After years working as a teacher, my wife, Lisa, went back to graduate school to become a therapist. Our church had long advocated for mental health assistance and maintained a referral list for congregants who needed professional counseling. We had even developed a generous scholarship to offset counseling fees. So when Lisa set up her new practice, I was excited to recommend several of our congregants to her care.
Lisa quickly objected to being placed on our referral list. “I’ll likely not see most people from our church. I won’t wear more than one hat with anyone. It is unethical.”
I was surprised, but she explained, “I can’t be a pastor’s wife and a counselor, a fellow worshiper and a therapist.”
Counseling students study the ethics of dual relationships. They are taught to wear only one relational hat with a client and to practice extreme caution in interactions outside their sessions—even on social media. On the rare occasion when a therapist must wear two hats with a client, the counselor is trained to pay careful attention to how the other interactions influence the therapeutic relationship.
Lisa’s caution about counseling our church members clarified something I’d been wrestling with for years. Pastors wear many relational hats with our congregants. It’s an inevitable vocational reality. Most other vocations require only a single relationship: You visit your doctor for medical help, your mechanic to repair your car, your therapist for emotional help. But because church ministry is multilayered, pastors must fill multiple roles to be effective. This relational complexity is a unique challenge in ministry.
A wearying weight
Sometimes these overlapping roles and relationships are annoying but relatively innocuous, like when I show up to a congregant’s party. The laughter stops and someone says, “Well, I was going to tell that joke, but the pastor is here.” In moments like this, pastors realize how hard it is for some congregants to see them as fellow humans. Instead, they see hats on our heads that read, “God’s probation officer.”
Or imagine a pastor on Christmas Day. She hosts Christmas dinner with some friends, thinking her pastor hat is hung up in the closet. Then her friend says, “Hey, while I’ve got you—we didn’t sing enough carols during the Christmas Eve service. And it isn’t just me; several others are saying it too. I just thought you’d want to know.”
Hold that thought while I retrieve my pastor hat—the one I almost never take off, she thinks. The one that’s soiled from a heavy season of pastoral care culminating in a 13-hour Christmas Eve marathon. Also, remind me to set fire to the friends-with-church-members hat once and for all.
This rapid switching of hats can be more than innocuous—it can drain us. Pastors are expected to hold an unusually broad skill set, and some of our required competencies actively contradict each other. It’s common for a pastor to run a board meeting, work on a budget, chat with a staff member about goals and development, host a funeral, and sit with someone who walked into the church asking for money—all in the same day.
I feel this exhaustion most keenly when I move from preaching a sermon to immediately listening to congregants pour out their pain to me after the service. My body is still hopped up from the adrenaline and vulnerability of preaching, and my thoughts are rapidly spinning through what I said and how I could have said it better. But before I have time to focus, someone is asking for prayer about his recent cancer diagnosis or is at her wit’s end with an adult child. My preacher hat is quickly displaced by my spiritual-guide hat.
And it’s not only the switching between hats that makes things difficult. In a few pastoral relationships, we have to wear multiple hats layered on top of one another. The chair of our elders is a wonderful human being, and it’s a pleasure to serve with her. But our relationship is complicated because she is my boss and I am her pastor. I am proud to call her and her husband my friends, but these tangled dynamics complicate things for all of us.
In William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2, the title character says, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” I have no firsthand experience with crowns, but are they as heavy and unwieldy as a stack of 20 hats?
What are we to do with all these overlapping and conflicting relationships? As pastors, we don’t have the option of avoiding dual relationships the way therapists do. Can we mitigate the weight and weariness that come with this multi-hat vocation?
Ministry friendships: A hat on a hat
Most ministry hats can be sorted into two general piles: those we wear based on competency and those we wear based on expectation. The competency pile might include hats like Bible expert, counselor, preacher, visionary, staff manager, recruiter, spiritual director, and fundraiser. The sheer breadth of skills required can grind us down.
Yet in my experience, the competency hats are not what tax me the most. The hats that generate the most anxiety and conflict are those I wear due to expectations I place on myself or others place on me. I expect myself to be a gold-star preacher, a 24-hour care service, and an expert at things I’ve never led before, like a capital campaign. Others might see me as a political partisan, a projection of their dysfunction, or the complaint department.
But there’s one role all pastors must contend with that defies categorization: friend.
Can pastors have true, life-giving friendships inside their congregations? Every ounce of me wants to answer, “Yes, of course!” But instead I must say, “It depends. Proceed with caution.”
How many congregants have their job performance regularly critiqued by their friends? People don’t stand around after a service questioning Peter’s civil-engineering qualifications or debating Danielle’s skills as an insurance agent. But they’re all quite comfortable reviewing the pastor’s latest sermon or leadership decision.
Then, of course, there are people who need to be close to the pastor in an unhealthy way. One time a newer member told me, “I only stay at a church if the pastor and I are close friends.” Yikes. I was far enough along in ministry to know that the best response was to let him down as quickly as I could: “If your single lens for church involvement is friendship with me, then I doubt you’ll get very involved. I hope you can see your way to finding a church where you can simply grow and serve.” He stuck around for a few months and then moved on to the next church, looking for his needed influential friend.
Further, pastors may forget that no matter which hat they put on at a given moment—including the friend hat—most people still see the pastor hat poking out from underneath. Years ago, I was running a capital campaign and asked a married couple I considered good friends to volunteer on the planning team. After a few days of silence, the husband finally replied with his regret that they could not help. But he accidentally also forwarded the correspondence between him and his wife discussing my request. One of the emails from his wife said, “I told him no last time. It is your turn.”
That private correspondence helped me see that my church friends face a challenge in managing my multiple relationship roles too. When I think of church friends critiquing my sermons, I can move into self-pity. But it helps to consider my friends’ perspective: After all, I am the only one in the friend group who gets up on a stage to monologue at them every week!
Yes, pastors can enjoy friendships inside the church. But wise pastors remember that even their closest church friends are navigating a dual relationship with them. And for most congregants, it might be best to stick with friendly over friend.
The simplest remedy to the complexity of ministry friendships is to invest in single-hat relationships outside your church. Pastor and author Glenn Packiam talks about a pastor’s need for a collection of single-hat relationships, all playing different roles in a pastor’s life. He likens this to the titular group from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo had a true friend in Sam, a wise sage in Gandalf, a healer in Elrond, and so on. I’m sure you’ve seen the alarming statistics about ministry loneliness and burnout. Unfortunately, pastors still often neglect proper investment in these needed single-role relationships.
In my coaching, I prompt pastors to do a quick inventory of their single-hat relationships. How many do they have, what role does each relationship play, and how much time do they invest in each one? My own pastoral life has been powerfully relieved by my intentional investment in these one-role relationships outside my church. They’ve given me a fresh ability to cultivate healthier relationships inside my church.
Faulty assumptions and unreasonable expectations
I spend much of my time training pastors to notice, name, and diffuse chronic anxiety. It differs from other forms of anxiety like trauma or grief because it grows from assumptions, expectations, and false beliefs. We hold faulty assumptions about ourselves and unreasonable expectations about our hoped-for levels of vocational competency—both of which lead to untenable beliefs that generate chronic anxiety. Unfortunately, assumptions and expectations are not private affairs. We willingly place them on each other. Chronic anxiety is the only form of anxiety that is contagious.
For example, a young pastor recently told me that after one of his sermons, a new family came up to meet him. They’d just moved to town and were anxious to find a church like their previous one. “Our last pastor was the finest preacher we’ve ever heard,” they said. “No one opens up Scripture the way he did.”
Their expectation, although innocent, infected this pastor’s assumptions about himself as a young church planter. If he is not careful, this chronic anxiety infection will form a false belief that he has to preach a certain way to keep people happy. He will pile hats on his head that God is not calling him to add.
Expectation itself is not bad; we should be held to a high standard, and people should expect certain things from us. But pastors’ ongoing vocational pressure is magnified when people place unreasonable and unattainable expectations on them. Some individuals think they know how to lead a church just because they attend one. Others hold a subconscious belief that God is on their side no matter what opinion they are expressing. Their expectations can infect our own and lead to tremendous stress.
Few things cause as much anxiety as the things we demand from ourselves. Some pastors believe they must always get everything perfectly right every time. Others feel they must always be there for those who are hurting, no matter the detriment to their own well-being. Some are driven by people pleasing—no critic can express a negative opinion without these pastors trying to win the naysayer over. And still others expect every sermon they preach to be the best they’ve ever given. None of these self-expectation hats belong in your closet; they just don’t fit.
As pastors, we’d do well to practice the difficult art of differentiation of self—noticing when we are living under untenable internal and external expectations and clearly defining a human-sized capacity and scope for ourselves. We must learn to sift through our own false expectations and beliefs. We must toss out the hats that don’t belong on our heads and resize those that sit too low on our brows.
Do you expect more of yourself than God does? I have found a simple question to be useful in bringing relief here: What if I were as _____ toward myself as God is?
For example, What if I were as kind toward myself as God is? This question helps me see that the “gospel” of my inner expectation is always harsher than the Good News of Jesus.
Learning to live as human-sized pastors does not come naturally to us. We often use “I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Phil. 4:13) as a license for self-abuse and exhaustion. But pastoring is complex enough without us adding more hats to the stack.
The dynamic blessings of pastoral ministry
We pastors will never get down to single-role relationships with our congregants—nor should we try. We can mitigate the weight of multiple hats by acknowledging them, paying attention to the rapid switching, cultivating single-hat relationships outside our church, and identifying and rejecting unreasonable expectations.
We may envy counselors with their streamlined vocations and one-role relationships, but pastoral ministry is an astonishing calling. No other vocation so fully opens us to the wonder and mystery of God and to the sacred task of soul care. We get paid to study Scripture, to enjoy God in front of people, to attend to the souls of our congregants over years, to tangibly envision God’s kingdom realized locally, and to do something about the most broken places of society.
So many people in my congregation have shared their pain, regret, doubt, and sin with me; but they also share their healing, joy, hope, and spiritual hunger. Wearing multiple hats can be wearisome, but I know of no other vocation that experiences the abundant life like a pastor. It is a complex, wonderful, exhausting, exhilarating, holy vocation.
Steve Cuss serves on the pastoral team at Discovery Christian Church in Colorado. His books include Managing Leadership Anxiety and, forthcoming, Minding the Gap.
This article is a part of our fall CT Pastors issue. You can find the full issue here.
