The Spiritual Disciplines Every Pastor Must Recover

Pillar: Integrated Life | Read Time: 10 min

The Interior Crisis of Contemporary Ministry

Contemporary pastoral culture has produced extraordinarily capable ministry managers and embarrassingly underdeveloped interior lives. We have systems for church growth, processes for volunteer management, strategies for sermon series planning — and pastors who are increasingly running on empty spiritually.

The disciplines outlined here are not strategies for ministry improvement. They are practices for soul care. They exist not to make you a better pastor (though they will) but to make you a living human being who knows God.

Lectio Divina: Reading Scripture to Be Read

The pastor reads Scripture professionally — for sermons, for teaching, for theological study. Lectio divina (divine reading) is the practice of reading Scripture to be formed, not to produce content.

The practice is simple: Read a short passage slowly. Read it again, more slowly. Sit with it. Notice what word or phrase arrests your attention. Sit with that. Respond to it in prayer. Rest in silence.

The goal is not information. It is encounter.

The Daily Examen

Developed by Ignatius of Loyola, the Examen is a brief daily practice (15 minutes) of reviewing the day in God's presence:

1. Give thanks for the day
2. Ask the Spirit to illuminate what you need to see
3. Review the day: when were you most alive? Most resistant? Where did you sense God? Where did you avoid him?
4. Confess what needs confessing
5. Ask for grace for tomorrow

Many pastors who have adopted this practice report that it produces more genuine self-knowledge than anything else in their pastoral formation.

Silence and Solitude

Jesus withdrew to lonely places (Luke 5:16). This is not a personality preference. It is a spiritual practice — the creation of space in which the noise of ministry cannot drown out the voice of God.

Start with one hour per week of complete silence — no phone, no music, no podcast, no preparation. Just silence. You will find it profoundly uncomfortable at first. That discomfort is information.

Confession to a Trusted Other

The Protestant tradition has largely abandoned structured confession, and we are paying a price for it. The pastor who has no one to whom they confess is a pastor who is carrying weight alone — and who is, accordingly, less free, less honest, and less trustworthy than they could be.

Find one person — not a parishioner — to whom you can confess your actual inner life. Not a performance of pastoral transparency, but genuine disclosure. The freedom that follows is not primarily psychological. It is spiritual.

The Journal as a Theological Document

The spiritual journal is not a diary. It is a record of a soul's conversation with God. When a pastor writes honestly about what they are experiencing — their doubts, their fears, their failures, their encounters with grace — they create a document that reveals patterns over time.

Many pastors who journal report discovering, months later, that God was present in experiences they could not recognize as grace in the moment.

Conclusion

The pastor who maintains these disciplines is not necessarily a better preacher in the immediate sense. But over years and decades, the pastor with a deep interior life produces something the competent-but-hollow pastor cannot: a ministry that comes from somewhere real, that carries genuine authority, and that does not collapse under pressure.

The disciplines are not optional extras for the spiritually ambitious. They are the basic maintenance of the pastoral soul.