One of my early church jobs was as a youth pastor at a church that had a youth ministry that deeply siloed from the rest of the congregation. We operated in our own building, with our own volunteers and staff, largely disconnected from the larger congregation. Our senior pastor functionally saw youth ministry as outsourced to our side of the street, and left us and the teenagers to our own devices. He would make an appearance at the Christmas party, and our end-of-year banquet, and that was the extent of.
When he retired, we got a new senior pastor, in his late 30s, with young kids of his own, and he seemed really invested in youth ministry. We met a few times and he talked about how important youth ministry was, how he wanted to be an active volunteer, and to make young people feel more deeply part of the church. I was excited. I had operated for years functionally without any supervision, and the idea of having someone I could learn from and bounce ideas off of was exciting, even if it meant I might have a little less freedom to do what I want.
It started off well, he came to a few weeks of programming, and we had biweekly meetings to talk about what was going on in youth ministry for a month or two. But once the full weight of all his responsibilities really kicked in, and his schedule began to be filled with pastoral needs and finance meetings, we started seeing him less and less, and he started canceling our check-ins with more and more regularity.
I didn’t blame him necessarily, and I didn’t think he had been lying when he said he cared about the program. When we did occasionally talk, he always seemed to express regret that he wasn’t more engaged and that he was going to recommit and definitely block out the time to prioritize this area. Things would improve for a few weeks, and then the calendar notifications of canceled meetings would start again, and within a month or so, he’d be scarce again.
I found myself more frustrated and hurt about it than I expected. He was definitely more engaged than my last boss, and he was at least trying, so why did this feel worse? Why did him plugging in occasionally make me feel less supported than I did by the person who didn’t show up at all?
I think the answer is, at least in part, predictability. As a parent of young children, one of the things that they say in all the books is that children need predictable reactions from adults around them to feel safe and secure. That as they learn how the world works, knowing what they can expect from you is huge in developing a healthy attachment style and regulated nervous system. 1
It makes me wonder if that’s a psychological need that we don’t stop having when we grow up. If we crave predictability in our relationships, particularly with authority figures, more than we crave engagement or even validation. That if perhaps part of the reason I preferred a completely disengaged boss to a sporadically engaged one, was the predictability of it. With my first senior pastor, I would bring my questions or concerns to the other support figures in my life and ministry. My second senior pastor told me he wanted to be one of my primary collaborators, so I would put together a list of things for us to talk through in our meetings, only to have it canceled last minute, and my questions would go unanswered longer than if I’d have just reached out to someone else in the first place.
In some ways this is just about how to be a good manager at work, but it’s important to keep in mind that as church leaders, we can be perceived as authority figures in a way that is particularly emotionally charged. Understanding how our responses to people may affect their sense of well-being and psychological safety can make us better leaders, and more faithful disciples.
So how do we do better?
Set realistic boundaries on your availability and time.
I was on a coaching call with a pastor recently who told me her lay leader calls her 5 or 6 times a day to talk through different thoughts, questions, and concerns he has. She told me that because he is going through a challenging season of life, she feels like she needs to respond to him but that she feels overwhelmed by the amount of time that he takes up of her day and sometimes just ignores his calls. I encouraged her to work with him to set aside a weekly hour for the two of them to talk. All throughout the week, when things come up and he has the urge to call her , he can write them down, and that when they meet, they can walk through all his concerns.
This may feel like it is a removal of support, but for a person who is feeling anxious or disorganized in the relationship may experienced this predictable set-aside time as actually more comforting and secure than rushed, unplanned calls that may or may not be answered. This also allows her to provide him undivided attention for that hour, and gives her more sense of appropriate professional boundaries in the relationship.
Keep the commitments you make.
This seems exceedingly basic, but it needs to be articulated. If you are this woman I am coaching, you do have to keep the meeting with the lay leader. While it was ok to blow off random calls here and there, that scheduled time needs to be respected. When I managed my first staff, I set up weekly, or bi-weekly one-on-ones with each of them, where we would walk off campus and sit at a coffee shop together to talk about how things were going and how I could better support them. Often, there wasn’t too much of substance in those meetings, but I always knew I had to keep them because if there was something of substance that one of my team needed to talk to me about, that was going to be the venue in which they would do it. ‘
These are the kind of meetings that are easily sacrificed to the tyranny of the urgent, but prioritizing the time sends the message to your team, your volunteers, and whoever else that they are your priority, and that you value what they have to say.
Communicate transparently, even when it’s uncomfortable.
As people in pastoral leadership roles, many of us are very very good at communicating gently and in a way that is emotionally sensitive. Clinical pastoral education experiences, chaplaincy, and more train us well to show up non-anxiously and allow others to emotionally project whatever they need to project into the space between us. This way of showing up in a room is critically important for the work of chaplaincy and pastoral care.
It, however, can lead to misunderstandings in the context of a full relationship. Because the pastor, in that space, often affirms and reflects the emotional experience of the person speaking, that person can easily assumes that the pastor agrees with their perspective and is even agreeing to do something that they are not agreeing to do.
Imagine a pastor speaking to a young woman who is upset that no one in her family will be able to go to her child’s recital which she will miss because of work. The pastor responds that he is so sorry to hear that, that is must be so hard, because those events are so important to kids, and her child is so wonderful. She hints that the pastor should come, and he gives a non-committal answer about having to check his schedule, trying not to disappoint her. When she drops the tickets off at the church the next day, along with a note saying that her child is so excited he’s coming, he has a much more painful conversation in front of him.
If you don’t have time for a commitment, articulate it clearly and quickly. Drawing boundaries, establishing expectations, and even giving difficult feedback can all be uncomfortable, but providing clear, predictably-offered information about what people can expect from you creates long-term feelings of security, even if it’s hard in the moment.
We all are doing the best we can, and we all want to believe we can give everyone who asks of us everything they want, but as a person who worked on the other side of an overstretched leader for most of my professional career, hear me when I tell you that you can’t. The effort doesn’t lead to everyone being happy, more often than not, it leads to someone’s well-being being sacrificed, and it’s usually the people closest to you (or even yourself). We never grow out of the psychological need to know how we can lean on the people around us, and, with the grace of God, if we are honest, we can build the support structures we need to make sure all of those we love get the care they deserve.
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