Leaving the pastoral ministry was a traumatic experience. But God used my experience of failure to teach me something about hope.
My personality is much like Simon Peter’s: bold, driven, impetuous, with a must-be-right attitude and the need to win at all costs. This gradually eroded my relationship with my wife, Fay, and in 1970, all communication broke down. We couldn’t talk about anything without my having to prove she was wrong and I was right. Inevitably, she responded by withdrawing into silence.
This especially troubled me because as a pastor I believed I had no business leading God’s church if I couldn’t lead my own household.
In desperation, we sought marriage counseling, where I began to discover something I had never understood: I behaved as I did to protect myself. I was most secure when I was competing and wining. I couldn’t admit I was scared and so tried to win by intimidation
The day this became clear to me, I had just returned from a week-long encounter group. I had listened to fifteen peers tell me day after day how they “experienced me” as a driving, smug, righteous person who always had to win. When I told this to Fay, she softened, put her arms around me, and said, “Honey, I’ve been trying to tell you for years.”
That was the first time in a long time I felt acceptance from her. And it came when I was weak and vulnerable. Could it be that what I never would be able to achieve by force I could achieve in weakness? I knew at that moment it was so.
My defenses began to crumble. I broke and sobbed as I faced the terrible reality that my encounter group and my wife were right. I didn’t change overnight, but I started to see I needed to stop trying to control others just so I could feel secure.
Lessons about ministry
This new awareness explained something else, a problem that seemed beyond resolution. I was pastoring a church in turmoil. A powerful faction was determined to get rid of me. Because the majority of the congregation was behind me and had given me a vote of confidence, I continued to press on.
For months the factional struggle continued. One night we were having yet another congregational meeting with the usual ugly scenes-a trustee exchanging heated words with a deacon, the moderator barely able to keep order. It suddenly dawned on me that I was still fighting. I still had to win. But here was a marvelous opportunity to do something about it. I could stop the bloodshed by resigning. So I did.
Even then, my old behavior still hung on. My supporters and I left the church and established a new one. At first I felt good about it. But as time went by, I began to have reservations about what I had done. Even though these people probably would have left the church when I resigned, wasn’t I doing what I had always done? By starting a new church, wasn’t I still trying to win?
These thoughts troubled me. Then I discovered the faction at the church I left was smearing my name with rumors that my children had gotten in trouble with the law and my wife and I were getting a divorce. I felt as long as I stayed in town, the warfare would continue.
I knew I was not ready to pastor another church. Yet, how would I support my family?
An emotional journey
A good friend in Washington, D.C., offered me a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a maintenance man-actually, a glorified janitor. My job was to unstop commodes and fix leaky washbasins and urinals. That work seemed suited for me at that time. Perhaps by trading the pastor’s scepter for a plumber’s friend, I might get my narcissism under control.
My goods in the back of a U-Haul truck, I left California to drive cross-country. My wife and our boys in grade school stayed behind to finish the school year. Alone, I started my trip to a new life.
As I drove, the tears flowed as a terrible sense of failure overwhelmed me. I had not made it in the pastorate!
At one time my seminary professors had high hopes for me. What would they think now? Often my professors would warn us about the pitfalls of the ministry and illustrate their point by naming graduates who had dropped out of the ministry. The doleful commentary usually ended, “And now he’s selling insurance.”
I thought, If selling insurance is the epitome of failure, what would they think of me? Not only had I failed in the pastorate, I also had committed the unpardonable sin of splitting a church. The next time the professors needed an illustration of failure, their commentary could end with, “And Bustanoby wound up as a janitor!”
Then I thought of a classmate who recently had come to California and given tremendous leadership to a church down the street. Chuck Swindoll was just beginning to make an impact on the community, while I was beating it out of town in a U-Haul truck.
I was a wreck that first evening when I stopped in Arizona. I thought I’d be able to sleep, but I was tormented with regret. Maybe some wine will help, I thought. I bought a bottle at a nearby store and drank myself into oblivion. This was to become my routine for five days. I’d drive and cry all day, and drink myself into unconsciousness when I stopped at night.
Though I was still hurting when I got to Washington, D.C., I was anxious to go to work. The only thing that sustained me in those difficult days was the conviction that God knew what he was doing, because I was sure making a mess of things.
New beginnings
About four months after starting work at the SEC, I felt I needed some kind of ministry. I was not unhappy with my work, and the pay was better than I had ever received in the ministry. But I felt I needed more challenge.
While in California, I had earned a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, so I thought of establishing a counseling practice. After much prayer and deliberation with Fay, who by then had joined me, I began a practice in my home. I worked my maintenance job during the day and built my counseling practice in the evenings and on weekends.
My clients were responsive and seemed to be helped, and the work was therapeutic for me. It was not a public ministry as was the pastorate. It was private and enabled me to maintain obscurity, which helped develop new behavior. It also required that I listen, be empathetic, and care about the pain of others, something I lacked in the pastorate. As a pastor, I could be warm and empathetic with people who liked me and whom I liked, but it was a new experience to truly care about people I didn’t know, some of whom were positively unlovely.
God blessed this new work, both in terms of those it helped and in terms of fulfillment and financial remuneration for me. In two years I was able to quit my maintenance job and devote all my energies to my practice.
Now as I look back over many years of counseling practice and the personal growth I have experienced, I am amazed at what God has done. Success did not come through ruthless competition, insistence on being right, and winning at all costs. God has shown me the behavior I thought I needed for survival actually was getting in my way. It was getting in his way, too.
Though I haven’t come to the place of relishing trial as “pure joy,” failure doesn’t hold the terror it once did. Indeed, God’s working through my failure to begin making me what he wants me to be is what gives me hope.
God isn’t done with me yet. Nor is he finished making any of us all he wants us to be. But as we begin to experience the growth that comes from failure, he generates a hope that otherwise we never would have known.
-Andre Bustanoby
Metropolitan Psychotherapy Group
Bowie, Maryland
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
