Ramblings of a recovering youth pastor...

How accurately are we portraying the clergy roles in the church? Especially the pastor?

Obviously this is a big part of the baggage that I carry from the traditional church, and I guess it especially pokes in my sides when I hear stories and witness the struggle of the church leadership to have to pretend so hard to be so perfect. We allow for them to place this pressure upon themselves and their families. We demand that they be placed under a microscope. We don’t allow them room to breathe. We force them to become fake, hollow, and hypocritical. The church wouldn’t ever allow for leadership to remain in tact if they are undergoing marriage counseling, filing for bankruptcy, or in the processes of dealing with their “unruly” teenagers…. Have you ever questioned why pastor’s kids have such terrible reputations? Do you think it is because of the anxiety that is passed from parent to child in the response of this perfect lime light that is cast upon them? It appears to me that more often than not we force them to become “white washed tombs”, where they are perfect on the outside but day by day becoming more and more decrepit on the inside. There are currently more than 500,000 paid pastors serving in the United States, out of these consider the following stats:

94 % feel pressured to have an ideal family
90% work more than forty-six hours a week
81% say they have insufficient time with their spouses
80% believe that pastoral ministry affects their family negatively
70% do not have someone they consider a close friend
70% have lower self-esteem than when they entered the ministry
50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job
80% are discouraged or deal with depression
43% report that they are suffering from burnout, frantic schedules, and unrealistic expectations
33% consider pastoral ministry an outright hazard to the family
33% have seriously considered leaving their position in the past year
40% of pastoral resignations are due to burnout

Most pastors are expected to juggle sixteen different tasks per day. For this reason more than 1,400 pastors of every Protestant denomination are fired or forced to resign each month. Over the past twenty years the average length of the pastorate has declined from seven to only four years! Sadly, pastors don’t connect the dots to discover that it is their office that causes this underlying turbulence. Jesus Christ never intended any person to sport all the hats a present day pastor is expected to wear. He never intended any one person to bear such a load.

I personally have felt the demands of the eldership and pastorate and found them to be crushing; they will drain any mortal dry. And our so called “brothers and sisters” will aid in hanging us out to dry (and I’ve been on both sides). Just imagine working for a company that paid you on the basis of how good you made people feel. What if your pay depended on how entertaining you were, how friendly you were, how popular you were, and how perfect your behavior was?
Can you imagine the unmitigated stress this would cause you? Can you see how such pressure would force you into playing a pretentious role - all to keep your authority, your prestige, and your job security? (For this reason, many pastors are resistant to receiving any kind of help.)
The pastoral profession dictates standards of conduct just like any other profession, whether it be teacher, doctor, or lawyer. The profession dictates how they are to think, act, speak, and dress. This is one of the major reasons why they are forced to live very artificial lives.
Because of all this, I feel that the pastoral role is forced to foster dishonesty. We expect our pastors to always be cheerful, completely spiritual, and available at a moments notice. Professional loneliness is another virus that plagues pastors. The lone-ranger disease drives some ministers into other careers. It drives others to crueler fates.
Its lonely at the top, I believe, because God never intended for anybody to be there - except Jesus Christ! In effect the present day pastor tries to shoulder the fifty-eight New Testament “one another” exhortations all by himself. It is no wonder that many of them get crushed under the weight. It’s because of this that I feel we need to reexamine the scriptures that discuss the role of the pastor. Honestly, I don’t see any clarity there at this point. Ephesians 4:11 simply states pastors, (and note that it is plural), and no where does the word describe the capacity of service these roles are to play. It expounds tremendously on the Eldership, which in present day you rarely see played out in traditional churches. Pastor from the Greek, is a word that John Calvin coined to describe a “Sheppard”…. throughout the primitive church in the New Testament, not a single pastor of any of these groups has ever been named. History explains the role we call today “Pastor” much clearer than scripture, but do to the massive amounts of constant whining over the length of my blogs I’ll pause hear in hopes of creating a dialogue at this point….until next time - CHEERS!