“I am unleashed. I am sprinting.”
I wrote those words in my journal a little over a year after my divorce. They would soon come back to haunt me.
In my pastor’s “State of the Union” address, he went in to detail about how our church, New Heights, went with a much lower staff ratio than was typical of churches its size in order to give the money saved to missions.
While it sounded like a noble idea on the surface, I thought to myself as he spoke, “That comes with a cost.” I soon discovered that a part of that cost would be my emotional well-being.
My mentor at the time, John McDonald, in a conversation with me said, “New Heights is a seeker-friendly church. It attracts hurt people. And all beds are full.”
My time spent on the singles ministry quickly went from leading one small group to over 30 hours a week on top of my full-time grocery job. The pastor who oversaw the different ministries of the church was liberally giving out my phone number to the many singles in their thirties and forties who called the church expressing an interest in the church or its singles ministry, or who expressed a need for counseling. Ironically, the church made extensive efforts to protect the senior pastor from burnout, but made little or no effort to do the same for their lay ministers like myself.
During this time God put it on my heart to lead a worship service for the singles. I had not been playing my guitar much and was very rusty, so I was trying hard to limit my involvement beyond the guys group and the core team meetings. To my dismay, over the course of a week and a half I came home after work and found 2-3 messages each day from singles who expressed a need to spend time with me.
Not only was I being severely pressed for my time, but the meetings with the singles were usually intense in nature. One of the contacts shared with me that his estranged wife regularly called him right before having sex during her multiple affairs to tell him not to give up on her. He was so upset by the situation that on several occasions he had attempted suicide. I argued with him that he was putting himself at risk and needed to move on from her. He argued back that God had told the prophet Hosea to knowingly marry a prostitute, and that confirmed his decision to continue seeking reconciliation with his wife. Other singles that I was working with were also suicidal. Many were going through divorces, and some were victims of physical or sexual abuse during their childhoods.
When God created us He did not design us to constantly work without rest. He designed us with a need for regular rest to keep us from exhaustion. So He commanded a weekly day of rest to keep us from hitting a wall. I was beginning to feel the effects of my lack of rest. I was hitting a wall.
I was starting to feel so exhausted that my emotions were constantly on edge, giving me a continuous state of anxiety and a quickness to tears. At first I dismissed this, thinking that I was simply feeling God’s passion for those hurting singles. But the fragile emotional state was constant, going far beyond just my work with the singles.
During this time God put it on my mind to re-establish contact with an old seminary friend who I had not seen in nearly 20 years. I did not know why, but I knew that he was a director of a church planting ministry, so I started going to their meetings. At one of the meetings he shared with the group how one Sunday as he was leaving to preach at the church he pastored he stopped and said to himself, “Something’s not right. Something’s not right.” He then began to weep and could not stop. He had to call and cancel his preaching engagement, then went to bed, laying in a fetal position. He was bed-ridden for the next 5 weeks in a state of severe depression, and had to take the next year just to grow healthier.
Around this time I bumped into another pastor friend and briefly shared what I was experiencing. He listened, then said “It sounds like you need to read the book, ‘Margin,’ by Richard A. Swenson.” Swenson, a doctor, discusses the problem of overload in the areas of emotional energy, physical energy, time and finances. The solution, according to the book, is contentment, simplicity, balance and rest.
God also brought a friend and mentor in my life named John McDonald. He shared with me his wisdom from a lifetime of experience, especially in the areas of ministry and rest. He shared with me how he made a commitment to completely set aside one day a week to rest. He was also very active in the same church as I was, but did not go beyond his usual work hours and days. On one occasion he shared with me a paraphrased summary from one of Oswald Chamber’s books, “The need is not necessarily the call.”
In his restorative book, “The Rest of God,” Canadian pastor Mark Buchanan argues against a legalistic sabbath that develops a host of minutia that can not be done, or a minimalist sabbath that focuses on getting away with the least possible. He then boils sabbath down to two criteria: to cease from that which is necessary, and to embrace that which gives life. He illustrates these principles with a story in the life of his family. They were leaving on vacation the next morning and he was busily tying up the loose ends beforehand. One of those tasks was putting his two young daughters to bed. In the busyness of the moment they asked him to read them a story. He had no intention to, but they persisted. He caught himself, slowed down and walked over to their books and picked out one that they were way beyond, Dr. Seuss’s “Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?” They all hysterically laughed their way through the whole book, went to sleep, and in the morning mooed and giggled their way through their breakfast. Buchanan thought to himself that he had almost missed that precious moment. Instead, he had wisely chosen that which was not necessary but instead gave life.
During my ministry to the singles I had an eye-opening experience. During the height of my burnout, I tackled a yard work project one evening. I wanted to move a medium-sized maple tree from the middle of the lawn to the edge, in line with two other maple trees already in that line. I carefully cut the lawn away from the trunk of the tree, much like cutting along the segments of a halved grapefruit. I then rolled the lawn away from the trunk, dug the tree out, and dragged it over to its new location. I filled the dirt back into the hole where the tree had once been and rolled the lawn back over the bare dirt. All that was left was a small hole in the lawn where the trunk had been, which quickly filled in with grass.
It was physically demanding work and I went into the house dirty and spent, yet strangely refreshed. It was then that I realized that for me that night Sabbath did not mean refraining from all physical activity, such as sitting inside on my couch, but rather refraining from the emotionally-demanding and time-consuming activity of ministering to those hurting singles. Later one of the singles in the group, upon hearing of my demanding yard work, scolded me for not enlisting their help, but I knew in my heart that I had done the right thing.
I initially believed that the cause of my burnout was solely systemic, that it was because I was in a church which, in my opinion, had a dysfunctional leadership model, a flawed philosophy of ministry. Then I came across an article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology titled, “Clergy Burnout: An Integrative Approach,” by William N. Grosch and David C. Olsen. In it they argued that the cause of the prevalence of clergy burnout was two-fold. One body of research suggested that the clergy burnout was indeed the result of “external systemic factors such as bureaucracy, poor administrative support and difficult working conditions.” However, another body of research suggested that the clergy burnout was also “the result of intrapersonal factors such as high idealism, Type-A personality, narcissism, and perfectionism.”
After reading this article I realized that my burnout was due to both causes. Yes, it was caused in part by the church’s leadership model that relied heavily on lay leaders like myself to compensate for their lack of pastors. But I was also susceptible because of my tendencies towards idealism and perfectionism. I had strong ideas that ministry should be done thoroughly and wholeheartedly, and had a hard time giving it less than my best effort. And sometimes that best effort got me in trouble.
During the week that Randy Shaw talked about his burnout experience he gave out copies of a book titled, “Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership,” by Samuel D. Rima and Gary L. McIntosh. The book details five different potential dysfunctional behaviors in leaders that could hinder their leadership potential: compulsiveness, passive aggression, codependency, paranoia, and narcissism. As I first looked over the list I wondered to myself if I might have just a little of passive aggression in me. Instead I was hit between the eyes by a pattern of codependency in my life.
I discovered that I had played the role of a codependent in my marriage, enabling my wife to go far beyond either of our time resources by agreeing to take on more dogs than either of us could handle. And I had again been a codependent in my effort to compensate for my church’s lack in providing pastoral care to the needy singles in the group. Both situations became dysfunctional for me and took a heavy toll on me.
I followed up on that book’s brief treatment on codependency with a reading of the classic book on it, “Codependent No More,” by Melody Beattie. One thing that struck me was her comment that codependents had poor boundaries. Up until then I had considered boundary problems as an issue of not hearing, “No.” Beattie was correctly asserting that boundary problems could also be an issue of not saying, “No.” I found that I had a problem of not saying “No” when I needed to.
Eventually I concluded that the only way for me to get healthy again was to step down from my roles of leadership in the singles group, and to find a new church that was a healthier environment for me. I eventually landed in a newer church in Portland, Imago Dei, that had a much better balance between leaders and the members those leaders were responsible for. It took time, but I gradually returned to a healthier condition.
A few weeks after the holidays, Garry Friesen, a longtime teacher from Multnomah Bible College and elder at my new church, spoke at the church. He shared a personal experience from his second year at the school where, in the midst of his hard-driving efforts to excel as a new teacher, he developed health problems first with his stomach, and then with his eyes, to the point that he was unable to teach.
He sought the advice of two different physicians and was told by both that there was no physical explanation for the symptoms he was experiencing. But the second doctor was also a friend from his church, and knew Garry well enough to suspect that his symptoms were being caused by his excessive work habits. He told Garry that he didn’t think he would be able to continue in his teaching profession, but that if he changed his work habits his stomach would improve in about a day and his eyes in about a week.
Garry shared that he cried for about a day, then concluded that if he could cause the problems by his work habits, then he could reverse them by changing those habits. The symptoms cleared up within the times the doctor said they would. Over the years the symptoms returned from time to time, and serve as a reminder for him to slow down.
Similar to Garry Friesen’s experience, I learned that my journey was not the sprint that I had imagined. It was more like a marathon, and I needed to pace myself for the long haul. In his book, “Margin,” Dr. Swenson summed it up by saying, “Life is a journey, but it is not a race. Do yourself a favor and slow down.” I slowed down, and once again got healthy.