Care For Yourself First
from Building Church Leaders Newsletter

Most of the pastors I’m talking to are busier now than they were before the pandemic. They’re scrambling to do everything they did to serve people before—but must do it all in new ways.

During this time, the idea of prioritizing your own soul care might strike you as selfish, especially since your life’s calling centers around serving others in ministry. But the truth is it’s biblical and wise. The Gospels tell us that Jesus regularly withdrew to the wilderness to pray. If the Son of God needed to take a break from ministry to spend time with his Father, we do too.

This week’s resources are designed to help you be strategic in caring for your soul. It may feel like doing so comes at the expense of others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Caring for your soul now will enable you to care for others better in the long run.

This 38-page resource lays out the case for the importance of regularly assessing your spiritual health, as well as practical guidelines for how to do so. It also offers resources for going about the work of developing spiritual health so you can effectively minister to others. While we all know the importance of rest and renewal, it can be difficult to allow ourselves to take time out of our day to rest and renew our bodies and souls. Also, check out Rest and Renewal for Busy Church Leaders to find ways to revitalize yourself during this trying time.

Drew Dyck
Contributing Editor

provide further information that may be helpful to our members during this time of continuing crisis.

Manage your Zoom Participants

Some of the other great features to help secure your Zoom event and host with confidence:

• Allow only signed-in users to join: If someone tries to join your event and isn’t logged into Zoom with the email they were invited through, they will receive this message:

This is useful if you want to control your guest list and invite only those you want at your event — other students at your school or colleagues, for example.

• Lock the meeting: It’s always smart to lock your front door, even when you’re inside the house. When you lock a Zoom Meeting that’s already started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (if you have required one). In the meeting, click Participants at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Participants pop-up, click the button that says Lock Meeting.
• Set up your own two-factor authentication: You don’t have to share the actual meeting link! Generate a random Meeting ID when scheduling your event and require a password to join. Then you can share that Meeting ID on Twitter but only send the password to join via DM.
• Remove unwanted or disruptive participants: From that Participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including Remove. Click that to kick someone out of the meeting.
• Allow removed participants to rejoin: When you do remove someone, they can’t rejoin the meeting. But you can toggle your settings to allow removed participants to rejoin, in case you boot the wrong person.
• Put ‘em on hold: You can put everyone else on hold, and the attendees’ video and audio connections will be disabled momentarily. Click on someone’s video thumbnail and select Start Attendee On Hold to activate this feature. Click Take Off Hold in the Participants list when you’re ready to have them back.
• Disable video: Hosts can turn someone’s video off. This will allow hosts to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate gestures on video or for that time your friend’s inside pocket is the star of the show.
• Mute participants: Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once. Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants. You can also enable Mute Upon Entry in your settings to keep the clamor at bay in large meetings.
• Turn off file transfer: In-meeting file transfer allows people to share files through the in-meeting chat. Toggle this off to keep the chat from getting bombarded with unsolicited pics, GIFs, memes, and other content.
• Turn off annotation: You and your attendees can doodle and mark up content together using annotations during screen share. You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.
• Disable private chat: Zoom has in-meeting chat for everyone or participants can message each other privately. Restrict participants’ ability to chat amongst one another while your event is going on and cut back on distractions. This is really to prevent anyone from getting unwanted messages during the meeting.

Try the Waiting Room 

One of the best ways to use Zoom for public events is to enable the Waiting Room feature. Just like it sounds, the Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready for them. It’s almost like the velvet rope outside a nightclub, with you as the bouncer carefully monitoring who gets let in.

Meeting hosts can customize Waiting Room settings for additional control, and you can even personalize the message people see when they hit the Waiting Room so they know they’re in the right spot. This message is really a great spot to post any rules/guidelines for your event, like who it’s intended for.

Click here to see more tips on Zoom Security features.