How to Know If It’s Time to Leave Pastoral Ministry
The Gospel Coalition asked three former pastors—all of whom now teach or counsel pastors—for their best advice.
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This is a regular theme, it seems, but I've never understood it.
The first questions he asks: Are you getting enough sleep at night? (Enough sleep is more than seven uninterrupted hours a night.)
Me: sleep? Sleep is over-rated. Too much to do.
Do you exercise?
Me: exercise? What's that? (OK, I sometimes go on walks or a bike ride, but it's pretty boring.)
Do you take a day off?
Me: No
Do you use all your vacation time?
Me: What's that?
“The number one reason pastors have to bail is that they don’t take care of themselves,” he said. “They’re pouring out while they’re on empty.”
Now, while I am mostly joking around in my answers above, I have really never understood the so-called "monday blues" or the frequent suggestions that the ministry is too much.
Yes, we've seen times where we have people turn against us (people in whom we've invested hours of time and years of ministry). Yeah, that hurts. But I've never seen the Lord fail me. He's the one I'm serving.
I also recognize that I am going to eventually have to slow down. I'm still in good health, relatively strong, but the clock is ticking.
I just find it hard to relate to a depressive attitude. (It could be that I'm just weird.)
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
Reading Don's note (not trying to pick on you, brother), it struck me that we might infer a few things from Jesus' life. Not hard "you must do this" things, but an interesting set of points of reference.
Regarding sleep, I'm guessing Jesus got plenty, as before electric light, you didn't just stay up until the wee hours; oil for lamps was too expensive. Sometimes He stayed up until the wee hours/dawn to pray, but overall, my bet would be He got good rest most of the time.
Regarding exercise, well, Jesus walked pretty much everywhere, at least when He wasn't ministering around Galilee. So He certainly got His exercise in.
Regarding days off and vacation, He followed the Mosaic law, which did prescribe certain times of rest and time off like Shabbat, Passover, and the like.
So with a little bit of looking at history, it seems that Jesus likely did a lot of the things that mental health providers (and physical health) describe as "self-care" pretty routinely. It's not an absolute command in Scripture, but if we follow His example...
On another note, a lot of the men I know who've left the pastorate did so because the mode of ministry they felt led to follow didn't fit the mode of ministry in the churches they served. I've heard of a fair number of others leaving simply because the stress got too great.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I'm a noob to regular pastoral ministry. I served as an elder and ministry leader for 5 years at a previous church before I became the bi-vocational teaching elder at my current church. Lord willing, this year I will be able to transition into fulltime pastoral ministry.
In my experience, I have yet to see a good pastoral transition. I've seen pastors get fired, I've seen pastors disqualify themselves and resign, I've seen pastors quit because they couldn't get along with other staff pastors, and I've seen pastors who quit after causing turmoil in the church because of their poor leadership and inability to lead through change.
So, I read these articles with much curiosity. From my experience, pastors leave because 1) they disqualify themselves because of sexual immorality, pride, or greed; 2) they are unwilling to acknowledge their own sin and to seek the forgiveness of others; 3) they seek to change the church after their own image / vision before they've earned the trust of the congregation and ministry leaders; and 4) they want to pastor a bigger / "better" church.
In other words, I've yet to see a pastor quit because of a lack of sleep, exercise, taking vacations, or being depressed. I'm sure it happens, but I don't think it's as common as the article makes it sound.
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