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Summary
Pastor Talk is the new podcast of Lifeway pastors, and I am the most-of-the-time host. It’s my pleasure to interview a lot of different pastors, authors, professors, and miscellaneous people that I can scrounge up. We’re looking for tools and encouragement to help pastors and other church leaders shepherd their flocks well.
Pastors and Good Research
I honestly can’t say how much data pastors need, but I can say that pastors should avail themselves with good research. We’re communicating in a day when #FakeNews is everything. There’s a lot of times that people don’t know what to think. They don’t know what to believe about certain things or they read a headline and as we all know headlines sometimes say exactly the opposite of what the article actually says. I think when pastors or if you’re an assistant pastor and you lead a ministry in your church.
You’re always in front of leaders, other leaders or volunteers, it’s good to have solid content that get your point across or helps them understand the context in which they’re ministering. If there’s research on mental health that Lifeway Research has done for instance, and you need to address that in some way then you can access that at LifewayResearch.com I believe a long with a lot of other studies.
Addressing Current Cultural Issues with the Congregation
What pastors often don’t think about is, sometimes we want to be so firm in our condemnation of evil that we don’t realize that to people who may be guilty of that, or struggling with it, even if they’re not yet guilty, it comes across as a condemnation of them, not the thing they’re struggling with.
Now, is that as fine line? Sometimes that’s a very fine line, and we don’t always pull it off well. I would say we need to go into it with the mind that whether it’s gay marriage, or abortion rights, or bisexuality, or whatever the current thing is, that there’s a better than good chance that there’s either a believer in the room that’s struggling with it, or an unbeliever in the room that’s given over to it, and we got to give them good news, not just bad news.
Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifewayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.
(See the full transcript for the episode –with links–on next page)
Marty Duren is the executive editor and marketing manager of Lifeway Pastors and host of the podcast Pastor Talk by Lifeway, both ministries of Lifeway Christian Resources. Prior to Marty’s role with Lifeway Pastors, he was the Manager of Social Media Strategy for Lifeway and Content Manager for The Exchange. He is also a long time pastor, writer, and blogger/social media enthusiast. He and his wife Sonya have three adult children and one awesome grandson. Marty and Sonya live in the Nashville area.
