Alone I cannot serve the Lord effectively, and he will spare no pains to teach me this. He will bring things to an end, allowing doors to close and leaving me ineffectively knocking my head against a wall until I realize that I need the help of the Body as well as of the Lord.
Watchman Nee
When I got to my first church, because I was so green, they asked a godly and experienced elder who had moved away to come back and help me for a week,” remembers Glen Parkinson. “One of the first things he told me as he oriented me to the church was this: ‘Glen, you are not to have any friends in the church. It’s not allowed; you just can’t do that. No personal friends. That leads to cliquishness, and you’ll antagonize some folks.
“‘Now we want you to be personable, to love everybody, but you can’t talk about anything of a personal nature in this church. Find pastors or somebody outside this church, but don’t do that kind of talking here.’
“Not all congregations feel that way,” Glen continues, “but most ministers I know don’t feel they’re allowed to talk about problems in the church with anyone. If they do, people think they’re being overly critical or they’re gossiping. And pastors simply are not allowed to talk about personal problems. They’re not allowed to have them.
“That’s going to destroy any human being. It’s no surprise it should happen to a pastor.”
Laments Gary Downing, executive minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota: “Feeling isolated, alone, that nobody understands or cares — it’s a disease that seems to strike leaders. I bristle at the idea that leaders have to be lonely. Yet I look around and the landscape is littered with lonely leaders.”
Why You Can’t Talk
The reason so many leaders are lonely? Several powerful factors keep them from sharing personal concerns with people in the church.
People can’t accept the pastor being down. One Southern Baptist pastor has tried at various times to share his discouragement with individuals in his congregation. The result? “I’ve opened up and had the door really slammed in my face. People have said, ‘Well, you really shouldn’t be discouraged. After all, you are a minister! You should pray about it.’ They couldn’t accept the fact that I was discouraged.
“Some have responded in a supportive way, but I’ve found it’s a gamble talking to church members about your periods of discouragement. They still, many of them, have a feeling that a minister should not become discouraged.”
Another consideration: Much can’t be shared without hurting the people involved. “With some things, I have the feeling there’s nobody I can talk to,” admits a United Church of Christ minister, “because it deals with people they see every Sunday sitting in the pews.”
“Pastoral discontent can be contagious, injecting a negative mentality,” is another reason, suggested by Gene Getz, pastor of Fellowship Bible Church North in Plano, Texas. To admit that you’re down about Sunday’s low attendance or a slump in giving may cause others to get down, too, and that would only exacerbate the problem. One pastor who’s felt the tension is Harley Schmitt, of Brooklyn Park (Minnesota) Lutheran Church: “I’m keenly aware that the members of this congregation will not rise above their leadership. That’s true everywhere. So it’s immensely important for me as a pastor to provide positive leadership.” And that precludes the sharing of some feelings of discouragement.
Perhaps the biggest reason pastors hesitate to talk about their discouragement with parishioners is they fear, wisely, their despondency may push a hurting person further down. And yet their responsibility as spiritual leaders is to strengthen — to never break off a bruised reed, however inadvertently. Teresa of Avila knew the concern when she wrote to fellow members of her religious order, “Let no one be … turned away from the life of virtue and religion by your gloom and morosity.”
Eugene Peterson discovered this through a painful experience. “When my daughter, Karen, was in her teen years, she was giving my wife and me so much trouble,” he remembers. “It was awful. One morning I walked into the church office and said to three or four women who were working there, ‘I quit. I’m not going to be a parent anymore. I’ve had it.’ I said it kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I was feeling that way, too.
“A couple of weeks later one of those women said to me, ‘Don’t ever do that again, because I’ve been having problems, and when you came in and said that, I thought, If you can’t handle it, how am I ever going to handle it?’
“She was right,” Eugene reflects. “As much as I don’t believe in keeping a stiff upper lip, any congregation has a lot of people who are just barely making it at times. They’ve got guilt, and burdens, and sorrow, and discouragement — it’s incredible what they’re living with. So for me to be careless and throw in something like that was a stupid thing to do, I think. I was her pastor and a source of stability for her. And at that moment I was so full of my own frustration, I didn’t care about hers.”
Why You CAN Talk
Despite the risks and the legitimate reasons not to share their discouragement with their congregations, many pastors have taken a deep breath and done it. And they’ve found that in the appropriate setting it can be a refreshing and healthy experience — both for them and their people.
Here’s why.
First, when a pastor reveals his or her pain, it lets lay people know they’re normal when they get down. In a sense, such sharing becomes a ministry to the hurting by helping them realize suffering is the province of everyone, no matter how righteous. Says Frank Mercadante, “If I don’t share my sins and weaknesses, I mislead the congregation. I make it look like I don’t have clay feet, and then when they start seeing their own clay feet, they think there’s something wrong with them. The pastor has never met any problems, they think. So I need to make a practice of making myself vulnerable.”
A second reason pastors share is reflected in an old rabbinic story told by Madeleine L’Engle, the Newberry Award-winning writer. A student comes to his rabbi and says, “Oh, Rabbi, I love you!”
“Do you know what hurts me?” the rabbi asks him.
“Rabbi, I just told you that I love you. Why then do you ask me this irrelevant question?”
“Because if you do not know what hurts me,” the rabbi answers, “how can you say you love me?”1
To love, people must first know where someone hurts. And for a congregation to love its pastor, it must know where he or she hurts. By sharing their discouragements with their people, many pastors have found themselves loved in a deeper way. “I thought I had to pretend,” says a Midwest minister, “but the more I told people how I really felt, the more I got ministered to when I needed it. It sure beat harboring the hurt.”
“I believe it can be a healthy thing for a church to learn their pastor is discouraged,” adds Dave Dorpat, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Geneva, Illinois. “They see they have to do something, and they can come rally around him and start praying and ministering and assisting.”
Contrary to the expected, telling parishioners you’re discouraged can actually help you stay. Ed Bratcher explains why. “It’s good to check out your feelings with somebody in the congregation whom you can trust. Ed White, an executive with the Presbyterian churches in the Capital area, thinks most pastors move too quickly because they are discouraged and feel they have not been able to accomplish what they should have. And if only they would check it out with someone, they would find they have accomplished more than they think.
“So I’m learning to go to people and say, ‘Give me a reading on this. This is what I see. I feel discouraged because of this. Is this how you see the situation?’ They usually give me a fresh, more positive perspective.”
Whom Can You Trust?
When you’ve admitted your discouragement and been blasted, and then risked it again and been blessed, you quickly sort the reasons.
The key difference, usually, is the person to whom you confess that you’re down. The trick is finding those blessed people within the congregation with whom you can talk freely.
That’s not partiality; that’s practicality. John tells us that “Jesus did not trust himself” to the people in Jerusalem during the Passover festival “because he himself knew what was in their hearts” (John 2:24-25). But he did reveal himself openly to his trusted Twelve, and within that group, even more closely to Peter, James, and John. Jesus knew people’s hearts and decided whether to trust himself to them accordingly.
Here are characteristics worth looking for in confidants, according to pastors who have sometimes learned the hard way.
One person to avoid discussing your discouragement with is a member who, in his or her favor, usually is heavily involved in the church, works hard, and enjoys hanging around the church office. This person shows interest in your family and ministry, at least measured by the questions he or she asks. But gradually you discover that something you told him or her got out to people you’d never intended to have hear it. You’ve found the parish gossip. Every church has at least one, and may the Lord have mercy on pastors in new churches until they find out who they are. “You don’t make yourself vulnerable to the parish gossip,” says one pastor. “You just don’t.”
Another check for prospective confidants: When they hear about problems from someone, do they quickly verbalize things such as “Oh, don’t worry,” or “Don’t be afraid”? As one Lutheran pastor put it, “To a discouraged person, those are ridiculous things to be saying.” What you want instead, says this pastor, who has developed close friends within his church, “is someone who will listen and then be willing to say in various ways, ‘I’ll stick with you; let’s walk together; let’s get together and pray.'”
A quality to accompany this: Can they lovingly confront people? As one pastor wrote on the Leadership survey, “One resource a pastor has for staying power is a friend(s) who understands and will confront.”
Sympathy, a precious gift, ultimately falls short when it’s not coupled with loving confrontation. The person to whom we risk personal things must know how to correct us when we need it. Deep down that’s what we long for. Sympathy alone won’t keep a ministry going. As Oswald Chambers knew, “The people who do us good are never those who sympathize with us; they always hinder, because sympathy enervates. No one understands a saint but the saint who is nearest to the Saviour.”2
Steve Harris found such a person while candidating for his first church in Worcester, Massachusetts. “I was all gung-ho right out of seminary,” he remembers. “I had all these ideals. I came in to the interview with the search committee and I laid out all these dreams and plans, and some of the people were really eating it up. But there was one guy, Larry, who was head of all the prisons in Massachusetts at the time. He was originally from down South, and he said in this real quiet voice, ‘Steve, I’ve been sitting here for an hour listening to what you’re going to do for us. How are you going to let us take care of you?’ My first reaction was to think, Oh, I’m not going to need that. I’m just, you know, … but then I stopped. It was a beautiful question.”
Additional traits have been pointed out by H. B. London, pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, who has met with a particular church member for prayer each week for years. “I looked for someone who was not going to dump on me all the time,” he says. “I looked for a person who has been wounded somewhere along the way. And I looked for someone who would not sit there in shock if I shared something heavy.
“When I was in Salem, Oregon,” he says, “my prayer partner was a backhoe operator. He’d come into my office with muddy boots, and we’d sit and pray together for a half hour or so, then he’d get up and go on his way. We got to know each other and could share openly, and I took him on the mission field with me a couple of times. He caught the fever. He and his family sold their house and became full-time missionaries in South America.
“Here in Pasadena I meet weekly with a fifth-grade school teacher. He comes in after school one afternoon a week and we talk for a while, and pray, and read Scripture. With both of these men, I’ve shared crisis times in the family or in my own ministry. I could do it without any hesitancy because I knew what I shared wouldn’t go any further.”
The search for those supportive members is worth the time and trouble, for when you’re discouraged, they will often be the ones to keep you going. “The single most helpful ingredient in keeping me going during the first four years here was the relationship I had with one man in the church,” says John Yates. “Charlie and his wife came into the church the same time we came, and we began meeting for breakfast every Wednesday morning.
“I also had a small group of men I was trying to disciple, and we met every week to study the Scripture together. But Charlie was a peer. In no sense did I feel I was trying to lead him or teach him. He was right at my level. And he was as committed to seeing this church turned around as I was. He shared my vision completely.
“So whenever we would meet, he would ask me questions: ‘How’s this going? How’s that going?’ And if I’d be down, he’d really encourage me. He was a Barnabas to me. There were weeks when I lived for that breakfast. My wife and I have the same relationship, but sometimes you need more than your wife to give you that little upbuilding. And Charlie encouraged me and encouraged me and encouraged me.
“Then after four years, he felt God calling them to the mission field in Europe and he left. It broke my heart. I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it without him. I had come to depend on him in a way that I had never depended on another man. It wasn’t an unhealthy thing; it was a wonderful thing.
“But when he left, God brought another man along who filled the same role in my life. And Charlie has come back from Europe. He’s been through kind of a difficult time. We’re meeting again, but now I’m more in the role of encourager to him.”
What Can You Say to “the Many”?
By definition, the number of these “best friends” a pastor can have in a congregation is small. Usually it’s only a handful with whom you develop an “I can share almost anything” relationship.
But meanwhile, you’re pastor of the whole flock. You’ve got to relate honestly and directly with everyone, even if you don’t talk on the most personal level. What can you say —and not say — about your discouragement to the many members of your congregation you meet each week? When they ask you, “How are you doing?” what are your options?
“I think it’s important to differentiate between the sharing of information and the sharing of feelings,” says Gary Downing. “Sharing information can be damaging and can break a confidence because I’m talking about somebody else. I learned from the Navy that when it comes to information, you have to remember the phrase ‘the need to know.’ Who needs to know this?
“But sharing how I’m feeling right now is simple self-disclosure. I’ve learned I can tell people how I’m feeling without going into all the reasons for feeling that way.
“It started with my secretary; I began to give her fair warning when I was grumpy or out of sorts. I’d say, ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you, but I’m feeling crummy today. Watch out for me.’ I was able to be honest and relate to her person to person without disclosing personal details.”
Robert Norris at Bethesda, Maryland’s, Fourth Presbyterian Church followed the principle recently. “We’d been having some hard times, and one lady came in to the office and said, ‘The Lord awakened me at four o’clock this morning to pray for you. Are you all right?’
“‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I can’t share all the reasons behind that, but thank you for your prayers. I’m deeply grateful for them.’
“And that was enough for her. She understood that and accepted it.”
But when you’re discouraged and most likely to say something hurtful, you’re also least likely to monitor what you’re saying. It calls for constant vigilance. A Midwest pastor admitted, “On Sunday nights, after the evening service, I’m wiped out. The adrenalin drops, and my defenses come down. I used to invite people over after services on Sunday nights, but I’ve found that’s a dangerous thing to do. It was too easy for me then, especially when I was discouraged, to start ripping into things or criticizing people.” When you’re deeply discouraged and out of control, then it’s probably not time to gather around you “the many.” That’s the time to call “the few,” the chosen ones who can handle your rantings and ravings — and keep on loving you.
What Can You Say from the Pulpit?
On Sunday, though, no matter how discouraged you may feel, you’ve got to mount the steps to the pulpit. What a tension. On the one hand, you want to bring a refreshing, faith-inspiring word to hurting people. On the other hand, you’re hurting yourself. You can’t hypocritically hide that, but you don’t want to add your burdens to others’. How can you express your honest discouragement without simply dumping on people? And how can you be helpful without putting up an “everything is fine” facade?
Pastors take radically different approaches, depending on a number of factors.
“I don’t share my emotional tiredness or spiritual fatigue with my congregation,” says a pastor of a small church in the mid-Atlantic states. “I have never felt good about dumping my emotional stuff on them.”
Another pastor, of a large church, concurs: “It may be the right thing to do, but I have never felt free to say, ‘Friends, I’m discouraged.’ I always concern myself with that number among the two thousand on a Sunday morning for whom that would be too difficult to cope with — that the pastor feels that way. I’m the only one who would reap any benefit from that.”
But some ministers have been forced through difficult circumstances to share their genuine, present-tense discouragement with a congregation, at least at times. Steve Harris is one.
“My son Matthew was born with spina bifida, and for the first year he was alive, he was in intensive care,” Steve says. “We were essentially living there. Every day I’d see my son suffering, and kids on the floor were dying almost daily. Talk about a war zone! An intensive care unit for kids is a bitter place. It was virtually impossible to live there and not bring that discouragement and pain into my preaching. But I’d heard that pastors, young pastors especially, are supposed to preach their convictions and not their doubts. So I didn’t share anything personal about what I was going through or how I was feeling.
“Every Sunday I’d come from a week of medical crises, and stress and tension at home. I’d hold it in. After awhile, I found myself pulling away from the people. I preached a whole sermon one time and didn’t mention God’s name, because I didn’t want to deal with any of that stuff personally, publicly.
“I kept thinking, The church shouldn’t have to deal with a discouraged pastor. After all, I’m supposed to be the example of faith here; I’m supposed to be lifting them up. I can’t be talking about how angry I am with God or how hard it is not to have prayers answered.
“Then one night Matthew’s stomach actually exploded. He was rushed into surgery, and it wasn’t all over until about 1:30 in the morning. To go from that into the pulpit finally became more than I could take. One Sunday morning I broke down in the middle of my sermon and began crying.
“From that, I learned I needed to keep more current accounts with my emotions and find ways to tell people —not in a way that would hurt them but in a way that was authentic. If a pastor is going to be authentic, if his ministry is going to be effective, he’s got to share those doubts in the appropriate ways. And as I began to take chances, to do that, I saw that God would use that, and it wasn’t detrimental.”
Sharing personal discouragement from the pulpit will never be easy. But it helps, when that’s necessary, to realize that such self-disclosure can benefit the congregation. In Where Is God When It Hurts? Philip Yancey tells of a Midwest pastor who “was reading Psalm 145 from the pulpit. He tried to concentrate, but something was plaguing him: his week-old grandson had just died, grieving the whole family. He couldn’t continue reading the words about God’s goodness and fairness. His voice choked, he stopped reading, and he told the tense congregation what had happened.
“‘As people left the church,’ he remembers, ‘they said two important and helpful things:
“‘1. “Thank you for sharing your pain with us.”
“‘2. “I grieve with you.” This simple statement was the most helpful thing said. I did not feel alone.… They embraced my grief.'”3
From experiences such as these, pastors who conscientiously avoid mentioning their discouragement from the pulpit, as well as pastors who think it’s worth the risk, have come to some common ground. On a Sunday when they’re down, they return to principles such as these.
Sermons inevitably are shaped by our personal experience. Though we may not mention our discouragement directly, the sermon’s tone and direction will probably reflect it, even if unconsciously. But that can help us preach more empathetically to parishioners who are on the ropes. “Many times my wife will come home from the service and say, ‘Boy, you really preached to yourself today, didn’t you?'” says H. B. London. “And I probably did. The sermon was probably born out of struggles that I was having. But that’s okay. Because if I’m having them, lots of folks may be having them.”
John Yates recently preached a sermon on discouragement, and “it prompted more response in this church than any I’ve preached in a long time. I think the reason was it grew out of some personal experience. I was discouraged about some marriages in the congregation that were going downhill, yet the people involved were not facing up to their problems. And a friend, a leader in ministry, had gone through a difficult experience and was not facing up to his own mistakes in ministry. I was so upset about those things that I preached with a little more passion than usual. Evidently it really struck home.”
To whatever extent you share your discouragement, do it in the context of God’s faithfulness. Says Yates: “If I share with the congregation, ‘I’ve had a discouraging time this week,’ I try to always do it in the context of ‘But God is good. God is faithful.'” Harley Schmitt amplifies the principle: “You can communicate to your people that you’re hurting, but you can communicate in such a way that they know you’re still trusting in the Lord and that you’re waiting on the Lord and that God is faithful. Then that gives them a sense of encouragement, too.”
Among other things, that may mean riding out the time of discouragement until you can say that honestly. Says a Presbyterian minister: “I find it better to tell people of the discouragements I have been through rather than ones I am currently engaged in. Once I’ve been through them, they become natural illustrations from my past.”
Recently I read of a survey in which members of a church answered this question: “Why do you attend here?” The answers people gave: (1) Our pastor is one of us; (2) He gives us hope.
In these survey results lies the key to preaching when we’re discouraged. We can in various ways share our discouragement with the people, so they know we’re one of them. But always, and in every way, we point to God’s faithfulness; we give hope.
Fellow Leaders
Because of the various constraints on talking to people within the congregation, some pastors find they can open up best to key leaders — other staff members or carefully chosen lay leaders who understand the church and the ministry but can give some perspective. “After ten years in ministry, my greatest sense of encouragement has been this year,” wrote a pastor on the Leadership survey, “because I’m finally on staff in a team situation. It’s great to be committed to each other and sense support, and therefore be able to reach higher goals. The other pastor has become a close friend with whom I can share openly and honestly; we can laugh together.”
When a staff situation is good, as the old nursery rhyme puts it, “it’s very, very good.”
But likewise, “when it is bad, it’s horrid.”
“The loneliest feeling you’ll ever have in ministry can be in a staff situation,” says an East Coast pastor who has been in both good and bad ones. “After coming to one church, I asked the senior pastor what I should call him, if I should use his first name. He said, ‘Well, we’ll see.’ It was clear he didn’t want me to do that.”
A safe professional distance easily widens into a professional Grand Canyon that’s nearly impossible to cross. The gulf comes from the natural hesitancy to let colleagues see you hurting and in need of help.
To get over that, it often helps to begin small, to share the daily discouragements first. Gary Downing tells this story: “This morning a young staff member working in youth ministry here came in and said, ‘How are you doin’?’ I so easily could have said, ‘Fine, things are going fine,’ and he would have gone on his way. But instead I stopped and said, ‘John, I’m down. I am sick of process, of going through all these motions to get anything done. I was at a search committee meeting last night till eleven o’clock dealing with questions for an interview with a prospective youth worker. We finally came to a conclusion and wrote some questions that reflected the values of the group, but it took us three and a half hours to get there. Then this morning I was up early for a breakfast meeting about the men’s group, and it was the same old story: it took forever to make a decision because we had to allow everyone to speak his mind. I’m sick and tired of how time consuming all that is.’
“And John looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, that’s the congregational way, isn’t it? We kind of lift our cups to that: Skol to the congregational way.’
“Boy, that helped. I didn’t need therapy for my discouragement; I didn’t need any advice. I just needed to acknowledge it and shake my fist about it. John listened, gave me a pat on the back, and walked away, and I felt about five pounds lighter.”
From that kind of experience, we learn to trust fellow staff members with our moments of deeper darkness. Carolyn Weese, for many years a staff associate at Hollywood (California) Presbyterian Church, writes of a staff retreat she helped arrange: “When the day came and I began the drive to the retreat, I began to wonder why I was even going. What did I have to offer? I surely expected nothing from it.
“Following dinner, we gathered for a time of Bible study and caring and praying for one another. As I listened to my brothers and sisters share their needs, I suddenly, for the first time, was face to face with the fact I was spent, used up, burned out. Sitting there quietly, my first thought was to run. How could I ever tell them what had been happening to me? What would happen if I shared my pain with them? Whatever would they say if they knew I was the weak link in the chain? No, I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, say a word.”
But Carolyn finally decided to say something, and when she did, “three members of the staff whom I love dearly, and who have had very strategic roles in my life, gathered around me and prayed for me. Through their prayers … I could actually feel a healing process begin to take place.
“On Sunday, I came to church and did all the usual things that are expected of me on a Sunday, but I also worshiped.”4
The risk of confessing our discouragement to fellow leaders may be great, but as most have found, the rewards are greater.
An Outside Chance
For many ministers, though, the best chance of finding a person with whom they can share their deepest discouragements comes outside the church.
“I’ve never had the expectation that the congregation would be my spiritual support,” says one minister. “I know some ministers feel they should, but I’ve always made sure I got it someplace else. I have friends and a spiritual director outside.”
There are some good reasons for going outside to find confidants. For one thing, ministers move frequently, and for at least a few years in a new church you’ll probably still be closer to friends from previous years — from seminary or earlier churches.
But the biggest reason stems from the nature of an intimate friendship. Explains Gary Downing, “Only with a special kind of friend can you talk about the four issues we all struggle with: money, sex, power, and time. We’re always facing opportunities but also dangers with these. Most Christian leaders I’ve encountered have no one, including their spouse, with whom they can talk candidly about struggles with money, sex, power, or time.”
These sensitive issues are the kind that generally are not appropriate to discuss with members of a congregation, because they either deal with others in the church or cause unnecessary ripples of confusion or fear. And that means the building of a friendship with someone outside.
“It’s great having someone outside, away from the situation, who honestly wants to know, ‘How’s it going?'” says one pastor. “But building that kind of friendship is tough because church life tends to eat up your time. You don’t have a lot of hours left over. So you have to make it happen.”
How did Gary handle the time problem? “About nine years ago, while I was working with Young Life, I met a guy named Rob, a young, rising business executive from the right side of the tracks. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. He was single; I was married. We didn’t have a lot in common, but as he began to drop by once in a while, I discovered his concept for his life was similar, focused on friendship with God and being himself with other people. We started jogging together and playing racketball together. I began to look at him as a close friend, and after a while I started relying on him as a sounding board for things.
“We really enjoyed getting together, but our schedules were so crazy that we could go for weeks and never talk. Then one fall afternoon we went for a walk around a local lake and decided we would try something together: once a week for a year we would get together just to talk, and we would talk about ‘our highest ideals and our deepest needs.’ But we would never share more than we felt comfortable talking about. At the time it seemed funny that we had to be so intentional about developing a better friendship, but we both saw that with the pace of ministry life in America, if it wasn’t on the calendar, it wouldn’t happen.
“As we got together and the weeks went by, we had a lot of fun. We found we could talk about those four tough areas, and just talking about them somehow made them more manageable. Power needs, struggles with money, sexual fantasies — they weren’t hard to share when you knew you weren’t going to get advice or lectures but just a listening ear from a friend who was committed to you.
“We’re in our ninth year together. I view Rob as my closest friend, second only to my wife, closer than a brother. I can’t think of anything I sooner or later wouldn’t be able to tell Rob except for the most intimate aspects of my marital relationship. I get tearful talking about it because it’s so important to me. I think for me that friendship has been a key in keeping me alive and growing through tough years of ministry.”
Care Network
Each one of the above resources, inside or outside the congregation, can be a place to turn when you’re discouraged, a place where you can let on that you’re down.
But two are better than one. And three are better than two. When your emotions are being divebombed, you need all hands on deck. You need many people who will listen, who will pray, who will stick by you. Writes Jim Stobaugh, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh: “My network of care — spouse, spiritual director, support group, and times of solitude — were present when my congregation nearly fired me. They were present when I needed to be told I was too hard on a congregant. They were there when I needed to hear that I was ignoring my wife. They were present when my father suddenly died of cancer. They encouraged me to continue pursuing a program when I was ready to scrap it. They enabled me to stand firm in the face of temptation and adversity.”
The whole network of care — without that, many pastors would not be in the ministry today.
Madeleine L’Engle, “The Door Interview,” The Wittenburg Door (December 1986 – January 1987).
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 223.
Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1977), 150.
Carolyn Weese, “From the Fire Back into the Frying Pan,” (1987, unpublished).
©1988 Christianity Today
