Category Archives: sevensd church

Hell on Earth- Pastors Burning Up and Flaming out

31 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in 7SD, Church, Church Leadership, God., jeremy, jeremy mcgarity, leadership, mcgarity, pastor Jeremy, patience, retreat, seven church, seven sd, sevensd church, Uncategorized

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I’m currently attending the final residency phase of my Doctor of Ministry program and I’m working on my final Doctoral Project. I’ve been digging in to research on pastoral burnout and how it effects churches all across the nation. With 80-85% of churches declining or dying across America and with pastors leaving the ministry every day– there is a clear correlation between pastoral burnout and church decline . I’ve been shocked to read the latest research and find that last year over 1,700 pastors quit or were forced to leave the ministry every month…I’m gonna say that again…every month. That number is rising…

My project is focusing on the causes and correlations between burnout and decline in churches and the correlation between healthy pastors and healthy growing and multiplying churches. If we lose our leaders the research is showing we lose our churches. Since we trust Jesus’ words that his “yoke is easy and his burden light”
— what is causing such burnout among church leaders? So far, the research is that crushing expectations, no time off, always in “crisis mode”, wanting to please people and wanting to always be “On” and the pressure of putting together a good message for Sunday are all factors in burnout, moral failure and quitting amongst pastors in America. My goal is to help pastors and churches and find preventative methods and cures.

Here’s where you can help. If you know of a burned out pastor- either currently out of full time ministry or formerly burned out but back at it- please let me know by emailing me jeremy@7sd.org. I would like to interview pastors and leaders and draw some conclusions and provide some solutions.

Gracias and peace,

4th of July Weekend Not the Blues

06 Sunday Jul 2008

Posted by in jeremy mcgarity, seven church, sevensd church

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4th of July weekend for churches is hold your breath time and hope people show up…unfortunately…however we are very happy to report that we had a great start to July. 4th of July weekend was a win!! We finished up our mini-series called “Wasting Time with God.” Wesley Van Fleet did a great job of sharing his testimony and talking about how he puts God first by wasting time with Him.

What a great day. We were thrilled to see so many people at Seven SD. It is so strange in a new area of ministry to try to gauge the patterns, mainly because there are no patterns in a new church. So, when so many people showed up today, on a day that “normally” would be a low attendance day we couldn’t help but get a little giddy. We’re not fooling ourselves, there is much work to be done, we’ve far from “arrived.” There is so much I want to do and often I feel far behind where I want to be. But, it is encouraging to know we’re on the right track. I have been praying Matthew 9:37-38, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few, ask the Lord of the harvest to send the workers.” There are so many areas in our ministry where I can see God bringing someone to fill the void. We’re getting there, we’ve got a long ways to go, but today was one of those “wins”. New churches need wins, especially when there seems to be so many tough days.

I’m looking forward to next week as we start our brand new series “Tabloid Jesus”. We will continue to build on the momentum as summer heats up.

Missions Meeting

26 Thursday Jun 2008

Posted by in Church, jeremy mcgarity, seven sd, sevensd church

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Getting ready for a missions meeting of sorts. We are partnering with San Miguel Community Church to do a community wide Youth Olympics for kids in K-6th grades. We will also do this in conjunction with a church from Houston Texas who will send a team of 25 young people here to help us with this event. It’s really cool to be able to partner with other churches in and near the community as well as churches all over country. We really need to have a team mentality when trying to reach this huge community. So, this is one event where a couple of churches will reach out to the community together to show we are ONE CHURCH. Today’s meeting will be full of planning, laughing, pizza, and excitement as we figure out how best to get the word out and get some kids fired up to participate.