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One of John Mark Ministries’ gifts to the wider church is to offer two-day ‘This is Your Life’ retreats for pastors, leaders, and/or their spouses, and others.

See http://jmm.org.au/articles/8046.htm for some of the issues we talk about.

The following summary-letter followed a pastor’s recent retreat. It is being shared with his encouragement and approval. The name has been changed and some of his personal details have been omitted.

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Dear ‘John’,

It has been a privilege spending the last couple of days with you. The purpose of a John Mark Ministries ‘This is Your Life’ Retreat is to provide a concentrated time to think, pray and reflect upon one’s life and ministry. You have talked with me for 6+ hours and have been free to journal, read, write, sleep, walk – whatever, as an opportunity for you to listen to God. I’ve simply been the ‘prompter’: you’re ont he stage, and God is the audience (to use a metaphor from Kierkegaard). I have found you to be honest, sincere, and eager to explore the relevant aspects of your life in terms of the stress you have been experiencing recently. You came to this retreat feeling ‘on edge’ about yourself and your ministry, and indeed wondering if you were in for another ‘breakdown’ like the one suffered some years ago which propelled you out of pastoral ministry for a time.

I believe you’re in good health and in good heart and in good spirits. However, you present with some of the classical symptoms of the modern malaise we have come to call ‘ministry burnout’. Recently you have felt somewhat depressed, anxious, and have felt that others’ expectations of you were not being met. You were trying to juggle too many issues at once. Some suggestions:

# We begin with the most significant psychological paradigm of the last twenty years: the ‘deep psychic wound’ suffered by adult males who have not been properly initiated into manhood by the ‘elders of the tribe’. The books you have been reading – Robert Bly’s Iron John, Biddulph’s Manhood, the quotes in my book The Family – all confirm that post-industrial Western males try to prove their worth by ‘succeeding’ at their jobs. But doing better than (or as well as) our peers in a vocation may feed our ego but it doesn’t satisfy the thirst of our hearts for real, manly significance. Solution? Find some men, form a group, relate honestly to them, share your pain, and be frank about modern masculine seductions.

# So underneath the other issues in your life is a deep grief. Your father was weak/distant, your mother was strong/available: not a good recipe to produce a fully-developed strong-and-tender adult male in our culture. You admit you’re towards the ‘tender’ end of the tough-tender scale; you’re a ‘pleaser’ who has difficulty saying ‘no’ and is wounded by negative feedback from significant others. (A pastoral leader needs the heart of a deer and the hide of a rhinoceros!)

# But there’s another grief: the precious last-born son who was to have ‘wrapped-up’ your beautiful family is seriously handicapped and has to be cared for in an institution. The raw emotions you feel at the funerals you conduct may be an indication that you’re still carrying this other deep grief. These two pervasive griefs, I believe, have led to the periods of significant low-level depression you have experienced all your adult life.

# ‘Burnout’ in people-helpers is about two things: the mismatch between expectations and reality, and the disparity between emotional input and output. Eventually, we find ourselves ‘running on empty’. Burnout is about ‘helping too much’ (stress is about ‘doing too much’). The burned-out pastor has had a propensity towards the ‘redeemer/Messiah complex’ – needing to be needed/ liked…)

# The classical ‘pastoral lifestyle’ wisdom is all about boundaries: boundaries around your own devotional/private/spiritual life; boundaries around your family; and boundaries time-wise. The latter includes a day off every week (a sabbath is when from the moment you wake until the moment you go back to sleep you do nothing that reminds you of your vocation); four weeks’ holiday each year – in one batch; time each day for reflection (a pastor’s job is to spend half his/her ministry-life with God, half with people and the rest in administration! And half the people-time ought to be spent resourcing leaders). It is not a good idea to do any ‘ministry’ on your day off, nor to live in a manse next to the church building. The best day off for a preaching pastor is probably Thursday (when most of your Sunday’s sermon is already prepared) – never Monday!

# How does someone at mid-life re-form one’s masculinity? Only by getting together with other men in an honest, open, frank fellowship – regularly. Pastors, because of the emotional demands of their calling (and particularly if they are introverts), tend to be private people in their free time: they do not have enough emotional energy for close friendships. You have two close confidants: but we in the people-helping business also need ‘mentors/equippers’: they’re not thick on the ground, but you must do your best to find one.

# Above all, it is important to have a balance between emotional input and output. John Mallison (an Australian equipper in the area of small group ministries) and I have put together sixteen different ‘input’ aspects: God ministers to us through father (self-esteem/ manhood), mother (nurturing, unconditional love), Spiritual Director (monitoring our prayer, and our commitment to faith, hope and love), prayer partner (someone we can phone any time of the day or night to share our prayer-needs), mate (with whom we go fishing or to the football), friend (with whom we share on a more personal level), mentor (who helps with skill-development), supervisor (essential for accountability if we’re doing successive counseling sessions with people – or even if we only do ‘one-off’ counseling and refer those who need longer-term help to others), encourager (who gives us candid feedback and strengthens us), role model (who shows us how to develop life-skills), a small group (of men, in your case, where you can tell each other your stories), leadership ministry team (every church – even small ones – should have one), coach (who guides you in terms of decision-making, conflict resolution and other leadership skills), sponsor (who opens opportunities for some wider ministries occasionally), and teacher (who stretches our thinking and with the Holy Spirit’s help guides us into more of God’s truth for us).

# Final suggestion: have a few sessions with Dr….. , a Christian psychiatrist who is also a very good listener/interactive counselor. It would be good to have a parallel appraisal to this one from a secular helping discipline. He can monitor any anti-depressants you might need.

As they say in commencement addresses: God bless and good luck!

Your fellow-struggler,

(Rev. Dr.) Rowland Croucher

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