Resilient Ministry

What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving

Bob Burns, Tasha D. Chapman, Donald C. Guthrie

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830864614
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

What does it take to have fruitful ministry over the long haul? The stresses of pastoring are well known and can be a match for even the best-prepared, most experienced in ministry--multiple tasks, long hours, taxing responsibilities and, yes, some challenging personalities. Too often the results can be burnout, being run out or just feeling worn out. To find out how pastors can thrive as well as survive, the authors undertook a five-year in-depth research project among working pastors. Here in this ground-breaking book is the distilled wisdom of dozens of pastors who have been on the front lines of ministry. We hear from them what works, what doesn't and what distinctive issues people in ministry face. The authors uncover five key themes that promote healthy, sustainable ministry that lasts--spiritual formation, self-care, emotional and cultural intelligence, marriage and family, leadership and management. These themes are unpacked from the vantage point of ministry on the ground. Questions for personal evaluation and reflection are included throughout the book to bring home the significance of each section. This is the perfect companion for a peer cohort of pastors to read together. It can also be of value to church boards and others who want to better understand how to help sustain their pastors in ministry. In short, this is a book pastors can't live without.

1

Life in Pastoral Ministry

When do pastors receive mentoring and pastoral care?
Where do pastors pursue learning and growth?
How do pastors stay current in our rapidly changing world?

A few years ago, Bob was sitting with a small group of pastors who were meeting together for the first time. In the midst of a lively conversation about ministry life, one pastor made the following comment:

I don’t have anybody that I open up to about my life, my family or my ministry. I feel like a guy who is driving over the speed limit on a narrow mountain road without barriers. It’s the grace of God I haven’t driven off.

People hear pastors preach on Sunday morning and assume they have their lives together. But most of us don’t understand what pastors think, feel and experience week by week. Take, for example, the pastor quoted above. A few years after he said this, Bob quoted him (anonymously) at a ministry gathering in this pastor’s hometown. Afterward, an elder from this pastor’s church came up to Bob. With his pastor standing behind him, the elder said, “Do you know what I remember from your presentation? It was that comment made by some pastor who said he didn’t have anyone to talk to. I sure am glad it isn’t that way in our church. Our pastor can really share with us.”

His pastor and Bob exchanged knowing glances, sharing the secret that the words were his own. From our research, we have found those words to be true for most pastors. People in ministry rarely feel understood and seldom have anyone with whom they can openly talk about their experiences.

What Enables Pastoral Resilience?

A denominational official recently made the following statement: “So many pastors today leave the church. Often they leave the ministry altogether. What does it take for pastors to remain fruitful in ministry for a lifetime?” This person was overwhelmed by the statistics of pastors leaving the ministry and by stories of people struggling with the idea of staying in the pastorate.

Ministry leadership is a tough but highly rewarding job. Many pastors love the challenge, but most find it much more difficult than they had anticipated. Some wonder what they have gotten themselves into. Like a recent seminary graduate who shared with dismay, “I never expected the church to be like this.” Or a pastor of eighteen years who confided, “My experience in the ministry has been good. But I question whether I can subject my wife and family to this much longer.” Statistics on the dropout rate of ministers vary.[1] But it is clear that conditions of ministry have changed in the past few decades and that too many local church ministers leave as a result.[2]

We probably qualify as ministry survivors. Bob has been involved in the church as a volunteer and a pastor for over forty years. Donald has served as a ruling elder in several local churches during the past twenty-five years. Tasha has been active in the church as a leader and staff member for over two decades. In addition, all of us train people for vocational ministry leadership.

Lilly Endowment, Inc., an Indiana-based foundation concerned about the health of the church, has been exploring this question of pastoral resilience for years. In one of their initiatives, called Sustaining Pastoral Excellence, the endowment invested over $84 million to support sixty-three projects that explore what it takes to thrive in ministry. The three of us have coordinated one of these grants, running research and facilitating continuing education for pastors designed to find some answers to this perplexing problem of pastoral survival.

What Is Pastoral Excellence? One of our Lilly-funded programs for researching resilience in the pastorate was called the Pastors Summit. At political summits, heads of state gather for several days to survey and collaborate on complex challenges. In a similar way, our summits were designed to be an emotionally safe place where pastors could share the difficulties of vocational ministry life. As we selected participants for the Pastors Summit research, we wanted pastors who demonstrated excellence in ministry. But how can you define ministry excellence? Our culture ­often identifies it by certain markers of success. These markers range from the numbers who attend worship services to the state of a church’s finances to the popular programs a church creates and sponsors. As one pastor put it, “People judge our ministries by noses, nickels and noise.”

Others, however, reject the idea of defining ministry excellence by these standards of success. They often counter by using the criteria of leadership faithfulness. Excellence is viewed as a pastor who remains committed over time. But we questioned whether the ability to “hang in there” and endure is a helpful way to judge ministry excellence.

As we worked on our selection criteria, we found some aspects of numerical success and pastoral faithfulness useful. But we felt that neither was sufficient to express the idea of excellence. After much discussion, we concluded a better measure was found in the idea of fruitfulness.[3] We came to believe that Christian leaders are to bear fruit by sharing their faith and nurturing the fruit of God’s grace in their own lives and in the lives of others. Fruitfulness includes a measure of faithfulness and a measure of success—valuing both but preferring neither.

The Pastors Summit. To choose pastors for the summit, we asked trusted colleagues about pastors who exhibited fruitfulness in ministry. (See appendix A for the research selection criteria.) As a list emerged, we explored many questions concerning fruitfulness in their lives. We spent time talking with these pastors, their families, friends, church officers and outsiders. We knew that none of these pastors were perfect. Neither would they personally accept the term excellent to describe their ministries. But each of them was on a trajectory of fruitfulness in ministry and life.

Over a six-year period, we carefully selected and worked with seventy-three pastors in the Pastors Summit. The pastors represented twenty-six states from across the United States. Gathering in small groups, each cohort of pastors met together three times a year, often with their spouses, during each two-year program. We talked with participants and their spouses about their joys and challenges. In the earliest meetings, our staff developed the agendas. But the longer we met, the more freedom each cohort had to define topics and activities that they needed for furthering their ministry fruitfulness and tenacity to stay in the ministry vocationally.

While the summit groups began to bond by sharing their lives, our staff was actively involved in research. Each summit meeting was audio-­recorded and transcribed, eventually creating about twelve thousand pages of material. This material was analyzed by our team, which constantly asked the question, “What does it take to survive and thrive in pastoral ministry?” Over the first five years, some answers came into sharp focus. Five subjects stood out as the foundations that enable pastors to sustain fruitful ministry with resilience. The following chapters explore these five themes. Before we look at them, however, we need to consider the uniqueness of ministry life.

Sitting on a One-Legged Stool

Ever heard jokes about pastoral work? We have heard them muttered by businesspeople after a worship service, by church members talking in grocery stores and even by pastors in denominational settings. These comments sound something like, “It must be nice to only work one day a week,” or, “Besides preaching on Sundays and visiting folks in the hospital, what do pastors do?”

Good question. What is involved in pastoral ministry? Jackson Carroll is a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying American clergy. In his work, he identifies four core tasks of pastors: leading worship, preaching, teaching and providing oversight.[4] Carroll explains that pastors rarely handle these tasks as distinct activities. Rather, they blend together through much of the week. Researchers Gary Kuhne and Joe Donaldson conclude that pastoral work requires a great variety of complex skills and talents. They describe pastors’ activities as “taxing, fast-paced, and unrelenting, often characterized by doing two or more tasks at the same time.”[5]

On average, pastors work long hours. Carroll compared statistics on the average workweek of various professions with his own research of pastors. He concluded that pastors averaged more work hours per week than other managers and professionals.[6] He also found that the larger the congregation, the more hours the pastor works.

Peter Brain, an Anglican bishop in Australia, completed a survey exploring the amount of time congregational leaders expect their pastors to work. Then he compared these results to the actual time pastors spent in ministry. His survey showed that pastors work an average of fifteen hours per week more than their lay leaders realized.[7]

The late Peter Drucker, one of the leading management authors and consultants of the twentieth century, once told a pastor friend that he viewed church leadership as the most difficult and taxing role of which he was aware. This perspective was confirmed by one of our Pastors Summit participants, who has a master’s degree in management and who left a successful real-estate development company to enter the ministry. He said bluntly, “The business world is much easier than the church.”

One of the unique aspects of pastoral ministry is how it affects and defines all areas of life. Work, family and personal responsibilities blur together through the week, so that pastors have difficulty distinguishing when they are on and off duty. One summit pastor put it this way:

Being a pastor is not just what I do—it is very much who I am. I live with that persona twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Another explained,

I was an art major in college. I still love to work at the pottery wheel. But the people in my church have no idea about this area of my life. They only see me as a pastor, regardless of the time or place.

Still another pastor shared,

Most people in our church have a life that is like a stool with three legs. They’ve got their spiritual life, their professional life and their family life. If one of these legs wobbles, they’ve got two others they can lean on. For us, those three things can merge into one leg. You’re sitting on a one-legged stool, and it takes a lot more concentration and energy. It’s a lot more exhausting.

The work of pastoral ministry may be summed up by two other comments. The first is from Jackson Carroll. After studying hundreds of pastors, he concluded, “Being a pastor is a tough, demanding job, one that is not always very well understood or appreciated. Pastoral work is more complex than that which transpires in the hour or so a week that many lay people see the pastor in action as she or he leads worship and preaches.”[8]

The other remark is from a summit pastor, who explained,

The relentless nature of ministry means that fatigue is a constant companion of leaders in the church. While lay people joke about ministers only working on Sundays, the truth lies on the other side of the continuum. A pastor’s work is overwhelming because it wears upon the body and soul.

Five Themes of Resilient Ministry

After seven years of studying our summit participants—their personal lives, marriages, families and ministries—we learned a lot about what it takes to survive and thrive in ministry. We spent hundreds of hours working through all of the data, pondering our notes and talking about our thoughts and reflections. Eventually our discoveries focused around five primary themes for leadership resilience in fruitful ministry:

• spiritual formation
• self-care
• emotional and cultural intelligence
• marriage and family
• leadership and management

Before we explore these themes in more depth, let’s step back and look at them through the lens of two “big ideas.” The first we learned is that while each theme can be presented as separate and unique, the themes should really be considered as a whole. Each is dependent on the others. They are like the strands of a tapestry woven into one piece. For example, we can’t really talk about self-care without taking spiritual formation into consideration.[9] Similarly, we can’t reference leadership and management without keeping marriage and family in mind.[10] The themes only stand together.

Second, consider the apparent simplicity of the themes. At first glance they don’t seem exceptional or unique to ministry. When reading them, your response might have been, “Everyone needs to work on these areas.” True enough. The unique nature of the themes, however, is how they speak into the lives and priorities of pastors and their families. As we look at them more carefully, ask yourself, Why did this issue stand out as important for the strengthening of pastors? We will e...