There is a sense in which a pastor can survive church ministry only if he learns how to manage depression.
In 1984, Dr. Archibald Hart published his classic book Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Other Helping Professions. (There are 26 used copies on Amazon as of this writing.) I devoured the book … memorizing many of its lines … because at the time, I was depressed at least some of the time every week.
In 2001, I took Dr. Hart’s class “The Pastor’s Personal Life” for my Doctor of Ministry program at Fuller Seminary. It was the best class I’ve ever taken, and he was the best teacher I’ve ever had.
Dr. Hart believes that whenever a person … or a pastor … is depressed, that person won’t improve until they discover their core loss.
They need to answer the question, “Why am I really depressed?”
When a pastor is forced out of office, he nearly always undergoes depression, but because his thinking is cloudy, he may not understand for many months why he’s depressed … thus delaying his healing.
Let me share with you eight possible reasons why a forced-out pastor almost always undergoes depression:
First, pastors instinctively feel that the way they were treated was wrong.
The sinful, rebellious, irrational behavior that many of us in ministry have experienced at the hands of church leaders is not in Scripture … doesn’t line up with what we’ve preached … goes against how we live … and is completely foreign to our thinking. We would never treat another Christian … much less a pastor … the way we’ve been treated.
Much of the time, board members don’t know what they’re doing when they dismiss a pastor, choosing to “fire” the pastor like they would fire an employee in a small business. Jesus’ prayer from the cross fits here: “Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Sometimes only one board member opposes a pastor … for personal reasons … and he convinces the others to take “official” action … never revealing his true agenda. If the board was firing a staff member, they’d consult with the pastor, and it would be a team decision, but when the board fires the pastor, the board doesn’t consult with him, and they can make a mess of things.
Second, even though many pastors experience forced termination (28% is the last stat I’ve seen), the topic is still hush-hush in the Christian community.
It’s not openly discussed. When it is, most Christians naively blame the pastor for his departure because they are ignorant of the facts. Pastors are blamed at the denominational level for political reasons (so the district guy keeps church revenue flowing into district coffers) and they’re blamed inside their former church because those who pushed out the pastor have convinced themselves they did right.
The wider Christian community is far more driven by politics than Scripture or spirituality. The same spirit that caused the Sanhedrin to approve Jesus’ execution (it’s advantageous for one man to die to spare the nation) is alive and well in our denominations. The leaders know what’s going on out there, but they aren’t doing anything about it because it’s not politically advantageous.
So many of us – and I include myself – feel abandoned by the wider body. Our loyalty to the denomination was not reciprocated.
Third, if we’re over 55 and undergo termination, we instinctively know that our pastoral career is over.
We’re done. Few churches will hire an older pastor. It’s wrong, but ageism is alive and well in the Christian community. As Neil Diamond sang 46 years ago, our time as a pastor is often “done too soon.” We always envisioned retiring on our own terms, but power-hungry laymen decided to retire us long before we were ready.
Some churches … usually small ones … will hire an older pastor. There was a church 90 minutes away that I contacted many years ago. It was a church of 60 people. Kim and I drove there one day, but the valley where it was located looked like the back side of the moon. There was nothing there! Depression City. No wonder they couldn’t find a pastor! Those churches will always be available, but they pay very little, and the congregation’s dysfunctionality negates even the best pay package.
Pastors believe something that isn’t true: “If I’m loyal to my denomination/district, when I really need them, they’ll be there for me.” But they won’t be. It’s this finality, in my view, that causes much of our depression. We’re still waiting for the district/ denominational guys on white horses to come and rectify our situation. But they aren’t coming. They never come. They’re company men who are unwilling to take risks. That’s why they were hired in the first place.
Fourth, for a pastor, our whole lives are centered upon our churches.
We are fully committed to our congregations. One guy I read called this syndrome a “total institutional mindset.” The church supplies our income … our friendships … and our self-esteem. When we put everything into our church, and then its leaders spit us out, it feels like a massive betrayal. It’s like getting a “Dear John” note from your wife when you’ve been the best husband you could be. The church can be a cruel bride.
My wife once told me that she felt I gave too much to my last church. Maybe I did. Maybe I wasn’t distant enough. Maybe I cared too much. But I think this is true of most pastors. I think of U2’s song “With or Without You”: “And you give yourself away, and you give yourself away, and you give, and you give, and you give yourself away …” That’s the life of a pastor. The call of God upon our lives translates to giving ourselves away.
So when you’ve given all you can to a church, and they turn around and kick you in the teeth … it takes a long time to recover from that blow. It takes a minimum of 1-3 years to heal from a forced termination, and I think the more a pastor loved a particular church, the longer it takes him to heal.
Fifth, the church is the place where most of a pastor’s friends congregated every weekend.
I had few friends outside my last church, but I had dozens of friends inside that church. When I resigned, I lost most of those friends overnight. Most never spoke with me or contacted me again. I still grieve their loss.
Not only were my friends in that church, but so was my support system. And then BOOM … it was gone overnight.
Pastors are somebodies inside their churches. Everybody wants to be their friend, so pastors don’t have to work too hard to make friends. They’re just there. But when a pastor is forced to leave a church, those friends disappear. And it can be hard for a pastor to make friends outside of church because nearly all his friends over the years have come from inside the church. You lose your pastoral identity. I’m no longer Pastor Jim – a somebody inside a church – but just “Jim” – a nobody outside the church.
Sixth, by their very nature, pastors are tender, sensitive individuals.
77% of all pastors are feelers on the Myers-Briggs temperament test. Even though I’m a thinker on that test, I feel things very deeply. Most pastors do. That empathy makes us great pastors but not always great leaders. Sometimes we’re more concerned about one lost sheep than the entire flock. So when we go through a horrible experience like forced termination, we feel it so deeply – and take it so personally – that it makes recovery very difficult.
So when we’re “fired” or pushed out … we take it hard. We forget that Jonathan Edwards … Billy Graham … and a host of other great pastors have walked this road before us. We aren’t better men than they were, so their suffering can give us some perspective.
By the way, I highly recommend two chapters in Charles Spurgeon’s classic Lectures to My Students: one called “The Minister’s Fainting Fits,” which is on depression in ministry; the other called “The Blind Eye and the Deaf Ear,” which is on handling criticism in ministry. I’ve loved that book for 40 years – there has never been anything like it – and it can be purchased dirt cheap as an e-book on Amazon. The chapter on depression has always lifted my spirits! (Dr. Hart even recommended it in class.)
Seventh, Christian churches have not devised fair processes for handling complaints inside churches concerning pastors.
It’s all black or white thinking: either the pastor stays or he leaves. The board doesn’t think in terms of other solutions, like bringing in a mediator/consultant, or giving a pastor a sabbatical/time off, or talking to the pastor honestly about an issue in his life/ministry. Pastors may assume that board members possess these skills – or that they will acquire them while they’re on the board – but they’re usually clueless. I can’t emphasize this enough.
As I’ve written many times in my blog, I probably needed to leave my last church when I did. I was clinically burned out, and had little left to give. But the way I was treated was wrong – especially the lying. I was accused of a host of charges that weren’t true because nobody ever brought them to my attention. My reputation outside of my last church is excellent. My reputation inside that church changed overnight.
Even though church bylaws were clear about how to handle problems with the pastor, the board chose to ignore the bylaws. I’ve learned how frequently this happens in the Christian world. When people become emotional, they easily bypass procedures and then create a rationale why they don’t apply. They don’t want to resolve the issues; they want to win and defeat their detractors. Many former pastors become depressed about this kind of thing because they were never presented any kind of forum where they could tell their side of the story. WE HAVE TO CHANGE THIS INSIDE THE WIDER CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY.
I’m grateful for the work Dennis Maynard has done in this area. (He wrote the book When Sheep Attack.) He says that whenever a pastor is forced to leave a church, that church can’t heal, and subsequently grow, until the people are told the truth as to why their previous pastor left. I agree with him 100%, but it rarely happens because it isn’t politically expedient.
Finally, there isn’t any opportunity to reconcile with those who hurt us.
For us, our dismissal was personal, but the church board will claim it was just business (although it is personal in all too many cases.)
Pastors are trained to engage in reconciliation, and when they’re dismissed, it’s a confession by the board that reconciliation isn’t an option. This inability to reconcile doesn’t seem to bother board members but lingers on in the memories and souls of pastors who just want to know, “What did I do wrong?” And the answer is almost always, “You did nothing wrong. You may even have been dismissed because you were such a godly, holy man that the other board members felt uncomfortable in your presence.”
Just remember that Jesus never reconciled with Judas … or Pilate … or Caiaphas … or the Sanhedrin … or any of the people who put Him on the cross. He died to make reconciliation possible, but without repentance, reconciliation – or bilateral forgiveness – cannot occur.
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I believe that after a forced exit, a pastor has to accept the following truisms in order to fully heal:
*I was treated wrongly … but I forgive my opponents.
*I will endeavor to speak openly about my experience whenever appropriate.
*I accept that if I’m over 55, my pastoral career is probably over … but I will be open to other ministry opportunities.
*I will center my life upon the Lord and my family, not a local church.
*I will seek out friendships wherever I can … not just in my church.
*I will remain tender but toughen up where I can.
*I will speak up for a fair and just process anytime I hear that a pastor is undergoing turmoil.
*I will accept the fact that those who pushed me out of the pastorate will never seek or be open to reconciliation.
What are your thoughts about what I’ve written?
Restoring Kingdom Builders 
Jealousy in Ministry
Posted in Personal Stories, Please Comment!, tagged 2 Corinthians 12:1-8, competition between pastors, jealousy in ministry, John 3:27-30, John the Baptist and Jesus on January 27, 2017| 2 Comments »
For many years, I struggled with jealousy toward those in ministry who seemed more successful than I was.
In my mid-twenties, I was a full-time youth/Christian education director at a church in Orange County, California. A friend I’ll call Ben … the pastor’s son … was a youth pastor at a church I had admired all my life, and he was making plans to attend seminary outside California.
Ben recommended that the church hire me as his replacement, and since many people already knew me, that’s what happened.
But right off the bat, I ran into resistance.
One high school girl told me that she felt sorry for me because I didn’t compare to Ben.
The adult youth leaders openly resisted my leadership.
An adult youth leader once stared at me and finally said, “Jim, you’re just so different than Ben” … intimating that wasn’t a good thing.
The following Christmas, Ben returned to the church and spoke on Sunday to a packed house where I was forced to sit on the platform and watch the lovefest between him and the congregation. It hurt … immensely.
When I left that church three-and-a-half years later, I tried to pave the way for the next youth pastor.
A few years later, the pastor retired, and who did the church hire as their new pastor? That’s right … Ben.
When I left that church, I became pastor of a small church in Silicon Valley. Pastor Joe led the largest church in the area, and one Sunday when I was on vacation, I took my family to that megachurch.
It was so crowded that we sat on the last row of the balcony. It was a hot day … the a/c wasn’t working … and we could barely see the stage.
But boy, could Pastor Joe pack them in!
I served a church of less than 100 people, and Pastor Joe pastored 2000 … and had co-written a book with someone who had a study Bible named after him.
To me, Pastor Joe was the epitome of success … and I felt great jealousy toward Pastor Joe because he seemed wildly successful while I was not.
But then something happened that profoundly impacted those feelings.
I had started a Spiritual Leadership Retreat for pastors and their board members in our district the year before.
Pastors often attend conferences … return home … tell their board members what they learned … but meet resistance because the board didn’t hear what the pastor heard.
So, I thought … let’s get pastors and their boards together, bring in a speaker, let him do a few sessions, and then after each session, ask the pastors and their boards to discuss the speaker’s ideas immediately.
We needed a speaker for our second retreat, and someone suggested Pastor Joe, so I contacted him, and we met in a restaurant to talk.
Going into that luncheon, I was greatly intimidated by Pastor Joe. After all, he was a SOMEBODY while I was a NOBODY.
But during our three hours together, he poured out his heart to me about all the problems he was having in his church.
The biggest problem involved a staff member who was single and had been caught having sex with another woman.
The pastor and his elders decided to remove this man from his position … keep him at the church … put him under an accountability group … and give him a job as a church custodian.
Pastor Joe could not have predicted the avalanche of criticism he would receive. He had received 300 letters that he could not bear to answer about the decision he and the board had made. Half the writers felt the decision was too strict, while half felt the decision was too lenient.
The pastor also shared some shocking news with me. While he had a degree from a Bible college, he had never gone to seminary, and his lack of a master’s degree made him feel very insecure.
So he overstudied. He spent 15 hours a week on his Sunday morning message … 15 hours on his Sunday evening message … and 20 hours on his Wednesday night message.
Why did he spent 20 hours on his midweek message, I wondered?
Because, he told me, on several occasions, he stood up to speak and John MacArthur was sitting in the congregation, and Joe didn’t want to say anything inaccurate.
The three hours I spent with that pastor did more to cure me of jealousy than anything I’ve ever experienced.
Here is what I’ve learned about jealousy over the years:
First, we should never compare ourselves to others because God has made us all so different.
Whitey Herzog was a Hall of Fame manager who led both the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals to World Series championships.
During his heyday in the 1980s, Herzog was often considered to be the best manager in baseball, an accolade he disputed. He said the only way to tell the best manager was to give several managers the exact same players and see where they finished at the end of the year … an impossible feat.
In the same way, the only way to compare pastors would be to take a few of them … put them all in the same community … give them the same number of people … give them the same size campus and buildings … give them identical staffs and board members … give them the same income … and then see how they fared five years later.
But since that’s completely unrealistic, why even try to compare ourselves with others?
It may be human, but it’s ultimately counterproductive.
Second, jealousy often doesn’t start inside of us but within the followers of others.
Before Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, John’s ministry took people by storm, and his followers reveled in their access to this superstar and his fame.
But then Jesus came along and began baptizing as well. The Baptism Wars were ready to start when John’s disciples said to him in John 3:26, “Rabbi, that man [notice they won’t name Jesus] who was with you on the other side of the Jordan – the one you testified about – well, he is baptizing, and everyone is going to him.”
There wasn’t any problem between John and Jesus. The problem was with John’s followers.
In the story I told above about Pastor Ben … the youth pastor I succeeded … there wasn’t any problem between us. We often met for meals at denominational events and laughed about my perception of the way people adored him.
And years later, I served as his teaching pastor for sixteen months.
Since we can’t stop people from comparing us to others, we either have to plug our ears or realize that we have our admirers as well, even if they aren’t as numerous or vocal.
Third, our job isn’t to become famous or well-loved, but to carry out God’s unique assignment for us.
In John 3:27-29, John tells his followers that he knows his role very well. Jesus is the bridegroom, and John’s assignment is to be Jesus’ friend, or best man.
In other words, John says, who cares what people think about me as long as Jesus receives the spotlight?
That’s what he meant when he said, “He must become greater; I must become less.”
During my second staff assignment, I occasionally preached from the church’s large pulpit. There was a small plaque attached to it that only the preacher could view. The plaque read, “Sir, we must see Jesus.”
I’ve heard guys preach who told story after story where they were the heroes … and those individuals often acquired a large following.
But like John, there comes a time when we all have to say, “I don’t even care if people remember my name as long as they see Jesus.”
And since He’s why we serve, there’s no reason to be jealous of Him.
Fourth, every pastor has his successes … but they only last for a season.
After a very slow start, I’ve had some successes in ministry:
*I once appeared with several other pastors on a live radio program in the Bay Area. I was very nervous going in, but talked quite a lot, and when I drove back to my church for our midweek Bible study, the congregation gathered in the lobby to greet me.
While that was cool, nothing really happened because of it.
*I pastored the largest Protestant church in a city of 75,000 for years.
But it didn’t last.
*The starting quarterback of the Oakland Raiders attended my church one year right before the season started.
But he only came for three weeks … and went on to became the worst quarterback in the league.
*I earned a doctoral degree, and enjoyed my classwork immensely.
But two years after graduation, I was forced out as pastor.
*I wrote a book, which I never thought I’d do, and it’s fun to see it on Amazon.
But the paperback has stopped selling, and as of this writing, it’s number 2,176,901 on Amazon, although I did sell one today, which will probably help me jump over a million places.
Our perceived ministry successes often don’t last very long. John the Baptist’s ministry came and went quickly. Jesus’ ministry lasted less than four years.
Years ago, I became convinced that success in ministry can only be measured by faithfulness. On occasion, God lets us taste greater success, but it rarely lasts forever, because …
Finally, great success is often followed by great suffering.
When Paul ascended to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12, he said he “heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.”
Paul was tempted to say, “Wow! I’ll bet nobody else has had this experience! I am obviously someone very special!”
But, Paul writes, “to keep me from becoming conceited” he received “a thorn in my flesh,” some kind of nagging bodily ailment.
When I sat in that restaurant with Pastor Joe, and heard him tell me about the 300 critical letters he had received, I reminded myself of an adage I had often heard:
“Big churches have big problems … small churches have small problems.”
At that moment, I realized that if I were ever to pastor a large church, I would probably have to suffer greatly … and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay the price.
And I was instantly cured of jealousy.
A year-and-a-half after our initial meeting, Pastor Joe died. I never found out what killed him, but mean-spirited criticism, constant stress, and sitting in a chair studying fifty hours a week surely didn’t help.
Several years later, that church of 2000 had plunged to 400 … and was barely holding on.
_______________
When I was in seminary, we had to attend chapel four times a week. Because we had to leave for work after chapel, my friend Dave and I both sat together on the back row.
Today, Dave pastors a large church. He’s on the radio every day in many US markets. I often watch his service on Roku. He has a lot of influence in the Calvary Chapel movement. He wrote the notes for The Word for Today Study Bible. He hosted Chuck Smith’s question and answer radio program with Chuck many times … especially at the end of Chuck’s life.
I don’t feel any jealousy toward Dave. He’s been my friend for nearly 50 years. I know how gifted he is and how hard he’s worked over the years.
In fact, I’m happy for him … and when the Lord takes me home, I want Dave to conduct my memorial service.
Dave has a very public ministry. By contrast, mine is quite private.
I spent two hours on the phone yesterday with a leader who has been struggling with some issues in his church. The situation is complex … without easy answers … but I know I was able to help him.
At this point in my life, I wouldn’t trade places with Dave for anything. I am quite content with my small ministry and glad that the Lord has called me to it.
And in the end, isn’t the antidote to jealousy to be content with the place, people, status, and salary the Lord has given us?
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