• Continue integrating small, but consistent regular changes in your own spiritual formation. Develop a Rule of Life (written or unwritten) that reflects personal life changes you want to make (e.g. Sabbath-keeping, Daily Offices, Silence and Solitude, One Day Alone with God a month, marriage, play, etc). Nothing will have greater long-term impact on your church.
• Intentionally build 3-10 minutes of silence into your time with God each day.
• Build morning/midday and evening pauses into your day to remember Him.
• Spend one day a month with God. Our staff takes the third Wednesday of each month for a day with God.
• Consider finding a spiritual director or older mentor.
• Read broadly, drinking deeply, from writings such as Eugene Peterson's The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation. I find reading the contemplatives help me with balance.

• Consider going to an excellent therapist/counselor, at least quarterly, to do further work on your own issues from your past and their impact on your leadership today.
• Sabbath for a 24 hour period each week - stop, rest, delight and contemplate. Approach your yearly vacations as sabbaticals, planning accordingly. Take 2-3 month sabbaticals every 5-7 years to replenish the soil of your soul.
• Cultivate healthy fun and other interests outside your work.

• Develop a "rule of life" with your spouse to cultivate your marriage.
• Attend at least one retreat, workshop yearly to get further mentoring/discipleship in being married.
• When stuck around an issue, get outside help from a wise mentor or counselor to break through to God's intention of intimacy
• Listen to the Following two CD/MP3 series together and talk about their implications for your relationship: Ephesians: Our Body, Our Sexuality and Our God (3 parts) and Ephesians: True Womanhood and True Manhood (4 parts).
• Keep an eye on our EHS website for Emotionally Healthy Skills (Explore The Iceberg, Constructing a Genogram, Community Temperature Reading, Ladder of Integrity, Clean Fighting, Reflective Listening, Expectations, Stop Mind Reading) materials available in mp3, handouts, and Powerpoint formats soon for your personal and congregational use.

• Agree on a Rule of Life you would like to commit to together as staff/elder board. (Use the NLF Pastoral Staff Rule of Life for both a sample and categories that can guide your thinking).
• Experiment with a Daily Office once a week at your staff meeting. I experimented for a year each week to finally find a framework that worked for us (e.g. we began and ended with worship, began with 2-3 Scriptures read out loud together, a devotional, 5 minutes of silence, the Lord's Prayer, and ending with prayer in groups of three to four). Begin the Journey with the Daily Office provides a nice starter if you like. For guidelines and a sample staff Daily Office, go to the website.
• Begin or end staff/elder meetings with silent prayer waiting on the Lord (2-5 min).
• Begin to prayerfully set goals and steps for meetings. Don't rush. Be thoughtful as part of your contemplative life, thinking though time limits of what you do.
• Seek honesty and integrity in your relationships, addressing "elephants" in the room with prudence and discernment.

Below are suggestions of sermon series that will build upon the EHS Church-wide Initiative with your congregation as well as direct your studying in the direction you desire to grow in personally.

• Your Life, Your Calling and Your God - a series we recently completed on a theology of work, how we are all in full-time ministry and the biblical call to eliminate secular/sacred categories is central to Scripture, is an excellent follow up series. It culminates in a commissioning service of your people!
• Revelation: Resisting the Beast. A series on the 7 churches (ch. 1-3).
• Beatitudes (Upside Down Spirituality)
• Elijah - silence and the desert
• Prayer - The Lord's Prayer (communion with God).
• Developing a Rule of Life - Prayer, Rest, Relationships, Work/Activity
• Sabbath Keeping: Four Part Series on each principle of Biblical Sabbaths
• Marriage and Sexuality (Your Body, Your Sexuality and Your God)
• Emotionally Healthy Relationships: Marriage, Singleness and Sexuality

You may want to lead, occasionally, the congregation in a silent pause for 30 seconds to 2 minutes after a sermon message.

• Offer a structured "Day Alone with God" for your people at a local retreat center. Keep it simple. Begin with 10-15 min. for establishing guidelines. Send off for a couple of hours of alone time. Follow this with a time to debrief. Then send them off again for a few hours of alone time followed by another time to debrief together.
• Utilize small group materials from John Ortberg's, The Life You've Always Wanted, Renovare, John Townsend and Henry Cloud materials (Boundaries, etc.). Consider using The Emotionally Healthy Church book and workbook
• Offer an EHS small group with the workbook and Daily Office book each quarter for new people to go through.

• Daily Office options - web, free
• Books (Tickle's Divine Hours, Celtic Daily Prayer)
• Develop a contemplative service with Prayer Centers