Many in ministry Did Not Finish. What can we do about that?

by Gordon MacDonald

When you read the results of a race-be it cars, people, or animals-it’s not unusual to see DNF attached to some entrants’ names. The letters-standing for did not finish-indicate those who had to quit. Sometimes the reason is also indicated: a blown engine, for example, a pulled muscle, or lameness.

What if the equivalent to a DNF were put by the name of every seminary graduate who is now doing something other than the ministry they once felt called to? Every study of dropouts I hear about suggests that it would be an enormous list.

If reasons were affixed, you might read stress/burnout, or conflict, inadequate people skills, insufficient leadership capability, poor work habits, family unhappiness, or mean-spirited congregants. There would be many others, of course.

And among those, be one that would probably catch the eye fastest: moral failure. The term arouses a lot of natural curiosity and not a little apprehension. The mind wonders: What happened? Why? How was it discovered? What has happened to the people involved? Could this happen to me?

The term moral failure covers a broad spectrum of tragic conduct. Someone has acknowledged an attraction to pornography; another is discovered to have engaged in an improper relationship (with either gender); still a third is found to have a history of some kind of molestation. Is this list large enough?

Given Jesus’ sweeping definition of adultery (the intents of the heart), I suppose we are all moral failures in one way or another. Murderers, too. Some in Christian leadership go beyond the intents of the heart and act out the intentions. Almost every time, an unspeakable heartbreak ripples out into lots of lives. And, beyond that, there is always disillusionment, scorn, and the loss of trust that accompanies such sin. Sins of the flesh are destructive and usually result in a DNF.

As much as I dislike the term moral failure, I am going to stick with it in this essay. And I’m going to stipulate right here at the top that moral failure is inexcusable, destructive, shameful, a matter of disgrace, downright sinful(!). Of this most of us will agree.

Of all the things I have written for Leadership, this is the most difficult-a subject I would like to have avoided-because I know too much. I was once guilty of moral failure (years ago), and, along with my wife, I have talked to too many others as well. I can tell you that the issue and its causes and solutions cannot be adequately addressed in a matter of a few thousand words. One can only scratch the surface. Every situation is unique; every situation has to be dealt with differently.

Prevailing temptations

Years ago when I lived in New York City and pastored a church heavily populated by people in the financial world, I came to realize that greed was a major theme among those who handle money. Money: there was never enough of it, and some bent all the rules to get more.

When I had the opportunity to mix it up in Washington D.C. with so-called politicians, I saw that power was a similar problem. There is never enough power in Washington, and many lust after it and will cut corners to gain it.

Having lived in New England for a large part of my adult life, I’ve also seen something of the sins of intellectual arrogance. The brilliant folks of the Ivy League world may not always be the richest (wealth) or the most powerful (politics), but they can be among the most prideful. Brutally so. And you know what St. Paul said about the corrosive effects of knowledge.

My point? What money is to the financial folks, and power is to political people, and knowledge is to intellectuals, intimacy-deep connections with people-is to those of us who are in the people-care business (pastors, spiritual directors, therapists, psychologists, counselors).

A preponderant percentage of those of us drawn to pastoral leadership have a higher-than-normal urge to engage with other people. We love to get below the surface of people’s exterior lives: to understand their dreams and their burdens, to urge them on to higher possibilities, to sympathize with their feelings and fears, to show them grace and mercy when they fail. The word close is operational here.

When we gets this “up-close-and-personal” with people, we come within sight of behaviors that cross the boundary into the inappropriate. The so-called temptations of the flesh become prominent under such circumstances and among people who operate in a world of intimacies.

This is not a problem if those in leadership are mature, balanced, self-aware, humble, sin-sensitive people who live in healthy and open accountability. But whoever said that these things would be true of all of us?

In ministry we are often given privileges and liberties that are nice but dangerous. We are given responsibilities that carry influence, power, and invite adulation in that small social set called the congregation (or subsets of it). People give us respect and attention in ways they give to few others. They form a fantasy about who we are: godly, spiritually mature, compassionate, sensitive, nearly perfect. Oh, and it should be said, they often abandon these perspectives sooner or later and can drop us with a thud.

Unless a leader is very (very!) careful, this can become an environment that distorts reality and engenders confusions of mind and heart in any number of ways. It accentuates loneliness, for example. Who are my real friends? the leader asks. Why do I feel as if everyone owns a piece of me and there is nothing left for myself? Who really knows the real me? Who is there that doesn’t want something from me? Why do I always have to worry about what others think?

Such thoughts intensify if the leader feels seriously misunderstood or unappreciated. Take it a step further if the leader feels unappreciated, disrespected, or misunderstood in his/her home and marriage.

The unreal environment is not helped by the tendency for there to be a contrived intimacy in human relations in a church. It can be a place where we share our secrets in the guise of prayer requests or counseling. It is easy for strangers to touch (“let’s form a prayer circle and hold hands”), to say things to each other without the benefit of months or years of the normal growth of friendship. We praise and thank one another (call it affirmation) and do so in ways that can easily invite the crossing of boundaries in personal relationship that are not normally done in the larger world. These are all ways for leaders and followers to, as we say, get the wrong idea about the intentions of another.

It is not a far distance from a prayer circle to a cup of coffee for two where the crossing into impropriety begins. Suddenly someone feels understood, feels appreciated, feels admired in ways that are not happening in more appropriate relationships or settings. Note the emphasis upon the word feels. You hear stories that begin with words like these: “We jogged together at the park”; “she was helping me develop my PowerPoint presentations”; “he was repairing our furnace.”

In short-and I mean no disrespect-the church with its emphasis on getting transparent, vulnerable, and authentic, can easily be a seedbed for moral failure, especially for leaders. Better to overstate this than understate the possibility.

From intimacy to sex

If most pastors have a greater instinct for intimate connections with people, then it does not surprise me that some (mostly male) will be attracted to various pornographic exposures in which intimacy is simulated and where there is-for a brief period of time-a sense of the kind of inner satisfaction that genuine intimacy is supposed to produce.

Just as alcohol or drugs can produce a pseudo-sense of well-being, of personal freedom, of pain-freeness for a short while, so pornography is capable of offering a momentary high not dissimilar to that experienced when there is genuine intimacy between two lovers.

The insidious nature of pornography, as almost everyone knows, is that it is a private event in most cases, capable of being carried out in secrecy. It is exposed only when one is surprised in the act, or when the person becomes so overcome by guilt that he feels compelled to confess it and seek help. But by this time the problem has reached addictive proportions, and dealing with it becomes very difficult.

Others in ministry have reached the DNF column not through pornography but by engaging in relationships that violate the terms of marriage or biblical standards of propriety.

Enmeshment describes something I fear happens more than anyone could ever realize. The word describes a connection between two people (unmarried or not married to each other) who work together in ministry and become dependent upon one another for emotional support. The nature of their activities (leader and assistant; ministry teammates; leader and volunteer; pastor and counselee) leads to levels of conversation and teamwork that puncture the healthy boundaries that normally separate us from one another.

Again, this possibility is accentuated if one or both parties have unstable relationships at home: an untended marriage that has lost its focus, or where there is a failure of mutual support. I often hear my wife, Gail, say that it is human to move toward the strokes, those places and people where the greatest encouragement, the greatest sense of understanding can be found.

I’ve talked to too many men in ministry who have morally failed, who have said to me, “I never got into this relationship with the intention of sexual activity. I simply found the friendship of this person to be more satisfying than what I was finding with my spouse.” The sexual part came afterward . like a trap that was sprung from within the human heart. It doesn’t start with sexual activity; it starts with something else that seems quite innocent.

Consider another dimension in the well-rehearsed story of David and Bathsheba. Like many who ascend to leadership positions, David, as king, might have gradually begun to live above the rules that others are expected to follow. The responsibilities and pressures of leadership often do a job on the mind of the leader. One slowly convinces himself or herself that there are privileges and freedoms that should be given (if not seized) because “I am so valuable to this organization and its work.”

At first the privileges are defended in that they make leadership life easier or more effective. A private parking space seems a good example: it’s time-saving, leader-honoring, a perk of the work, a symbol of one’s authority. A larger office, a private bathroom, more vacation time? All very defensible for those leading larger organizations and churches, but it can become an elixir of perceived indispensability.

All of this begins to erode the soul’s vigilance and tempts a leader to set aside moral rules and boundaries (perhaps just once, the self-deceiving mind says). The abilities of our minds to engage in self-justification are amazing, frightening.

In the aftermath of his sin, David appears to be oblivious of the seriousness of what has happened with Bathsheba. He goes on running the country as if nothing untoward has happened. Her husband a problem? Find a way to cover things up-even if it means his death. When confronted by Nathan, it is clear that David cannot, at first, face the truth. It must be put into story form so that he can get it on his own.

How often it is said that leadership is lonely. There is truth to this, of course, but if it is lonely, it may indeed be the leader’s fault. While a leader may bear some unique responsibilities, part of a leader’s job is to build in appropriate amounts of time for the pursuit of family/marital priorities and for enjoying some same-gender personal friendships.

I need to raise the matter of a leader’s marriage again. It is not unusual for a leader to experience distance between him (here I use male terminology with apologies) and his spouse. It can be an intellectual distance as he grows in different ways than she does. It can be a distance created when he invests more time and energy in his work and she (for various reasons) less. The distance can be one of adulation where he is more and more praised for success and she begins to drop into the shadows of his private life.

At the same time, others of the opposite gender may come closer to him because they are more closely aligned in the work side of his life. A new kind of “togetherness” occurs because they share prime time hours where one is at his or her supreme points of competence, where the intoxication of vision and accomplishment is shared. New, perhaps unhealthy, sinews of relationship are formed at just the same time as the original sinews of a marital relationship are weakening. The possible results are not hard to imagine.

The internal war

I find it hard to put into clinical words what I intuit. Simply put, I am not confident that many young men and women entering public ministry with all of its privilege and demands are emotionally (and spiritually?) ready to face the subtleties of human relationships on their darker side.

I am not sure that many midlife men and women appreciate all the pressures bearing down on them that make it easy to seek illicit ways to anesthetize the growing discomfort within. Saying good-bye to children, adjusting to a now childless marriage, caring for aging parents, facing the inexorable aging process with its health issues: pressure, pressure, pressure! For the less vigilant, escape into something simpler, more exciting, seemingly more fun can be exceedingly attractive.

The pastoral task-relative to many other jobs-is not submitted to adequate systems of accountability. In a sense we send men and women out to do a job that is not unlike sending soldiers into battle. Just as there was a scandal in the Iraq war of soldiers having inadequate armor, so the armor of many in ministry is inadequate.

We do not respect the darkness of the human heart in such a way that we believe the finest and best of our leaders could-overnight-capitulate to temptations that they themselves once thought powerless.

In my book Rebuilding Your Broken World, I told the story of a man I met at a conference. I could tell he was trying to create conversation as he asked: “How do you think Satan could blow you out of the water?” I was a younger man at the time and had no quick answer. So I said, “I’m not sure I know, but I am confident that he could never get at me by undermining my personal relationships.” I could hardly have said a more foolish thing. A few years later, I was a potential DNF, and it was reasonable to ask if I would ever “race” again. Why? For a moment I had failed in the one human relationship most important to me.

As pastoral life grows more intense with greater demands and expectations, I do not believe the so-called moral failures of leaders will subside. I fear they will increase, and we will hear of more good leaders with DNF by their names. Just saying this makes me sad.

Perhaps these changes could stem the tide:

1. Let’s stop beating around the bush about moral temptations and talk about them in the same way a commanding officer talks about the dangers of going into battle. The officer does not assume that anyone is exempt from taking a bullet. So all are forewarned.

2. Let’s require that every man and woman in Christian leadership belong to a peer-oriented group that creates covenants of behavior such as no casual dining with a member of the opposite sex, no travel of any kind with a colleagues of the opposite sex, no team relationships unless three or more people are involved.

3. Let’s make sure every pastor and spouse has a mentoring couple who keeps an inquiring eye upon family and marital life and steps in if they believe that systems of healthy relationships are breaking down.

4. Let’s be more honest about the high-risk effects of ministry in large churches: what happens to marriages, mental and emotional health, spiritual vitality. We’re doing great in teaching about vision-casting, outreach, management, and leadership. But-I’ll be as blunt as I can-we are failing miserably to help young men and women form the necessary soul-power to undergird those efforts.

In our contemporary Christian culture, let’s frankly admit the fact that we are-most of us-starved for healthy intimacy at every level and, when we do not experience it, are likely to turn toward the sexual to find it. We need to surface this, find ways to identify the drives and desire and then talk about how to prevent it.

DNF: did not finish. Among the saddest of all epitaphs for a leader. Moral failure: among the most serious and tragic of the reasons. You’d think we’d talk more about this and what can be done to prevent it.