I KNOW OF A MID-LIFE MINISTER who loves to fish. He not only enjoys fishing, he is a good fisherman, according to those who can evaluate the sport. He spends a significant amount of time reading about fishing and searching the Internet. He says he has finally learned, in middle age, to enjoy life, but several of his church leaders have said that he has finally learned how to avoid life. This pastor devotes so much time to his hobby that his ministry appears to be suffering. He, like others at mid-life, seems to have succumbed to the temptation of distraction—all in the name of “getting a life,” or finding a hobby outside of the church.
After twenty-plus years in the local church, a pastor who finds the pace getting faster and the body growing more weary may wrestle with some tough questions: What do I do with the next half of my working life? Have the blessings outweighed the burdens? Do I still feel that inner fire that once drove me? If not, how do I recapture it?
It’s tempting to try to escape the issues of mid-life rather than work through them. This temptation, of course, is by no means unique to the ministry; it is one of the crucial issues we face as we grow older. Although I have not done a scientific study, I am not sure career restlessness is any greater in the ministry than in other care-giving professions—or any profession, for that matter. All of us grow weary of the daily grind. There is a certain loss of energy and enthusiasm that comes at mid-life. Some pastors fight this loss by working harder, only to find that doing so does not relieve the pain; it only increases the misery, the desperation, and the loneliness.
Others leave the ministry completely, the most obvious way to escape, and find another way to make a living. When I have visited with ministers in their mid-forties to early fifties, I have found many had seriously considered other lines of work. A friend who has served three churches for a total of thirty years told me that not a week goes by that he does not look at the Want Ads section of a major city newspaper.
I asked him why, and he replied, “Some days I think I can’t continue to endure the criticism and the pressure.”
Yet seeking another way to make a living is not necessarily an attempt to escape life. For many who serve as pastors in the local church, ministry is their life, not their livelihood. Some at mid-life, for a variety of reasons, simply move to another means of making a living, but they are not forsaking their calling. A pastor in our area recently resigned his church and opened his own business. Yet he preaches every Sunday at a small church and is helping it to discover a fresh vision for its community. Because of his spouse’s health and the fact that he has two children at the university, his financial needs required him to find another line of work. Was he escaping ministry? I don’t think so. Ministry is a way of life.
From what I have observed, most pastors who leave the church in mid-life do so for two reasons: (1) They have a strong sense of call away from church ministry. As they have walked faithfully on the journey of ministry, God calls them to new opportunities. It is not an abdication of duty to go in a new direction. This is not walking away, but being led away. (2) There are personal, family, emotional, or physical health problems, necessitating a change in what he or she is doing.
An acquaintance recently left his church and started a new career. His wife’s emotional and physical well-being were directly affected by ministry in the local church. Although he could have made some adjustments in his style of ministry, he said he left the ministry in order to keep his marriage vows. To stay would have hurt his wife. Was that an escape? Yes, but in the sense that the Old Testament Exodus was an escape. We don’t criticize Moses for leaving Egypt. Ministers need to be cautious in condemning those who enter other professions at mid-life. In some cases those who are leaving may be taking the higher road.
Escape routes
Then again, leaving the ministry may be an attempt to escape life. We’re tired of the hassles, the weekly grind, the lower pay than our contemporaries with similar levels of education.
When we were young, most of us may not have even known that escaping from life was an option. But by the time we reach the end of the second quarter of life, we not only know it is an option, we know several ways to escape without appearing that we are abdicating our calling and profession. Some pastors, in effect, quit even though they are still working.
My fisherman acquaintance, whom I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this chapter, tells his friends in the church he has finally found a hobby and now he can minister more effectively. Some in the church say he fishes away, rather than deals with, the stresses of the ministry. From the amount of time spent with his hobby, it appears he is trying to escape the discontent of ministry. He is likely on a collision course with the church leadership. He is going into the battle carrying the flag of well-rounded life, while his opponents say he has hoisted the white flag of surrender to the pressures of life. According to the church insiders, his well-rounded life will probably roll to a new location soon.
Another person in ministry, a staff pastor, announced to his church he no longer would neglect his wife and children, that he would be taking more time off to spend with them. Yet when his wife went to see a counselor about her marriage, she said his hours away from the office were not spent with his family but with his computer and the television set. According to him, the pressure of his work was so great he needed the diversion of the keyboard and the remote control.
Other ways of escape may be much more subtle but just as damaging to ministry. One, of course, is workaholism—the “acceptable” form of escape to many church attenders. Some pastors defend their unholy work habits with holy language: “God is blessing my ministry.” Many pastors neglect important areas of their lives, especially in the early, career-building stage of ministry.
A twisted outcome of workaholism can be martyrdom. A pastor who is now retired was overworked and underpaid during his years in ministry. He rarely took time away from work for his family or for himself. By his poor example, he inadvertently created a great amount of pain for his young successor, who is seeking to be more balanced. The retired minister never confronted the church about its apparent lack of concern for his family, and is now angry that no one intervened on his behalf. He accepted the suffering as his lot in life. He still attends the church and visits parishioners, who comment warmly on his ministry, but who also say, “Poor Brother ‘Do-good.’ He has done so much in his life, and he has had it so hard.” He is, in effect, attracting salve for his wounds. His behavior helped foster a martyr culture in the church. The church has taken on his personality, and although the economy of the region is good, the church sees itself as a poor, struggling church. The church has more than a year’s budget in reserve, but still pays its pastor less and expects more than in comparable churches in the county.
There’s a fine line between being a martyr and being a victim, between suffering for the cause of Christ and casting oneself as somehow holier because of the heavy duties that go with ministry. The pastor with a victim mentality can find this style of living and ministry falsely rewarding. Seeing ourselves as victims, though, is a self-centered way of living.
I’ll mention one more temptation, a form of quitting or retiring on the job, which I will discuss further in a later chapter: Mid-life can also bring the temptation to specialize. This can be another form of escape. The upside of maturity—working out of our strengths and wasting less time trying to buttress our weaknesses— has a downside.
“My gift is preaching,” someone might say. “I don’t have time to do pastoral care anymore.” Or, “My gift is pastoral care. I’m going to preach somebody else’s sermons. My church will understand, because I am a caring pastor.”
Most of us who serve local churches cannot, with a few notable exceptions, become pure specialists. I serve a relatively large church, with a staff that covers many areas, and yet I preach, do pastoral care, handle some counseling, and give some administrative leadership. Granted, I don’t do nearly as much in each area as I did when I served a smaller church, but I still function regularly in areas outside my expertise.
This has been a surprise to me: I thought that as I matured I would be able to serve primarily out of my strengths, but I have come to the conclusion that to serve a local congregation is to be a generalist. I am not suggesting we ignore our natural giftedness or our spiritual gifts, but in most churches a legalistic interpretation of spiritual giftedness does not work. And those who try to focus solely on their giftedness in the second half of life may be trying to escape the full role of pastor.
Such escapism can lead, of course, to more destructive behaviors, such as an addiction to pornography, drugs, or alcohol. I have heard of ministers who justified these sins because they felt they were so holy most of the time that they had a right to a private life!
The answer, of course, is not to escape life but to embrace it.
Getting a life
Instead of checking out at mid-life—either by leaving the profession of ministry or by retiring on the job—we must distinguish better between our calling and our profession. We are called to serve God. Our profession is only a part of that—a significant part, but not the whole. This distinction can help us redefine joy. When we were younger, joy often came wrapped in an adrenaline rush, and was often work-related. Can anything compare with the “high” we experience during the half-hour of preaching, when we realize we are communicating the Word of the Lord effectively? Or what can compare with the sense of joy that comes from helping someone make a good decision, or comforting someone in a time of sorrow or hurt? Yet what happens when the gate to the pulpit is locked because we have been terminated? Or when our ministry of care is not performed as an official member of the clergy?
One key to sorting through our calling and profession more clearly lies in accepting our life as a gift from the God who wants us to experience life abundantly, wherever we are. Relaxing on a beach with my wife, Alta Faye, can bring a sort of divine joy, just as preaching to an Easter crowd can. It is a different kind of joy, but a holy joy nonetheless.
Several years ago Alta Faye and I had a swimming pool put in our backyard. I worried about what people would think if the pastor had a pool, so I explained to the key church leaders what I was doing—even though we owned the home and didn’t need their approval. One of them said, “If you want my approval you’re not getting it.”
Disappointed, I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t do it.”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “If you’re waiting for my approval, you’re not getting it because you don’t need my approval. You work hard. It’s your money. Whether I think it’s a good investment of your money has nothing to do with it.”
The pool was built, and it turned out to be a wonderful gift for our family. We moved two and a half years later, but as an investment in our family, the rewards were incalculable. It was, in essence, the first step toward our family’s “having a life.”
Another key to help rethink the relationship between our call and our job is to learn to enjoy certain experiences for their own sake, rather than as a vehicle for ministry.
I’ve always enjoyed Friday night high school football games, but in years past I would only go to support the players and their families. Sometimes I went to make contacts with prospective members or absentee members. Especially when I was serving a small church in a small community, almost every act could be leveraged into “ministry.” I would seek to turn an ordinary event into something holy to advance the kingdom. But as I reflected on my motives, I realized my Friday night ministry was more often related to my ministerial career than to doing any good for the kingdom. I wanted people to know what a great and caring pastor I was.
One night I was in the stands at an exciting football game. Ordinarily this would have been a lot of fun for me, but I saw three people on the opposite side of the stadium with whom I wanted to make contact. I became so consumed with how I could “conveniently” bump into them after the game that I missed out on the game itself. On the drive home, I thought. This isn’t right. One, it’s hypocritical; and two, I’m miserable.
On another Friday night, the weather was bad and I didn’t relish sitting outside watching a game, but I told my wife I still planned to go.
“Why?” she asked.
“I need to,” I said.
“Why do you need to?”
I was honest with her: I had a work-related agenda in mind—on a night I had declared to the church to be personal time, a night when I did “what I liked.” I had turned my going to a football game into something I needed to do. I have found that ministry can take place if I don’t force it. But if I determine I can do ministry and have fun at the same time, it is usually neither. I began not to take every Friday night so seriously.
A friend—not a pastor—tells a story of being in San Francisco in 1989 during the earthquake. He was at a conference with a group of ministers, and the hotel, although it wasn’t damaged, was shaken. The next morning at breakfast he asked one of the ministers, “What was your first thought when the building shook during the earthquake?”
One answered, “I was trying to think how I could use the experience as an illustration on Sunday morning.” And he wasn’t chuckling.
When my friend told me the story, he said, “How ridiculous.” I laughed and feigned agreement, but inwardly I was thinking. What’s wrong with that? I probably would have had the same thought! While I’ll always be a preacher looking for a good illustration, I don’t want that to define me. I’ve begun to see that my profession as an ordained minister is not the same as my calling to serve God. He will use me as he chooses.
Healing wounds
Another component that can help us not to check out of ministry in mid-life is to monitor more closely the pain that comes as a result of local church work. Over time the bruising and battering endemic to and pandemic in the local church can build. If that happens, we will want only to escape.
I have recently come to know a retired minister, an articulate gentleman who seems at peace with his ministry and at ease with the world. Most of his ministry was in a different part of the country in affluent churches. I assumed he probably had enjoyed a comfortable ministry. But he recently told me of the church that terminated him after less than nine months. It was a large church, and its leadership maneuvered a longtime staff member to replace him. He told me some of the warped rationale they used to justify his termination. When I remarked to him that he did not seem to be bitter about it, he said, “I determined my call and my gifts would be my identity and not the position I held. I was old enough to know what to do when I was wounded.”
It is true that by mid-life we should know how to recover when we are wounded. There is a difference between withdrawing and going deeper into our spiritual reserves. The fact that we have been wounded does not indicate a lack of spiritual depth, but taking on an attitude of martyrdom and victimization does.
I find at age fifty I have to work more diligently at not feeling sorry for myself than I did at thirty-three. When a young minister is wounded, there is always some dear saint ready to anoint his soul with the balm of comfort. But at fifty, pastors don’t receive so much slack from churchfolk. It’s as if they are saying, “At his age, he should have known better.” A question I now ask folks who hold me accountable is, “Am I giving any evidence that I’m feeling sorry for myself?”
Much to my dismay, on occasion they say yes.
Balance over time
I want to mention one more aspect of rethinking our work in the second half of life: balance. At mid-life, more than at any time since his ordination, it may be possible for a pastor to lead a more balanced life. His family is grown, and the learning curve of ministry skills is not so steep.
However, balance may not be the most practical goal to shoot for. There will be seasons when our lives won’t be balanced, and we need to be able to live with that, at least temporarily. Accomplishment takes effort, focus, and a selective neglect of other priorities. A concern for balance alone can lead to a kind of mediocrity. Thinking about a balanced life must take place in a larger context—it cannot always be neatly packaged into weekly or monthly segments.
A pastor in a stressful church situation once told how he kept himself emotionally healthy. During a controversial building campaign, for instance, he focused on the task at hand and postponed other pastoral duties, even some family issues. When it was over, he changed his pastoral style and also spent more time with his family. I was younger when I first met him, and I asked him how he kept his composure and energy.
“If you looked at my ministry through a microscope,” he said, “you would think it was unbalanced, but if you looked at my ministry through a telescope you would have a different picture. There are times during the year when folks think I’m lazy, and other times when I’m accused of being a workaholic.” In a sense he was advocating a short-term plan of imbalance but a long-term plan of balance.
In 1996 our church went through a major fund-raising campaign for our building program. It was the most intense five-month period of my ministry. Not only was raising money difficult, some neighbors of the church began a high-profile attack on the zoning for our building. I neglected some pastoral duties and postponed some family tasks to handle the crisis. I knew the capital funds campaign would not last forever, but if it was not done right, I, and the church, would be feeling the effects for a long time. The campaign ended on June 6, and our family took off for the beach on June 7. For the following three weeks after vacation, I deliberately kept a lighter schedule; my life balanced out over time. In the fall of that year I picked up the pace of pastoral care. The key to balance is to look at the big picture.
I’m slowly learning that I’m a person before I’m a pastor. The older I get, the more I realize how sweet God’s gift of life is. Not long ago a friend from church died of a sudden heart attack. He was forty-seven. His children and mine are the same age. It was a sobering moment: If I have a heart attack, my death will be no more or less significant to God’s kingdom than his was. At one time I would have looked at his death and thought only of the tragedy, but as I thought about his life, I saw grace and joy. Yes, he died too young, and his children still needed him. But he also lived and experienced joy.
With God’s grace, I hope I can do the same.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
