Hard Fact No. 1: The ministry never has been and never will be a nine-to-five job.
Hard Fact No. 2: Ministers who do not give attention to their marriages come to regret it.
Those two facts, of course, do not mesh very well. Both are true; both are acknowledged by husbands as well as wives. Neither fact is going to change. Pastoral couples simply have to accept them.
Most pastors find their own natural ambition heightened by what is at stake in the ministry: eternal destinies. One pastor tells an early experience that typifies the conundrum:
I was a youth pastor, and one day I had an impulse to stop and see a certain teenage girl. I didn’t do it—and that night, she ran away.
After that, whenever I’d get an impression to do something, I was afraid not to follow through on it. I don’t think I did very well at taking a day off for seven or eight years.
Finally, there were a couple of times at home in bed when Barbara said, “I don’t know you” or “I don’t feel a part of you. You’re doing a great job as a pastor, but you don’t know me.”
Dr. Dennis Guernsey, author and professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, “A pastor’s wife is put in a terrible bind when the church becomes The Other Woman—but her husband isn’t unrighteous for sleeping with her. No one considers this obsession immoral; he’s ‘doing God’s work.'”
Most women bear this “affair” in silence for several years, until the pressure becomes intolerable. Then they confront. Richard Foth, who spent his first dozen ministry years pioneering a new church in Urbana, Illinois, tells about one day when he came home exhausted from a marathon of appointments. His normally placid wife (by then the mother of three young children) said, “Dick, I have a question. How come you give your life away to all these people you hardly know? They get the prime time—and we get the leftovers. Why do you do that?”
In the years following, he did some major reordering of his priorities. Now president of Bethany Bible College in Santa Cruz, California, he says, “The idea of ministry versus marriage is a false dichotomy. We must not pit one against the other.
“It’s almost as if we’ve ripped Matthew 6:24 out of context and misapplied it to our work and our home—’No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else …’ That’s not what Jesus was talking about.
“Marriage gives rise to ministry. It is ministry’s foundation. Out of our service to our wives we build a superstructure of ministry to the rest of the congregation.”
The task for busy pastors, he concludes, is dual. “Building a marriage and a ministry is like trying to build a boat and a glider at the same time. They are both forms of transportation, they use similar materials—but they’re different.
“And if you can’t sculpt the prow of your boat to slice smoothly through the water—a substance you can see—how can you shape a wing to utilize the lift of the air, which you can’t see? The shapes may differ, but the fundamental laws of physics apply to both.”
The following case studies show couples working on both the glider and the boat. Some tell of difficulties at transition points—moving from one church to another—which is hard not only for Dad and Mom but children as well. Others deal with staff conflict; still others, with time pressures. All are examples of the way church stresses impinge upon home life.
“Reflections” in this part come from Louis McBurney, M.D., psychiatrist and counselor who operates Marble Retreat in the Colorado Rockies for clergy and their spouses who face crises.
“I don’t think I ever had to make a really hard decision the first thirty years of my life,” says Jim Ruch. He grew up the oldest of three sons in a staunch churchgoing family in Saint Joseph, Missouri, and his enrollment at one of the official church colleges on the West Coast was as much his father’s choice as his.
Five years later (with a year out to travel on a denominational youth team), he graduated, married a blond classmate from Ventura named Sharon, and moved smoothly into seminary. His internship at a nearby church went well enough, and once he was ordained, the young family—three of them now, including little Kevin—moved to the Sierras to take a church at Sonora.
Says Jim:
It was an intimate community—you went to town and saw somebody you knew almost every block. The main show in town three months of the year was the high school football game. Everybody listened to the same radio station.
Plus, it was the summer home of several administrators and professors from the seminary, who’d come up to the mountains to relax. We had a great time together. I said I was going to stay there a long, long time.
That was right in line with the congregation’s wishes; they liked this young couple and wanted to keep them longer than the usual three or four years. Sometime after Sharon gave birth to Mark, the church hit upon an incentive: a new parsonage. They invited the Ruches to help choose the floor plan, the carpeting, and the wallpaper. A spirit of pride began to grow in the church as the contractor began moving dirt and pouring the foundations.
The house was under roof, and in fact, the drywalling was already finished when an inquiry came from Wade Memorial in Kansas City. It was a church twice the size of the Sonora congregation.
Jim and Sharon had driven by the summer before while on vacation seeing Jim’s parents, who lived only forty-five miles up the Missouri River. He’d even said to his wife, “Wouldn’t it be something to serve here someday?”
Jim told the Kansas City chairman he’d call back within a week.
Twenty-four hours later, the wheels were already starting to turn. Kansas City … all the advantages of a metropolitan area … grandparents an hour away … a larger church, larger budget, larger facility … Jim dialed the chairman and announced he was willing to come out.
He mentioned the opportunity a few days later to a fellow pastor in Sonora. “Seems only natural,” said his friend. “If God’s calling you to something bigger, that’s where you should go.”
Candidating went well. The congregation’s call to the Ruches was unanimous. A date was set for their coming to the Midwest.
The people in Sonora were of course disappointed when they got the bad news. It had happened to them before and would probably happen again. So they bore their feelings in silence. Jim had expected they would ask questions about where he was going and what it would be like, but no one seemed very interested.
The old parsonage had already been sold, so the Ruches spent their last month in town living in someone’s mobile home. The church farewell was polite but restrained. Jim had promised himself he wouldn’t get emotional, and he didn’t. He said his good-byes, the moving van pulled away, and the family headed east.
One more smooth, almost automatic decision.
When they pulled onto the Kansas Turnpike at Topeka, excitement began to mount. A whole new challenge would soon be theirs. Jim checked his notes for the name of the trustee chairman who would meet them and show them to temporary housing. The church did not own a parsonage; the Ruches would be buying their own home in due time.
“Welcome to Kansas City!” said the man with a bit of a drawl as they stood together on the sidewalk outside the brick sanctuary. “How was your trip?”
It soon became apparent that he didn’t have any housing arrangements made. He had meant to work on that but just hadn’t gotten to it. They could do it together now, the three of them.
Jim and Sharon were a bit chagrined as they followed his car around the area, talking to three different apartment managers and asking about short-term leases. The Ruches finally decided to stay the next couple of nights with Jim’s parents in Saint Joseph while the search continued.
By the weekend, they had landed an apartment and rented some furniture. Church ladies brought over a box of dishes and a box of pots and pans. “We felt like we were camping,” Sharon remembers. “It was a little unsettling, since we’d always had a place to go to up till then.”
The first Sunday morning went well, and that afternoon, Jim said to Sharon, “We’ll probably do something with someone after the service tonight.” She threw in an extra couple of toys to keep her preschoolers occupied at a restaurant or someone’s home.
The crowd was small that night, and when the benediction was pronounced, the people seemed to move out quickly. There wasn’t much standing around for chitchat. Soon it was just the Ruches and the custodian left. They said good-night and headed to their car a bit crestfallen.
Monday night Jim met with both the deacons and the Christian education committee and came away with a long “To Do” list. People seem relieved that the interim was now over; their new senior pastor would be grabbing hold, seizing many of the tasks they had had to tackle the past months.
On Thursday, there was a funeral to conduct. After the burial, people returned to the fellowship hall for a meal together.
I remember a group at one table talking about having just heard J. Vernon McGee on the radio, and what a marvelous message he’d preached, and on and on.… I began realizing I wasn’t the only voice in town! People had all kinds of different heroes.
There had been discussion in the pastor-parish committee, he knew, about his age. Some felt a thirty-year-old was too young for such a prominent pulpit. But the denomination had experienced a dearth of seminarians in the years prior to Jim’s class, so pastors in the age group a bit older than he were at a premium. The church had finally concluded he was the best available.
That evening, Sharon was startled to find Jim sitting on the edge of the bed, head down, staring at the carpet. “Honey, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”
He hardly shifted positions as he quietly said, “I can’t do it. It’s too much.”
I’d never seen him act like that in seven years of marriage. It was completely unknown to me. He just seemed overwhelmed with the task.
We started talking—or at least I talked. I guess I got kind of angry after a while. I mean, he’d brought me to this place he’d always wanted to go, and here I was sitting in this second-floor apartment with rented furniture and two little kids, and a husband who didn’t think he could do the job we’d come to do!
She alternated between “Come on, you’ve got to at least give it a try” and a softer “You’ll be all right; we know the Lord called us here, and I’ll help you make it.” The conversation ended with a decision to go see the district superintendent the next day.
The man expressed confidence in Jim’s ability, told him he really didn’t need to be afraid, and then asked a practical question: “Have you unpacked your books yet?” Jim hadn’t.
“Well, I’ve noticed that sometimes when I get down,” the superintendent said, “it’s good to do something, work at a task.”
Jim took his advice and spent Saturday arranging his library at the church. That evening his parents came down. They wound up kneeling together in a family circle and praying.
Jim preached acceptably the next morning and also carried through with an afternoon appearance before the membership committee; he and Sharon had to give their personal testimonies as part of becoming members of the church.
But the nights were another matter. He could not sleep. He slogged through Monday and Tuesday, accomplishing little. He didn’t feel well. He was tired. He drove around the city supposedly looking at homes—but a couple of times just parked the car and sat crying. “I felt like I was in this big, big pit,” he remembers.
By Wednesday, Sharon called her parents-in-law in Saint Joseph. “Something’s got to be done. He is simply not functioning.”
They drove down to attend the midweek Bible study and then announced afterward, “Jim, we’re taking you up home to Methodist Hospital. You remember Dr. Clark; he’ll know what to do to help you.” Jim looked at them blankly and nodded.
Dr. Clark met them at the hospital late that evening, asked a few questions, and gave Jim some medication for sleep. The patient awoke the next morning feeling rested. Soon he was introduced to a psychiatrist named Stouffer, also a Christian, who listened to his account of the recent months and weeks.
Jim says:
By the middle of that day, I was really feeling chipper. I began to have some ideas of things we could do at the church.
But that night, I came as close to suicide as I’d ever been. I felt like I was dying. I thought, I’ve got these chemicals in my body, and I’m going to die by morning. In fact, at one point I realized I had put my head in the toilet.
The psychiatrist came in Friday morning ready to send me home—and I told him all this stuff. He saw I was really in bad shape. He said, “We’re going to have to take you someplace else.”
Sharon arrived at the hospital that morning to see her husband—and was told he was being transferred to a private psychiatric hospital. She could not even drive him there; he would have to go by ambulance, strapped to a gurney, with her following along behind.
I was devastated. All the names being thrown around were unknown to me. I’d never suspected this kind of thing would ever happen.
What was I going to do? I basically had no home. All I had were my in-laws, who were very supportive. They knew where to go and how to keep this quiet.
But I’d never read books on depression or anything. I was feeling very alone.
One of her first tasks was to try to explain—from her limited knowledge—to the church chairman what had happened to their brand-new pastor. She didn’t know where to start, so she gave up and arranged for the two of them to meet Dr. Stouffer. The district superintendent also sat in on the meeting. The doctor gave them his diagnosis and then said something very important: “He will get better. I want you to go ahead and do all the things you and Jim have talked about, even though he’s not able to do them now. He will be able to function as a pastor again; this is not the end of the world.” He closed by recommending some books for Sharon to read.
The chairman, fortunately, was an older gentleman who took the situation calmly. He arranged for a pulpit supply and assured Sharon of his support. On Sunday he simply told the congregation that Pastor Ruch was “ill and in a hospital up near his parents in Saint Joseph. He can’t have visitors at the present time, but he’ll be back with us soon.” That was all.
Jim spent two weeks in the psychiatric hospital withdrawing from all pressure “and gaining about ten pounds,” he remembers. Only the district superintendent and Sharon were allowed to see him.
I had lots of time to think. Things like I’ll never be a pastor again. I’ll surely never pastor HERE.… I’m thirty years old, and it’s over.
God felt so far away. He wasn’t there, or at least he certainly wasn’t listening to me. I’d done something so awful he must have completely rejected me. I thought, Well, I’ve got Sharon, and my parents—but they’re probably thinking, “What in the world?”—this son they were so proud of.
Next came the second-guessing of the decision to come to Kansas City. He must have been following his own desires, not listening to God back there in Sonora. If he hadn’t come out here, none of this would have happened. If only there were some way to go back.…
That’s it! Just tell the people here we made a mistake, and we’re going back to California. That church hasn’t called a permanent pastor yet—we can just slip back into that beautiful new parsonage, and everything will be fine again.
When Sharon arrived for her visit that day, Jim announced his new plan. She sat aghast listening to his instructions: pack up and get ready to head west, just as soon as he got out of the hospital.…
She and Dr. Stouffer managed to convince him that the past was over and done, and he’d have to stick with the present. The Kansas City church reinforced that message by paying his salary right on time. The chairman phoned one day to lend his encouragement and say, “Well, we’re starting to make plans for Advent now. We’re looking forward to having you preach on Christmas Eve.” Tears came to Jim’s eyes; they wanted him after all.
Rumors in the congregation were generally held in check. The most open incident came in a couples’ group when someone said, “Let’s pray for Pastor Ruch and his nervous breakdown.”
A board member rose to his defense. “He didn’t have a nervous breakdown.”
“Oh, yes, he did,” the first person insisted.
“No, he’s just having a difficult time. But he’ll be all right.”
And that was the end of the discussion.
By the sixth Sunday after his arrival in town, Jim was back in the pulpit. The sermon was short that day, and the perspiration on the pastor’s forehead was visible, but he managed to finish.
That evening, the phone rang.
“Pastor Ruch, this is Dr. Stouffer. How’d it go today?”
Pastor Ruch. The title so struck him that he couldn’t answer the question for a few seconds.… So he really might be a minister again, here, in this very church.
In the following weekly appointments, Dr. Stouffer took him back to review the move from Sonora. Jim told how disappointed he had been at his former congregation’s lack of interest in his ministry. He saw the folly of refusing to cry at the farewell.
For the next month and a half, there were good days and bad days. Bursts of initiative were broken by sags of despair. House hunting was a chore at times, and after they finally settled on a home, Jim didn’t want to go through with the closing. “I can’t commit myself to this,” he told Sharon that morning.
His wife stayed calm but firm. “No, Jim, this is what we’re going to do. Go ahead and get dressed; we must be down there at nine o’clock like we promised.”
When she felt fearful, she tried to keep Jim from knowing about it.
I remember going for a walk one very foggy night. Jim had been real down again, and every time I saw him slouching and distant, I thought, We’re going to go through it all again.
I walked and cried a long way. I didn’t want Jim to know I was wondering whether we could put it together. At that point I was simply doing what other people encouraged me to do for him.
She had not lived in Kansas City long enough to have built any kind of personal support other than her in-laws, and even they were fairly new in her life. She needed someone to understand her, to reach out and say, “You must be hurting.”
Such a person arrived on the scene at just that moment: a former boyfriend from California.
He was now an airline pilot. He called and invited Sharon out for coffee. He told about his floundering marriage, his money, and how he’d always remembered Sharon through the years. She recalls:
I was very vulnerable. I didn’t know for sure if I had a husband who was ever going to be able to do anything. And here was Bob saying, “How nice it is to see you again; you’re looking beautiful.…”
He began to call. And I was feeling a little flattered by it. It looked really good. I wasn’t getting affirmation from Jim at that point; he wasn’t seeing me as helping to pull him through his depression; I was more of a nag to him.
Eventually, Sharon realized she was facing a choice.
I had to say, “Look, Bob—I no longer want to hear from you. I do not want to see you, because I know I’m kind of weak just now.” That confirmed my commitment to Jim, that through hell or high water we were going to make it. I was going to put my energy there.
Her statement did not keep the airline pilot from dialing her number again occasionally. But eventually, the contact ceased.
Meanwhile, Jim was learning more about what causes depression. He had never, as a pastor, dealt with anyone like himself. He found out a classic definition of depression is repressed anger.
I’d never been an angry guy in my life, I didn’t think. I didn’t know what it was. Now I realized I had been genuinely angry at the people in California because of their cold shoulders and their lack of affirming my ministry there. I hadn’t brought any kind of closure to the last pastorate. Nobody there had been blunt enough to say, “I’m really upset at what you’re doing.” And I had never said, “Well, it bothers me that you’re upset.”
I hadn’t brought that chapter to a close so I could be free here to start again. I wasn’t recognizing that I was an emotional being; I just wanted life to go smoothly.
About that time, someone called from Sonora to say, “We heard you haven’t been feeling too well. We just wanted you to know a candidate is coming to the church now, and things look very good. We’re moving ahead here, and we sure hope things go well for you.” That relieved a lot of pressure—and also told Jim he could forget about returning.
The last of the down days came in early December. He remembers a particular pastoral act—going to visit a recent widow—and suddenly “feeling like a pastor again.” True to the church chairman’s prediction, he was in the pulpit for the Christmas Eve service. By spring he was off all medication and had wound up his visits to Dr. Stouffer.
It’s been good since then to minister to other depressed people, to go into a psychiatric ward and say, “You’re going to get better”—and know what I was talking about.
I’m sure I’ll leave this church someday and go somewhere else. But when I do, I can tell you there’ll be a lot of crying, a lot of feeling. Rather than dreading that expression, I now know it’s part of being human. I think I have enough emotional health now to handle another transition.
Jim Ruch’s ministry in Kansas City has turned out to be thirteen years running at this point, a stable and effective pastorate. His oldest son, a four-year-old when they came east, is now ready for college and will probably win a scholarship. Jim now serves on the denomination’s pastoral guidance board, which oversees counseling services for ministers and hears disciplinary cases.
It is almost frightening to think how much worse his trauma might have been if any one or more of the following factors had been true:
• an unsteady wife
• a demanding or impatient church
• a too-busy district superintendent
• a domineering or martyrish set of parents
• an incompetent psychiatrist
This is a case where the supporting cast came through with honors. They said and did the right things at each turn, and as a result, Jim was quickly healed. Their prompt and sensitive action resulted in the salvaging of a ministry and perhaps a marriage.
Reflections
by Louis McBurneyMinisters are human beings, and the quicker they recognize their humanity, face their limitations, and get help when they need it, the sooner they begin to escape terrible consequences. Ministers are not perfect and don’t have to be; they have legitimate needs for family, for support, for friendship. The church world must permit this, and ministers must accept it.
The Ruches are a normal couple who inherited the common assumption that bigger is automatically better. I am not saying they should not have gone to Kansas City; perhaps this was the right thing to do. But I have seen many other situations in which the Peter Principle has seemed to operate. A pastor has risen to maximum potential but hasn’t been willing to stop there.
Why is it that whenever someone gets a call to a bigger church, it always seems to be God’s will? At least that describes the cases I know about. Occasionally the call to a smaller church is said to be God’s will, but not nearly as often.
I’m not sure I know all the answers to this, but I do know it’s important for a person to know himself and what stage of life he’s in. This fellow was around thirty years old—the time of establishing oneself as a more independent, productive person. The lure to Kansas City was definitely heightened by his own developmental needs.
He had a lot of things going for him in Sonora. The ministry situation there was far from bad. Yet something bigger came along that linked up with some private dreams. He had once said to his wife while in Kansas City, “Wouldn’t it be something to serve here someday?”
Recently a man came here to the Retreat, a country boy who has now gotten into a big city church. The first thing he said in our group was “I grew up in the rural South and I’m really just a guy from the sticks.” He’s doing all right in his present church, but in his heart he knows he’s out of place. He feels it every day and wishes he could go back.
It’s the rare minister who can look at a larger opportunity and say, “But I’m comfortable; God can use me here,” and be willing to stay.
This story also deals with separation. It was a lot easier for the Ruches just to drive away from their first church than to deal with their feelings. However, any kind of move is a loss. It creates a degree of grief, even if you’re moving to a better situation or leaving tensions and problems behind. If you pack up the moving van without taking care of emotional closure, you’re forgetting something very necessary.
And pastors move often—some say on an average as frequent as every two years. That can mean stacking up one grief reaction on top of another. Somewhere along the line, this catches up with pastors, as the loss snowballs.
When some of the things the Ruches had taken for granted didn’t materialize in Kansas City—housing, for example, or warm fellowship right away—it contributed significantly to depression. There was anger about both ends: the cool send-off from Sonora, and the unsettled reception in Kansas City.
Jim didn’t know how to deal with this. In fact, he didn’t recognize his anger for quite a while. That’s not unusual. The church world does not handle interpersonal conflict and anger very well. For one thing, our theology often says anger is sin, so any good spiritual person shouldn’t have it. We are taught to deny it rather than deal with it.
So it gets expressed some other way. It sneaks out as bitterness, or criticism, or maybe depression, as happened to Jim Ruch. In one of M. Scott Peck’s books, he says mental illness can be an attempt to escape legitimate suffering. Jim Ruch’s mental crisis was born out of inattention to the processing of grief and anger.
Too many Christians have grown up thinking the New Testament demands we live in an ideal state—right now. Not someday, but in the present. There should be no conflict. No anger. No tension. If the church is as it should be, everything will be smooth.
That is just not going to happen.
The idea that a pastor should ever succumb to depression may strike some as unusual, but it is not. We see many such cases here at Marble. In fact, it is not unlikely that most pastors at one time or another are going to have to deal with some depression.
When that happens, one of the most needful things is to talk their feelings out. Jim Ruch was able to do this right away with a professional, but more than that, his wife appears to have been a very good listener. So was the church chairman and even the busy district superintendent. He told Jim to unpack his books. Physical activity is often important in dealing with depression, rather than sitting down and surrendering to the fatigue.
One aspect of depression is a sense of loss and of value, feeling unwanted, lonely, without purpose. Talking can help you identify what the losses are. It can also help you deal with the anger that is often (but not always) a part of depression.
Naturally, I encourage people not to be afraid to seek professional counsel for depression and not to be afraid of antidepressants. A lot of people say, “Well, if you go to a psychiatrist, he’s going to fill you full of drugs.” In some church circles, any kind of neuroactive drug is almost a sin.
Actually, the antidepressants are effective medicines that can often break the neurochemical effect of depression. They won’t deal with the loss, anger, or relational issues, but they effectively treat the neurochemical and biological aspects. A short course of antidepressants can be very helpful. Illustration: Dr. Stouffer was able, by using drugs, to get Jim Ruch some sleep, which was obviously a prerequisite before other necessary things could happen.
Jim Ruch demonstrates his present healthy mind by being willing to tell the interviewer he once did something very irrational: he stuck his head in the toilet. He certainly isn’t the only pastor who ever did something like that. We find in our group therapy sessions that such an admission is a healing factor. Other people say, “You did that too?” Or they say, “Well, last week I was so upset I sat with a gun in my lap thinking about blowing my brains out” or “The other day I lost track of where I was—I didn’t know until two or three hours later where I’d been” or “I thought, Boy, I’d just like to go get roaring drunk. I’ve never been drunk in my life, but I sure thought about it. Why do I have those kind of thoughts?” The people all around the circle come to know that it’s part of the human condition to do irrational things when under extreme stress.
Even being called of God does not exempt you. Look how many of the prophets in Scripture went off and did something kind of screwy. This is what I meant earlier when I said we do not have to be perfect all the time.
If you don’t admit that, you may go the rest of your life thinking you’re the only person in the whole universe who ever did such a ridiculous thing. Unless you’re willing to risk being vulnerable and talk openly about yourself, the memory will grow and become a scar that may haunt you for a long time.
As a psychiatrist I’ve been in the unique position of hearing people’s stories. I know now that virtually everybody did something once that has become his or her terrible secret. A tremendous relief comes from being able to unmask the secret and find out maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
