A few years ago, Eric and I blocked off a half-day, drove to a trailhead outside Ames, had lunch at a local spot, and started walking.
There was no agenda. No curriculum. We were two guys in ministry who both needed to be outside and needed to talk, and for once neither of us had a meeting to get back to. We walked, we talked, and somewhere around the ninety-minute mark we stopped talking and just walked in silence for a while. That part surprised us. It shouldn't have, but it did.
By the time we got back to the car four hours later, something had shifted. I drove home lighter than I arrived. More like myself. The week ahead looked different than it had that morning.
We talked later about why it worked. We didn't have a clean answer. But we kept coming back to the same thing: we had stopped. Not strategically. Not as a productivity move. We had simply stopped, and something in us that had been running on empty for a long time had gotten a little room to breathe.
That afternoon became the prototype for everything in this guide.
Matt Heerema is the Lead Pastor at Stonebrook Community Church in Ames, Iowa. He has been in pastoral ministry for over a decade and has spent a good portion of that time watching colleagues run themselves into the ground in the name of faithfulness.
Eric Schumacher is a biblical counselor and the pastoral ministry director for the Baptist Convention of Iowa. His work puts him in close contact with pastors across the state who are tired in ways they haven't named yet. He knows the patterns. He knows the rationalizations. He's heard them all because he's used them himself.
Between the two of us, we have a clear view of the problem: pastors who are outwardly functional and inwardly depleted, who have not stopped in long enough to notice. The burnout statistics are not the worst of it. The worst of it is the slow dimming, the years of low-grade depletion that never quite becomes a crisis, and therefore never gets addressed.
We built this resource because we couldn't find one that was simple enough to actually use. Not a retreat center. Not a sabbatical. Not another book about the importance of rest. Just a set of practical liturgies that a busy pastor could actually put on the calendar.
If you are reading this, you probably know what it feels like to give all week and arrive at the end of it with nothing left. We are not here to tell you that is a discipline problem. We are here to give you a few small structures that create room for something different.
That is all these liturgies are: an invitation to stop. Not forever. Just for an afternoon.
We hope one of them finds its way into your regular rhythm. That is the whole ask.
Matt Heerema and Eric Schumacher