cw: sexual harassment, clergy abuse

Last week, we started a series talking about, broadly, burnout, but more specifically, the ways in which church leadership can become devastatingly unhealthy for those who feel called to lead them, and the cost that unhealth can have on leader’s sense of self, their identity, and their very faith. 

I am hesitating to use the word burnout too frequently here, not because it’s inaccurate, but because I think the way we talk about burnout in pastoral leaders isn’t always productive. If you google burnout, or how to combat burnout, for Christian leaders, the advice is frequently to engage in spiritual disciplines, to take Sabbath more seriously, to have more boundaries with work. While all of this is generally good advice, the subtext is that if a pastor was doing these things well enough in the first place, they probably wouldn’t have gotten burned out. 

This discourse makes the devastation leaders feel squarely their fault and theirs to solve. The response to people at the end of their rope, people who have answered a call from God to serve, have sacrificed their whole life for it only to be chewed up and spit out by it cannot faithfully be “Well, you weren’t doing it right.” or “You wouldn’t be in this position if you were more careful, more faithful, healthier, or” (most painful of all) “actually called.”

Ministry Incubators co-founder Mark DeVries likes to tell a parable about a dancer: Imagine a ballerina goes out on stage to perform, and just a minute into her performance she falls and breaks her leg. The staff of the theater scoop her off the stage, telling her she should have been more careful, and admonishing themselves for not hiring a better dancer. They send out another ballerina, and just a minute into her performance, she comes down from a leap and falls and breaks her leg as well. They scoop her off the floor and tell her she should have practiced more, and go to fetch another ballerina. How many dancers will they blame before someone thinks to go check if there’s a hole in dance floor?

Sometimes the problem is not squarely on the dancer.

This isn’t about good churches or bad churches, although I am sure there are extremes on both ends. This is about the reality that there are seasons of health and unhealth, areas of friction, and areas where things go smoothly, and both people and churches have specific pressure points. You can do everything right, and follow God as faithfully as possible, as you lead a church full of people doing their best, and it can still burn you up. 

I have a friend who worked at a church with a significant history of sexual abuse and misconduct by leaders (including civil and criminal suits). Like many organizations that have this sort of history, the church went to great lengths to try to deny any culpability, or acknowledge any issue in its own systems and structures. The result was a few people losing their jobs, but a culture, and a pattern of treatment of women, that remained unchanged. 

This friend came into this workplace as a woman in her mid-20s with her own history of sexual harassment and abuse by men in places of power. She experienced many of the same cultural shortcomings and problematic, abusive behaviors as the women before her, and when she advocated for better sexual harassment policies, accountability for men who consistently engaged in predatory behavior, and an honest effort at creating a safer workplace, her concerns were dismissed, in an effort to not make too many waves or draw attention to the problem. Over several years of consistent harassment, and her efforts to address the problem going unheard, her felt lack of safety grew to the point that it was no longer healthy for her to work there. By the time she left, she wasn’t sure she could ever work in a church again. 

There were lots of things that church did well. There are plenty of people who probably could have worked there and supported those places where the church thrived, while helping them walk them through the slow, painful process of acknowledging where it has caused harm, and taking the steps to change. That is good work to do and work worth doing, and my friend was not the right person to do it. 

As I said last week – it doesn’t have to cost you so much.

Getting burnt is not necessarily (and almost never exclusively) the fault of the leader who feels that way, and is not necessarily (and almost never exclusively) a sign that a church is an irredeemably toxic place. We as leaders often feel responsible for the success of the ministries we lead. That responsibility can be interpreted as a pressure to stick it out, when really the most responsible choice, not just for your own well-being, but for the well-being of the ministry,  is to leave. 

The work of ministry should be challenging, interesting, and at times, frustrating, boring, and repetitive. You should have board members who don’t like your ideas, or overenthusiastic congregants who keep trying to get you to do theirs. You should have hard weeks, where the weight of pastoral care feels heavy, and the message of hope from the pulpit in the midst of it all is a sermon mostly to yourself. The work of ministry should ask a lot of you, and cause you to grow and learn alongside your congregation. 

The work of ministry should not leave your nervous system fried, and your relationships strained. The work of ministry should not make your stomach turn or keep you up at night, or leave you dry-heaving in the bathroom, hoping a congregant doesn’t hear you. 

“You know it doesn’t have to feel like this… [It] doesn’t have to cost you so much.” 

Next week is Holy Week, so stories of death and resurrection are all around us. We’ll wrap up this series with some thoughts on when you know its time to leave, but for now I’ll leave you with this: no matter where in the walk you are – the triumphal entry, the quiet Maundy Thursday, the trial, the garden of Gethsemane, the cross, the tomb – that Christ has been there too, and that Christ is with you still.

And from every grave, there is resurrection.