Apparently my previous post on the pastor and self-care hit a nerve as I had several email responses from pastors and even a few laymen. This matter of self-care seems to be an issue for many of us. Here is what one pastor wrote in an email:
"I am so guilty! Why is it that taking time for myself is such a hard thing to do? Something is wrong with my personality make-up. I have four weeks vacation but last year I took two. Do I feel I have to justify myself or try to earn the respect of others? To somehow model hard work? How wrong can that be? Yet guilty am I."
The truth be known, many of us could write the same confession. I've read that pastors tend to be sicker and more stressed. As a group pastors tend to be overweight, exercise too little, have poor dietary habits, and increasingly under treatment for things like depression.
As my friend above laments, why is taking care of ourselves such a hard thing to do? What is wrong with us? In the hope of generating thought about the subject and perhaps some level of dialogue, let me offer several ideas of my own. Feel free to respond with a comment below if you have other insights or even wish to disagree. Here at least is my first stab at the subject as to why pastors as a group tend to do a poor job of self-care.
Why Pastors Often Fail at Self-Care
1. Pastors are givers. That is, most are by nature servants and generous with their time and energy. Pastoring is parental by nature and as so often happens with parents, they expend themselves in serving others.
2. Pastors tend to be people pleasers. They like to make people happy. In and of itself that is not a bad thing until it gets out of balance and even neurotic. Too easily one can be driven by the need to please.
3. Pastoral ministry is open-ended. That is, the pastor's job is never complete. There's always one more person who needs to be visited, one more lesson or sermon to prepare, or one more meeting or activity at which the pastor feels compelled to attend. And the larger the church, the more the demands for the pastor's time.
4. Pastor's have so few signs they are succeeding in their work. If you sell something, you can measure success by the number of sales and the income produced. If you build something, there is something you can see at the end of the day as a sign of progress. But when you are pouring your life into people and there are few visible or measurable signs of progress, the result can sometimes be that, like my friend above, to feel we must work harder to prove our worth.
5. People don't understand the work of the pastor. Until you've lived in the fish bowl of the parsonage, you can't understand what it's like to be constantly under scrutiny and evaluation. All pastors have heard the jokes about only working on Sunday and maybe Wednesday. While most are said in genuine good humor, there are those that comes with barbs disguised as humor. Pastors as a whole tend to be a pretty sensitive group of people so the result at times is that they feel they must work harder to prove to others they have a "real job."
6. Pastors have had few good role models in self-care. Many from the generation that were my mentors as a young pastor could not distinguish their love of God from their devotion to the church. It seemed to get muddled all together. The result was often fourteen hour work days six to seven days a week with meetings many of those nights. I remember arguing with one such minister of that generation as he proclaimed that Sunday couldn't be considered as a work day for the pastor. His reasoning was for the volunteers of the church it wasn't a work day. I argued back that for the church volunteer they also weren't there six or seven days a week. For the volunteer theirs was an act of service; for the pastor it is his job. The result of having few good role models is that we tend to do as our models have done just as we tend to parent as our parents have parented. Many of us have learned some bad habits as a result.
Are there other reasons you would add? Feel free to talk back and share with me and with the other readers your thoughts.
Randy Spence, Director of Ministries
