Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Paul Rankin

Refilling so We Still Have Enough to Give

I wanted to start just by reading Luke chapter 19.

Luke chapter 19 is the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem and everyone starts praising God and singing hosanna and doing all sorts of things and the priests and the leads asked him to tell them to shut up.

And he said, if I tell them to shut up, the very stones will cry out.

And then the next verse, it says, when the city came into view, he wept over it.

If only you had recognised this day and everything that was good for you, but now it's too late.

In the days ahead, your enemies are going to bring up their heavy artillery, surround you, pressing in from every side.

They'll smash you and your babies in the pavement.

All this because you didn't recognise and welcome God's personal visit.

Going into the temple, he began to throw out everyone who had set up shop, selling everything and anything.

And he said, it was written in the scripture, my house is a house of prayer.

You have turned it into a religious bazaar.

I find that passage quite interesting because I sort of grew up with this picture of Jesus being Jesus meek and mild, calm and quiet, nothing ever went wrong.

But when I read that passage, and I think behind the scenes, I think Jesus was actually probably struggling with burnout at that time.

He had a dream, and a dream to see Israel accept him as Messiah.

And at this stage he realized that wasn't gonna happen.

And then he goes into the temple and gets rid of some of his frustration by chasing out the money changers with a whip.

That's my interpretation, it may not have been like that.

But there's actually a photo of my graduating class from Avondale College.

Lionel Smith's now the division secretary.

Yasuki was actually, he's now a lecturer in Japan, at the seminary in Japan, he did theology with us.

We graduated from Avondale College and we were out to change the world.

And we discovered that instead of being nice places with decent structure, that this is actually what the typical structure of a local Seventh-day Adventist church looked like.

And Seventh-day Adventist churches, we discovered, are social clubs.

And the most important thing in a social club is your position in the social club, because you happen to be a few higher rungs down the ladder.

And we discovered that being an Adventist pastor wasn't all we had dreamt it would be.

And as a result of some of those experiences, when I did my Master's in Public Health at University of New South Wales, my research project was in burnout in Seventh Day Adventist ministers.

And burnout's interesting because often there's confusion between burnout and stress.

And burnout, Poyin said, failure in the existential quest for meaning is the root cause of burnout.

Burnout's caused by internal factors within ourselves.

Stress is what happens outside of us, burnout's what happens inside of us.

And burnout is when we have dreams to change the world and those dreams don't come to fruition.

And we try and work out what's happening in that process.

The term was actually first Maslach who Rob referred to, Maslach burnout inventory.

Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do people work of some kind.

It's a response to a chronic emotional strain of dealing extensively with other human beings, particularly when they're having troubles or problems.

Thus it can be considered 1 type of job stress.

What is unique about burnout is that the stress arises from social interaction between helper and recipient.

And it has these 3 factors, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment.

And it was actually first coined by a bloke called Freudenberger back in the 1970s when he was working with people running the free clinics in Germany.

And what he discovered was that people in the free clinics were working harder and harder and harder and seeing less and less results.

And the dream of changing the world didn't happen.

And all of us, I believe, dream about changing the world.

And it's that dream of changing the world that gives us the motivation to get up in the morning.

I get up in the morning because I believe what I'm doing when I get up in the morning has significance.

However, at times other people don't see that what we're doing has significance.

And I've just been through a situation where the funding for my position at the South Pacific Division has dried up, and so I'm moving to a position at Greater Sydney Conference, which is really, really exciting.

But it's also a little bit depressing when what you've put your life into for the last few years has suddenly said, oh no, we don't need to keep doing that anymore, go and find another job.

And We keep struggling with this fact that what we think is making a difference doesn't seem to be making a difference.

And I'd like to run through some of those that we discovered.

First of all, we need to look after our own health.

And for those of us that are married, part of that looking after our own health is looking after our families.

There's an old saying, happy wife, happy life, and believe me, it's true.

But and, you know, Andrew talked about the fact that his wife came in and helped sort out the books and that sort of thing.

Our health and our own personal relationships and our family relationships are vitally important.

If you look through the New Testament, Jesus regularly took time out.

And there's a number of incidences there when the disciples couldn't find Jesus.

Or after he fed the 5, 000, he put the disciples in a boat, told them to get lost, and he went up into a hill and prayed and took some time out by himself, and then just wanted to cross the water.

We're not quite up to wandering on water yet, but Yeah.

The other thing is, it's really important to avoid this, that we have a passion outside of our work life that we pursue, not with the same amount of hours, but with the same intensity, that we pursue what we do in our work life.

Actually bumped into Andrew yesterday and he was looking a bit sunburned.

If you've ever played golf, you don't play off a 6 handicap unless you get serious about golf.

I actually happen to fly hang gliders, and I love flying hang gliders.

1 of the best hang gliding sites in the world is about 20 minutes drive from Loma Linda University.

And 1 of the few disadvantages of my new job is I won't be getting to Loma Linda quite as often as I did beforehand.

But it's just to be able to go out, to be able to forget all about work, all about the pressures of life, and do something that you love doing.

The other thing that's really, really important in avoiding burnout is social support.

And I want to expand on that a little bit more.

And that social support is vital for a number of different reasons.

We need someone that's going to listen to us without making judgment about what we're doing.

And I would suggest in most cases that person can't be your spouse.

It needs to be someone that can listen without the buy-in that your wife or your partner, your spouse has in that issue.

It needs to be technical support and appreciation from the person who is an expert in the field and who honestly can be trusted.

And look, In the area of ministry, there's a couple of young ministers that I mentor.

And it's a matter of sitting down with those young ministers and say, mate, you are not going to baptise 1500 people today, this year.

Now let's try and get those goals and those aims realistic.

Refilling so We Still Have Enough to Give

Transcript

Description

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Amazing Disciples

2. What is a Disciple?

46m

Biblical Missionaries

02. Biblical Missionaries: Abraham- the First Missionary

44m

Misc

Bootstrapping a School Farm

48m

Plenary

Soul Winning Hour

1h 24m

Certainty in Uncertain Times

12. How Can We Recognize Christ’s Followers in the End of Time?

55m

The Nativity

03 The Nativity

43m

Orchard Frost Protection

45m

Meeting the Master Gardener

Jesus’ Heavenly Fruit

37m

The Lord’s Prayer

37m

Throne Exchange

30m

Homesteading

My Wild Orchard: Successful Home Fruit Production

51m

Market Gardening

Meet the Farmers— Market Gardening Panel Discussion

1h 2m

Sound Doctrine