“They’re making me crazy,” Peter said, “they” meaning, among others, the board of elders and a few prominent members. He described the elders as lazy and uncommitted, and the chairman as controlling and incompetent. Peter was very angry.
“If only they would listen to me, things would be better,” he insisted.
Peter was middle-aged and a skilled minister. Gifted to lead, Peter’s intelligence and creativity opened the door to many ministry opportunities. But soon, even the best ministry setting would turn sour. Peter was baffled by this pattern in his career. His own behavior at those times stumped him. He would suddenly become angry and controlling, and then just as quickly retreat into a subservient position. What brought him to me was the depression that settled in, and with it occasional thoughts of suicide.
When I first met Peter, I noted his intelligence immediately. He could talk about his concerns in great detail, but he couldn’t connect his concerns with painful emotions. Mostly I saw and heard anger. Frequently his anger was greater than the situation might have called for.
“Why do people always argue with me?” he asked me. “Why can’t they see things the way I see them?”
Peter’s reactions also baffled the board and those who worked closely with him. On some occasions Peter spoke tersely and seemed to distance himself from the others. Sometimes he would conspicuously acquiesce to their expectations. This, too, had a distancing effect. Peter was unpredictable. He was hard to live with.
Peter was sabotaging himself, but he couldn’t see it.
His story is not unusual. The issues may vary, but stories of ministers plagued by church conflicts are as common as Sundays. Over the past 15 years I have counseled dozens of ministers. Many lacked self-awareness. As a result, their unconscious needs and motivations expressed themselves in ways the ministers were blind to. This undermined their relationships and ultimately their effectiveness in ministry.
Personality is formed in the earliest years of life. By the time we are three or four years old, our personality style is in place and remains in place throughout life. I often describe personality as the filter through which we experience life (take it in) and express life (communicate to others through word and behavior).
The personality filter is formed in the context of the caregiving we receive as a child. And much of one’s personality is tucked away in the unconscious.
Most of us have a colleague or two who seem oblivious to some of their actions or reactions that harm their work. And it is distinctly possible that you and I have an unconscious quirk or two. We all have some traits or idiosyncrasies that cause problems for us. For that reason it is vital for ministers to pursue healthy self-awareness. What you don’t know about yourself—or more accurately, what you haven’t exposed to conscious thought—will undermine your ministry.
Ministers come in a smorgasbord of personality types. My experience suggests, however, that certain styles are more common to clergy. Let’s look at three: the grandiose personality, the perfectionistic personality, and the depressive personality.
The Grandiose Personality
On the surface, the grandiose personality reveals itself in the display of arrogance and entitlement. Other people feel taken for granted and frequently used to enhance the minister’s own pursuits.
The person with this style is unable to truly step into the world of others because of the need to preserve an enlarged sense of self. The most grievous cost of a narcissistic orientation is the stunted capacity to love. This is dreadful for parishioners. Their phone calls and questions are considered disruptive and critical. The grandiose minister unconsciously reflects a disdain for detractors. The parishioners will leave an encounter feeling small, incompetent, and insignificant. The minister will engender a naïve following that functions as a mirror reflecting the minister and his or her value.
The grandiose personality replaces substance with image. The mask the minister shows to the world, Karen McWilliams writes, “becomes more vivid and dependable than one’s actual person.” The grandiose person tends to consider image everything.
Under this mask I often discover an individual who feels fraudulent and unlovable. Some time ago Sharon came to me for therapy because of interpersonal conflicts.
She recalled on one occasion working on a community worship service with several other ministers. She joined the group after it had met two times. The other members, though willing to engage in dialogue, did not make what she thought to be an appropriate effort to respond to her ideas. “I can’t understand why they didn’t want my input,” she said. Sharon became angry and alienated herself from the others.
This was her pattern. It had been as long as she could remember.
Sharon’s parents perceived her unplanned birth as disruptive. When Sharon needed praise and attention, she experienced her parents’ resentment at her very existence.
Later Sharon proved herself to be a competent student. She won awards for academic accomplishment, and her parents began to see her as their badge of honor. She had felt unimportant early in her life. To cope with her emptiness, Sharon developed a grandiose approach to life. It kept her pain at bay, but Sharon was unaware of the damage such an approach was having on herself and her church.
As Sharon became more aware of how her character developed, she was able to get significantly freed of the power of her history. Awareness, she has discovered, provides the potential for choice. Her grandiosity still lingers, but she now admits it and frequently chooses to go against her natural tendencies.
The Perfectionistic Personality
Technological societies breed a type of personality organized around thinking and doing. Value is placed upon rationality and logic. “Can-do” pragmatism takes the day.
Perfectionistic ministers can talk about feelings and think about feelings, but they go to extreme lengths to avoid feeling their feelings. Anger is the likely exception.
Anger in the form of righteous indignation is tolerated, even admired, if it is seen as reasonable. But if the
indignation is consistently directed toward the people in the pews, the ministry is in danger. Perfectionistic ministers moralize. They need everything to be regulated and structured. They lean toward legalism. This is not only the territory of fundamentalist and conservative ministers. The moderate or liberal minister can equally be a list-lover. It’s just a different list.
Offshoots of this personality type are the “workaholic” and the “Type-A Personality.” While highly effective, ministers of this sort frequently deny themselves adequate release and recreation.
Jerry had been perfectionistic as long as he could remember. Nothing he did as a child was ever good enough. His was a deeply religious family, but rather stoic. Emotions were denied or held at bay while precise thinking and appropriate behavior were valued. His mother was moralistic and his father reserved and authoritarian. Jerry never seemed able to think and act as well as his father and mother wanted him to.
This is the key dilemma for the child who may become perfectionistic. The parents expect the child to fulfill the parents’ own unfulfilled dreams and expectations. Meanwhile the child has great difficulty developing a healthy sense of himself outside the realm of pleasing his parents.
Jerry’s perfectionism also involved his thought life. As a teenager, Jerry fretted that he could not stop intrusive sexual thoughts. As an adult, control became the main expression of Jerry’s perfectionism—control of himself.
McWilliams notes that “Paragons of virtue may have a paradoxical island of corruption. … People who try excessively hard to be upright and responsible may be struggling against more powerful temptations toward self-indulgence than most of us face.”
Jerry’s way of coping was to try harder.
The impact on his parishioners was the notion that following Christ is about performance. Drivenness became the Christian standard. Perfectionistic ministers have a tendency to produce perfectionistic churches.
In such contexts, grace is delivered with a backhand. Jerry explained it this way: “Someone in my church said, ‘You tell us how much God loves us, but mostly all we hear about is how much we should be doing for God.'”
One minister described the frenzy of such churches: “When you cut off the head of a chicken it suddenly flies higher and appears to be more active than at any time in its entire life, but it is very dead.” Jerry and his church had that quality of frenzied activity and simultaneous deadness.
Theologically and relationally such people are in need of the experience of grace. However, because the personality is organized around thinking and doing, experiencing is a difficult process to enter.
Ministers caught in this personality style should explore their need for control—whether of themselves, others, or the church. When they risk getting beneath the frenzy of their driven lives, both external and internal, they discover what Lee Eliason said in a sermon I heard years ago: “God is everywhere you are fleeing from.” The good news is that God met the standard of perfection so we don’t have to.
Jerry has learned to relax a bit, and to relax his unrealistic standards for himself and his flock. “I’ve discovered grace isn’t about my doing, but rather, it’s about what God has already done for me.”
The Depressive Personality
A minister I’ll call Dale came to me because he was feeling dull, unmotivated, and burned out. Our explorations revealed strong evidence of a depressive personality. He seemed to have what I would describe as a depleted sense of self.
Grief is normal when a person’s external world is diminished in some important way.
In contrast, for the depressive personality, what is lost is part of the inner world. We mistakenly assume grief is a form of depression; in fact, a depressive response is the result of not grieving. This person gets trapped experiencing all of life through a depressive filter. The glass is always half empty.
Anger turned against the self is often the culprit. Usually such individuals do not effectively express anger. Instead they feel guilt. One author writes: “Depressive people are agonizingly aware of every sin they have committed, every kindness they have neglected to extend, every selfish inclination that has crossed their mind.” I have suggested that such people, if confronted by the knock of the police at their door, would raise their hands and say, “I give up! What did I do?”
The losses in Dale’s life came early. Dale was adopted, then his adoptive parents divorced when he was seven. Dale was introduced to Christ as an adolescent. He attended a camp with a friend, and went forward at the campside service on the last night partly because feared his friend would reject him if he didn’t. Dale’s faith was thoroughly infused with a pervasive sense of guilt.
His years as a pastor had been painful ones. “I always felt like I was failing,” Dale said. Successes he attributed to luck, while even the smallest glitches he credited to himself. “I felt like it was my fault when things went wrong.”
Dale believed he was responsible for driving away anyone who left his church or his life. He unconsciously held the conviction that he deserved to be rejected.
“I simply stopped returning phone calls,” Dale said, as a way of keeping some distance from church members. It was easier than befriending them, only to feel rejected later.
Parishioners who want a meaningful connection with their pastor may feel put off by the depressive minister. More problematic may be the minister’s tendency to seek assurances from people who approach him for help. Struggling with his own neediness, the depressive pastor has difficulty with emotional boundaries. And church leaders may find themselves feeling drained in their dealings with the pastor. Depressive attitudes are contagious.
Do the lion thing
My favorite line in The Lion King is Rafikki pointing out to Simba that “You don’t even know who you are.” What can be done about that? Here are my recommendations:
1. Identify your blind spots. These are aspects of the self that, when left outside the realm of awareness, will sabotage good ministry. Find out what they are and bring them into your consciousness.
Be open to feedback from those who know you best. Ask your church leaders how they experience you. Ask several parishioners about their perceptions of you after listening to you preach or teach. Given the right opportunity, they will share what they see in you that you don’t—yet.
2. Get below the surface. The surface problem is usually not the real problem. When you commit to discovery of your blind spots, you will begin to see the injuries that have lived underground and, without your awareness, guided your adult relationships and behaviors. Start bringing them to the surface. Don’t be so quick to fix the present symptom that you fail to address the cause. Don’t merely hack at the leaves; to deal with the tree you must strike at the root.
When dealing with the root problem is uncomfortable, remember Jesus’ words. He says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He uses language that invites us to feel and express our fears and losses. Such awareness and expression results in comfort. The likelihood of unknowingly damaging ministry dwindles as a result.
3. Remember your message. Paul described ministry in a phrase: “We have this treasure in jars of clay.” These jars were the cheap, breakable, easily discarded dishes of the first century. God does not need you to be without blemish. That’s the role of his Son. He’s the treasure of grace. God needs you to be yourself, the vessel. He chooses to use broken people with a variety of personality styles to accomplish his purposes.
The core of ministry is the proclamation of grace by broken people.
The restored personality
Peter, the first pastor I mentioned, and I met together for several months. He made excellent use of therapy. He is now able to recognize and even appreciate the components of his personality. He has developed a greater sense of autonomy. His self-esteem is realistic and more stable.
“The impact on my ministry came slowly. People still saw my old patterns emerge at times,” said Peter, and they tended to interpret healthier functioning as the exception to the norm. But Peter felt better about life overall.
“A woman challenged me in a recent committee meeting,” Peter said. “I felt intense anger rising up in my throat. But before I lashed out at her, I was able to recognize my internal response and adjust my reply to fit the situation.
“And the funny thing is—she was right.”
Doug Andersonis clinical director of Oak Glen, Inc., a psychological service for ministry professionals, in Sioux Falls, SD. oakgleninc@aol.com
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