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Old 11-24-2009, 01:54 PM
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Viclyn Viclyn is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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I think any job where your responsibility is "people" (notice that many of the jobs are very people oriented) you have stress. They are unpredictable and things that you think should work, and you work hard on, don't always.

Relationships can be very stressful and almost all the jobs listed are relational in nature. If you also have to take on extra jobs because the pay is low, you may be compounding the stress.

Not to mention that the results are very intangible. How do you know you are doing a good job? It's not like a cabinet maker where you can stand back and see the accomplishment and know you were directly responsible for that. There are so many variables that the direct impact of your ministry gets a little hazy.

I see many parallels between my job (high school teacher, #15 on the list) and music ministry. Although I have never been in a paid ministry position I have had similar and dissimilar experiences.

I think it often comes down to expectations. I expect the church and its members to be different because of Christ, and I get very discouraged when I see too much similarity between it and the world. That's what makes the bumps a little hard to deal with sometimes. I deal with difficult parents, administrators, kids, other staff member with much more grace than with fellow brothers and sisters because I expect too much of Christians sometimes. Maybe the expectations are too high for music ministers as well or maybe we expect too much from ourselves and don't let Christ dwell in our weaknesses enough. If we did, we probably have much more peace.
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