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David Yarbrough remembers standing at the back of the sanctuary as his congregation worshiped. His heart was racing, he was trembling, and he felt like he was going to die.
Then he looked to the front of the church and saw five men and their families. That gave him strength.
“I knew they were with me,” he said.
A couple of years ago, as Yarbrough—lead pastor of The Bridge Fellowship Church in Martin’s Mill—approached 25 years in ministry, he wasn’t sure he was going to last much longer. At the time, he was weathering public criticism on social media—aimed at both himself and the church—while also shouldering the emotional and financial strain of his 87-year-old mother’s declining health.
“It was just more than I could take at that time,” Yarbrough recalled. He told his wife he was hanging by a thread, about to break. “I had never felt like that before.”
Yarbrough and his wife finally were able to retreat to Oklahoma for a couple of days. While away, he watched a podcast interview with a pastor who mentioned he surrounds himself with a group of five men in his church for accountability and encouragement.
God had already provided five men Yarbrough felt he could count on, so he asked them to meet at his house at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. All of them agreed, and though they already knew he was under more pressure than usual, they learned that night the extent of his stress.
“It wasn’t just that I wanted to step away from ministry,” he said. “I was at the point where I was ready to step away from life.”
That Thursday night, the five men started speaking encouragement into the pastor’s life. They prayed for him and decided to meet weekly. “They were coming to rescue me,” Yarbrough said.
Despite the new group, the pastor continued to struggle. As he made the 20-minute drive to church on Sunday mornings, he repeatedly would get physically ill. The morning he stood at the back of the sanctuary trembling, he had just come from his office when he experienced the first panic attack of his life.
“I never really knew what burnout was like,” he said, describing it now as being so empty he had nothing left to give. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to preach anymore. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the people anymore. It’s just that I didn’t have anything in the tank.”
As the meetings continued, Yarbrough asked the five men to share about their lives, too, and the group would encourage one another and pray. Most Thursdays they would spend as many as five hours together.
“You would think that their wives and children would not want them doing that because they lose a whole Thursday night,” he said, “but [because of] what they were getting back in return, they wanted them to go because they were seeing the transformation that was taking place in their lives.”
“I never really knew what burnout was like. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to preach anymore. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the people anymore. It’s just that I didn’t have anything in the tank.”
‘Full of courage’
Patrick McGhee is one of those five men. He agreed to be in the group because he was intrigued that a pastor would let others get that close to him. As time went on, McGhee realized he was being rescued, too.
As the men called out the good and godly things they saw in him during their meetings, McGhee realized they were seeing things he was blind to. They saw good in him that he didn’t. It empowered him.
“I was full of courage,” he said. “I could leave that house … and conquer whatever I was coming up against.”
McGhee’s wife encouraged him to keep going to the group because she noticed him becoming a better person, particularly by spending more time with his family and trying to live out what he knew from church.
Before long, McGhee felt led to start a group with five other men so they could experience rescue. “It was replicating itself,” he said. Now there are three rescue groups at The Bridge.
One of the chief lessons the men have learned, Yarbrough said, is based on Galatians 2:20. They have learned to die to self.
“You can’t hurt a dead person’s feelings,” Yarbrough said. “You can’t offend them. We know any time that we’re getting offended, our feelings are getting hurt and we can’t serve other people because we think they’re mistreating us. We’re too alive to ourselves.”
Sometimes God allows suffering in a believer’s life, he said, because the person needs to learn humility.
“It’s not about my platform. This isn’t my church. This isn’t my wife. These aren’t my children. They’re His, and I’m stewarding them,” Yarbrough said. “I can’t steward them effectively when I’m worried about what everybody’s doing for me.”
In all of this, the rescue group didn’t just tell Yarbrough they loved him. They showed it.
“It’s one of the clearest pictures of the kingdom I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “God using ordinary men to do extraordinary things through simple obedience and genuine love.”
