Our cover story this month is one minister’s experience of suffering a mental health problem related to his work and how he managed to get back on track.
This is not the first time we have addressed clergy health. Six years ago our award-winning cover story, Breaking the Silence, addressed the unhealthy state of many clergy in six Canadian denominations.
That was just a year after this month’s author, Matthew Ruttan, graduated from seminary.
The editorial commenting on the article quoted a Methodist pastor who had written this in The New York Times: “‘It’s a personality trait that accompanies the sense of divine calling,’ he said. ‘You’re feeding your need to be liked, your need to be valued, your need to be needed.'”
I noted that what the minister was describing is a co-dependency, where one person’s needs feed the other’s needs. It’s a common affliction of the clergy.
So, has anything changed? It seems not. The website pastorburnout.com carries some dismal statistics from the United States.
• 70% don’t have any close friends.
• 80% of pastors say they have insufficient time with their spouse.
• 80% believe that pastoral ministry affects their families negatively.
• 90% feel unqualified or poorly prepared for ministry.
• 90% work more than 50 hours a week.
• 94% feel under pressure to have a perfect family.
We have fewer congregational churches in Canada, so the percentages may be off somewhat, but there is no reason to think the results would be hugely different.
The background story is dismal, whatever the numbers are. Yet ordained ministry is not numbered among the most stressful jobs, which include firefighters, police and the military.
That does not excuse the church, because Christian churches claim to be focused on and supportive of families. The truth is, that may apply to all but the minister’s family.
I wonder if at the root of this problem is a lack of discernment and a lack of making time for discernment? Both personally and corporately, when do we take the time—and it takes considerable time—to discern what God is calling us to live into?
Clergy feel a pressure to do—to visit sick and infirm—and to think—to produce engaging sermons that answer life’s big questions, and programs to engage church members. But these pressures are rooted in needs, and can quickly devolve into the co-dependency mentioned above.
Discernment requires something different. It requires that we be still and silent. If we do not empty our minds of the clutter and stress of life, we don’t give God a chance to speak.
Until we are still, until as a denomination, as a presbytery, as a congregation and as individuals we take the time to stop thinking and doing and just be, how will we ever be able to hear what God is calling us to be in this life?
And until we are able to discern what God is calling us to be, we—personally or corporately—will be full of anxiety. We will be unhealthy.
And as long as the institution is unhealthy, its leaders will be unhealthy.
