Desperate, Pastor Gary Stiles slouched on the sofa in my office.
“Dr. Blackmon, our ship is sinking, and if we don’t get help fast, we’re going under!”
Gary’s wife, Sue, sat nearby, crying softly. As their story tumbled out, I felt the pressure of their sleepless nights and 80-hour work weeks.
“Our ministry no longer has any joy or meaning,” Gary sputtered.
In twenty years of ministry, they had toiled faithfully in three congregations. Their ministry was acclaimed widely as a success.
In the last year, however, their church had begun to criticize them. Feelings of inadequacy and fatigue began to fester. They buried their pain, keeping their confusion and struggles secret. With nowhere to turn, they desperately needed a confidant.
“I guess my fire has gone out,” explained Gary. “Now I’m either angry at every little thing or so tired I can’t stand the thought of helping one more person.
“At first I thought if I just worked harder I could turn things around. But that isn’t working. Now our marriage is showing the strain.”
“What can you do to help us?” Gary and Sue pleaded, almost simultaneously.
Rethinking basic assumptions
In ten years of counseling pastors and their families, I’ve discovered that the problems facing a couple like Gary and Sue can be traced to their assumptions about ministry.
In our initial conversation, they revealed their “it’s better to wear out than rust out” attitude, which suggests that if things aren’t going well in the ministry, then the pastor must not be working hard enough.
Sue reinforced this belief by quoting Bible passages that encouraged them to “take up their cross,” leaving the family for the sake of Christ.
To balance this exhausting model they had endorsed over the years, I, too, quoted Scripture passages. We looked at Christ’s pattern, which balanced time with his disciples and the crowds with the time he carved out for close relationships and solitude.
I offered them a different model of ministry, one I call sensible servanthood, which takes into account the calling pastors feel to serve the Lord with a theology and practice of self-care.
Being more than a pastor
Gary agreed that a clearer boundary between himself as a person and himself as a pastor was needed. He admitted his identity as “pastor” comprised the sum total of who he was.
“Gary is boring when he’s not in his pastoral role,” Sue chimed in during one session.
Her comment opened the door for a lengthy discussion about how all families struggle with the need to balance independence and intimacy, distance and closeness.
Reflecting on his Midwest upbringing, Gary discovered that the rules of his own family emphasized loyalty and closeness to a fault. Actions and opinions independent of the family were discouraged.
Gary’s father was also a pastor. As a child, Gary remembered thinking that his “family” was several hundred strong, that he had more sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles than anyone he knew. He also recalled longing for more time alone with just his own family, but he was gently chided when his parents felt he didn’t understand that the Lord’s work came first.
Gary discovered this pattern in his own ministry.
In his first pastorate, Gary landed in a small church in the Southwest accustomed to having the pastor do everything. During the board meetings his first year, he would bring up the need for the sanctuary to be repainted, both inside and out. Agreeing enthusiastically, the board members would then move on to the next item on the agenda.
You may have already guessed what happened. After a year, Gary got out his rollers and brushes and painted the entire church himself.
That memory prompted Gary to discover that he, like his father, had a tendency to overfunction. Sue observed that both of them had never met a congregational need they didn’t feel obligated personally to fulfill. Their successes reinforced their tendencies.
Success, though, also reinforced the underfunctioning of their congregations. When the church climate wasn’t peaceful or things weren’t working perfectly, Gary personally assumed the problem, thinking he wasn’t trying hard enough. The people around him, of course, were more than willing to support his work habits. And when his credibility began to deteriorate (an inevitability of pastoral overfunctioning), criticism mounted, both from inside himself and from the church. His bent to solve personally every problem in the church had created expectations he no longer could meet.
“For years I have felt my efforts weren’t appreciated,” he mused, “but now it looks like the problem started with me. I trained these people to expect much from me, and the moment I couldn’t deliver, they felt I was letting them down.”
Knowing that overfunctioning leaders almost universally feel underappreciated aided Gary’s recovery. He had secretly taken these feelings of not being appreciated to the Lord for many years, believing his motives for ministry lacked integrity. He had never confessed them to anyone, even Sue. Instead, he converted his feelings into irritability and angry outbursts that left his family bewildered.
“Now that I know all of this, how can I change?” he asked.
Redefining yourself
“By strengthening your level of self-definition,” I replied. “Pastors with high levels of self-definition are able to stand their ground, calmly sharing their ministry values and goals even in the heat of emotional demands by the congregation.
“A pastor with poor self-definition, however, is emotionally overwhelmed with other people’s expectations and demands. This pastor constantly defines himself based on unrealistic expectations.”
Gary chose first to work on the issue with his own family. If he could exercise more self-definition with his parents, then he might feel empowered to do this with his congregation.
During his next visit with his parents, he deliberately chose to speak out on a ministry issue with which he knew they would disagree. His pattern in the past, he told me, was either to avoid such issues or, occasionally, to get angry, cutting off his parents if they disagreed.
This time, however, he spoke calmly and firmly, staying connected emotionally to his parents as they worked to change his mind. In one of our sessions, we role-played this encounter, preparing Gary for their resistance and his calm response. The actual encounter, however, went off without a hitch.
“Dad, my ministry is taking a new direction, and I wanted you to know about it,” Gary began timidly. “To reach the community, we’ve brought in guitars and an electronic keyboard every Sunday morning.”
“Well, Gary, I would never give up playing hymns in any worship service I conducted!” his father retorted.
But Gary continued-without storming out of the room and with a steady calm in his voice-to explain his rationale for modernizing the worship service. His father, to Gary’s surprise, endured his lengthy explanation, listening patiently to his new ideas. Gary returned from the visit shocked that his parents were so “accepting,” feeling closer to them than ever before.
Gary was fortunate. Often, when the unspoken rules are broken, my clients encounter stiff resistance. The resistance is designed, of course, to realign the adult-child’s thinking with the old rules of the family.
Changing the rules in Gary’s own family set the stage for changing the boundaries in his church family. Through prayer, relaxation exercises, and practice, Gary learned anxiety control. He became a “nonanxious presence,” which allowed him to maintain objectively his own role under emotional pressure while staying engaged with the issue at hand.
Broadening your identity
The final phase of Gary’s therapy centered on Sue’s comment that Gary was boring outside his role as pastor. Gary’s whole identity was wrapped up in his work; his whole world was ministry.
For Gary, this meant reinvesting himself in family activities away from the church. He had talked about fishing with his sons but had never taken the time. Now was the time.
A year later, talking to me over the phone, Sue took back her description of Gary as a bore. She now saw him as multi-dimensional-“pastor” was only one aspect of his identity. Gary had even taken up cooking! One date-night a week, he would practice a new gourmet dish on Sue, and then they would spend the evening alone. She loved it!
Redrawing the lines
A few simple steps can help overfunctioning pastors regain control over their lives and redefine their boundaries:
Muster emotional support. Most of us can’t see the impact of our leadership style without objective counsel from a friend or colleague. And most likely, we’ll have to take the initiative to find this support.
One pastor I know, after an episode of burnout, negotiated with his board members a one-hour telephone call each week to a colleague from a previous pastorate. Both pastors used this weekly conversation to confess their struggles and solicit feedback.
Rebuild personal identity. Like Gary, many pastors are so tightly focused on their church that the rest of their personality is underdeveloped. Rediscovering hobby interests, developing new activities both as an individual and a family, and pursuing friendships outside the congregation are great places to recover a balanced identity, which also infuses new life into your ministry.
Some time ago, a woman disagreed sharply with my belief that people in Christian ministry should lead balanced lives. Real servants, she said, sell-out, giving all their time and energy to ministry.
Three years later, she called me to say that she was out of the ministry. She needed time to restore her spiritual and physical vitality. Only three years of her hectic pace was needed to burn out. Now she hoped for a second chance, with a new resolve to serve her Lord more wisely.
Clarify expectations. Educate your congregation about the hazards of ministry. The people in the pew are mostly naive about the unique pressures on the pastor’s family.
One pastor’s wife recently gave a Saturday morning workshop on the role of pastors and their families. To her surprise, almost the entire church showed up!
During the two-hour session, she asked the audience to generate solutions for handling the pressures on the pastor’s family. The congregation responded enthusiastically, participating in finding helpful solutions for family stress. In thirty-five years of ministry with her husband, she has never felt more supported by that congregation than she feels presently.
Reflect on the boundaries in your family of origin. Was there a balance between independence and closeness, or was one emphasized over the other? Recognizing destructive patterns is often the first step toward lasting change.
One pastor discovered that in his family the women did most of the talking and made all the decisions. That pattern of men deferring to women, he discovered, had impacted his ministry. He frequently looked to women to affirm his decision making, and he avoided displeasing women in his church. In our counseling, then, we worked on his assertiveness with females-both in his family and his church. A sensible servant is not a contradiction in terms. Like the apostle Paul, our aim is to meet our Lord, knowing that over a lifetime we have given our best.
-Richard Blackmon
Pacific Psychological Resources
Westlake Village, California
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
