By Amy Butler While I’d bet this problem spans professional worlds, I know for sure that anybody who is responsible for a church staff will agree that good help is hard to find. Even the ridiculously high pay and indisputable…

By Amy Butler I’ve heard it told that some pastors really like to make hospital visits. Me? Not so much. It’s not that I don’t understand their purpose in the larger scope of my job; of course I do. I’m…

By Amy Butler When young pastors ask me for advice on self-care (insert uproarious laughter here) I always say that one very important part of survival in the trenches of ministry is getting a life. Outside the church. While one…

By Amy Butler Warning: this column is purely a pastor’s summer rant. While I often feel alone in these sentiments, I strongly suspect that other pastors out there share my feelings. Thus, I’ve recorded them here just to see if,…

By Amy Butler Seems like everybody likes to use the phrase “prophetic leadership” when it comes to the church. It sounds deeply theological and also a little daring, don’t you think? Pastor search committees have a tendency to use the…

By Amy Butler When I first took up preaching every Sunday I made the decision to follow the Revised Common Lectionary as a guide for worship planning. It would be nice to say that I chose to do this because…

By Amy Butler I work right around the corner from The Gallup Organization’s headquarters here in Washington, so I’ll just say up front that the informal poll I recently took on Facebook should not be considered strictly scientific. That being…

By Amy Butler I had a free evening last week, so I decided to go to church. Though I spend quite a bit of time at church, I don’t often go to church in the way that most people think…

By Amy Butler One of the great hardships of being a pastor is that the job involves two very important tasks that generally do not work well together: sales and offending people. It all sounds very distasteful to call it…