Tag Archive - stress

Depression, Burnout & Ministry: Deciding to Get Honest About Our Journeys…

January 22, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 37 Comments

42-17222040I remember where I was at the exact moment I read the words below by Rob Bell in his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. I was sitting on our couch in Pasadena, CA and as I read each word the resonance grew deeper and deeper within me until I finally felt like I was hit by a ton of breaks…but at least understood.  At least there was some pastor out there I thought, this one in Michigan, who put words to my feelings and thoughts in ways that I was not able to at the time. Bell says,

Once again I am going to give you some numbers, and I hesitate to do so, but it is part of the story and it helps to explain the rest. Two years into it, there were around 10,000 people coming to the three gatherings on Sundays.

In the middle of all this growth and chaos was me, superpastor. I was doing weddings and funerals and giving spiritual direction and going to meetings and teaching and dealing with crises and visiting people in prison and at the hospital–the pace and the workload were unreal.

I can’t begin to describe what it was like because it was happening so fast. One minute you have these ideas about how it could be and the next minute you are leading this exploding church/event/monster. All of a sudden there are all of these people who know who you are and want something from you and think you’re a big deal, and you are the same person you’ve always been. Everything has changed and yet it hasn’t. It’s hard to explain, but I found myself asking, “Where is the training manual?”

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Unrealistic Expectations?

May 12, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

My co-worker RO Smith and I have been talking a lot recently about expectations in the Church.

RO has been concerned with what are some unrealistic expectations placed upon pastors which he wrote about in the post, We Are All Pastors.

After reading the post and talking with him more about the topic I have become concerned with what I think are sometimes unrealistic expectations of those employed in the Church (i.e. pastors, directors, etc.), upon the rest of the congregation.

As a pastor, director, church employee or whatever, it is basically our job to do things in service of Church (really in service of Jesus Christ, but we know how that can become clouded). Without diving into debates over what that “service” means, and what a vocational position in the Church entails, or whether or not we should even be called “professionals” (John Piper deals with this topic extensively in Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry).

The reality is this: In ministry we have very flexible schedules, and can cater our schedule however we want to make meetings, meet with people, plan events, make time for events, etc, etc. But I’m starting to wonder about whether or not we take the average church attender into consideration when we plan things or expect them to serve with the same passion, effort and time that we do on an event.

Example: My full-time job is as college director at Bel Air Presbyterian Church. My vocation revolves around thinking about that ministry. But a college student in the ministry for example (and this may be a bad example since college students tend to have the most leisure time of any when you compare them amongst other demographics) has school, work, homework, family, friends, etc. Their schedule does not revolve around the college ministry, and yet sometimes I have expectations of them that it should. We as pastors and directors don’t fully think about the family with two income parents, driving across town in traffic running errands, shuttling kids, and all the demands that revolve around that family. And yet we have expectations of how much time they should volunteer, and how many events they should be at.

So the expectations head in both directions–clergy to congregation, and congregation to clergy–and it seems to create a vicious cycle of stress, burnout and an overprogrammed church and ministries.

So please read RO’s post Stress and the Unrealistic Expectations of the Church at our collaborative youth ministry site (though I have not collaborated to the site very much lately).

After reading RO’s post, I’m looking even more forward to Anne Jackson’s upcoming book, Mad Church Disease: The Church-Wide Burnout Epidemic.