During the past decade, I’ve counseled scores of pastors whose lives could best be described by Datsun’s phrase We are driven!
Remember the commercials? Little pickups airborne over crests of hills. 280-Z’s eating curves. The advertising agency packed a world of meaning into those three words.
It may be a great slogan for an automaker, but it’s a danger sign for pastors propelled by unrealistic expectations. Many ministers today are headed toward the mental, physical, and spiritual salvage yard because they expect too much of themselves. And most do not have a clear idea of the forces driving them to that tragic end.
Forces on the Accelerator
Part of the problem lies in the nature of the call to the ministry, a call to exemplary conduct as well as unselfish service. Yes, there are legitimate demands upon Christian leaders to model what they preach. Paul’s instructions to Timothy are clear concerning the qualifications of elders and deacons. Yet some pastors take these scriptural foundations and construct an elaborate structure of personal expectations far beyond the Architect’s intention. Not many admit it, but the bottom line they have drawn for themselves comes pretty close to being divine. If they have spiritual doubts or family problems, they feel guilty. Simply put, they do not permit themselves to be human.
Another contributor to a driven life is the nature of helping professions. Trying to preach a sermon of challenge and hope, most pastors are assailed by the faces of people who have confided incredible stories of tragedy and heartache. Pastors can carry heavy loads, but there’s a point at which it becomes too much. Needs of the congregation combine with the pastor’s own need to be needed, pushing the load beyond the breaking point. You can work twenty-four hours a day, and there will always be someone else needing your attention.
Our goal-oriented culture, with its need to succeed, also feeds personal expectations. The pastor slugging away in a one-hundred-member rural church is rarely praised. The good press usually goes to those preaching to big crowds in the city. The small-church pastor thinks, I should be doing that. Unfortunately, many denominational conventions and ministers’ meetings feed the problem by inviting speakers only from large churches who tell the secrets of their success. There’s nothing wrong with telling of God’s blessing, but it can be awfully tough on the pastor struggling in a small church.
But I see the deepest struggle in those facing midlife, those who have been in ministry fifteen to twenty years. Suddenly, it seems, they’re no longer able to bounce back from disappointments. Questions about what they realistically will achieve in the remaining years produce a profound sense of futility and pessimism. In addition, personal needs for intimacy may be catching up with them. They may have been able to deny those needs for a long time by pushing them under a heavy workload and sacrificing family life for “the good of the church.” But now, more than anything else, they’re lonely, and without knowing it, prime candidates for extramarital affairs.
The pastors we counsel at Marble Retreat are, for the most part, somewhere near this point of discouragement and despair. More than half are facing marital difficulties. Others are dealing with a personal or professional crisis. No matter what the problem, an important part of the helping process is working on the pastor’s level of expectations.
Unconscious Motivators
Unlocking the dark closet of unconscious motivators is an important step toward spiritual health. There may be several of these factors at work within us.
Anger. One recently retired pastor came to us because he found himself mistreating and verbally abusing his wife. He desperately wanted to change.
As he told about his family background and years of ministry, a story of hostility and conflict emerged. He was like the man whose army record read, “He fought with General Bradley, General Clark, and General Patton. He couldn’t get along with anyone.” For years he had been at war, sometimes silently, sometimes vocally, with his denominational hierarchy. He usually dealt with it by changing churches, but it was only a matter of time until the problem surfaced again.
Searching for the root of his hostility, he told of growing up in a tough city neighborhood where life was a no-win situation. He never knew when a bigger kid would jump him and take what he had. He had entered the ministry with the idea that all of life was like his neighborhood-people waiting to pounce, and his only defense was to get them first. He had never connected his childhood anger with his distrust and lack of success as a pastor.
Although that same hostility pervaded his marriage, he had developed a defense system to deal with it. During his days of active ministry, he compensated for his unhappiness at home by being a great guy to the people in his congregation and gaining all his emotional support from them. But when he retired, he no longer had that, and the problems at home multiplied.
When he discovered the root of his hostility, he was able to confront it and deal with it. Before that, anger had driven him as an unseen, subconscious tyrant.
Fear. The most common is the fear of rejection. If we fear too much the disapproval of others, then we do not feel free to do anything that might jeopardize their approval.
We falsely assume that most pastors have the advantage of being raised in kind and loving Christian homes. That assumption does great disservice. Many pastors have come from very difficult family backgrounds with rejection or separation playing major roles.
One pastor told of his painful memory at age five of being left on a stranger’s doorstep along with his little brother. His divorced mother abandoned them because her new boyfriend did not like them. He remembers watching her drive away.
That kind of emotional scar often surfaces years later in a fear of separation or death. The pastor who shared that story was driven to try and maintain every relationship so no one would ever leave him again. He found it impossible to say no. He was in agony when someone left his church and joined another. For him to think about leaving his church and accepting another assignment was almost impossible.
Guilt. It makes little difference whether guilt is real or imagined; the impact is the same when it is unresolved. If a pastor lived a worldly, sinful life before coming to Christ, lots of residual guilt can remain. Some pastors have experienced great difficulty applying God’s grace to their own personal load of guilt. In some cases, they may be using the ministry as a means to work out their own atonement.
I’ve encountered other pastors burdened by guilt for things their parents had done. Whether alcoholic fathers or reprobate mothers, the offspring felt they owed a debt to God and humanity for their parents’ sin.
The important thing to remember is that these factors-anger, fear, guilt-operate at the unconscious level. Because they are not readily available to conscious scrutiny, they are relentless taskmasters. They can produce a frenzy of activity, yet leave no trace of the real cause. They are a spiritual carbon monoxide whose presence is usually detected only after it causes sickness or snuffs out a life.
The Road to Healthy Expectations
In the face of these deeply rooted factors, the outlook seems dismal. But I’m not a pessimist. My wife, Melissa, and I spend a great deal of time helping pastors explore practical ways to avoid these emotional dead ends while building healthy expectations.
I suggest four ways to assess your own expectations and to set realistic goals and attain them.
First, get in touch with your own expectations. Take some time to list them on a sheet of paper in different areas of your life. Complete some sentences like:
“In my relationship with my wife, I expect to . . .”
“As a father, I expect myself to . . .”
“As a pastor, I won’t be satisfied with my performance unless I . . .”
“The most important goals I have for myself as a person are . . .”
It may be helpful to articulate these expectations to another person. You may be able to realistically assess your expectations alone, but it’s very difficult. The same kind of blinders that contribute to our unrealistic expectations hinder us from discovering what they are even when we make a concerted effort to do so.
When things produce pain, we cope by creating defenses. These defenses never solve the problem, but they enable us to endure or ignore it. If we’re serious about discovering our flaws, we’ll probably need to sit down with someone who knows us and ask, “What do you see in me that needs to change?”
For most pastors, that person is their spouse-if they can risk the encounter. It’s always risky to ask someone who knows us well to level with us, but how we need it! Like the wounds of a surgeon’s scalpel, the words of a true friend are the beginning of healing. The experience can bring healing for the spouse as well.
Sometimes a close friend or colleague may be the one to help us unmask and face ourselves. Lots of pastors today seek out a professor or friend from seminary days. Often, these older friendships were forged during shared adversity. Seminary can be a difficult time of working two jobs, living in housing with paper-thin walls, and amid everything else, trying to give studies the attention they need. For those who survive it together, a deep bonding can occur. That’s the kind of friend to whom a pastor will listen when he cannot listen to others.
No matter who it is, another person is needed to help separate conscious and unconscious motivators. When it comes to evaluating life’s expectations, two are a great deal better than one.
Second, try to separate external expectations from internal ones. In evaluating internal versus external expectations, it often helps to ask, “Where did that idea come from? When or where did I adopt that as a goal or expectation for myself? Does my congregation really expect this of me, or is most of it coming from within myself?”
I know several pastors who have explored these questions with a few of their key church leaders in a retreat setting and made some liberating discoveries. I recommend a two-day period, perhaps a weekend, when the setting is less structured than a church committee room and everyone has time to relax and relate in an informal, personal way. The pastor will probably have to initiate things by modeling the kind of open sharing necessary. By sharing himself, his expectations for the church, and some of his struggles, others can open up and express their feelings as well.
Often the pastor will find that people do not expect him to be at every church function. They would be quite happy for him to take a couple of days a week off and spend more time with his family. The drivenness he blamed on them has been coming from within, not without.
Third, compare your conscious goals and expectations against the unconscious motivators of anger, fear, and guilt. Most of the goals we pursue and the methods we use are the result of conscious decision. Yet the underlying expectations are largely the product of subconscious forces.
I’m not suggesting you try to psychoanalyze yourself, but simply be aware that the subconscious can be a harsh taskmaster if left unexamined and unexposed.
People who struggle most with goals and expectations tend to be more reactive than intentional. By that, I mean they have not stopped to identify a set of goals that are available for their conscious, rational evaluation. They tend to be driven by gusts of circumstance instead of knowing where they’re going.
It’s important to set goals, whether spoken or recorded, because they’re then available for examination. We may choose to retain a goal and work toward it or abandon it as unrealistic. But we can do neither until we identify it. Pastors who have no goals wind up tyrannized by unconscious fears and feelings.
People with lots of unconscious motivation also tend to think in extremes. To them, life is a matter of all or none. Instead of looking at a single unmet goal and saying, “I failed to achieve that,” they are likely to extend the impact of falling short and say, “I’m a failure.” That’s the kind of unhealthy generalization produced by unconscious motivation.
Finally, examine how closely your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in fulfilling your expectations. If our sense of value as a person depends on living up to our expectations, then we’re headed for some painful failures. All of us will fail from time to time, but we won’t be devastated if we do not put all our emotional eggs in one basket.
I’ve been fortunate in that most things have come fairly easy for me. If I ran for an office in school, I got it. If I took an exam, I passed it. All that held true until I faced my psychiatric board exams.
I passed the written portion of the test and then went to Seattle for the oral portion. We were shown a short film containing a psychological vignette and the background of a patient. Later, each of us met with an examiner who asked us to make an assessment and diagnosis. I could not answer his first question. I completely missed what he was after, and it left me rattled for the rest of the exam. After that, it didn’t make any difference what I said. The exam was over. I had failed.
That was a devastating experience. Later, Melissa and I rode the ferry across Puget Sound to Bremerton. The sound of the water and the gulls along with the sting of the cold spray helped me gain some perspective and begin thinking of another attempt at the oral exam in a few months. Somehow my self-worth returned, and I was not left feeling worthless by the experience.
The extent of our emotional stake in our expectations is critical. When we think, If I don’t achieve this, I’m worthless. People will reject me as a person if I fail, we’ve invested more than any goal is worth.
Our sense of worth must be anchored in God’s love and acceptance of us. If it’s tied up in achievement, something is controlling me besides the Spirit of God, and I’d better back off. If I am driven to make myself valuable, I’m not free to truly minister.
I love and yet struggle with Matthew 11:28-30-“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
I struggle because I do not see this passage being lived out in ministers’ lives. I see pastors wanting to follow Christ and taking up his yoke, but somehow not finding the rest. Instead of a lighter load, they have a heavier one.
I don’t know that I’ll ever completely understand that passage, but it does offer hope. Our worth does not depend on living up to human expectations. Part of exchanging our burdens for Christ’s yoke is recognizing the factors contributing to the tyranny of unrealistic expectations in our lives. God’s power does not eliminate the struggle to see ourselves as we are, but it enhances our ability.
We often refer to the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news for those who receive our Lord by faith. But the gospel is also good news for those who preach it.
Louis McBurney, M.D., is founder of Marble Retreat, Marble, Colorado.
David McCasland is a free-lance writer in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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