Lately, members of the clergy have been getting some attention in the mainstream media. Usually when this happens, it is because of scandal and corruption. Not long ago, it was a steady drip of stories about pedophilia in the Catholic Church, and the extent to which church officials knew about the problem and failed to address it. Before that, it was stories about televangelists who were building personal fortunes with money they had collected to feed the hungry, consorting with prostitutes while preaching family values, or engaging in homosexual activity while bashing gays.
Now, the attention to clergy is much kinder but no less disturbing. The subject is clergy burnout, which is well documented by years of study. Those of us who have been practicing ministry for a while are familiar with the research showing that professional clergy are more likely than the average American to be overweight, clinically depressed, and to suffer from hypertension. Twenty years ago, while still serving among the Southern Baptists, I was appointed by the State Convention to conduct interviews with local pastors and compile statistics on pastors’ mental and emotional health. What I discovered was alarming to me then but old news now. Too many pastors were living at or below the poverty line. Clergy marriages were at risk because the demands placed on ministers took them away from their families. Depression and suicidal thoughts were common. (In fact, two suicides by local pastors in our state convention prompted the project I was asked to lead.)
Most of the studies about clergy burnout conclude that pastors do not allow themselves enough Sabbath. They are reticent to take vacations, do not allow themselves days off, and generally have a difficult time saying “no” to people because they feel like they are saying “no” to God. A lack of rest, however, doesn’t really explain why pastors are at psychological risk. After all, pastors of previous generations were also in great demand, but they were not leaving the ministry in droves or feeling trapped in their profession.
The root of the problem, it seems to me, is the near total collapse of denominational loyalties, which has robbed most local churches of their natural constituencies and thrown them onto the open market. A corollary is the diminished role of pastors, who are no longer granted respect because of their profession. No longer are they naturally regarded as leaders of the community. Even within their congregations, pastors have less authority than in past generations, for church membership is no longer regarded as an obligation but a choice, and the proclamation from the pulpit is often regarded as just another opinion rather than the gospel. It is not at all uncommon, in fact, for church members to grant more authority to a celebrity preacher they have never met personally than to the pastor of the local church.
The shift toward consumer religion has resulted in several consequences that, taken together, make ordained ministry a more perilous profession than it used to be. I’ll mention two here.
First, pastors as a whole are grossly underpaid. The clergy is the lowest paid profession in our culture. (We’ve been competing with teachers for this distinction for several decades now, but the success of teachers’ unions has placed public school educators in a better position than pastors.) Most denominations require ordained clergy to have graduate degrees in theology. Many have doctoral degrees as well. Other kinds of professionals with similar levels of education start out with salaries two to three times higher than some pastors will ever make. This means that many pastors receive much less income than most of their parishioners and yet are expected to maintain a similar lifestyle. The financial stress can be enormous.
Second, the divine call to ministry is devalued and pastors are expected to function as CEOs of their congregations, improving the church’s “bottom line” by employing whatever gimmicks or marketing tools are necessary to attract new members who will contribute financially. Church becomes another commodity to be consumed and the pastor becomes the chief salesperson. This bastardization of the ministry is another source of tremendous stress, in part because it has nothing to do with theological training, and in part because pastors are being asked to abandon their heavenly calling in favor of a worldly enterprise. Most pastors who are pressured to fill this role feel inadequate. Even if they are successful in building big churches, however, they will not likely escape the eventual realization that they have traded away faithfulness in order to achieve success. Not long ago, a pastor who had presided over the rapid numerical growth of his church confessed to me that he had “sold his soul” in order to attract so many people. After his marriage failed, he became ill with depression and left the ministry.
It is certainly helpful when congregations recognize the need for their pastors to exercise self-care. Adequate rest for the pastor, however, is not enough to address the more fundamental problem of how churches have allowed themselves to be swept up into the consumerist culture.
Ordained clergy are partly responsible for this problem. We have to a greater or lesser extent bought in to the consumer model of church in order to feel more “relevant.” Congregations, though, also bear responsibility. Worship is not entertainment. Pastors are not motivational speakers. The gospel is not pop psychology and the Bible is not a self-help manual. If declining churches spent less time pining for the past and worrying about paying the bills, and more time praying and studying the Bible, they might be surprised at how much they could do as a small group of people, and even more surprised at the spiritual growth – including financial stewardship – that results from serving God rather than maintaining a church.
When it to comes to the pastor-parish relationship, healthy congregations understand that 1) the pastor is not an employee of the church but one whose personal calling from God intersects with the congregation’s divine call to ministry; 2) the pastor’s primary role is to “shepherd the flock” (the word “pastor” means “shepherd”), which means giving theological, biblical and spiritual guidance to the congregation; and 3) the pastor leads the ministry of the church, but is not expected to do the ministry of the church. In the language of the New Testament, all members of the church are ministers, while the pastor is an equipping minister, helping the people utilize their gifts well to “build up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12).
Copyright 2010 by J. Mark Lawson
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