Why Pastors Like Me Burn Out

The first church I ever pastored on my own wasn’t very big. I was an Episcopal priest then; I’m a Catholic priest now. Back then, on a good Sunday we’d gather just over a hundred souls. Faithful, diverse, families of all kinds, folks of all kinds – in many ways it was an ideal parish. I knew them all, and they knew me. A community, in the sense that Wendell Berry uses the word: we were members one of another, bound to each other supernaturally and sacramentally as friends, as family, as church. It felt like a thing provided by nature: charismatic, messy, unmanaged, holy. God was in it, I think. It was a beautiful thing.

But it was also enough to kill a man. It was a lot of work: visiting parishioners, making sick calls, planning worship, writing and printing newsletters and worship aids, teaching, keeping peace in the flower ministry, overseeing a daycare, worrying about money, preaching. I loved all of it, but it added up. It was exhausting. Now I’m a Catholic priest caring for a much larger church; the scale of ministry is entirely different. These days I pastor a community of nearly five thousand registered families, thousands of them worshipping each Sunday. Our parochial school, with some eight hundred students, is one of the largest in the city. From teachers to youth ministers to musicians to the security, maintenance, and communications teams, we have over a hundred full-time employees. On any given weekday, the church’s campus becomes its own bustling little town. It is an enormous parish, a Catholic megachurch. I can’t even really compare it to my first little Episcopal parish; it’s apples and oranges. Except that, in some ways, my large Catholic parish is much easier to manage, many hands making lighter work.

Photograph by Aleksei Gorodenkov / Alamy Stock Photo.

I’ll never forget that first little church, though. It almost did me in. I was a young man, but I felt its weight, the burden of being alone, feeling I had to keep the whole thing afloat. It was the first time in my life I ever worried about myself. Not long out of seminary, having achieved what I had worked and prayed for, I observed acedia setting in. It frightened me. I was doing a good job, I think, but the work had become so much that I needed to open up. I needed rest, or some relief at least. I was a preacher of Sabbath rest, but I knew little of that rest myself. I needed to speak to the lay leaders in the parish, to share my love for them and for the ministry but also let them know how heavy it had become. I was stressed, trying to be there for everybody, trying to be a good husband, a good friend, a good priest. The way I put it to them was this: “I love what I’m doing. It’s fun, but I need help. I just worry that at this pace I’ll be dead at sixty. I really could use a little help.”

I will never forget the answer. Maybe my tone wasn’t quite right. Maybe they didn’t register what I was saying. Perhaps I could have said it better. Surely they didn’t intend to be so cold, so mean, to laugh. “Well, we’ll get a good thirty years out of you, anyway,” said one of them.

That was that meeting’s liturgy: The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We’ll get a good thirty years out of you, anyway. I still feel it: my blood pressure dropped, my ribs hummed like a tuning fork. I didn’t know how to answer, so I laughed with them laughing at me. It depresses me today, two decades later, just to remember that meeting. I wish I hadn’t said anything. It doesn’t feel good to write about it now. It changed me as a minister, as a Christian, and I still don’t know if it changed me for the better. Sometimes even today, when things get rough, I wonder if that’s how my people think of me, that they’ll just take what they can get while the getting’s good.

The reason I bring this up is to suggest that sometimes working for the church is hard, that sometimes the man or woman ministering to you is suffering, and that sometimes you should be gentle toward them. One of the last things the patron saint of parish priests, John Vianney, supposedly said is, “Ah! Sinners will kill the sinner!” He also tried to run away from his parish several times. He was holy, clearly a saint, venerated even as he lived, but he worked himself to death. A strange example, inspiring but frightening. As much as I revere him, I am glad I am not like the patron saint of parish priests.

What’s the difference between self-sacrifice and self-immolation? For those in professional ministry, it’s sometimes hard to make the distinction, what with Paul, who poured himself out as a libation, and all those martyrs and monks and missionaries valorized for their ascesis and death (Phil. 2:17; 2 Tim. 4:6). Christ’s sacrifice is the source and model of Christian ministry, which is what makes the work of ministry so complicated, so harrowing, so beautiful. Flourishing in ministry isn’t simply about striking a balance between life and work. It’s always about being open to a type of crucifixion. That’s the truth hidden in those cold words I heard early in my ministry: “Well, we’ll get a good thirty years out of you, anyway.” I mean, if I signed up for ministry, what right do I have to expect anything other than to be spent, and not necessarily in the way I would choose?

Here we come to the spiritual crucible of all Christian ministry, its cruciform tension, the cross at the center of church work. But this is true of other work too. In his 1981 papal encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II places the cross at the center of his “spirituality of work.” He writes, “The Christian finds in human work a small part of the cross of Christ and accepts it in the same spirit of redemption in which Christ accepted his cross for us.” But what does that mean? Must we simply accept that work may be a kind of crucifixion? Must we immediately cover with some sort of calming spiritual excuse the burdens and injustices that often come with work? That is, must we spiritualize exploitation, inhuman working conditions, unjust wages? I would hope not. Obviously, it’s insufficient, if not potentially masochistic, merely to point to the cross. That is, if the measure of the work of Christian ministry (or of any kind of work) is the cross, then we must take care to see the cross more deeply than by the lights of shallow spiritual analogies. For the cross, in fact, is first an instrument of torturous execution; it can indeed, if we’re not careful, be made into an instrument of spiritual torture. It takes faith and understanding to know that it has anything to do with the revelation of God or forgiveness or peace or rest.

It takes, in short, a theology of work, a theology John Paul II sketches briefly in Laborem exercens as follows: Created in God’s image, man and woman share in his work; in their stewardship of creation, they “reflect the very action of the creator of the universe.” Even in Eden, man and woman worked. Humans were created to work, but for work done purely in service of the fruitful goodness God saw in creation itself – as if by their work, God wanted his creatures to share in the same joy he knows in creation, to see, as he did, that “behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But  – we all know the story –this joy was renounced in sin. Sin disfigured sinless work. It turned work into the toil of selfish survival and scarcity, bringing about, as Saint Augustine puts it, “pain and grief, death and all the wear and tear of the world.” Our world, a world of work devoid of paradise, a world of pain and restlessness.

In God’s punishment of Adam, however, we come to be part of the plot of redemption, part of the long story of our return to Eden. It is the story by which we understand the gift and mercy of the Sabbath, that rest of the seventh day God blessed and wanted to share with his creation, and which later in the desert he commanded Israel to remember (Exod. 16:1–30). In the desert the Sabbath becomes, as Abraham Joshua Heschel calls it, a “palace in time,” a sign and moment of the rest God wants to give us. Thus, the Sabbath becomes an end, the goal of work and life, synonymous, Heschel said, with eternal life itself. The Sabbath is the closest thing on earth to the eternal joy and rest God intends for us. All labor, therefore, should lead to and serve that Sabbath rest. Hence the prophets’ cries for justice and the scorn they heap upon those who dare to celebrate the Sabbath while still preying upon the poor, because the Sabbath is meant to be a moment of rest as reconciliation, an inbreaking of original peace. That’s why the Sabbath demands what Karl Barth calls a “renouncing faith,” a renunciation of the temptation to work for one’s own glory (a temptation that often ends in violence and injustice).

The Sabbath is a mercy, the peace God still offers even after Eden’s ruin, a peace which, Christians believe, is Christ (Eph. 2:14). It’s a peace that is given to believers by way of Christ’s sacrifice, death, and resurrection. Jesus offers laborers who come to him rest, which he gives them by inviting them to share in his own renunciations – the renunciation his own will, obedient even unto death (Luke 22:42; Phil. 2:8) – and in the perfect Sabbath of his resurrection. Christians encounter this peace in the church, the body of Christ, in hearing the gospel and celebrating the sacraments. You could say this the reason the church exists. Hence Saint Augustine, in the City of God, says that Christians themselves will “become that seventh day.”

Here we come back to the subject of work. For the Christian, work is reordered to redemption and to the eternal Sabbath. Such work makes the world more nearly like the peace of the Sabbath, the original peace of Eden. From Isaiah and Ezekiel to the prophets of today, social justice has always been an inseparable part of honoring the Sabbath, because justice leading to Sabbath rest is the real purpose of work. That is, the purpose of work is not merely survival, or the maximization of profit, believing naively that invisible market forces will fairly order all the countervailing varieties of self-interest; rather, the purpose of work is to create conditions for the just flourishing of human society so that it may more readily receive the gift of the Sabbath. Such is the “glimmer of new life” that John Paul II talks about at the end of Laborem exercens. This is what all Christian work should be about.

Here finally, we can understand, in very broad terms, the work of Christian ministry and church work. Keeping the Sabbath and reverencing the sanctuary have always belonged together (Lev. 19:20; 26:2). That is, the point of the Sabbath is not merely secular; the point of the Sabbath is God’s redemption of Israel and the church, a thing accomplished ultimately in the worship of God. That is why an assembled congregation, a community that encounters the word of God and encounters that same God in mystery, is necessary. The Sabbath is in fact about more than justice or telling everyone to take it easy on themselves and their employees once a week. It is also about encountering the Christ who is peace and rest himself, eternal and passing all understanding. This is one reason we need the church and the work of ministry within the church. The church is the place where God’s real rest will first be found if it’s ever to be found at all.

This is the purpose of Christian ministry and church work. From the priest celebrating the Eucharist, to the preacher preaching, to the secretary answering the phone, to the youth minister walking with the adolescent, to the usher helping the newcomer, to the facilities crew keeping the lights on: all of it is for the sake of being a community in which Christ is visible and encounterable, in whom people may find at least a little rest on earth as it is in heaven, which may inspire them to love justice at least a little more than they would have otherwise, enough to make their work a little more moral, a little more beautiful. That’s what anyone who works in a church works for – for that peace which the world cannot give.

But what does any of this theology and spirituality of work do for the church worker worn out and on the verge of collapse? What does it do for the minister who finds himself or herself in the place I was in all those years ago, tiredly asking for empathy and help but finding none? Does it take away any pain? Does it relieve any stress? Does it remove the tensions and the burdens of working for the church? No, it doesn’t. But it does help us place our burdens within God’s great redeeming work. It helps us to remember the ministry that came before us and inspires us to be responsible for the sake of the ministry that will come after us.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to Pope Eugenius III, his former monk, a treatise that is, in its own medieval way, about the work of ministry. He reminds the pope that the prophets had not been able to clean all the ground, that they had left plenty of work undone for those following them to take up. He adds: “Nor will you prove equal to the whole task.” As a minister, I will never prove equal to the task and should rejoice nonetheless. Accepting that truth has given me peace – enough peace at least to be OK with giving my parish whatever God wants me to give it, be it another thirty years or another thirty days.

The good of any sort of theology or spirituality of ministry is simply to outline the circumstances of a minister’s self-offering. It’s to set such ministry within the work of God. That is why, after two decades of ministry – beautiful ministry that has not been excruciatingly hard at all but also not without inner trial and trauma – the best advice I can offer anyone considering such work is that you really should pray to God that he put you in a place where you’re willing to be spent and then simply allow it to happen. For no one is above the Master. The cross remains the measure.