The advice Henry Blackaby offered Jay Wolf years ago is something the Montgomery pastor said he still clings to during times of frustration.
Wolf, pastor of First Baptist Church, Montgomery, said the Christian author once pointed out that Christians don’t live their lives against a backdrop of the present or even the following year, but eternity.
“If you can keep that in perspective, that you are doing the work for Christ that has eternal ramifications and will yield eternal fruit, it will just keep your heart filled with joy,” Wolf said.
That outlook is one Wolf and other pastors said is essential in keeping their ministries fresh and avoiding pastoral burnout.
Wolf said pastors have high stress jobs because they have to deal with so many people.
“When you’re dealing with so many people all the time, it’s easy to get fed up on people and people can be very petty — they can let you down, they can stab you in the back,” Wolf said.
“It’s frustrating when people leave the church over nothing items and that can really sting,” he added. “But a far better mode of operation is to stay focused on Christ and realize, ‘what I do, I don’t do for a paycheck, I don’t do for the people — essentially, I do it for the Lord.’”
Dale Huff, director of LeaderCare and church administration with the State Board of Missions (SBOM), said the work pastors do makes them prime candidates for career burnout.
“It’s a problem in Alabama churches, it’s a problem in Southern Baptist churches — it’s a problem with ministers and in churches, period,” Huff said. “It’s a problem with the helping profession.
“Caregivers, persons who are in people intensive professions, have a greater tendency to burnout,” Huff added. “Within a congregation, the needs are so great that no pastor can be sufficient in responding to all those needs and he’s constantly overwhelmed with the rush of needs and there’s no end to it.”
Addressing resources available to ministers who have become burned out in their ministries, Huff said the SBOM conducts stress management conferences in Alabama’s associations. “That is the most direct thing we do,” Huff said.
In addition, he said counseling is available for ministers that is subsidized by the SBOM for “managing what’s happening in one’s life.”
“Those are two things that are most directly done through this office,” Huff said.
He said the SBOM also conducts several conferences each year at Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center in Talladega such as marriage enrichment, personal enrichment and leadership training. “It offers a getaway,” he said.
Huff said plans are underway to begin retreats at Shocco Springs for ministers and their spouses that offer them a chance simply to relax and recharge their batteries.
“It’s being designed as just a personal retreat away,” Huff said. “We’ll be able to take maybe 30 couples at one time and give them a weekend away at essentially no cost.”
Huff said he hopes to begin the retreats sometime next year.
Jerry Gunnells, who is semiretired after most recently serving as pastor of Fairhope Baptist Church in Fairhope, said ministers have to remain realistic.
“The very role of leadership means that not everybody’s going to like everything you do,” said Gunnells, a pastor in Alabama churches for more than 40 years. “If you think you’re going to please everybody, you’ll never be successful as a long-term preacher.”
Gunnells said the biggest help he found was fellow pastors who had experienced similar situations.
“You can’t always find that where you are and most likely you don’t do that in the town where you are,” Gunnells said.
Gunnells pointed to his participation with a group of ministers in churches running more than a thousand in Sunday School, which met annually.
“The wonderful thing about it was that you could always call them or get together with them,” he said. “There was a mutual feeling among the group and [camaraderie] that strengthened you in what you were doing.”
Gunnells said it is also important for pastors to have individuals with whom they can share. He praised his wife as someone he can talk to, along with friends from previous churches where he had served.
“My strong friends in churches I had already served were more often used by me as sounding blocks or counselors,” Gunnells said. “There is a danger in revealing to someone within your church how you feel about some things.”
Wolf also stressed the importance of ministers having confidants to whom they can turn. He cites “low maintenance friends” he can share with, along with an accountability group as being invaluable in helping him deal with frustration.
“They’re accountability partners and they keep me on target,” Wolf said. “I think there are too many pastors who are allergic to accountability.”
Another way Gunnells said pastors can avoid burnout is through staying fresh with the messages they deliver. He said this is challenging when a pastor has enjoyed a long tenure at the same church.
“Your study habits have to be so much stronger, because you can’t preach these old sermons,” Gunnells said. “You can’t go back to them and redo them — you have to keep preaching (new material).”
A sense of perspective is also important, according to a former pastor who now teaches at Judson College.
“I think the difference in ministry is — that for many ministers — the church is not only their job, it’s their hobby and their life,” Mike Brooks said.
“They’re your support group, they’re your friends,” said Brooks, who is now an instructor in the department of speech and dramatic arts at Judson and a member of Siloam Baptist Church in Marion. Wolf said it is important for ministers to remain focused on Christ.
“If we get our focus on other people, on our problems, on ourselves — that’s a real sure-fire formula for discouragement,” Wolf said. “Satan is the master at taking our discouragement and crafting it into a tool that we use to dismantle ourselves.” Wolf said he also has to remember why be became a preacher. “I cannot begin to imagine any greater joy,” he noted. “I would not swap places with anybody that I know. I get paid to do what I would pay to do. That’s kind of my perspective on it.”
Using the analogy of a picnic, Wolf said he tells his staff there will be ants at every picnic. Comparing people who are demanding or unreasonable to ants, the pastor said he tells his staff that you don’t allow ants to ruin a good time at a picnic and that it should be the same with ministry.
“I think the hardest part about being a pastor is maintaining a balance,” Brooks said. “You have to take care of yourself physically, you need to spend time with your family and the demands of the pastorate are so great.”
Citing a philosophy of Ronald Reagan to never work past 6 p.m. most days, Brooks encourages pastors to commit to spending time with their families.
He noted that the former president was famous for telling his staff, “Men, we’ve done all we can do today, let’s go home and spend time with our families.”
“The problem with ministers is that they get there early, stay late and work weekends,” Brooks said.
“Any profession that is people intensive — and that’s what the ministry is — has a higher rate of burnout,” Huff said.
“There’s going to be an even greater problem with burnout as the world gets more fast-paced and hectic and as the expectations upon ministers keep growing and enlarging,” he added.
For information on dealing with pastoral burnout, contact Huff at the SBOM at 1-800-264-1225.
Study finds pastoral burnout a common problem
Alan Klaas of Mission Growth Ministries believes about 100,000 parish pastors and their families are currently experiencing career burnout.
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod hired Klaas and his wife, Cheryl, to investigate the root causes of the clergy shortage it and many other mainline denominations currently face.
The Klaases expected to study institutional problems. Instead they unearthed what they called shocking behavioral problems as one of the most important causes leading to burnout.
“It was intended to be a traditional recruitment and retention study,” Klaas said. He said he thought he’d be recommending changes on issues such as seminary communication with potential students.
“We wondered if students got good services, if seminaries were recruiting the right people,” he explained.
In the end the Klaases concluded the problems are 20 percent institutional and 80 percent behavioral. “In other words, the fundamental finding is that people beating on one another is the main issue,” Klaas said.
The Klaases wrote a book about their findings — “Quiet Conversations,” a story of a pastor and his wife struggling through ministry burnout.
While the book is fiction, it is a collection of incidents that actually happened — incidents the Klaases feel help illuminate why so many pastors burn out, leave the clergy and contribute to the growing clergy shortage. Klaas estimates 10 percent to 25 percent of congregations are currently without pastors. The book tells of pastors’ wives getting chastised by members of the congregation for working outside the home. It includes stories of pastors and their families being alienated from their congregations because the pastors’ wives asked to redecorate the parsonages.
Members of congregations often decorate parsonages in ways they’d decorate their own homes, so they take offense.
Klaas said hurt feelings lead to gossip, criticism, bad behavior from both congregations and pastors, and ultimately to burnout.
“We heard about one situation where a pastor and his congregation were at such odds that he took a vacation and when he came home he discovered bullet holes in his house. So he sent his child more than 1,000 miles away to stay with relatives. But church members tracked the child down and harassed her over the phone,” Klaas said.
All of these behavior problems contribute to clergy burnout.
“It affects pastor burnout because pastors get whipsawed trying to satisfy everyone while satisfying no one,” Klaas said.
The problem also affects clergy families, which is not only bad for the individuals but also adds to the clergy shortage problem.
Klaas estimates pastors’ children made up about 40 percent of seminarians in the 1950s and ‘60s. It’s a much different picture now at the two Missouri Synod seminaries: Last year pastors’ children were 5 percent of seminarians at one school and 17 percent at the other.
Klaas knows the problem crosses denominational lines. At a recent conference with officials from 25 denominations, 24 of the 25 representatives agreed the description of the problem applied to their denominations as well.
“The denominations are very much aware of it, but it’s being approached differently in each one,” said Adair Lummis, faculty associate for research at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary.
The Hartford Institute surveyed more than 4,300 clergy in 1994 and found 32 percent of women and 28 percent of men had thought seriously about leaving church ministry in the last year.
The problem of clergy burnout “is definitely recognized, but the question is how do you treat it?” said Lummis. “Some individual judicatories from different denominations have nothing for clergy,” said Lummis. “Others try to arrange some outside consulting services so clergy can call anonymously.”
Lummis said potential solutions run the gamut. The Episcopal Church is working on a new program called the CREDO Institute that will use continuing education and counseling in an attempt to catch clergy before they burn out. The Assemblies of God operate a toll-free number clergy can anonymously call for help.
The Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions offers services and resources also. Dealing with issues of bad congregation behavior, bad pastor behavior or both is a sticky political issue no one likes to address.
“This is a highly political problem,” Klaas said. “How do you acknowledge this kind of bad stuff?”
Not only is it a politically charged problem, it’s an expensive problem. “Clergy wellness is an integral part of being a minister. There needs to be some funding included in the benefits package for clergy and their families to engage in their own self care,” said Kerry Carl Hagan, director of the Clergy Wellness Center in Houston. The center has been open for about a year and a half.
“Most denominations are in denial,” said Hagan. “I think it’s important to distinguish between a life of service and a life of deprivation,” said Hagan. “A life of service is enriching; you get energy from it. A life of deprivation is drudgery and is not fulfilling and I don’t think God intends us to live lives of deprivation. God intends us to live lives full of abundance and it comes through service,” Hagan said.
The center can work with about 80 ministers or relatives of ministers a year. Those seeking help represent many denominations, including Jewish rabbis. But Hagan admits helping 80 a year is not nearly enough.
“We need a center like this in every city and they need to be ecumenical,” Hagan said. “There’s something about being with somebody who is not from your denomination that lends an increased sense of safety and confidentiality.”
Klaas and Hagan both believe a large part of the solution involves changing congregational expectations and behavior. That means educating congregations about the role and responsibilities the cleric takes.
“They need to clearly define the difference between God and their ministers. Their ministers are to be channels of energy as opposed to sources of it,” Hagan said. (RNS)
Conference addresses struggles of ministers who have been wounded
A former north Alabama pastor terminated from his church after unfounded allegations were made against him said he knows the heartaches that can go along with serving as a minister.
“A lot of hurt was there,” said Pastor Arascamus Smith, who asked that his real name not be used.
But while the pain Smith felt was difficult, he soon learned it was not unique to him. A June conference is one the Richmond, Va.-based Ministering to Ministers (MTM) Foundation hopes will equip Alabama pastors to deal with the trials sometimes accompanying ministry.
Scheduled June 18–22 at Judson College, “Healthy Transitions: A Wellness Retreat for Ministers and Spouses,” is described as an event for ministers who have faced conflict.
Charles Chandler, executive director of MTM, said the conference is a retreat where ministers can get away and work toward restoring their ministries by sharing with others. “We believe that some of the best ministry hurting or wounded ministers can receive will be from their peers,” Chandler said, “those who are going through it, those who’ve been through it and found some help, they can share together.
Chandler said enrollment at the retreats is limited to no more than 16 participants “and that’s pushing the upper limits,” so ministers can share in a small setting.
A pastor since 1972, Smith said he had been at the north Alabama church seven months, when he was “falsely accused of saying something to a couple of the ladies” in his church.
Discussing the help he received at a previous MTM conference held in Alabama, Smith said the information was invaluable in getting his ministry back on track.
“It’s a week designed to re-instill hope in the lives of ministers who have been crushed,” said Mike Brooks, co-host of the conference.
Brooks said the wellness retreat is for those who have experienced stress, primarily those who have gone through forced terminations.
A former pastor, Brooks now serves as a professor in the department of speech and dramatic arts at Judson College and is a member of Siloam Baptist Church in Marion.
Four sessions of the conference will address “Telling Your Story.” Included among the other sessions are “Resolving Disputes,” “Preparing Parents to Help Children Cope with Conflict,” “Creating a Market for Your Skills,” “Coping With Your Anger,” “Developing a Support Group” and “Facing Your World Again.” Dealing with other people and anger are among the issues that will be addressed, but it will also tackle topics such as legal problems, according to Brooks.
“We bring in experts who provide information and answer questions in areas that can be of help to them as they look toward the future, hoping to learn from whatever experience they’ve had and to know how to best deal with similar situations,” Chandler added.
Speaking in addition to Chandler and Brooks are:
- Bart Grooms, a counselor with Samaritan Counseling Center in Birmingham;
- Arch Wallace, an attorney from Richmond, Va.;
- Ross Campbell, a Christian psychiatrist and author from Chattanooga;
- Jane Roy, director of human performance at Judson;
- John Huelskoetter, chair of the religion department at Judson.
Brooks said terminations are epidemic among pastors because too many expectations are often placed on them.
“We have this business idea of success,” he said. “The graph always has to go up and if churches are not growing, if finances are tight — the pastor’s like a football coach. If he has a winning season everything’s fine and the church can overlook some things.”
But he said those who are terminated or facing burnout should not look at the situation as a failure of their ministry. “This conference is unique … to instill hope, to show that there are ways out and there are other opportunities to do ministry,” Brooks said.
For registration costs or more information, contact MTM at 1-800-414-8123 or Brooks at 334-683-5160.
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