Persevering in Ministry and Publishing: A Podcast Interview

Every so often, I share a post on my blog about a recent podcast interview. This spring, my friends Josh Ott and Emily Gardner invited me to be on their show Church Chat. The three of us have known each other for the last twelve years because we are part of the same region in our church denomination, the Evangelical Free Church of America.

You can listen to the podcast episode here, “Persevering in Ministry and Publishing with Benjamin Vrbicek” (Apple, Spotify, and YouTube).

Their Church Chat podcast can be, admittedly, a little goofy. I actually like that about them. They started the interview with an extended game of “two truths and a lie.” This might give you the impression we never get to a more substantive conversation. But that would be wrong. We explored some of the hardest questions in ministry. For example, how do you keep going in life and ministry when you don’t think you can?

Many of my worst ministry challenges occurred in the first summer of Covid. Thankfully, nearly five years have passed since that difficult season. I did not realize the extent to which Josh, one of the co-hosts, had faced hardships in his church, which even led him to wrestle with his call to pastoral ministry. On one fateful Christmas Eve, Josh’s wife looked at him and said something like, “Why aren’t you getting ready?” Josh told his wife, “Because I’m not going.” He was supposed to preach at that service, by the way.

Josh did go to church and he did preach. But after that night, he took drastic steps over the next few months to pursue health.

If there is a common thread in each of our experiences of struggle and perseverance in ministry, it is the importance of churches having godly, volunteer pastor-elders. Were it not for the humility, kindness, and wisdom of the leaders at each of our churches, those seasons might have unfolded differently, and perhaps neither of us would be pastoring.

In the interview, I mention several ways my friend Mike Grenier helped me, a volunteer pastor at our church at the time. I did not get to mention it in the interview, but there were also several long phone calls with my dad during those seasons. He kept bringing up the ministry metaphor of an ox with too much weight on his shoulders. “The problem isn’t with the ox or the work of plowing,” he said. “It’s just there is way too much load on the kart.” The metaphor helped me and our leadership team reevaluate what a pastor should do amid all the work he could do.

In the interview, I also discuss writing and publishing, sharing my perspective on “starting small in publishing.” I affectionately, though typically only privately, refer to starting small as guerrilla warfare. The metaphor sorta works, sorta doesn’t. I’ll let you parse it out.

Before concluding this post, I would like to share a brief collection of other life and writing updates.

The last six weeks have been some of the most intense yet also meaningful times in recent years. My oldest daughter just graduated from high school; my wife and I completed another successful season of coaching track and field; three staffing roles changed at our church as we commissioned one associate pastor to take a new position elsewhere; I finished writing the first draft of my book; and in a few days, it’s our twentieth wedding anniversary. A lot of normal things occurred too, like cars visiting the mechanic, and another attempt by me to explore once again the chronic, mysterious pain I experience with food, this time with a new doctor.

Speaking of the book, I am incredibly grateful that after five years of hard work, I submitted my manuscript on the hope of Christ’s return. This will be my first traditionally published book. The manuscript is currently with the acquisition editor, and the initial feedback has been encouraging. I have already finished my part in supporting the marketing team, and they have begun developing the official title and cover. Sometime this winter, Baker Books will open the book for pre-order, and, Lord willing, you can have the book in the summer of 2026. Publishing has a long arc.

In the meantime, I am taking the month of June to reboot my website and email system. More on that later. I will also be giving away a short ebook that I’m calling Lord, Haste the Day: 49 Bible Passages to Fill You with Hope about the Return of Christ. During the research process, I had compiled a list of nearly one hundred passages related to the end times, and it was a blessing to spend a few months reading over them in my morning devotionals. I hope sharing the ebook will help others eagerly await his second coming (Heb. 9:28).

* Photo by John Nupp on Unsplash

Diesel Fuel for Writers and Preachers

If you pour even a small amount of gasoline on a bonfire, it flames up quickly and dangerously. That’s why every warning label on gasoline canisters will tell you never to do that. Diesel fuel, as opposed to straight gasoline, burns much slower. You still shouldn’t dump a gallon jug of diesel on a bonfire, but in small amounts, the resulting combustion from diesel can be controlled and used for building and sustaining a fire with poor kindling in a way that gasoline never can. It’s just too flammable.

For the last few years, I’ve considered Chase Replogle’s podcast The Pastor Writer like diesel fuel for writers and preachers. Replogle is a pastor and writer in Springfield, Missouri, and he’s released a new podcast episode most weeks for the last two years.

I suppose there’s a place for gasoline-fueled binge-writing sessions, times when fingers pound keyboards like pistons in a V8 engine. But that type of writing can’t be sustained over the long haul or often even manufactured in a moment. You typically can’t script productive, frenetic writing.

What I need, and what most writers need, is the slow-burn of diesel fuel to help grow in the craft over a lifetime. Most writers, if they are anything like me, shoehorn writing into an already full life. And to do that well—to fit quality writing in and around pastoring a church and being a dad and husband in a big family—I need more than adrenaline and Monster-Energy-Drink type writing, the type of writing that soars for an hour or two but then crashes for weeks; writing that flames up quickly also flames out quickly. I need, instead, fuel for the long obedience in the same direction required to excel as something worthwhile. The Pastor Writer podcast has been this type of fuel for me.

As Replogle neared the hundredth episode of The Pastor Writer, he asked for feedback from listeners about ways his podcast had helped listeners, and I was able to share some of these thoughts with him, which he kindly included at the beginning of episode 98. But shortly after I sent him that feedback, the pandemic we’ve all been living with hit and work at our church became all-consuming. I quickly fell off the podcast wagon. Only just recently, while on vacation the other week, did I begin to catch up on all the episodes I missed and heard my own remarks.

Episode 98 is not an interview but one of the occasional monologues where Replogle reflects on some aspect of the craft. In this episode he talked about how a writer can find his preaching or writing voice. We often begin with imitation, where we try—intentionally or unintentionally—to imitate our heroes. A decade ago, when God first stirred passions in me to write, my wife and I were reading together Jon Acuff’s witty, sarcastic book Stuff Christians Like, and everything I wrote that summer sounded like an Acuff knock-off. I was a little kid trying to walk around the house in his father’s shoes, which is cute when you’re three-years-old but awkward when you’re thirty.

The next stage for many writers of finding your voice, says Replogle, involves following the crowd. You discern what the masses like and try to produce that. The final stage of this progression comes when you make uniqueness the goal, where you seek to write or preach as no one has before. Replogle points out, however, that while each of these stages may be necessary in the development of a writer, they are neither the way we develop best nor how we find our voice.

So how does a writer or preacher find his voice? “Eventually,” Replogle says, “you come to realize that a voice is not something you can construct but something which must be uncovered.” He goes on to say you can’t find your writing voice, as with so many aspects in life, by looking for it directly. You can’t find your voice by trying to find your voice. You only find your particular way of writing and preaching, he argues, as a byproduct of pursuing something else.

His point reminds me of that old parable about the phrase “you can’t get there from here.” The origins of the phrase aren’t so clear, but the phrase tends to get used when someone is lost and looking for directions, typically in a rural setting. A guy pulls his car over to ask a local resident for directions to get somewhere specific. The local stares back at the driver, takes a condescending look at the direction the car was headed, then looks back at the driver. “You can’t get there from here,” the local says. The meaning is something like if you keep heading the way you’re going, you’ll never get there; you have to back up to the next town over, as it were, to get to where you want to go.

In the podcast episode, Replogle rebukes the idolatry often involved in the pursuit of perfect prose and perfect preaching. When you go after either of those directly, you end up exhausted and disillusioned. No sermon lives up to your expectations and no article ever achieves all you hoped it would. But, Replogle argues, if we instead have something we love more than the craft, we just might also get good at the craft too. Good writing and good preaching are not to be served but employed in the service of something greater. If you have as your highest aim to love and live for the beauty of Christ, then you just might stumble toward compelling prose and preaching. We can’t get there from here, but we can get there.

I’m sure it takes an enormous effort for Chase to recruit the guests for his podcast, read books by the authors beforehand, craft compelling interview questions or write the monologues, process the podcast through post-production, and then publish and promote each episode. That’s a lot of work. But I’m so thankful for it. Each episode fills my writing tank with diesel fuel, sometimes when I’ve been writing and preaching on fumes.

* Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

** I was a guest on The Pastor Writer, episode 40, “Reflections on the Pursuit of Writing”