In this episode, Gina’s guest Ken Baugh shares his journey as a pastor who found himself burned out, fired and faced with a decision; either run from his pain, anger and brokenness, or let Jesus meet him there to bring transformation.
Ken’s new book, Unhindered Abundance, weaves his personal story throughout a deep dive into spiritual formation, psychology and neuroscience—all of which reveal the beautiful invitation extended to every believer.
How we process hard things intellectually and spiritually recalibrates us toward either health and wholeness or bitterness and defeatism. Ken helps us rewire our brains by simmering in the Scriptures that remind us whom we belong to and what God has promised us. The result is a resilient, robust faith prepared to weather every storm and keep in step with Jesus.
Ken served as a local church pastor for 25 years and started IDT Ministries in 2014 to be a resource for Christ-formation and to gather a community of believers who desire to journey together in discipleship to Jesus. Ken earned his Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and his Doctor of Ministry in Discipleship from Talbot School of Theology.
Buy Ken’s book Unhindered Abundance
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Listen below starting at 00:00
Meet Ken Baugh
Gina:
Ken has been a pastor for over 25 years. He started I.D.T ministries in 2014 to disciple men and pastors in their walk with Jesus. He’s passionate about discipleship and he just released a book called Unhindered Abundance, Restoring Our Souls in a Fractured World. I tell you what, our world is pretty fractured right now. Ken and I used to be on staff together at a church.
He was the senior pastor, and I reached out to him to be a guest on the podcast before I even knew that he had a book coming out. His story is woven through his book, his story of being a senior pastor, the weight and pressure of all of that, him hitting a wall, really burning out, his subsequent firing from that position, and really being faced with whether or not he was going to allow Jesus to meet him in the middle of that pain, in the middle of that trauma, in the middle of his anger and hurt over everything that happened.
Let Jesus bring transformation out of that, or to hold onto those things and be formed by his anger and bitterness. It’s an invitation for all of us. We all have a choice to let God, who is our Redeemer, come into those dark hard places. There’s an invitation to intimacy, invitation to be family, spiritual community. We talked about everything from his story, to the role of senior pastor and whether or not that’s even a healthy biblical position. We talked about elders, we talked about all of it.
It’s a really good examination of the things that we take for granted and presume in life, in church. I hope that you are encouraged. you’ll see leadership differently. you’re going to have some compassion and love for the spiritual leaders in your life. I hope that we can all step into intimate relationship with God and each other, and really be the spiritual family and kingdom family that we are called to be. I’m so excited that you’re here. Ken, you and I were on staff at a church together for a long time. We worked together you have a book coming out?
Ken:
Yes. A long time in the making.
Gina:
What’s the name of your book?
Ken:
It’s Unhindered Abundance, Restoring Our Souls In a Fragmented World.
Gina:
That’s timely right now.
Ken:
With everything going on in our world and culture and subculture, there’s hopefully some things that will be useful.
Gina:
You and your wife Susan, have two daughters and three grand babies.
Ken:
We hit the grandparent jackpot when our oldest daughter had twins, so that’s been very fun.
Gina:
We have a lot of history. We’ve been through a few things together, but I would love for you as much as you’re able and are comfortable to share your story. When I met you, you were a pastor in Washington D.C. You were leading a huge young adults church that went from a few hundred to a few thousand. You stepped in as a Senior Pastor at the church that I was at. I wasn’t on staff at that time. I would love to hear your journey. You can go back farther than that if you want. Let us get to know Ken Baugh.
Ministry Relocation
Ken:
You might get more than you bargain for on that one. Like a lot of pastors, we could say for all pastors, your ministry comes out of your life and the things that have shaped you for good and for bad. That is certainly true in my life, because we can’t compartmentalize things where we’re holistic beings in the sense that we don’t live in these neat tidy compartments, that everything leaks into each other.
My ministry is no exception to that. I’ve been in pastoral ministry, local church ministry for over 30 years. At each juncture God worked in different ways in part because of what He was doing in me. A lot of the ministry outcome is what He’s doing in us. That’s what provides integrity to ministry anyways. Our time in Washington D.C. was coming out of a very large church in Southern California and thinking that my life was over. This is a theme that comes up, because I don’t like change.
I don’t move through the stages of orientation, disorientation and reorientation smoothly. It’s very messy, especially in the early days. I’m getting better at it. At times I’m better at it than I actually am. But our transition from southern California to Washington D.C. was kicking and screaming. We went there, we were there for 10 and a half years, at McLean Bible Church and which is a great church.
I got to work with some amazing people and the ministry that God allowed us to lead and we actually built from the ground up. It was just a really sweet time to be in that place with all of those young people. Because Washington D.C. is one of the meccas for young adults in our country. That timeframe was certainly true and the ministry that came out of that was global.
It was just astounding to be a part of that. We were there for 10 and a half years. Then the ironic thing is that coming back to California, to go to the church where I was pastoring, which you eventually came on staff at as, I went kicking and screaming back. There’s a kicking and screaming theme in my life. That is just part of it. But one of the things that I have really come to appreciate about the journey is that God is with us on the journey.
I’ve really come to believe that one of the reasons God doesn’t just snap His fingers and fix everything is because He wants to be something for us in the midst of the desert, that He can’t be for us otherwise. How can I know that God is my Provider, unless I’m ever in need? How can I know God is my Comforter if I’m never in pain? At least in this life, there’s aspects of God’s character and nature that we can’t experience outside of contrast.
That’s been a real healing paradigm for me, because it has brought perspective to hiccups that are just part of life and the messiness of both life and ministry that when you look back on, you see God’s presence in that and His faithfulness through that. That bolsters us and gives us resilience as we go into whatever is next. Not that everything is one perpetual wilderness wasteland experience after the other.
But certainly, I’m 56 years old, so I’ve been through a couple of those and the great thing is that I’m not afraid to go into the next one, because I’ve learned some things in coming through the other ones. I don’t look forward to it, but I also realize that God doesn’t just wave to me as I go into the desert and just say, “Okay, I can’t. I’ll see you on the other side.” Instead He says, “No, I’m going through this with you.” That’s the sweetness that comes out of the intimacy that God cultivates in our hearts as we go through really difficult times.
Gina:
That’s the fruit of that is the reorientation. There’s the orientation, “God, You’re good, You’re awesome. The birds praise You.” Then disorientation, “My flesh is rotting off my bones.” But then reorientation, “But, You’re on the throne and I will praise You even in the valley of the shadow of death.” You can’t express that unless you’ve been in that place in the middle. You can’t.
Ken:
You can’t. There’s another benefit of this and that is the community that God brings around you as you go through that. Because He doesn’t abandon us in that. Like I said, He is with us, but He also brings flesh and blood, Jesus people around us to help us through that. Those are some of the sweetest relationships that you can have.
Relationship is Essential to Transformation
Gina:
Doesn’t that just get back to the core of what we’re made for? To love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s all about relationship. All of it we’ve distorted it and reduced it and turned it into religion and turned it into so many things.
But at the end of the day, if we can come to that place of recognizing what the prayer of John 17 was looking towards, and if we can recognize the miraculous gift of spiritual community and what it means to bear one another’s burdens and the invitation that is there both vertically and horizontally. It’s pretty remarkable.
Ken:
The relational dynamic of our faith is essential to our transformation. Because God doesn’t bring about transformation outside of relationship. He is a relational being. He exists in a triune community. The Trinity is God’s small group. Part of being created in His image and likeness, means a lot of things, but one of the things that it means is that we are created as relational beings also who need relationship with Him and with each other.
God created it so that a relationship with Him is not enough as heretical as that sounds, that’s His doing. We see that play out in Scripture. Even in James, “You can’t say you love God and hate your brother.” There’s this vertical, horizontal, like you said, dynamic going on constantly. They’re intertwined. You can’t separate them. We can’t separate relationship from our transformation process.
But in the last 500 years or so of church history, we’ve really leaned more towards propositional truth as the means for our transformation, then relationship. It’s not minimizing the importance of propositional truth in God’s revelation in His Word. I’m not minimizing that, but the written word is always to lead us to the Living Word, relational dynamic.
With that comes emotions, with that comes the messiness of life. We’ve tried to separate that from ministry, separate it from discipleship. That’s been part of what has led us to the place where we are today in North America, with a lot of brokenness, both in leadership and as a congregation. This current pandemic is both revealing, but also we’ll look back on this at some point and see that it has been one of God’s greatest gifts to us in the last hundred years.
Gina:
You came back to California kicking and screaming and you step into a Senior Pastor position in South Orange County. Pick up your story there.
Ken:
That was an interesting time for me personally, because I didn’t want to come back to California initially. I was actually in conversation with the Senior Pastor in Virginia about succession. We were having conversations about that. There was no guarantee, but we were starting to have conversations about what that might look like, what a process might look like to bring that outcome so forth when I brought that information home, Susan informed me that she needs to be a part of that conversation.
Signing up for permanent residency in Washington, DC was not on her to-do list. That led to quite a bit of conversation, and some hardship in our marriage. Because I was very resistant to that. As God does, He works on us and brings us to a place of recognizing change when it needs to take place, so He brought us to Southern California, which is home for us. We both went to the same high school right here in town so this was not a foreign place, but living in DC for 10 and a half years, which is a very different culture from California. It took a while to readjust to Southern California culture.
Gina:
I remember you showed up and were wearing suits on Sundays.
Ken:
To my defense, I still, to this day, would prefer preaching in a suit than otherwise.
Gina:
This shows you the silliness of American ministry. How many meetings were we talking about “Tie, no tie. Collar, no collar.”
Ken:
It was. We need to adapt to our environments. But it is what it is. I slowly came around to making some changes to my wardrobe, but reluctantly. Here’s the irony though, I came back to California and really the first eight months that I was at the church felt very normal. It felt like it didn’t feel any different than what I was experiencing Washington D.C.
There was crazy growth, there was excitement. It was just fun. It really was. Then the recession hit California, and one thing after the other. I just felt like the ground underneath me was disintegrating, to a large extent. My time at that church really felt like a desert experience. It ended up leading me into even a deeper desert experience…
Check out the rest of this conversation: Restoring Our Souls & Unhindered Abundance
Check out the Dwell Meditations
