Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, several families I know have adopted children from Eastern Europe. As they grow, some of these children exhibit a set of extremely troubling symptoms: hostility, inability to form close relationships, and distrust of people, particularly authority figures. These children can become self-destructive, highly sensitive to rejection and anger, and blame everyone close to them for the problems in their lives.
Paradoxically, they often idealize their relationships initially and become preoccupied with them, so that they desire large amounts of contact and affection. However, break-ups are rapid, climactic, and destructive, and soon after one relationship ends, they begin to obsess about filling the vacuum with another. Psychologists call this syndrome Attachment Disorder (or AD).
In my consulting work, I interact with certain churches that exhibit the same sets of issues with love and authority as AD children. I call them Attachment Disorder churches.
Like AD children, AD churches are made, not born. They have been abandoned somehow, either physically, emotionally, or both. Attachment Disorder, in both children and churches, makes love and authority relationships incredibly challenging. Fortunately, God offers ways of healing the unique pain they carry.
A church’s detachment
One AD church I worked with recently had an awesome history. They had sent close to seventy missionaries overseas and placed several leaders into key positions in their denomination. For many decades they experienced spiritual health and blessing.
Then about 25 years ago, they called a pastor whose wife had just undergone a radical mastectomy. Her cancer went into remission, and for three years this pastor labored faithfully with this flock. Then the cancer returned. As his wife grew sicker, the congregation supported both her and him, visiting, bringing meals, and giving him time off as needed. The pastor came to believe that God was going to heal his wife completely. He preached confidently that he was neither anxious nor worried about what was happening because God had told him she would be healed.
He maintained his “stance of faith,” and the church continued to provide care and support of all kinds, as she wasted away. Then suddenly, she died. The pastor and his church were devastated. He could not preach the Sunday after her funeral, which was understandable. But that very afternoon, he handed his resignation to the chairman of the church board.
“I cannot do this anymore!” he said. He would not be dissuaded from resigning. This broken-hearted, grieving man left the church and the ministry, bitterly disappointed with God and unable to serve him thereafter.
Churches with AD say they want a shepherd to lead them but remain completely resistant.
The church body had been deeply vested in this couple. Then, in the moment of crisis, and despite their attempts to reach out to him, this shepherd abandoned his flock, just at the time they needed each other the most. And the church bore scars for years.
Like the pastor in this account, the parents of AD children are often in such deep emotional pain that they have nothing left to give their infants. In other words, the point is not to blame the shepherd. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that for a flock to be abandoned by its shepherd at such a moment has significant repercussions. Jesus gives us a hint of them when he says: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep” (John 10:11-13).
While his actions were understandable, this devastated pastor left his grieving flock scattered. Once the dust cleared and a sense of normalcy returned, this church began to exhibit some unhealthy traits.
It did not help that the next pastor repeated the pattern. He led them through a building program and a move to a new location and, within a month of the move, packed up and left. Another case of abandonment.
With two such desertions at critical times, this formerly great church began to see and treat its pastors as “hired hands.” It even got the reputation within the denomination as a “pastor killer,” refusing to love and support any of its pastors! It no longer trusted leaders and, as a result, resisted their attempts to lead. With every pastor who departed, the syndrome was reinforced: “See! We were right. These men cannot be trusted!”
Diagnosing the disorder
It used to be that churches trusted pastors unless something such as moral failure or spiritual abuse broke that trust. Today, though, when the average length of a pastor’s ministry in some churches is less than three years, the factor that prompts to churches to become “hard to lead” is a situation of abandonment at a crucial juncture.
What is a “crucial juncture”? A wolf on the horizon (some significant event with potential negative consequences for the church) that causes the pastor to flee. It can be a conflict or a challenge to his leadership. It could be corporate anxiety caused by a drop in giving, decreased attendance, a move, or a building program.
If you are in a church that is difficult to lead, but you have never heard about a moral failure or spiritual abuse from a previous pastoral administration, you might be involved with an AD church.
Attachment Disorder churches share several common symptoms.
1. A time of splintering or scattering. In one church I was consulting with, the founding pastor had established a “papal model” of pastoral leadership. The church had grown and thrived under his benevolent dictatorship for many years, but the lay leadership remained untrained, untested, and, therefore, weak.
A crisis moment came when the pastor was challenged by an associate staff member, and he looked to his lay leaders for strong support. They just looked back at him passively as they had always done, and at that moment he felt deserted and unsupported.
Broken-hearted, he left the church and the church reeled. Another associate used Jesus’ words from John 10 to describe the effect. “The congregation splintered and scattered when he left. It was horrible.”
2. Resistance to your voice as pastor. Jesus describes a healthy shepherding relationship when he says, “My sheep hear my voice.” And they don’t just hear the sound; they respond to it. A key indicator of AD, then, is a lack of responsiveness to vocal direction.
One pastor described his experience in an AD church as “preaching to a wall.” This resistance can manifest itself in both active and passive ways. Actively, people can become very critical of the pastor’s preaching. Because they think of him or her as a hireling, they feel they have the right to tell the pastor both what and how to preach.
Passively, people will attend but simply sit in the pews, arms folded, unfazed by the word of God preached. No matter how passionate the preacher may become, he cannot motivate them to action.
3. A lack of closeness—or desire to know—the pastor. Jesus says of the good shepherd’s relationship to the sheep, simply, “I know them.” That knowledge becomes mutual as the sheep hear and respond to him. In most churches, there is always a small group that will connect with a pastor, even one that is there briefly. But in an AD church that is unwilling to get to know the pastor, misunderstandings abound.
The pastor finds that his motives, actions, and words become strangely misconstrued. Thus he often feels profound loneliness in his role.
A pastor of an AD church once told me that he hated Mondays because of the letters under his door and emails in his box, almost all of them critiquing aspects of his message.
“What I find amazing is how often they totally miss my point!” he explained. “They hear the exact opposite of what I intended. If they knew me at all, they’d know that I couldn’t possibly be saying what they think I am saying.”
4. Unwillingness to follow pastoral leadership. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice … and they follow me.” Churches tend to follow their shepherd when they trust him or her, but the opposite is likewise true. If they don’t trust the pastor, they won’t follow. The pastor may not see this until he attempts a leadership initiative that requires the congregation’s trust—something like changing the style of a service or moving to a new location.
5. A spirit of confusion, helplessness, and negativity. Jesus felt compassion for the people of his day because they were “distressed and downcast, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). This illustrates the paradoxical nature of the AD church: they have a shepherd and are often excited when he first arrives.
But because they can’t fully embrace him, they don’t feel like they have a shepherd at all. So they become distressed, confused, and downcast.
Hope for the AD church
Children may have wonderful adopted parents and still struggle with AD. Speaking of the Romanian child he and his wife adopted, a colleague told me, “We had so much love in our hearts that we naively thought, ‘Even if this little girl has been abused, broken, or neglected, our love will heal her!’ We were so wrong. We had no idea the level of resistance such children have to love and care.”
Likewise, AD churches desperately need shepherding and yet remain completely resistant. If you pastor such a church and are frustrated out of your gourd, step back and take a breath. Let the Spirit of the Good Shepherd fill you, and know he has not left you without the resources needed to love and minister to such congregations. Here are a few steps toward loving and healing such a congregation.
1. Find the hinge event(s).It is critical that you learn the history of your church. Chances are good that the situation you are facing has repeated itself in the history of your church, back to a turning point. Find this event and learn all you can about it. Talk to the key players who were there at the time and find out how the abandonment took place. This will equip you for the second step necessary to heal your church.
2. Practice identificational repentance.Identificational repentance is a concept John Dawson explains in his wonderful book, Healing America’s Wounds (Regal, 1994). Dawson says that it’s important to name the hurt that led to the current situation and to repent of it, even if you didn’t commit that offense personally. Because of your role as a leader, you can “identify” with the perpetrator of the abandonment by recognizing that you have done similar things in your own history. Your “confession” can be heart-felt, because you have abandoned people who needed you in the past, or let them down in some way. You may not have done so in this congregation, but “bailing out to save yourself” is in your heart.
Therefore you stand in the place of the one who abandoned the congregation in the past and, as a “similar sinner,” ask their forgiveness. A pastor who understands that congregations sometimes take issue with the role and not with the pastor personally can represent everyone who has held that role previously. People then can let go of the pain and forgive from the heart.
The effects of identificational repentance are powerful. Like Nehemiah who prayed, “I and my fathers have sinned,” pastors who exercise identificational repentance recognize that they are part of the problem, even if they didn’t personally commit the deed. This stance is key to becoming part of the solution. Rather than distancing yourself from the sin and pain, you can take it on yourself, as Jesus did, bearing it publicly before the congregation that they might be healed.
3. Stay!Commit to long-term ministry. Obviously this is the hardest part to sell to wounded and scarred pastors, yet it makes perfect sense. If the problem has been a reaction to abandonment, then part of the healing is to persevere long-term. How long is long enough? Long enough to lead the church through the healing process outlined above. In the end, you may find the atmosphere around you changing in a way that makes it much easier for you to stay. If nothing else, you will have made an honest effort at reconciliation before reassessing your decision to leave.
Churches are very aware of the signs of long-term commitment. I pastored a church that had two short-term pastors (both stayed less than two years) after the founding pastor had been there seventeen years. I did not realize how they felt about pastoral abandonment until I planted asparagus. The congregation, a farming and suburban community in Michigan, knew very well that asparagus takes three years to bear a crop. When they learned I had planted asparagus, they began to trust I was not going to be like the two previous pastors!
Attachment disorder churches can be a challenge, but God gives sensitive pastors the tools to turn things around.
Kenneth Quick is associate professor of practical theology at Capital Bible Seminary in Lanham, Maryland, and a consultant with BlessingPoint Ministries (blessingpoint.org).
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