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 33:36
The importance of Soul Care
Ken:
As a senior leader, I don’t care whether it’s the church or whether it’s the business world, you’re in that position and just because of the position, people don’t tell you the truth. People tell you what you want to hear. Most good leaders are not looking to have a bunch of “Yes” people around them. If there’s a problem, tell me there’s a problem and then let’s hopefully work on it together.
You would think in the church, we would be the place that would extend the most grace, have the most compassion, be the most long suffering and yet when you don’t experience that and especially of senior leadership you’re struggling with something, whether it’s emotional or physical or whatever it is. If you’re burned out, this is too much for you. Why don’t we look at the problems here instead of just the symptoms.
Gina:
Let’s identify the problem and come up with the plan, which they weren’t willing to do at that point. But even that is still organizational problem solving. True there was not anybody looking at you going, how do we care for Ken?
Ken:
It didn’t seem that way. I would like to think that there were some of the elders that were doing that.
Gina:
There were, but the train had already left the building that goes back to.
Ken:
It left without me because I didn’t know it had left the building until I’m the only one standing on the train station.
Gina:
With your bag. I’ve said for years, but there isn’t really training to be an elder, or to steward spiritually and care spiritually for the leaders, and there really isn’t training for that. Like how do you care for that?
Ken:
There is training in doctrine and theology, but there is not training in the church today. There is usually not even soul care in churches. That’s a very new term that still a lot of churches and elder boards don’t embrace. Like I said, I coach a lot of pastors and in one particular situation, I remember talking to one of the senior leaders of some of these pastors and it was like, “Pastors should take care of themselves.” The assumption is that they are, but they don’t know how.
We weren’t taught that in seminary. We weren’t taught how to do self care. That seems like selfish humanism stuff. So you’ve got all this woundedness and brokenness that you bring into. It’s like marriage. Marriage is not the people that have marriage problems. It’s not marriage that’s the problem. It’s all the baggage they brought into the marriage. So you’ve got two people, you’ve got two sets of bags and now you’ve got all these dynamics that are going on.
That’s true in any situation. That’s why relationships are messy. That’s why we need so much grace. That’s why, love covers a multitude of sins. There’s all kinds of dynamics here that we can talk about in regard to how our communities function and be biblical and yet how they tend to function. It’s not that anyone’s sitting there going, “We don’t want to be biblical in this.”
Gina:
No, that’s the thing. Nobody’s being malicious. No one’s intending to destroy anybody’s life or to hurt anybody. That is the farthest thing from the truth. Those patterns that we fall into and the presumptions that we make end up doing that instead of leaving the 99 and going after the one, elders and senior leadership tend to go, “Oh, we need to protect the 99, so let’s just let the one go because there’s a lot at stake.”
Here it’s ironic thing that we neglect to look at Jesus’ model of leadership. Look at even with His disciples, He prepared His guys to even hit a wall and fail and fall. He told Peter, you’re going to deny me. he didn’t let him go off. He brought him back in. “Go tell my disciples and Peter.” There’s this grace and room for failure, for stumbling, for not getting it, for doubting for whatever the issue may be and grace and intentionality, pursuit and love to bring back in. Unfortunately that’s just missing most of the time.
Ken:
Jesus clearly was not interested in numbers because He did not pursue the crowds. He would respond to the crowds and he had compassion on the crowds over and over again. We see that, but we’ve flipped that around for some reason. It may be going back to what you said earlier, that a lot of the men who sit in positions of elder are business people that bring with them their training and expertise. A lot of these people are very gifted at that.
My experience has been that there’s this switch that gets flipped that as an elder, “Now it’s my job to protect the church.” That is the switch that once you think that’s your job. God is plenty able to protect his church. Our job is not to protect the church. Our job is to be good stewards with what God has given us.
Our job is to care for each other and to create a community of love and grace and acceptance. I’m not saying we don’t deal with problems when they arise and if there’s challenges leadership or otherwise we don’t address those. I’m not saying any of that. I’m saying we do that in a communal way. That’s like a family. Family is messy. Church as a family is messy.
Gina:
This whole situation was really hard. It was very hurtful to you and and your wife, and it was hurtful to the church. It was messy. It was hard.
Ken:
And the damage to my girls too.
Processing anger with God
Gina:
But God is a redeemer and he does work things together for our good in his glory. It’s not just a bumper sticker, or a nice little hobby lobby thing that you hang on your wall. But it’s a brutal path to that redemption. We have choices how we respond in the darkest times, I said this before, you could have just cut your losses and bolted and moved somewhere far away.
Take another job at a church and just pretend that never happened. But you didn’t and you stayed and faced the ugly and the dark. You and Susan both allowed the Lord to meet you there. I would love for you to just talk a little bit about that choice to deal with all of this because you could have very easily just gotten so hurt and offended and bitter and placed. Blame would’ve been very easy.
Ken:
Oh, I was there.
Gina:
But, you could still be there, and build a whole ministry on the mound of your crap.
Ken:
Sadly that’s what happened a lot of times. I don’t know if you remember Gina, but the series that I did right before I was terminated, we did an eight part series on forgiveness. Remember? I interviewed you on stage. That’s during one of those talks. There were a number of reasons why we stayed. There was a really large successful church that reached out to me and said, “We would like to interview you to become a senior pastor.”
I did enter into that initially, then it got to the place where it looked like it was going to happen. I remember being really conflicted about it, because honestly there was a part of me that felt like I was going right back into what I had just gotten out of. I was concerned about that, and I remember praying and asking the Lord, I said, “Lord, I don’t trust myself in this decision, if this isn’t supposed to happen then take it off the table.”
It was a week later, the chairman of the search committee called me and said, “We decided to go a different direction.” I was stunned because that is not the direction I thought this was going, but I remembered what I had asked the Lord. I really think the Lord took it off the table. I hadn’t worked through some of the things that He wanted me to work through.
Now I feel like I’m still working on those things. It’s not that I’ve arrived in any way. But there’s been growth and progress. The pain that I was in was exacerbated by what I thought had been resolved. There was pain that goes way back into my childhood. That really came out as I was writing my book and just understanding, and the clarity that comes out of my dissertation.
I was doing double sessions in therapy for a year every week with a very skilled psychologist. That had a huge impact, though it probably had less of an impact in the moment. It was the after effects of it, that honestly I would still be stuck. One of the reasons we didn’t go someplace else is because I had just done that series on forgiveness, and I knew that I had to work through this bitterness, because if I didn’t, it would consume me and destroy me.
I was that angry. I felt like it was unjust, and I went into the victim thing. I went into all that stuff. Now it wasn’t that I wasn’t taking any personal responsibility for what had happened, because I did. But I definitely placed the lion’s share of the blame on everybody else. As I look back on that, I would say it is a defining moment in my life that was really a crossroads.
It’s like, “Okay, Ken, you have a ton of years of experience in ministry, tons of years of being a teaching pastor, being in the Word constantly, how has that really shaped you? How has that really affected you?” For me, there was a point of real integrity in this. It’s like, “Wow, am I going to really put my money where my mouth is?”
It took a while for me to get to that place because I was so angry. It’s amazing how much you can justify something when you’re angry. As the anger started subsiding, as I continued to work through stuff, I was able to be more objective, and some other people see things differently.
God The Redeemer
Gina:
It’s so powerful. I hope that people reading recognize that this isn’t just about somebody who’s in ministry. We all come to those moments in our life where we’re dealing with pain, trauma, and disappointment. The choice whether or not to forgive the choice, whether or not to face those things, the choice whether or not to let that offense and hurt from us, or to do that hard work, so that we allow God’s grace to form us in the midst of that.
Ken:
We don’t want it to malform us. It definitely forms us. That’s the redemptive beauty of it. Is that in God’s hands? Something painful can be used to form us more into the image of Christ. The book is entitled “Unhindered Abundance” because I believe that the abundance that we’re talking about is a quality of life that is largely characterized by the fruit of the spirit.
As I am becoming more and more like Jesus, the evidence of that is my character is being changed into the person that responds to a situation with those attributes. That doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a result of willpower. It’s the byproduct of an inner work of the spirit that requires my participation. God just doesn’t zap us with instant character.
Gina:
It’s easy for us as believers to want that. We want the easy way out. We want God to be the genie in a bottle. I want to rub the lamp and go, “Okay, heal me.” But more often than not, we have a choice to engage in the process and you hit the nail on the head. Just now that we don’t respond out of willpower, I’m a Christian, therefore I need to do A, B, and C. I need to respond this way. I’m going to hit the end of myself every time.
I might be able to go pretty far with that and if I’m really good. I can fill myself and everybody else for a period of time. But at some point I’m going to run into the end of myself and have to let go and surrender. The malformation is really when we let those things build strongholds. We build thinking that they’re some sort of protection, but in fact they’re the very thing that are going to stand in the way of that freedom that we’re hoping for, and that we’re longing for.
Ministry out of Intimacy
Ken:
I’m not sure, Gina. That the character formation we’re talking about here can happen outside of the crucible of life. God is with us in that, and he is bringing those changes about, but he does that in partnership with us. There is a fundamental expectation in the New Testament that we as believers are being transformed into the image of Christ. The question is how does that happen?
What is my part in that, if any, and what is God’s part in that? If you go too far, talking about what my part is, then people are accusing you of legalism and a works oriented righteousness and so forth. If you don’t, then it’s this passive, “I’m just going to sit here and wait for God to fill me with instant Christ-like character.”
So there’s a middle ground where Dallas Willard talks about the whole aspect of training so there is a training dynamic that requires our participation. So in my book, I go through what that looks like and what are the specifics and the practical outcomes of all of that. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m like the primary Guinea pig through this whole thing of course.
Where God is working this out, not only in my thinking and and how I understand this, both biblically and theologically, but in my own practice and in my own personal life, my marriage and my parenting and all of those things, and how all of those things work together. It’s hard to do that.
It’s hard to get at that when you are standing in front of thousands of people preaching a sermon. So I’m not saying that the public preaching and teaching of the Word doesn’t produce a transformative outcome. It does. But Jesus invited the disciples to come be with Him, not show up at the synagogue at 9:00 AM for their next Hebrew lesson.
There is a life together that when you study the brain, you realize that character formation is not a left brain activity, the left brain is focused on information, data, facts and figures and so forth. It’s on the right side of the brain, whereas everything gets processed first. In the right side and then to the left it happens quickly. But that’s the relational side.
There’s other components that are going on, so in a very real sense, character is formed by those that we are bonded to in relationship. So there’s this aspect of, “More is actually caught than taught.” Jesus invites the disciples to, “Come follow Me, come be with Me, come really do life with Me.” Then He teaches them what it means to be one of His people.
“So to be one of my people,” Jesus says, “My people love their enemies. I’m going to teach you that, and then I’m going to model it for you, and then I’m going to give you the opportunity to do it. I’m going to instruct that and guide that along the way, we’re going to do that over a period of time.
Your default when you are confronted by an enemy is not to lash out, but is to respond in love, because you’ve become the person that loves their enemy.” In order to become that person requires lots of time and relationship. It doesn’t just happen as a result of a really good series taught by a really gifted preaching with really cool graphics and great music.
Gina:
So much of church as we know it today, is really just a cultural thing that’s been built over years. The few thousand or a few hundred people gather in one place, and then there’s a little bit of music, and then someone stands up for the all important sermon for 45 minutes, and then takes an offering and has donuts on the patio. None of that is biblical. I’m not saying it’s heresy, but those are cultural things that we’ve constructed.
As hard as this year has been in a lot of ways. it’s one of the things that I’m the most excited about, that all of that’s been removed. We would be missing something very profound if, six months from now everything’s fine we just try to go back to business as usual, and we don’t recognize the gift of the deconstruction and the disruption and do that very thing and actually go into the secret place with the Lord and go, “Okay, what do you see?”
What is your vision for the church, big C, moving forward in this day and age? What does it look like to be in community and relationship with you and each other? Because there is something about that whole format now, that for at least this is just me personally, that feels like old wineskins. It just feels like we’re done with that.
It’s time for something new. What does it mean for families and men and women and singles and young adults and people who are retired, to start living their personal intimacy with God and stewarding that and then bringing that into community?
Ken:
When our ministry comes out of our intimacy with Jesus and we’re actually ministering out of the fullness and not out of a vacuum, we experience a deeper outcome.
Gina:
Ken, this is awesome and I’m thankful for you and I’m proud of you for walking it out. I’m excited for what God is going to do in and through you through this book and the things in front of you.
Ken:
I am only where I am today because I have the love of an amazing woman who is patient and kind and pursues Christ with a passion that I’ve seen in very few people, and a family who has just been there for me, and a community of friends who’ve come around us that are still with us today. That in very practical ways, and in just ways of just being supportive and loving and kind, have really enabled us to heal.
I really hope that both my ministry today in coaching and doing discipleship coaching and mentoring pastors and through whatever God ends up doing with this book, is that it becomes part of the process and a tool to help us as the body of Christ, not only grow to become more like Christ, but also create culture, where we can help facilitate that in each other’s lives.
Check out the rest of this conversation: A Fractured World & Restoring Our Souls
Check out the Dwell Meditations
