Dryness as a Gift (or “did Jesus burn me out?)

Could it be that the spiritually dry seasons are not our fault, but God’s choice? I’m of the belief that man, in his own deluded selfishness, would never pursue God by his own volition. I believe salvation is a gift, and not something to be acquired. It seems logical, then, that nearness to God is also a gift. If we cannot earn salvation, how could we earn sanctification?

If God-experiences, profound insights, and holy moments of God’s presence are gifts, then we can claim no credit when they occur. Just as we cannot tease the sun to emerge from the eastern horizon, we cannot bait God. And the adverse is also true: dry seasons are not our fault. God is responsible for the harvest, we are only called to abide in Him (see John 15). If we are being faithful laborers and the season does not bring the sweet fruit of God’s holy presence, then it is a logical assumption that God is choosing to withhold His felt manifestation for a time, a dry season.

Burnout is often an indication that a ministry leader has fallen victim to Satan’s great lie: that we can earn anything with God. When we are dry, we pastors tend to work harder, study more, pray incessantly, and dive deeper into the disciplines of the faith. What if we faced the dryness instead of fleeing from it? If God is at work in the dryness then an act of worship would be an embracing of this season in honor of its Source. Our theology tells us that God is near, but He’s choosing to be cloaked; perhaps resting in the ambiguity instead of wishing it away will bring us peace.

“God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.” (Acts 17:27)

Selfishness and Burnout (or “I always take the biggest brownie”)

When looking through the linen closet, I always take the biggest, fluffiest towel. When taking a brownie, I always go for the coveted biggest middle one. When parking my car I always go for the best spot in the lot, sometimes strategically racing other vehicles to get there.

Selfishness is as much a human instinct as breathing, dreaming, or popping bubble wrap; to battle this default position is to declare war on our very nature. Still, Christ calls us to wage that war, even though He’s already achieved the victory.

Burnout is often blamed on the demands of the ministry world, but we would be foolish to discount our role in this malady, our selfishness is a major contributing factor. Scripture cautions us about thinking too highly of ourselves (Romans 12), yet we pastors are frequently consumed with perceived slights, recognition, people-pleasing, and getting what we believe we deserve. Certainly such sin propels us deeper into burnout.

If we want to escape or avoid burnout, we should take a good look at our own hearts.  And maybe leave the biggest brownie for someone else to enjoy.

Unspoken Expectations (or “when the should hits the fan”)

There are a number of unspoken expectations on a pastor, and, like most unspoken expectations, they are not fair.

Think of all the things many people believe their pastor should do:

• Preach every Sunday unless he is gone
• Visit the hospital for every person in the congregation, and their siblings, and their friends, and their sibling’s friend’s dog’s niece.
• Be available 24/7
• Live in a constant state of grace, understanding, patience, acceptance
• Not live in a state of grace, understanding, patience, and acceptance when it comes to certain sins
• Have a perfect family consisting of three well-adjusted children who have memorized the Psalms and a wife who plays piano.
• Be content. At $30,000 a year and no retirement. With $120,000 in student loans.
• Know the name of every person who crosses the threshold of the church, their kids’ names, their occupations, and their pets’ names.
• Lead singing and play guitar.
• Be able to tell them where “that one verse that goes something like” is.
• Drywall.

These unspoken expectations are a big steaming pile of should, and I step in it frequently. Unfortunately pastors do not find out they stepped in the should pile until enough of it has built up that it hits the fan and some congregant or another calls a meeting. Then the should really flies as a person hits the pastor with a long, sometimes well-documented, list of shoulds that the pastor failed to perform, none of which were in his job description.

Unspoken expectations ruin relationships and battle against authenticity as pastors are made to tread cautiously, not wanting to inadvertently make a mess. Pastors should work against this by leading with boldness and not out of fear, but their congregation can help by clearly communicating what is expected and accepting some responsibility when a pastor steps in a pile of should.

Beneficial Brokenness (or “why it is good to be burned out”)

The soul-shattering, heart-crushing initial moments of brokenness are the things of pastoral nightmares.  The ornate rug of pride (we call it acknowledgment of God’s blessings), self-righteousness (we call it discernment), and arrogance (we call it confidence) is pulled from beneath our well-polished Sunday shoes and we find ourselves on our backs, looking up at the ugly face of reality.  The world has an axis and in such moments we rediscover the uncomfortable reality that it is not us.  The impact leaves us breathless, stunned, hurting.

During such moments we feel hopelessly ruined, gravity has shifted and what was up will now be down for all of time.  The recovery does come, but slow.  And this is where we find truth  in the biblical paradox: last really is first, weak really is strong, broken really is whole.  The swift knock to our far too large heads brings clarity, the godly perspective: we really are not capable of anything by ourselves.  Our sin-soaked, self-seeking hearts are addicts of praise, we are glory thieves, we hoard what we were never intended to receive.  When we glimpse the divine perspective we are convicted, which leads to confession, which leads to repentance, which leads us to a place where we can worship “in spirit and in truth”, and when we worship we can truly minister properly.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss said, “It is a wonder what God can do with a broken heart, if He gets all the pieces”, and it is when we are on our knees after being put on our backs that we learn exactly how true her words are.  Being burned out means relying on God, and there is no substitute for such a powerful position of weakness.

Impenitence (or “people not hating sin”)

The impenitent heart is the calloused, barely beating, often scarred, rotting lump of flesh found in the chest cavity of those who have grown cold toward the Holy Spirit. To pastors, it is a black hole, a mysterious joy-sucking vortex found within far too many of his congregants. Impenitent hearts are people who have been taught truth, claim to believe that truth, but live indifferently to it. It’s the Sunday School teacher who can educate his or her 4th grade class about tithing, but their home budget doesn’t include the church. It’s the Youth Pastor who teaches purity two hours after viewing porn in the church office. It’s the church-goer who listens to a sermon about being the salt and light of the world then goes to work where not one person knows he or she even goes to church.

The byproducts of marrying knowledge with indifference are hypocrisy and judgmentalism. Niel Cole once stated that “we in the Western church are educated beyond our obedience.” How many pastors make this same observation every single week? Our congregations know truth, we teach it to them week after week, sermon after sermon, study after study, and yet where is the life change? Where are repentant hearts? Where are the called ones rising up?

When I discovered my students’ Twitter feeds it hit home for me: My students were hearing/memorizing/teaching God’s Word, but it’s impact was nowhere to be seen in the godless logs of their lives among the F-Bombs, OMGs, party pics, and cyber-bullying. I had to ask myself some difficult questions: How do I go about facilitating the transformation from impenitent hearts to repentant hearts? How much responsibility do I have for my students behavior? Do I call my students on their godless behavior? Can I start drinking now, too? What exactly is a S/O and a RT?

Still working on the answers.

Venomous Sheep Bites (or “people hurt pastors”)

Dwight L. Moody is credited with saying something like, “Ministry would be great if it weren’t for all the people”.  I’ve never heard the context of this quote, and I’ve seen it in various forms, but it’s been spread throughout the ministry subculture for a reason: People suck.  Some doctrines are discussed but never observed (think angels on the head of a pin), but the dogma of man’s inherent sin is readily visible in any church pew (or mirror, for that matter).

The fact is people tend to feel the liberty, even the invitation, to openly criticize their pastors at will and without regard for the impact their words may have. Favored critiques include comparisons to previous pastors, pastors of other churches, and pastors on TV’; quantities of humor, altar calls, mission trips, offerings, and sermons; length of messages, prayers, and their wife’s skirt; and how well the pastor cares for them, their children, their nieces, their great-aunt’s-friend’s-cousin’s-dog’s-lover.  The criticisms voiced openly are enough to advocate a lockable prayer closet, but it’s the criticisms spoken behind closed doors and learned of later that really tempt the pastor to dunk parishioners just a little longer than necessary during baptism services.

Gossip is a cancer, and harsh criticism is a sure way to demotivate even the tireless of pastors. Why do Christians tear one another down? Why do we tread on the servant-leaders God Himself has assigned as our authority? Pastors all over the world are being burned out, exhausted, and discouraged by the words of those they sacrifice so much to serve.  Matthew recorded Jesus’ teaching on the appropriate approach to conflict, I think maybe we should go with Jesus on this one. If you’ve got a problem with your pastor, maybe you should give him a call.

The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back (or “twitter broke my heart”)

It begins with a monster disguised as a little bird. I’d made my obligatory Twitter account a couple of years ago, but at some prompting or another decided it was time to take it for a test flight. Three hours later I was down in flames. The public profiles of my students revealed their keen ability to communicate bitterness, hatred, vileness, and immorality in a never-ending barrage, each one efficient to 140 characters or fewer. Each post left me deeper in despair. This is no overstatement, I was moved to tears, an anomaly, as I soaked in their bile.

I was just coming off a seemingly powerful weekend youth retreat, one of those “mountaintop” getaways described in such impressively exaggerated summaries: “God really showed up!” “The students were moved!” “Life-changing!”  In Youth Pastor currency I was a very wealthy man; certainly Pride and Ego, those ever-hungry beggars of the mind, were momentarily sated. Oh, the good I thought I had accomplished.

Then the little bird, that logo of the site of hatred, the dump site, where my students had been publicly displaying their projected selves while I was blissfully ignorant and thinking myself effective, tool of God.  Tool, alright.

I read for three hours.  I looked up weeks when I knew we were on some big youth trip.  I studied.  I searched.  Eventually I became desperate to see one tweet, one casual side comment, one single mention of truth, wisdom, love, purity, godliness… all the things I thought I had been effectively teaching!  They certainly mentioned God, but in acronym form and certainly not honoring, especially when my Student Leaders had room to employ the ‘F’ character.  One student had retweeted a few Bible verses (one student out of many, we are a somewhat larger youth group, though not huge), but none of her self-written posts mentioned God with anything resembling honor.  Soon my students noticed I was ‘following’ their posts and began to block me, some before I even got to their profiles.

My heart sank, shriveled, and partly died.  Some would say I took it too seriously, kids will be kids, and teens will be monsters, but this was my life! I was ten years into ministry, and by modern evangelical standards I was a success! My identity was wrapped into this ministry, I had sacrificed so much time, so much effort! What had ministry already cost my family? And I had thought things were going so well!  Just a week earlier I had written my annual report, declaring the youth ministry to be healthy, growing, and effective. Everything I thought I was accomplishing, all that I thought God has blessed and touched through me, was false. We are known by (identified by, judged by) our fruits, and my garden was full of manure and weeds wrapped in falsehood, like rotten pumpkins.

I prayed.  I vented, then humbled myself as recently read words came to heart. Ann Voskamp’s book was my judge/guide: There is God in it, there is something here to be thankful for, God is at work even in this. I cried to God, I pleaded for eyes to see His fingerprints even in this, the realization of my failure. I’ve just lighted on the pile I’ve received from God in response to this prayer, this blog will be my searching through, cataloging, marveling at the pile.