To My Pastor Friend in Pain,
Galatians 6:2 – Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
Every pastor I know has wounds. I’m going to openly talk about five of mine. You have wounds too. Do you know what they are?
If we are honest, we don’t talk about them much. Similar to the way veterans often don’t talk about the internal wounds that linger from years of battle, pastors often carry wounds that most people know nothing about. By the way, PTSD for pastors is a real thing.
Quick story, but I think it helps us understand how traumatic wounds linger. Growing up, I used to pick up lizards, frogs, snakes, etc. What can I say? I was a boy. Several years back, while on vacation with my family, I picked up a lizard by its tail and it bit the heck out of me. Stung for days. Now, anytime I’m tempted to reach for a lizard or snake, the pain comes right back to me. The wound lingers in my mind. For at least a few seconds, I’m paralyzed. And because the wound lingers, it changes my behavior. We can debate all we want about whether that’s beneficial to me in this case. But it’s clear, my wounds change me, and my wounds change my behavior. The question is not whether the wound changes me but how the wound changes me. Is it for better, for worse, or both?
As Richard Rohr has said – “If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it – usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.”
Here are five of my wounds that I bet you struggle with too.
1. The Failure Wound – “When My Self-Inflicted Expectations of Bigger Do Not Equal Better”
When I began ministry, I was taught that healthy churches grow, and healthy leaders grow healthy churches. This ingrained in me a “bigger is better” mindset that much of our culture already believes without giving thought to its implications.
Over the years, I’ve served in larger churches and smaller churches. The rural church, the inner-city church, and the suburban church. Church plants and neighborhood churches.
Studies estimate there are between 1,500 and 2,000 megachurches in the USA depending the definition of “mega.” Almost all these megachurches exist within larger cities and suburbs. Other studies estimate there are nearly 400,000 churches in the United States. That number is shrinking. If you’re a pastor, that means there’s a far less than 1% chance you will ever serve one of these “mega” churches.
If I’m convinced that I need to serve a bigger church to feel successful, I’ll always wrestle with “when the church is big enough.” And I’ll wrestle with “chasing bigger opportunities.” Yes, we need to reach more people for Christ. But let’s be honest. Some of the time, what we’re chasing is an ever-elusive feeling of success that never comes. When warp our calling when we understand success and failure in terms of church size.
When I read God’s evaluation of pastors and churches in Revelation 2-3, I read about a lot of factors that drive whether a church is faithful to Jesus. Size and success are not among them.
2. The Loss of Trust Wound – “When I Don’t Know Who I Can Trust”
Pastors care for people. No matter the size of a church, we care for lots of people. Not just people in our churches, but people in our neighborhoods and people on our kid’s sports teams. Because of this, we experience more grief than the average person.
Last year, I read a post that said that “most people lose 5 to 7 significant relationships over the course of their lifetime, but most pastors lose 5 to 7 significant relationships over the course of a year.”
Pastors also experience a specific kind of loss that leaves a sting. People who at one time or another said, “I am with you,” and then all of a sudden they weren’t. I don’t mean that people always have to agree with us. If we think that, we have an ego problem. More on that shortly. But we often make difficult decisions, and sometimes when people disagree, they walk away. Sometimes, they don’t even talk to us about it. They just disappear. This leaves a wound and makes it much harder to trust next time.
In other cases, we’ve experienced a situation where a person told us one thing to our face and said another to others behind our back. Or maybe after church one Sunday, we were blasted by someone for not preaching enough of “their politics.” This breaking of trust leads to an ever-compounding struggle to trust again.
Every pastor I know struggles at some level or another with trust. If we don’t find ways to heal our trust wounds and work to trust again, we’ll find ourselves paralyzed, then hardening our hearts, then becoming the “I’ll never be that way” kind of pastor we railed about when we were younger.
You will either face your wounds or you won’t. But either way, your wounds change your life.
3. The Fraud Wound – “When My Family Experiences Me At My Worst”
We often talk about how churches tend to have great expectations of their pastor. Likewise, those of us who spend a lot of time in front of others can sometimes get more caught up with our image than with our real character. That’s never healthy.
Let’s be honest though. Pastors aren’t perfect. That’s no excuse for some of the character flaws we are seeing with increasing frequency in pastor’s lives. And “I’m not perfect” is no justification for adultery or abuse.
Still, when pastors go home for the day, our families sometimes experience us at their worst. Our most exhausted moments and our moments where we feel most like giving up. The dissonance created between our interactions at home and our interactions at church can sometimes leave us feeling like a fraud.
For this reason, it’s important that pastors admit they are flawed. It’s important that the people we lead know that we are human beings who struggle with doubt, temptation, pride, and sin. It’s equally important that our families experience our honesty, vulnerability, and repentance as well as our best qualities. Some of us have fallen into the trap of giving all our good energy to the church and leaving the leftovers for our families.
4. The Ego Wound – “When Pride and Insecurity Come Knocking on My Door”
Pastors spend our lives in front of other people. After a while, it becomes somewhat normal. Just as public speaking can become normal, so can tying our feelings about ourselves to crowd size, people pleasing, goal achievement, success or failure, and so much more that isn’t healthy for our soul.
We’ve probably all met pastors who are prideful. Likewise, we’ve all met pastors who struggle with pride’s twin – insecurity. In fact, we all do whether we know it or not. If I say – “I don’t struggle with insecurity,” I might think I am fooling others, but I am only fooling myself.
There are plenty of places where our ego and insecurity show up as we lead others. Reaching people with the gospel is the mission. But it can be hard to separate the exhortation to reach more people from the human ego of preferring bigger crowds. That’s one of the reasons that many of us wrestled so much with our churches shrinking over the last 5 years. It has left us feeling like we are doing something wrong.
The reality is that all of our other wounds impact our ego wound. When the crowd shrinks . . . when a wise leader disagrees . . . when our spouse calls us out for rude behavior . . . can we be honest enough to admit our sins, admit our flaws, accept our limitations, and turn to Jesus in our weakness? Can we choose humility when we would rather not?
5. The Hidden Wound – “When I Don’t Want Anyone Else to Know”
The most overpowering wounds tend to be the wounds that remain hidden. When wounds are intentionally kept hidden, they gain an almost Godzilla-like power over us. Wounds rooted in shame. Wounds that create a fear to tell anyone for fear of what we might lose. Wounds that hurt in secret, but we pretend don’t exist in public.
Our hidden wounds cascade from one into another much like waterfalls. And as they grow, the sound of our blind spots and character flaws grows louder and more deafening to no one else but us. The longer they remain hidden, the more deafening they become.
You and I are not immune to the struggle with sin, pride, ego, or shame any more than anyone else in this world.
I mentioned earlier that we seem to be having a character crisis among pastors. I believe with all my heart that it happens because we tell ourselves . . . no one will understand . . . there is no one I can trust . . . no one will know. Isolation erodes character, allowing us to believe one small illusion at a time. Soon, we find ourselves so deep in sin and shame that we hide everything from everyone. And we think that because we can hide so much from so many people, including those who love us most, that maybe we can hide our sins from God. We conclude that we can go on leading as long as no one knows. Secretly, we’re haunted by this reality.
Thankfully, we cannot hide from God. And it’s a good thing He seeks after us when we do. Something He has been doing since . . . Genesis.
What Should or Could We Do about our Wounds?
- Perhaps I need to reset my expectations and find my identity in who Jesus says I am.
- Perhaps I need to learn to forgive and embrace the people I serve today, refusing to hold hostage the people I now serve because of what someone did to me in the past.
- Perhaps I need to learn to live authentically and vulnerably with family letting them become the most important people I serve.
- Perhaps I need to re-familiarize myself with the phrases: “I don’t know” and “I was wrong.”
- Perhaps I need to learn to practice strength in weakness and vulnerability.
- Perhaps I need to return to some basic ways of walking with Jesus through suffering.
- Perhaps I need to talk to someone with whom I hold nothing back. A friend. A spiritual director. A mentor. A counselor. Someone with whom I can be a sheep rather than a shepherd. Actually, I need a circle of people, and it might include all of the above.
If I can help in some way, please reach out. I’ve written extensively about the pains of life in ‘Letters to My Friends in Pain.’
Here’s a bit of the model I work from:
- Every single day of my life is a choice between pity and perseverance.
- I build my life on the best foundation when I lean into my identity as God’s loved child.
- My perspective about life is healthier when I lean into the goodness God provides even while in pain.
- I’m stronger when leaning on Jesus rather than leaning on myself.
- I’m more resilient in the connectedness of community.
- And I’m mentally tougher when I’m moving forward in healthy ways.
Your pastor friend with wounds,
Brian King
Pastor of Harvest Community Church – Eugene, Oregon
Author of Letters to My Friends in Pain