Errors were made

I believe that being a local church minister is, hands down, one of the most complex, stressful, joyful, and totally bonkers positions one can hold. There is no educational degree that one can undertake to be considered fully prepared for ministry. 

The late Eugene H. Peterson in his book The Pastor: A Memoir says “A job is an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated. It is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not. It is pretty easy to tell whether a job is done well or badly. But a vocation is not a job in that sense. I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do it, dismissed if I don't. But I can't be hired to be a pastor, for my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve but to the God I serve.”

I think that most folks in church ministry would agree with Mr. Peterson’s sentiment. Folks often go into church ministry seeking to follow God and make a difference in the lives of others. At the same time there have been many stories recently about “the great resignation” of many church ministers. Folks who went into church ministry to follow God and make a difference discovered that they had become emotionally, spiritually and physically wretched. 

There are plenty of reasons for folks to leave church ministry. Greater financial stability for their family or the burden of high expectations can be reasons. Rampant among many church ministers is their lack of treating themselves like a human being. 

Speaking from my experience here are some areas in which I erred in treating myself as a human being when I served as a church minister. I share these not as a kind of venting or blaming. I hope that by sharing, others might learn from my mistakes, seek the help they need and or realize that they are not alone in their struggles. 

Lack of personal care 

When I started in local church ministry, I was ill-prepared with the skills needed to care for myself. I learned all kinds of things about how to care for others. Yet I did not have the skills to notice when I was over-functioning, recognize my need for rest and healthy life rhythms, and cope with my own anxieties. 

I once estimated how much time I spent on various ministry-related tasks. I roughly calculated the time spent over a year at Elders's meetings, Camp Board meetings, summer camp, summer mission trips, local gatherings, and so forth. When I added up all of the hours spent doing these things it was like being gone from home for about 2 to 3 months!

That is not a healthy way to take care of yourself. Dallas Willard was right when he said, “You need to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” We human beings are simply not built to go and do every moment. There might not be a more promoted value in our culture than that of productivity. How many times did you talk about being in a hurry in the past few days? How many of us comment about how tired we are because of the stuff we are doing . . . and that is not a good thing. Our bodies need rest. We need time to connect. We don’t need to reduce ourselves to a commodity in which our only value is in our consumption and productivity level. 

The biblical concept of Sabbah was known only to me, at the time, as a concept not as a healthy way to do life. The Sabbath in the Bible is not about sitting around and doing nothing. The Sabbath is all about having a healthy rhythm to life in which time is set aside for relationships and rest on a regular basis.

In his book Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann writes "The way of mannon (capital wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways." Perhaps we need to be reminded that God, on the seventh day, rested or abided with his good creation. In other words, God is not a workaholic. Might we go and do likewise.

I simply didn’t take care of myself mentally, physically or spiritually. I over-functioned and lacked healthy personal boundaries. There are people who can often have difficulty recognizing that the preacher is a human being and that goes for preachers too. 

The role of anxiety in leadership

The majority of the leadership (elders) meetings that I attended, I have come to believe, had a hint of anxiety mixed into them. Often leadership meetings devolved into attempts to maintain homeostasis. What could the leadership do (or not) that was the least amount of pain to the greatest number of people? 

Leadership meetings often became concerned over old questions instead of reframing them. Catastrophizing issues and indirect communication led to discussions and decisions that were often based on conjecture and strawman arguments. Instead of reframing discussions around what is the loving thing to do, it came down to what was the least painful thing to do. 

Here is a truth . . . there are no spiritual solutions to systems problems. The word faith in the New Testament is the word pistis. Sometimes it means the trust a person displays in something. Sometimes it refers to faithfulness or the ongoing actions of faith and is sometimes translated as belief or to believe. All of these involve action, not just mental adherence to concepts, dogma or doctrine. 

In the book of John, the people around Jesus who have faith in or believe in him do so by following him and taking sides with him. Not just making statements about what they believe. When Paul talks about faith and works, he is not offering faith as teaching as much as discouraging people from expressing their faith only in ritualized acts. Paul would actually agree with James that “faith without works is dead.”

Even in Hebrew 11 where it says, "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" the author then gives examples of people whose faith manifested in action. Much of what is taught in some churches and expressed by many Christians is that faith is something you think or feel. Faith becomes an abstract concept that you can hear when Christians say stuff like, "You just have to have faith in faith." Yet the New Testament picture of faith is action. 

If you are going to pray about reaching your community, then you had best come up with an actionable plan too. If you are going to say, as a church, everyone (all sinners) is welcome then you had best come up with a plan for how you're going to welcome all people. If your church has a vision and mission statement it had best have some measurable goals and strategies. Are you praying for people to visit your church? Awesome and what systems have you put into place to invite people to church? You get the point. We have to put systems in place that put our faith into action. Talk is cheap. 

I think that much of the leadership anxiety I experienced personally and within the broader leadership of the church was that we didn’t take action. We had a lot of meetings about a lot of things yet never really created and implemented actionable plans. We assumed this or that. We hoped for this or that. We expressed a desire for this or that. We prayed about it. We asked others to pray about it. 

Yet we avoided hashing out actionable plans. In a lot of ways, as James might say, we kept looking at ourselves in the mirror only to walk away and forget what we were looking at. This lack of action created, I believe, much of the anxieties within the leadership meetings as well as within the congregation at large. 

Understanding how I (didn’t) operate with boundaries.

In most churches, an inordinate amount of attention and focus is placed on the preacher/pastor/minister. They are the ones who it is often said “run the church.” While there is some truth to that statement it is also misleading. Most church boards function as minister managers. In churches where members vote for their church board leaders, those leaders are often voted to be the voice of the members who voted for them. 

Thus, most church boards operate with a built-in tension between the minister and the members of the board. The board members often view themselves as the managers who are there to approve or veto whatever they are presented. They are present to make sure things are managed be that the budget, the Sunday service, or the minister. 

There were a lot of leadership meetings when I did not take responsibility for how I was feeling or what I actually thought. I did that because I knew it could create conflict and I didn’t handle conflict well (like most church ministers). I hadn’t learned about and used healthy personal boundaries. 

I have figured out ways to better cope with conflict and have come to realize I do not have the superpower to make anyone upset, feel a certain way or calm down. I do not have the ability to fix anyone. By holding back what I thought and felt I didn’t fully engage, and it created a lot of internal conflict that was avoidable and unnecessary. 

Forgot the Enjoyment 

There was much about church ministry that I enjoyed. In church ministry, you often get to participate in joyous family gatherings, and weddings and celebrate the birth of newborn babies. You get to baptize people and watch those people, over time, turn into someone new. 

I enjoyed my talks with a homeless guy named . . . well . . . Brian who stopped by every now and then for a shower, a little conversation, and a place to sleep. I enjoyed doing good in the community with home painting projects for the elderly, participating in some Habitat for Humanity home-building projects, Thanksgiving food giveaways, and rounding up Christmas gifts for disadvantaged children/families. 

There were lots of smiles and laughs. There were plenty of funny moments. Over time I became a walking talking repository of the history of people, entire families, and the life of the congregation. I knew their stories and struggles which was, for me, its own kind of enjoyment. 

While there was much to enjoy, the tyranny of Sunday was a real thing for me. Often as soon as the Sunday service was done, I was getting ready for the next Sunday. The constant prepping for Sunday often left me reducing people to the level of resources or projects to be fixed. 

I was constantly taking a look at my preaching calendar and getting ready for the next thing. Who were the people I needed to talk to in September or October about the Christmas Eve service? Who was leading worship next Sunday? What needed to be in next Sunday’s bulletin? What sermon series was I doing next? The constant never-ending prepping became the focus and less and less about the enjoyment. 

What I forgot was the best way to take care of the future was to take care of the present. If the book of Ecclesiastes is telling us anything it is telling us that the moment that matters the most is the one happening right now. There is no such thing as a time machine. You can't go back, and you can't go forward. The most important thing happening to you is what is happening right now. In the words of Ecclesiastes . . . enjoy life now because it could be gone at any moment.