How Deep the Well? August 29, 2009
Posted by Dan R. Dick in Church Leadership, Religion in the U.S., The United Methodist Church.Tags: Christian service, Church Leadership
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With apologies, this is a “rerun” of the post I put up in March. A number of people have asked for it to be “made available” because they had trouble finding it. I’m just reposting it to make it easier to find. The topic is clergy self-care, but it applies every bit as much to laity leadership as well.
A young clergy woman, beloved by her congregation, finishing her seventh year as a full-time pastor, successful by almost any and every measure, surrendered her orders and left the church. Her excuse? In a word, burn-out, but in more detail — too many demands from too many people taking too much time while constantly failing to live up to too many unrealistic expectations. (In other words, a normal pastoral ministry.) I asked what changed over the seven years, and she confessed that nothing in the job changed, but she had. She wanted a life, and ministry had become for her a slow, painful death.
I share this story because this young pastor was part of a study I did on the spiritual life of pastors. One of the main questions we explored was, “how deep is the well from which you draw?” We explored over 200 pastor’s prayer lives, engagement with scripture, worship lives, self-care, and personal relationships to better understand how pastors renew their spirit and stay grounded in Christ. The thesis we tested was this: you can’t give what you don’t have. If the pastor isn’t spiritually nourished and constantly renewed, he or she will not long last in the pastoral vocation. Not surprisingly, the young woman pastor was “too busy” to pray regularly, read the Bible, worship, exercise, rest, or spend time with friends and family. Somehow her ministry displaced her spiritual life.
