I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Mark Twain
Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.
You, O Lord, are loving. Surely you will reward each person according to what he has done.
David (Psalm 62:5, 12)
Several years ago Dr. Frederick Herzberg, professor of management at the University of Utah, set out to discover what factors encouraged employees and what factors discouraged them. As he studied workers in a variety of settings, he found that despite the diverse situations, specific factors emerged clearly as the top encouragers. In the Harvard Business Review, he listed them.
The top encourager Dr. Herzberg discovered: Achievement.
The second greatest encourager: Recognition.1
Doing something well — and then being recognized for it — there is no greater motivator. The sweetness of heaven will be, in part, hearing the words of the one for whom we have worked say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Yet these top two human energizers — achievement and recognition — come rarely for some pastors. “There are long stretches when I don’t hear anything such as ‘We really do understand what you’re doing; we appreciate it,'” says a large-church pastor. “In the middle of those long dry spells, it can be discouraging. Like a radio deejay, I wonder, Is anybody out there? Is anybody really listening?“
No News Is Bad News
When feedback does come, whether positive or negative, it’s often in the form of vague and general impressions — the least helpful kind. How are you supposed to change when you hear “We’re just not being fed” (whatever that means) or even “That sermon touched me, Pastor”? No specific weaknesses have been identified to work on, no specific strengths to build on. The comments leave you with a free-floating sense of frustration.
Part of the problem is that few people understand the work of the pastor well enough to evaluate it helpfully. Says a Baptist pastor in the Midwest: “The laity don’t really know what we do. They can give some feedback on our personal relationships with them, but they’re not following us around, seeing how we led the music committee meeting or how we handled hospital visitation yesterday. So it can get lonely wondering how you’re doing.
“Of course, when I’m honest, I’m not sure I want to hear a lot of feedback. Well, I would like to hear positive feedback, but I’m not sure I want to hear a lot of negative.”
The result is that for the solo pastor, especially, there may be long stretches “where seldom is heard an encouraging word.” Without affirmation, some pastors withdraw. Admits one, “It’s not a good way to handle it, but if I articulate something we need to do and everyone looks at me cockeyed, I just back off. I withdraw and say, The heck with it.” Another natural response is to become even more dependent on the stray comment that comes our way.
Is there a way to get support and affirmation without becoming dependent on “the praise of men”? How can you get clear and helpful feedback on how you’re doing — and weather the times when you don’t get any? Says Steve Harris: “Ed Koch, the mayor of New York, is famous for walking around saying, ‘How’m I doin’?’ That’s his pet phrase: ‘How’m I doin’?’ I’ve thought it would be good if we as pastors could do that once in a while.”
But is it possible?
Here’s what tenured pastors had to say.
Finding Feedback without Fishing
By teaching the congregation how to encourage each other, the pastor also gains encouragement, H. B. London has learned. The First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, places “encouragement cards” in the pews and asks members to use them to write uplifting notes to others in the congregation and then place them in the offering plate. The church office then fills out the addresses for the intended recipients and mails the cards. And as a fringe benefit, London and the staff often receive cards themselves. When I visited the church not long ago, several bulletin boards in the church office had encouragement cards pinned to them. H. B. shared this one he’d received: “I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you I’m very glad you are our pastor. When you preach I sort of feel like you and I are having our own little conversation, and that feels good. Thanks.” When a congregation learns to be encouraging, pastors benefit the most.
Giving people a chance to tell how God has been working in their lives also opens the gates for affirmation (and builds an affirming climate in the congregation). One pastor wrote on the Leadership survey: “After preaching on transformation I invited volunteers to stand and tell how they had experienced transformation during that year. As they stood and told how the Lord had changed their lives, it was the greatest day of encouragement I ever had in the ministry.” Why restrict such testimonials to an anniversary? They glorify God, build up the church — and remind you that God really is working through your ministry.
To get more concrete evaluation, some pastors have employed periodic questionnaires or surveys. Not long ago, John Vawter, pastor of Wayzata (Minnesota) Evangelical Free Church, mailed evaluation forms to thirty-five people in his congregation to measure his preaching effectiveness. John got back a few responses that stung, but those helped him improve specific areas such as projecting his voice more during the introduction and building rapport by not using anecdotes that pointed to the congregation’s frailties.
Another pastor distributes annual “performance profiles” to a dozen key lay leaders for their evaluation of his previous year’s effectiveness. Others use similar measures, though less formal, with a pastoral relations committee.
Despite measures like these, long stretches of silence may come. Some pastors have compensated with the knowledge that not all churches are affirming by nature. Says a pastor in the upper Midwest: “This church is not an affirming church, as a culture. Maybe it’s the Midwest reserve, the Scandinavian heritage, or simply that people were never really trained how to express what they’re feeling. Then we have the suburban mentality that says, ‘Everything’s always fine.’ But if a pastor here based his staying on people’s affirmation of his pulpit ministry, he’d never last.
“Somehow recognizing that helps, though. It doesn’t solve the problem of where you get encouragement, but it at least helps you to understand it’s not going to come, in this case, from a lot of individuals in the church.”
This holds true particularly for pastors who have just moved from a loving parish to one that is more reserved or even standoffish. As a temporary measure, at least, contact with people in a previous work can remind you that you have been appreciated and probably will be again. A pastor in the mid-Atlantic states discovered this: “I’ve had the opportunity to go back to churches where I had served as a pastor. The thing that impressed me the most was the number of people who were able to mention times in their lives when I was present with them in the midst of their particular needs.”
Many pastors accomplish the same thing by saving their notes of encouragement and going back to them on gray days. “You pull some of them out, and you get a different perspective,” smiles John Yates. “Here’s one I’ve kept. ‘Dear John: We think you’re great; we think you’re great; we think you’re great! Roger loves you, I love you, God loves you. You can do all things through Christ. Love, Roger and Julie.'”
A note like that becomes an Ebenezer, an unbudgeable monument that declares you are indeed doing a work that counts.
In the final analysis, though, as Alabama pastor Jim Bankhead puts it, “If your staying power depends on other people’s affirmation, you’d never stay in some places. The pastors I know who have been able to stay with little or no recognition have done so because they had a vital relationship with Christ. His approval sustains you when there is no other.”
Salary Setbacks
Affirmation comes in both verbal and nonverbal forms. The verbal, as stimulating as it is, needs the nonverbal, most often shown through finances, to support it. And when a verbal message disagrees with a nonverbal one, people will believe the nonverbal one every time. No matter how much a pastor hears he or she is loved, unless reflected in some way financially, the words begin to sound hollow.
Not long ago I learned of a pastor who had led his congregation from under one hundred members to five hundred in twenty years of just plain hard work. He had guided the church in a relocation and building project, which had been an enormous success. Yet in the twenty years he’d given to this church, he had received raises in only six of them. The pastor and his wife were now on the other side of midlife with no savings for retirement, and they’d had to borrow against the equity in their home to finance an education for their children, so they had little if any money left. What hurt him most, he admitted in a low moment, was seeing board members head off for expensive vacations while they told him he needed to tighten his belt. He was beginning to feel the people in the church didn’t really appreciate a thing he’d done.
A staff member of a Conservative Baptist church of over a thousand members knew the feeling when he wrote, “The number one problem I face in my ministry is my lack of money compared to my load of responsibility.” Another pastor confessed, “Those fleeting moments of thinking about leaving the ministry have come mostly as a result of low compensation.” When you’re not being affirmed financially, your checkbook may be hit hard, but your emotions will be hit even harder. According to a recent Gallup poll commissioned by the Christian Broadcasting Network, the most common reasons for depression were job-related pressures and financial problems, or in other words, heavy work and light pay. The study by Dr. Frederick Herzberg mentioned earlier concurs: a leading cause of discouragement for employees is an inadequate salary.
Almost four of every ten respondents to the Leadership survey said their compensation discouraged them. The reason the problem is so widespread can be easily documented.
Based on data culled from the 1985 Bureau of Labor Statistics, Leonard Sweet writes: “Among professionals only nursery school and kindergarten teachers rank below clergy in median weekly earnings. Secretaries, truck drivers, office machine repairers, postal clerks, drywall installers and laboratory technicians all have weekly incomes higher than those of clergy. And none of them put in three to four years of graduate school after four years of college.”2
Lyle Schaller points out that in the last fifty years, pastors’ salaries have slid from the equivalent of a school district superintendent’s, to a high school principal’s, to a classroom teacher’s. And self-esteem slides with them.
No one finds that an easy thing to come to grips with. As a pastor in his mid-thirties admitted: “I’ve already reached the peak of my earning power. It’s going to be a flat curve for a long time now. It’s tough to accept that, to be honest about what that means for my family, for me, for my self-esteem.”
Affirmation without Affluence
Business executive Fred Smith says that a problem is something you can do something about; if you can’t do something about it, it’s a fact of life. In that case, feeling unaffirmed because of low compensation is both a problem and a fact of life. It’s a problem in the sense that pastors have done, and can do, some things about it. But it’s a fact of life because certain elements of it cannot be changed.
For example, it’s an unchanging fact of life that asking for more money is risky and may well be misunderstood, as one pastor who completed the Leadership survey discovered through a painful experience. “We had just had a new baby and had another child in a long hospitalization,” he writes. “But when I asked for a pay raise, it led to my firing. What really hurt was that one of those who voted against me was someone I had led to Christ and counted as a personal friend.”
And yet, pastors have begun to overcome this source of discouragement as they’ve done the things they could do.
The internal outlook is where many pastors have concentrated their energies. They make it year to year by focusing not on their low pay but on God’s call and the rewards he gives. “The church is not the highest-paying organization in the world,” says one pastor, “and there’s always that draw to material things, but my wife and I recognize it as a short-term sort of draw. It’s not going to motivate you over the long haul.”
Wrote a United Methodist pastor from the South: “Once I was invited by a businessman to go to work for him at three times the salary I was receiving.” That offer would have lured many people from many careers, but this pastor added, “My definite call of God gave me the reason I must stay.” Not that he’s unhappy about that call. He said, “My choice is being a pastor of a local church. That is where the real action is.”
His commitment reminded me of a story told by Tim Hansel: “A war correspondent tells a story of coming across a nun on her knees patiently swabbing the gangrenous leg of a very sick young soldier lying on a mat. Revulsed by the scene, he had to turn his head away. Finally he said to her, ‘Sister, I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.’
“The nun paused momentarily, and said, ‘Neither would I.'”3
But there may come a point where you have adjusted your outlook and considered your call and still come up feeling unappreciated and unaffirmed — or just plain unable to make ends meet. Then it’s time, pastors have discovered — if only for the sake of your relationship with the people — to take a deep breath and ask for more. Nobody finds that easy; it’s full of self-examination and just plain fear. But it can prevent the smoldering bitterness that comes from trying to pour yourself out for people who seem either uncaring or unconcerned.
“It’s hard to take that first step,” explains Ed Bratcher. “We clergy feel very uncomfortable talking about money, partly because we still have some of the Middle Age concept that poverty is a virtue.
“In my first pastorate, a brand-new church in Austin, Texas, we were meeting in a barracks building. In my fifth year there I was feeling the need to get away for some continuing education. With the church being new, I wasn’t sure how it would go, but finally with some fear and trepidation I went to the deacons and asked if they would provide for me to be gone three weeks that summer for a program I’d investigated.
“Not only were they unanimous in their support, they made the motion that continuing education be written into the budget every year. I had gone four years without asking for anything. But when I finally got up the courage to ask, people were very gracious.
“That incident came to mind recently,” Ed continues, “when I was talking with a seminarian who was a staff person here. He was really feeling financially pressured, and I told him, ‘You have got to tell the personnel committee exactly where you find yourself. Not that they will necessarily give you everything you need, but if you don’t tell them, they are not going to know what your needs are.’ He was reluctant. Finally I told him I wanted a written statement of his financial needs. He wrote it, and I pushed him to present it to the personnel committee.
“When he did, they were glad to give him what he needed.”
Not every story of a pastor going to the board ends so happily, but many do. One pastor wrote on the Leadership survey that his greatest sense of encouragement in ministry is occurring right now, largely because he recently asked his board for an increase — and they responded with a 20 percent raise. Affirmation!
Some pastors who ask for what they need will be rebuffed. But their number is far smaller than the number of pastors who desperately need more, who feel unappreciated and unaffirmed, but fear to make their needs known. Larry Osborne, pastor of the North Coast Evangelical Free Church in Oceanside, California, is one pastor who has overcome that fear and been honest with his board about his financial needs. After several experiences, he reports, “When good people get the facts straight, the outcome is usually fair for all concerned.”
The Toughest Critic of All
There’s a third reason pastors cry, “I need affirmation for what I do,” and it’s a surprising one. The source of discouragement is not a silent congregation or an uncaring board. In fact, it’s not a group at all. It’s a single person.
This person often demands more than anyone else and can be severely critical. He or she can make it hard for a pastor to receive a genuine compliment.
The person’s name is I.
A Lutheran pastor confessed to me, “I think the thing that discourages me most — even more than the disloyalty of some of the people — is myself. My own sins and my own failures and my own faults — those are the ones that bother me.” Said another minister: “People do place high expectations on clergy. But sometimes I’m the hardest on myself. I have great expectations, and then I don’t live up to them. So I get down on myself.”
Don Gerig, president of Fort Wayne Bible College, discovered this in his early years of ministry. “In my first fifteen years of ministry,” he writes, “I let myself become a slave to the annual records I had to send the denomination. I couldn’t let my number of baptisms or sermons slip. The more patients in the hospital, the better; I’d get more calls logged and help my statistics. I was running myself ragged for the sake of the record, not for ministry.
“The sad thing was I thought that’s how ministry was supposed to be. My expectations, not the ministry needs, were creating the overwork.”
Assessing Your Own Expectations
Self-expectations, like internal injuries, can be difficult to pinpoint. Something hurts, all right, but what? And how do you treat it?
Some pastors have found helpful the counsel of Louis McBurney, a Mayo Clinic-trained psychiatrist and founder of Marble Retreat, a counseling center for pastors and other Christian workers. McBurney advocates a four-step process to assess internal expectations and then set realistic goals.
The first step is to get in touch with expectations by completing 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,” McBurney writes. “You may be able to realistically assess your expectations alone, but it’s very difficult.”
The second step is to try to separate external expectations from internal ones. Says McBurney: “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 me?'”
Many pastors find their unrealistic self-expectations come from seeing highly gifted individuals at work. “We’d all like to think we’re Dobson in the counseling room and Criswell in the pulpit,” says one, “but we’re not.
“I look at Criswell and marvel. People at First Baptist in Dallas don’t say, ‘We came in June of 1978’; they say, ‘We came when Pastor Criswell was in Philippians.’ I’d love to be able to preach like that. He can get on a theme and stay with it, and people are right with him. But if I try that, I kill it. If I preach any series longer than three months, people get tired of it.
“The only way I can keep from getting discouraged about that,” he says, “is to come to grips with what my gifts are. I need to live within what God has given.”
McBurney’s third suggestion: “Compare your conscious goals and expectations against the unconscious motivators of anger, fear, and guilt.” This kind of winnowing process helped a United Methodist pastor I talked to realize, “One reason I can’t get everything done is my own fear of rejection. I’m afraid if I say no, people will reject me, and that makes me take on too much.”
Finally, McBurney suggests, “Examine how closely your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in fulfilling your expectations.”
Many pastors talk of discovering, often through painful experiences, that ultimately, self-worth comes from God alone. In the words of Christian psychologist David Bock, “The acceptance of the self as lovable and worthwhile has its foundation in the mysterious reality that God is both the author and the revealer of man’s worth.”
Consider the experience of Richard Foster in his first church: “I had finished my doctorate, and I was supposed to be an expert. I went to a tiny church in Southern California that would rank as a marginal failure on the ecclesiastical scoreboards. I went in there and worked and planned and organized, determined to turn this church around. But things got worse. Anger seemed to permeate everyone: the conservatives were mad at the liberals, the liberals were mad at the radicals, and the radicals were mad at everyone else. I hated to go to pastors’ conferences because I didn’t have any success stories to tell. I was working myself to death, but it seemed to do no good. Then I spent three days with my spiritual director. Toward the end of that time he said, ‘Dick, you have to decide whether you are going to be a minister of this church or a minister of Christ.’ That was a turning point. Until then I had allowed other people’s expectations — and my own — to manipulate me.”
When our work and worth come from God, his grace covers when we fail. “My biggest failure as a minister is letting details slip by and not being faithful in doing the little things that need to be done,” says a Lutheran pastor. “Once a funeral director called me and said, ‘I have this person who’s not a member of your church, but could you take the funeral?’ I said okay.
“Some days later I went out to make some calls, and on the way I drove by the funeral parlor and saw all these cars there. All of a sudden I realized I had forgotten the funeral! I quickly called and the funeral director said, ‘I got somebody else.’
“That was bad. Oh, it’s hard to admit I did that. The only way I can deal with it is to go to Jesus.”
Finding our worth in God and receiving our ultimate affirmation from him, paradoxically, frees us to truly receive affirmation from others. Writes Ed Bratcher: “I had the misconception that it was wrong to accept positive strokes for the good that I did — that I would become too proud and arrogant.… I have a hunch that ministers would experience greater fulfillment in ministry if they were able to accept more head patting from their congregation. A pastor who had left the ministry for a while told me that one reason he had decided to return to the parish ministry was that in his years as an expastor he had learned how to receive positive strokes.”4 That’s a wonderful lesson.
Michael Donald, pastor of Liberty Baptist Church in Van Wert, Ohio, finished preaching on a Sunday evening not long ago and dismissed the service. But then one of the men in the congregation came forward and said, “Wait, Pastor, we’re not done yet. We need to do something.” Then he and another man brought two high-back chairs to the front of the small, storefront church and had Michael and his wife sit in them. They looked at each other nervously, not quite sure what was going on.
“You know, we’ve had some hard times with pastors here,” began one, “and some of those pastors discouraged a lot of people. But you have accepted us the way we are. And we wanted to let you know on your one-year anniversary that we love you.”
Then one by one, spontaneously, members stood to tell the Donalds why they loved them and were glad the Lord had sent them their way.
“You haven’t put a lot of expectations on us,” said one person. “I’m so glad you’ve been willing to just be real before us,” said another. Other people contributed other statements.
Mike went home that night ready to serve those several dozen people in a way he never had before. “It was my most encouraging moment in ministry,” he says. “Ever.”
Cited by John Cheydleur, “Burn-Out and Walk-Out,” Leadership (Summer 1980), 62.
Leonard I. Sweet, “Pearlygate Satires Are Weak on Substance,” The Christian Century (July 29 – August 5, 1987), 644 – 5.
Tim Hansel, When I Relax I Feel Guilty (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1979), 127.
Edward B. Bratcher, The Walk-On-Water Syndrome (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1984), 115.
©1988 Christianity Today
