maybe I'm not most wired for. I've been living that dream for seven or eight years now, so it's been fun.

Calvin Copeland: That is so powerful. To go a little bit deeper, so many people think about finishing well in ministry as avoiding scandals, maintaining your reputation, or building something successful. Can you talk about your story about how when you were pastoring a local church, by many people's standards, you had checked all the boxes?

Kevin Abbott: I was blessed to have multiple experiences in ministry, like a lot of us. The last ministry experience I had would have been seen by many in ministry as the zenith. It was the apex to a lot of us. We aspire to be the senior pastor, lead pastor of a seemingly successful church, depending on how you define that with the metrics.

The metrics were pointing well. We had a good church. It was good before I even got there, and I just inherited this thing and God used it to do great things. I even had little old ladies in the foyer say how I was one of the best preachers they ever heard, only to find out later that they tell everybody that that goes and preaches.

By all the metrics, we were seeing people come to Christ and baptized, all the things that we number in the evangelical world, especially in the Baptist world that I'm in, as a sign of a church that's doing well. We were making disciples and we had a pretty good, robust discipleship program, and I felt I was getting accolades from people in the area. It was all positive things.

There came a point where I just felt like there was something like a turmoil going on in my own soul, and I didn't even have language for it. In fact, I thought I was just going crazy. Am I just mentally going crazy and nobody knows it except for me? I'm isolated up on this little perch. It's crazy how you can be in the room full of five or six hundred people but yet be so lonely. That was where I was.

I was even probably battling aspects of depression and didn't even know what it was called—loneliness, isolation, depression, all the things that I now have found out King David battled in the Psalms. Imagine that. You read psalm after psalm, he was going through the same things, days that his bones were aching. Days I would go to sleep at night and sleep was my escape. It was like if I could just go to sleep, get away from whatever it was I thought was the turmoil, then in the morning everything would be better.

Of course, in the morning it wasn't always better. There was a quote from a book called *Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership* by Ruth Haley Barton. I read that book about that season, probably eight, nine, or ten years ago. I remember that quote just came out of the sky like a dagger to my heart. I'm not going to read it all to you, but basically, there's a line in there that says we need as leaders to let God go to the inner places of our soul and lead from that place. That basically summarizes about a whole three paragraphs that just hit me.

I started thinking, in ministry for 20 or 30 years and nobody ever talked about the soul of a leader. Never talked about soul care. Nobody in my circles talked much about emotional and mental stress and decision fatigue. We just didn't go there in the world that I was in, and it just hit me out of left field. I realized that if something doesn't change within me—and I'm talking about internal—I'm not going to make it for the long haul, let alone finish well.

That's where I was. I remember coming up under a study of a man, J. Robert Clinton. His protégé Terry Walling was my professor at Fuller for my doctoral work. J. Robert Clinton did a lot of research on leadership—more leadership data and stats and research than you'll ever have time to read. I'm still digging through it all 10 years later. He came out with this study over a 10-year period of about 3,000 leaders. Those leaders were biblical leaders, historical and contemporary leaders. They were all kingdom-minded ministry leaders.

He was studying how they finished life. How did they live life? How did God shape them over a lifetime? The ones that did finish—which everybody finishes in one way or the other—how did they finish their life? He found this is very sobering, but one out of three will finish well. Out of those 3,000 that he studied, one-third finished well. A lot of these were really powerfully spiritual kingdom leaders in the Bible. He started digging into what finishing well looks like. His results were one of the things you mentioned. Here's the three things that came out of that study of what finishing well looks like according to *The Making of a Leader*: that you're more in love with Jesus at the end than you are in the beginning.

Calvin Copeland: It's so funny because as you talk about the readings and what it did, it just reminded me of my days when I was in process in my local church where I was eventually one of the adjutants, one of the folks that would serve the leaders as they ministered. That whole finishing well paradigm in that place was I'm still preaching well and I'm still leading well and I'm showing up, but there's this slow drift.

The way that I experienced that slow drift is oftentimes after they ministered, I've got to take them to the hotel or I've got to take them to the airport, I've got to get them something to eat. After you minister, you're wide open and they would begin to talk about their lives outside of that spotlight. I can't tell you how many times I drove home after dropping them off crying and asking the Lord, "Please tell me it's not like this. Please tell me that the cross that I've got to bear is that my life's got to be miserable for the sake of the call." Can you give us some early signs that ministry loses closeness with Jesus? What does that look like?

Kevin Abbott: One of the first signs—get ready for this—is that you get really good at ministry. You get so good at ministry that autopilot can happen. We call that plateauing or arrested development and I can give you a definition for that in a minute. Also, you stop depending on the power of God, the spirit of God. You're so good at it.

By the way, if anybody in this room or this chat is for excellence in ministry, I'll raise hands both times. I don't know how many times I talked to our staff when I was pastoring; we want to do things with excellence. Yes, but when you get so good, you find a safe comfort zone and you know what you're good at and you can kind of coast there and nobody for the most part will even know because you look like you really have it all together.

In the end, we start relying upon our own strength and not God's. When we do that, we're not allowing God to take us to new levels, to new deepness. We tend to want to stay in the safe, in the shallow, on the bunny slope of the ski slope. We're not ready to go to the blues and the blacks. What God's wanting us to do is he's wanting us to stretch us to the deep.

Sometimes we need new experiences to stretch us, new places, new voices. So my last 10 years has been that—reluctantly being dragged out to the deep, to the uncomfortable where I can't put my feet on the ground and I have to rely upon him.

Calvin Copeland: I love it. There's teaching that I do and I help people expose the lies that they've been told about their identity and then I tell them all the things that God says and how he loves us. But the last phase I talk about is the way God loves us is through challenge, is through rebuke. That's the way that he loves us. I just love how you talk about this difference between falling into habits and holding onto passions. Why isn't passion or calling enough to sustain long-term ministry? Why is it that we need relationship?

Kevin Abbott: Good intentions always die on not having an intentional health process, full-orbed health process. So I think if you polled every pastor or minister or kingdom leader out there and their spouses, they all have a passion and a dream to live into what God's called them to do and to be faithful and finish well, or else they shouldn't be in ministry. We're just going to assume they all love Jesus.

The problem is we're not intentional and we are humans and creatures of habit. I can speak for me and I think 99.9% everybody else is with me. I have to have these intentional things that I place in my life. You can call them habits, you can call them choices. We need them in there as guardrails and as conduits to allow the power of God to move through us, to allow us to be where he's uniquely placed us to really put us in places honestly, ultimately to hear the voice of God and to hear that voice fresh and then to lead from that place.

It's kind of like *Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership* by Ruth Haley Barton, one of my favorite books in the world. I kind of half-jokingly tell people I've got a woman that's my pastor and I love it. I know that's controversial in some circles, but I'm telling you, this lady, God used her. Lead from that place of fresh voice of God. We have to be intentional about these habits.

In fact, again, I go to the well of J. Robert Clinton a lot. There's a lot of great resources and books. You can see my shelves are full of tons of books and they're just like any pastor in ministry, I've got boxes that are collecting dust of books. One of my favorites, J. Robert Clinton and *The Making of a Leader* that I keep referring to, because in that study that we referred to earlier, he was studying those leaders that finished well, the 33%. That's a thousand out of three thousand that he studied.

What happened to the other two thousand? I believe they did not have the habits and choices they needed intentionally so that they would finish well. Out of that study, he figured out studying those thousand that finished well, what were those commonalities that they had that were habits or choices? Just maybe if we want to finish well, we need to have those same habits, those same buckets.

He gave us five of them. The first one is they had to have a clear mission. A clear mission means not their church's mission statement, but their clear mission as an individual kingdom leader. That goes for the husband and the wife, both spouses in a leadership process when you are leading a church or a ministry. You both need to be clear on how God has uniquely called each of you and uniquely wired each of you for a kingdom purpose and begin to live into that sweet spot.

Especially as you enter the mid-game, when you get in your 40s and 50s and older like you and I are in right now, at this point, we need to be clear in what we must say yes to and say no to all those other good things. I've had to make some really hard "nos" in the last couple years of things that have come my way. I've done them with my wife.

I allowed her to enter into the process, and it made it so much easier because I knew what God had uniquely called me for. I call it a life mandate, one of the processes we use called APEX. We take leaders through APEX process to really figure out based on scripture and their own personal timeline and a bunch of other tools we use to help them discover their life mandate.

That one thing that I must do every day; it's what I breathe for. Because I knew that when I had these great opportunities come my way over these last two or three years, I could enter into a conversation with my wife and with God, of course, and I could more easily filter those decisions. I've been able to have some great conversations with Mindy, my spouse, over some really hard things and we both would look at each other and remind ourselves, "Okay, is this really the sweet spot of what God's called you to? Or is it just another great opportunity maybe for someone else?" I've had to say some of the toughest "nos" I've ever had to say, but that habit of clear mission has been key for me.

Calvin Copeland: I absolutely love it. It reminds me, with the work that I do around relationship development, both for singles and for engaged and married couples, one of the things that I tell my wife—because she doesn't necessarily consider herself to be called to ministry. When we first got together when we were first married, I was a corporate salesperson. I didn't know I was eventually going to get into the ministry.

Kevin Abbott: My wife's been in IT for 30 years and still is.

Calvin Copeland: One of the things that I do to really cover and protect me is I tell her if there's ever a time when what I am doing is too much for you, I'm done. She goes, "What?" and I say, "Yeah, no, you've got to understand, I understand my first ministry is to you and especially if I'm called to minister to couples and I'm called to minister to people around relationships and you're miserable, that's not happening."

Every time—this is probably the first time I've been able to say that and struggle to hold my composure because I mean that with all my heart—but I also know that my wife knows my heart. What it does is it helps me, it's one of the rhythms, one of the tools that I use to know what to say yes and what to say no to. That's awesome.

We learn how to pray beyond preparation. We don't study scriptures for transformation, not just for teaching. We have the Sabbath, we have rest. We reflect and self-examine. We're honest in relationships. Just like you, it's been in these last five or six years since the COVID hit and the Lord began to redirect my focus in terms of my call and my purpose that my wife and I are at a place that I don't even know we even thought we needed to get to.

Our marriage, by many people's standards, was never bad, but we've been able to have conversations that we have never been able to have before. Once again, it's just been that rhythm that keeps us focused on our first ministry, which for me is to her, for her is to me. It has done a great job of having this resilience under pressure. Has that shaped your understanding of resilience in ministry? I keep hearing it.

Kevin Abbott: Oh yeah, maybe I haven't put words to it, but there's definitely resilience there. In fact, the first ministry cohort we developed in Houston at the UBA, I chose to use that word "Resilient" because it just kept coming back. Of course, it was in the middle of the launching of all the COVID stuff, so it was a pretty vogue word at the time.

Resilience when I have a clear mission and know what God has uniquely called me to—and when you look at the leaders in the Bible that were clear about God's unique wiring and calling, they were some of the most resilient leaders you could ever study. Moses. Look what Moses had to go through. One of the greatest other than Jesus, the greatest leadership studies you can do is the life of Moses. You talk about a guy that was resilient.

I think about my ministry and I look back at my life. We do a project, a hands-on project with our pastors called the sticky note timeline. We have them map their whole life out: people, events, and circumstances over their whole life that God has used to intervene, good and bad. You lay it out chronologically and you put chapter titles and you mine lessons out of it.

When you look at my life and probably the life of most leaders, I have seen time after time where I could have ejected from ministry easily. I could have said "enough's enough. I'm not going to do this anymore." But God. They're usually the pink sticky notes, which are the pain ones, and the yellow ones are the positive ones. When I look at those threads of pink, I say, "If it wasn't for God, just look what he did."

In those moments, I can say one of my values that came out of my sticky note timeline when we call it sovereign perspective—looking at your life through God's eyes—one of my values I mined out of that was the value of sticking with it. I have that as a value that I live with now. Now it took 30 years of ministry and 50 years of life to get to that value, so resilience you can almost call that one of my values. If you would have asked me that at 17, 18, 19 years old when I surrendered to ministry, I'd have been like, "What do you mean resilience? Why is that important?" Oh, it's important.

Calvin Copeland: One of the phrases that I've coined within my ministry is because my personal relationship, my marriage with my wife has been so fairytalish. I saw her when I was 12, said I was going to marry her, we dated for seven years, we got married as virgins, we've been together now for over 35 years.

So many people look at the fairytale-ish of it. But what I've really come to know in these last six or seven years, honestly since this COVID timeframe, is that forever love isn't a fairytale. Forever love is formed. This understanding—and that forming can be a place of real enjoyment when you really understand what it's all about. That's why I love the cohort, because it feels like it's so woven in. Our messages are so similar.

The audience may be tweaked just a little bit, but it is a universal message that I think that all of us as believers need. We've all heard the scripture in Ephesians that says, "Husbands, love your wives like Christ loved the church." If you're any husband that wants to be pleasing to God, that is a very intimidating scripture to read. But I remember the day the Lord told me that I wasn't just the groom in that scripture, I was the bride too.

This whole "husbands love your wives like Christ loved the church" and then you find out that Christ loved the church by washing us with the water of the word to remove every wrinkle and every stain and every blemish so that we come back to him without those wrinkle, stains, and blemishes. When I understand that this washing that I am supposed to do to my wife, I'm never going to be able to do it unless I learn how to allow the Lord to wash me with his word and continue to keep that resilient rhythm going. I get so excited. Tag team, now you're it.

Kevin Abbott: I just can't help but think of processing. One of the terms we use in this whole lifelong leader development process that I'm a part of is the study that these guys did was on processing and how God uses a lifetime of processing the pain and the good of people, events, and circumstances that God has used to shape you.

I can't help but think about that passage that we talk about a lot with our leaders, Jeremiah 17:7 and 8. He says in Jeremiah 17—and Jeremiah, by the way, is loaded—but in Jeremiah 17:7 and 8, he says, "Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots to the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in the year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." That's processing.

I can't help but lean in, whether it's in marriage or with your kids raising them or in ministry in church or just life in general, relationship conflicts, ministry crucibles, marriage struggles, whatever it is, God has promised us something. He's given us over 500 promises and one of them is one that I don't like, and that promise is heat will come. Drought will come. Are you ready? And they are gifts of God so that you will bear fruit.

Calvin Copeland: When you look at the scriptures that talk about how God loves us—one of the things I love about Jesus is Jesus would meet you and he would talk about all your mess. "I know this about you, I know that about you. That wasn't your husband." The woman at the well ran back to the town that was already talking about her and said, "You've got to come meet a man who told me all my business."

I thought, man, what would it be like to be a leader like that that could share those hard truths, but there was such a love in it that you feel safe? You feel forgiven, you feel redeemed to the point that you want to tell everybody. I've experienced it through the cohort. Some of my best friends are because of this cohort. Now, I still have my best friends from high school. My two best friends, when I go back to Buffalo, I'm in trouble if we don't get together with our wives.

Half of my football team, we still connect. There's a part of me that's always been wired to stay connected and in relationship. But when it came to ministry, Kev, there was that drift that took place. "Was anybody else feeling this and am I supposed to be feeling that?" What this cohort has done for me personally is it has produced a safe place for me to be authentic about my ministry challenges and struggles.

While I thank God that these last six or seven years have done that in my marriage, there are still some things that I've got to talk to another pastor who gets what my stuff is.

Kevin Abbott: For sure. I was so excited about having you on and Joel, I'm having him and his wife on too. I'm getting all of you because I think this is the core of what God is doing in this season in ministry, exposing all of the drifting methods that the enemy has used for centuries. His technique hasn't changed since Genesis 3. He has three simple questions and it blew everything out. "Did God say it? Did God mean it? And what about your desires?"

It hasn't changed; it's just multiplied. Now we've got to the place that we've got so many options, nobody makes a decision. We've got so many options that truth is now relative. I can't tell you how many times I'm in coaching sessions and this concept of "well, I'm living my truth." What is that? How far is that getting you?

Kevin Abbott: Could their truth as a leader be what's safe and comfortable? I say that facetiously. It really goes back to that study of *The Making of a Leader*. Those 3,000 leaders, those that didn't finish well, the 2,000 out of 3,000 that did not finish well, that limped or crashed and burned, there were six common barriers that derailed them from ministry.

I'll give them to you real quick. The final one, number six, was plateauing—arrested development. Let me go there first, then I'll quickly breeze through those other five. We have time? Okay, good.

Out of those six barriers, the number six on the list, which doesn't mean it's the least—it's actually the one we most fall into, I think—is plateauing, where we get really good at ministry and we go to those places that were excellent at and we don't stretch ourselves and grow and allow God to do new fresh work. Another word for it that J. Robert Clinton uses is "arrested development."

Let me quote the quote: "Arrested development reflects a profound disruption in growth. It occurs when emotional, relational, or psychological development becomes stuck at a remedial stage, often due to unresolved experiences, trauma, fear, or adaptive strategies formed under pressure. Arrested development is not merely a pause in growth. It is a protective freeze where development halts in order to preserve stability or safety and if not addressed quickly, quickly begins to produce a decline in one's development."

Calvin Copeland: "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."

Kevin Abbott: And that's true if you think about it. That's not only true in ministry outside, but what about all aspects of our life and journey, all relationships? Because I think about my journey being married to my wife nearly a quarter of a century and I'm thinking of moments where we plateaued and that was arrested development even in our marriage. Think about times where in my kids, as I raise my kids and they're now adulting or older teenagers, where if I wasn't intentional and I got comfortable with the status quo, we kind of had arrested development in our relationships.

It's true all across the board. I'll tell you the gift for me, once again, as I remember going through the timeline, I was 14 years old when I had the experience of going to the Bible for the first time for myself, not because I was in some Sunday school class or because it was some assignment, but because I wanted to know what God said about marriage and divorce.

A preacher started a sermon by saying half of the people that get married get divorced, and it doesn't matter if you're saved or not. I remember sitting in that church thinking, "Then why am I wasting my time in here? If you're having the same success as out there, I might as well go out there." But I had seen this girl and I said, "God, you have to tell me something because I'm about to give up on this stuff."

I looked for marriage, and in my little 14-year-old brain, all I could see is you get married so you can have legal free sex. Better to marry than to burn. I thought, I don't mind that answer, but then I got confused, Kev, because I thought there are a whole lot of girls I probably wouldn't mind having sex with if my little 14 self would be honest. But I knew that I had never had that feeling like I had when I saw my wife.

I knew I had never thought about marrying any of them. So I said, let me see what the Bible says about divorce. He hates divorce. But then I found in Matthew where he said that Moses allowed divorce because of hardening of heart, but from the beginning, it was never supposed to be that way.

What I realized—this is the timeline moment—is that it was at that moment that I subconsciously began making decisions considering my wife's heart that wouldn't even give me her number. That caring for her heart subsequently caused me to start caring for other people's heart. So instead of meeting my desires—because I had some desires—I'm like, well, I can't hurt her. I can't hurt her, my wife, and it'll hurt her too because I ain't trying to stay there. I'll just be satisfying myself.

I didn't realize at 14 it was developing that discipline. It just became such a powerful thing for that word to come alive in me at 14 and I didn't even know it was alive. It literally wasn't until our 30th anniversary when people started asking me, "How y'all still look like y'all like each other? How you married 30 years and y'all still like each other?" and I'm looking at them like, "You don't like your wife? You don't want to hang out with your wife?"

It's not about you having a date night every week. That's just the way we're wired. I coach all kind of people and that shows up differently for them depending on how they're wired. But that principle of learning how to give before getting, the principle of having the resolve of staying—it is a discipline. It's a skill that you can learn. Like I said, I sit in this cohort and I'm like a kid in a candy store. I shared one of them; I need the other five, Kev.

Kevin Abbott: I'll cruise through these other five and you stop me whenever you want. Basically, they're in order of the most prevalent barriers to finishing well from these 3,000 leaders, really the 2,000 out of the three that didn't finish well.

Finances. Finances always come up there really high. We're talking not only personal finances and not managing it well, but also corporate finances and the abuse of it. You see that throughout scripture with leaders and in modern-day leadership of churches and ministries. But it's also are you taking well care of you and your family? Sometimes it's out of your control, sometimes it's not. Sometimes the church is just not rewarding their shepherds well so that they can take care of their family. So there's a financial thing that can be a barrier.

Power. In fact, the next two are twins—power and pride. A lot of times we like to use that word in psychology, narcissism. But that's really what it is. It's a lot of narcissistic behavior and attitudes and with leaders, especially leaders who make it to the top of the leadership pile of whatever organization they're in. Narcissism, power, and pride, they'll come back and they'll haunt you as a leader. How many leaders have we seen that are prominent across the United States that have gone down because of that?

Calvin Copeland: It was six mega-pastors in one year in Texas alone.

Kevin Abbott: Wow. And it probably rooted in something of power and pride.

Calvin Copeland: Absolutely. And that power and pride was probably connected to some wounded place, some wrinkle, stain, or blemish that they've never had a place to call them on it, to challenge them on it, to walk with them. The Bible says confess your faults one to another so that ye may be healed.

I just love how the cohort creates those environments where you confess because we all got the faults. If I talk to somebody and they act like they've arrived, I'm like, "Yeah, okay man, alright. Bless you, bless you man."

Kevin Abbott: Out of those barriers, there are other barriers I'm sure they're out there that we face, but these are the six in those leaders, those 2,000 that didn't finish well in the study. So finances, power, pride, sexual improprieties—surprise, surprise—lust of sex outside of marriage, unhealthy things like that, which I believe kind of like you just said, they're probably rooted in a lot of pride and power type things.

I had one pastor speak up in one of our cohorts and he says, "Doesn't the system of the church foster this? They're like incubators for this?" and I kind of paused and I go, "Yeah, you're right." In a lot of ways, our churches have fostered and created, maybe unknowingly, a breeding process for this type of narcissistic, out-of-control, unaccountable leader.

Calvin Copeland: I think about the scripture that says that in my weakness, He's my strength and how difficult that is for many pastors to understand the value of being vulnerable enough to show your weakness so that they see God's strength. Right? But that means you've got to understand that I'm not your savior.

That means you've got to understand that you have a relationship with Christ for yourself and you ain't always got to get the answer from me. That means that God might call you to do something that ain't in my ministry and now you've got to go and do what God calls you to do. I get a kick out of pastors who know it's God when people show up but it ain't never God when people got to leave.

"The Lord called me to go overseas and be a missionary." "Well, we don't have a missionary program here." "Yeah, I know, the Lord called me to do that." That ain't God. So that whole power and pride thing... once again, the cohort just does this wonderful thing of creating this space where people can show what the world would consider to be their weakness, but there is this striving search for the power of God, for the strength of God. Just phenomenal. I think we got one more.

Kevin Abbott: There's two more. We talked about the last one already. Family is another barrier to ministry. The very thing that should be most fruitful and life-giving for ministry can also be the opposite. It could be something that, depending on who you marry, if they don't have a passion or calling to at least be alongside of you as a minister in local bride-of-Christ work, that could be difficult.

Marriage conflict, marriage issues, not having a healthy marriage, being a spouse or a husband that's so basically ministry is their mistress and they're not focusing on their spouse, that can be an issue. Even your children—we talk about kids get kind of used and abused in the church mentally and emotionally and spiritually, but they could also make decisions that kind of put a ripple in things and you sometimes can't control it. Family definitely could be something that derails you from ministry or slows you down or makes it difficult for sure.

Calvin Copeland: Once again, I think about the three questions that the enemy asked: Did God say it? Did God mean it? And then what about your desires? God told me if I'm going to be in ministry, my prerequisite is how's my family? If he said it, and if he said it, what did he mean by that? Does he mean that my spouse can tell me, "Hey, this is too much for me," and so now I've got to pull back and take care of my spouse?

Oh, did he really mean it that way? "Well, you know the call that's on my life." Well no, God said this and he meant it. What's that look like? For the work that I do, I see that scripture as a life source for me. What do I look like out here trying to help people with marriages and you see my wife and she look torn up, she look a mess? Every time I open my mouth, she rolling her eyes and she sucking her teeth.

How profound is anything I say if that's the response? One of the people in I sit on this board for NARME, National Association of Marriage and Relationship Education, and it is the who's who of marriage and relationship education. One of my mentors, he's written a curriculum that is just absolutely phenomenal.

He tells the story about how he was running marriage ministry in his local church and he started the process and he said, "Okay, we want everybody to rate your marriage from one to ten, ten being the best. I'll go first. I would rate it a seven, eight," and he looks at his wife and he says, "Honey?" and she says, "A two." He says, "No, no, no, ten is the best." She said, "I know. Two."

It reframed his entire world. Now there isn't a week that he's not on some military base or at some church ministering to thousands of couples. The thing I love about his curriculum is it really is about empathetic listening. He literally starts his workshops with this phrase from David Augsburger that says, "Being heard is so close to being loved that the two are almost indistinguishable." Then he gives you real tools to help you learn how to effectively hear each other's heart, but also how to communicate your heart.

Think about this strategy: If I as a man, as a pastor, have been told that I'm supposed to project this image, which means I've never processed my heart issues. If I've never processed my heart issues, how can I tell you? If I can't tell you, how can you hear me? If you can't hear me because I can't tell you, then how do I feel loved? If we reverse engineered that whole concept that being heard is so close to being loved it's almost indistinguishable.

You get all these preachers out here that think they're supposed to be representing God and they get to this performance place and if you started to ask them about what's going on in their heart, they couldn't tell you. So how do they ever get to a place of feeling loved? Once again, it is those same three questions asked in Genesis 3. The work that God has before you, I've seen it from the first time I was with you. I see it as transforming the world. You've impacted so far 300 pastors, but if Jesus did it with just 11 of us, and if we really get this, if he could do it with 12, I think we could do it with 300 in two years. That'll be 3,000 in two more years. I think this is absolutely profound what the Lord is doing in you.

Kevin Abbott: It's been powerful. I also do PastorStrong South Asia and so I've been privileged to walk alongside of many regional leaders across Nepal and India these last few years. We've had two cohorts in two years in a row and I just got off of a quarterly call. I jump on Zoom every quarter with those pastors, and they were all in a room, all 30 of them were packed in a little small conference room eager for me to jump on this little Zoom call just to say hi.

It was just amazing. I had them open up for testimonies: how is God working? How is he taking some of the stuff that we processed back in January when I was over there for a week in this retreat doing this type of stuff? It was amazing to hear what God was doing, revolutionizing these guys.

These are guys who are on the front line of the battle with persecution from village to village in somewhat hostile Hindu territory countries. To see what God's doing and shaping them and how their minds are just being revolutionized and transformed, and they understand how God is taking these painful moments.

One after another, they kept saying, "My biggest lesson is that God actually wants to use this pain of persecution to shape my character and to draw me closer to him." That was like the brain emoji that explodes; that's what that was to all of them. I'm just sitting there leaning on the edge of my seat on this Zoom call going, "Oh my goodness, God."

You let me be a little bird in the tree to be able to be a small part of being a part of this process from a distance. Look what he's doing. He wants to do that in the lives of all our leaders and he wants to do that in the lives of our husbands and wives and spouses and families. This stuff works. It works with my kids. I walk this journey with my oldest daughter who's 25 now. She's serving in the United States Army as a nurse and about four years ago she went through sort of a little mini life crisis of really trying to determine where has God uniquely shaped me for and called me?

I was able to walk that journey that I went through with her and I do with pastors with my own daughter. This type of journey of shaping is happening in our teenage kids and our young adult kids as well. So that's part of the journey. It's been fun.

Calvin Copeland: I love it, I love it, I love it. Well, it's been just about an hour, so we might have to do a part two. Is there any final words, final things that you'd like to say for the people?

Kevin Abbott: If you don't mind, I'd love to be able to close this in a prayer and basically Jesus' words straight from his mouth. It's amazing how Jesus speaks powerfully, but before I get to that, I've got a quote that my mentor said to me over and over. He said there's never been a time that God hasn't been at work in yours and my life. The question's not, is he at work? Because he's working.

He's working to shape you behind the scenes under every current of every moment and second of your life. But the question really is, what is he at work doing through people, events, and circumstances to shape you? Then once you figure that out, which is part of the journey, now the biggest question: Do I have the courage to go with him? Will I say yes?

In other words, it really comes down to that big T word: trust. Will I trust him? Will I trust what he says about me? Will I—and that's where I'm at in my own journey. I know where he's shaped me and I'm starting to live in it. But every day I wake up, am I going to have the courage to go with you today, Lord? Am I going to trust you, what you say about me and how you've shaped me? Am I going to trust you that you got me?

That's really ultimately spiritual formation of every believer. That's the journey we're all on, whether it's in our marriage or whether it's with our kids, whether it's in our ministry journey, all included. All believers. If you signed up to be that disciple, then you are on this journey whether you want to be or not. You don't have to have "reverend" or "pastor" by your title. Absolutely not.

Calvin Copeland: So the prayer, the prayer.

Kevin Abbott: Basically, I pray this over our kingdom leaders a lot and I pray it over my own life and my family. It's actually Jesus; it's his own words. In Matthew 11:28 through 30, he's talking to his disciples. I love praying this over kingdom leaders and I love praying it from *The Message*, Eugene Peterson's *The Message*, because it just gives a different flavor to it. I invite kingdom leaders to just, wherever they're at, to close their eyes and I'm going to read this prayer and just imagine as if you were hearing Jesus pray this over you.

Jesus prays this for you: "Are you tired? Are you worn out? Are you burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." Amen.

Calvin Copeland: Amen. Amen. Forever love isn't a fairytale. Remember: Forever love is formed.