No one escapes the grip of personal insecurity. It’s part and parcel of life after the Fall. The problem comes when our personal insecurities significantly affect our behavior.
— Louis McBurney
Over twenty years ago, I pulled out of mainstream psychiatry to start a counseling retreat for pastors. I still attend psychiatry seminars, and invariably someone will ask, “What do you do?” When I attempt to describe my present calling, I receive a puzzled look. Then an awkward silence.
“Mmm,” the person says. “How nice.”
Other psychiatrists’ respect shouldn’t matter to me. But it does. I yearn for the approval of my peers. Intellectually I know my self-worth is established by God through what Christ did on the cross, that I’ve been created and redeemed by him. Yet it’s difficult resting in God’s unconditional love while holding down a job many people I admire don’t respect.
In working with pastors, I’ve learned this is a common feeling among them. There are lots of reasons for this.
The social fragmenting of our culture has heightened their insecurity. More and more I hear pastors say, “I don’t feel trained to cope with the things that confront me daily.” These things include the complications of blended families, sexual abuse, and marital breakup. It’s hard to feel good about what you do when you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing.
Furthermore, the media portray the average pastor as a balding fiftysomething with a reversed collar and a paunch; sometimes the reverend is benignly kind; sometimes he’s a hypocrite, but in any case, he’s hopelessly out of touch with the “real world.”
Nor do pastors get an emotional boost by comparing their work to other jobs requiring comparable education and having similar demands. Salaries seem painfully higher in law, in educational administration, and in business.
Finally, while our culture gives increasing status to specialists — pediatric ophthalmologists, nuclear medicine technicians, and bioelectrical engineers — pastors remain generalists. Like the family doctor, they seem to be a thing of the past. This is particularly unnerving for generalist pastors as they watch some churches become staffed with specialists.
Take Frank, for example, a “utility” pastor loaded with talent. He entered the playing field of Trinity Church. During his fifteen years there, he bounced from responsibility to responsibility, plugging in where needed. He was a generalist, and the church needed a generalist then.
His last five years at Trinity, however, the church exploded numerically. Increasingly the board was filled with leaders of industry, and Trinity was rapidly becoming a multi-staff church of specialists: a junior high pastor, a children’s pastor, a small group pastor. Suddenly, Frank was a dinosaur, a low-tech pastor in a high-tech church. An outside consultant hired by the board said Frank had to go, so Frank was terminated. In his place were hired four specialists.
A Tough Place to Work
Sometimes it’s not broad social forces that aggravate our selfdoubts but specific pastoral experiences. Unfortunately, the church can be a cruel place to work.
Dan, a pastor, felt good when he was courted by Long Valley Community Church for the second time. Nothing like a church approaching you to make you feel important. Though he had turned down the first offer, he was ready when the second came his way. He looked forward to pastoring a church that seemed to like him so much.
Soon after he arrived, however, dark clouds began clustering on the horizon. None of the church’s power brokers was on the search committee, and they were not happy with Dan’s innovative style (the reason the committee so vigorously pursued him). His attempt to rearrange the order of worship, for example, was met with stiff resistance. The typical grumbling turned into a roar: he was openly criticized at board meetings and in letters from members of the congregation.
Naturally, Dan began to doubt himself and his abilities. But rather than dealing with the criticism or facing his self-doubts, he simply withdrew. His office became a sanctuary. There he spent most of his days, studying for Sundays and programming the church computer. His relationships with the congregation grew colder and colder.
Determined to be heard, the opposition grew louder and louder. The disenfranchised part of the church elected to the elder board their turn-around man: a hard-nosed businessman “who would let the axe fall if needed.” The first item on his agenda: send Dan to Marble Retreat to “get fixed.”
When Dan arrived, his self-esteem sagged badly. As I alluded to in another chapter, when I learned of the dynamics surrounding his coming, I phoned the church chairman to satisfy myself that this wasn’t merely a prelude to Dan’s being fired, which is often the case. “If you expect Dan to get fixed instantly and come back a different person, you’ll be disappointed. If sending him here is only a token stab at resolving the issues so you can say you’ve done everything you could before you fire him, I need to know. Then we’ll spend the rest of his time here helping him work through the transition of leaving the church.”
“No, no,” the chairman replied. “All we want to do is help. He’s our main concern; he’s valuable to us. We wouldn’t make any decision about his leaving for at least another year.”
Two weeks after returning to his church, though, Dan was fired. If that wasn’t enough, the chairman then warned him that if Dan so much as breathed a word of his termination, never again would he pastor in that denomination.
You can imagine Dan’s psychological state at that point. Certainly, his is a worst-case scenario. But many pastors are treated cruelly by their churches, and that can have a devastating effect on their sense of self-respect.
The Face in the Mirror
Although the pummeling of the world and the church aggravate the problem of a pastor’s self-respect, I believe the main issues lie deeper. Our doubts about our calling and our feelings of inadequacy are rooted in a poor self-image.
But let’s face it: no one escapes the grip of personal insecurity. It’s part and parcel of life after the Fall. The problem comes when our personal insecurities significantly affect our behavior. Here are several indications of insecurity gone haywire.
1. Compromised integrity. Each of us holds to convictions that shape who we are. From time to time, we question those convictions. That’s all part of growing morally. But when we find ourselves wrestling time and again with basic issues, when we’re not sure what is right and what is wrong, when we’re afraid of making an ethical blunder but don’t know what exactly we should do — that’s when we should take a look at the issue of self-esteem.
For example, the male pastor who thinks he should caress the lonely divorcé to give her comfort is a confused pastor. He probably is lonely and unappreciated himself, and he has lost some ethical judgment in trying to compensate.
2. Inflexibility. When people don’t respect us, we’re tempted to make them respect us. So some pastors try to command respect by becoming more demanding. They overload their associates with work and then criticize them severely for not meeting deadlines. And they justify it by saying, “I’m no harder on others than I am on myself.”
At board meetings, they refuse to budge on issues, even minor ones. “I can’t let them push me around. If they won’t let me purchase a new word-processing program to prepare my sermons, they won’t respect me on vital issues.” Such pastors end up making major issues out of minor ones, which all become “symptomatic of deeper issues.”
3. Physical symptoms. When self-esteem sags deeply, it can show itself physically: panic attacks, insomnia, lack of appetite, depression. Almost any body system can be affected.
4. Drivenness. This is probably the most common symptom, the others often being aspects of this one.
For men in particular, the need to achieve, to invest tremendous energy into their work, is at least one part biological. Males are endowed with large amounts of testosterone, an anabolic chemical. The male body turns out large amounts of energy, which naturally gets channeled into work.
Striving to achieve outward success can be — but is not always — a symptom of deep-seated insecurity. A workaholic pastor may be attempting, say, to gain approval from his dead father who never affirmed him. Or he might be bolstering his weak self-image by being outwardly successful.
The driven person, rather than finding satisfaction in the work itself, needs a scorecard. He constantly compares himself with others. Rather than feeling satisfied and celebrating reaching a goal, he feels empty and guilty at what he has yet to accomplish.
A model for the way we should feel about our work comes from children. In his book Your Pastor’s Problems (Augsburg, 1966), William Hulme says, “Jesus pointed to a child as the expression of human greatness.… The light touch of the child is an expression of his childlike faith. His enjoyment of his father’s world is inseparable from his security in his father’s world.
“Childhood, therefore, is not only something we go from but something we go toward. Enjoyment is probably closer to whatever we mean by human perfection than accomplishment. And anxiety over accomplishment may be the most telltale symptom of idolatry.”
While learning to walk, our granddaughter would pull herself up and stand alone on wobbly legs. Seeing our smiles, she would shake her head and squeal with delight. Her grandparents squealed along with her. Her freedom and joy as she explored her new mobility, as she discovered her ever-expanding world, was as pristine as a blanket of new snow.
Driven people know little of this joy, the pleasure of expending oneself in God’s creation, the satisfaction of discovering new worlds. They know only the ravenous need to achieve. And it all comes back to a basic need: to know one is already esteemed.
Realigning the Image
Whether a pastor’s self-esteem is radically shaken or just in need of fine-tuning, his or her self-view needs to be regularly aligned with Christ’s view. Here are three suggestions that may help.
• Examine your calling. Some pastors choose to go into ministry for the prestige or power that church leadership promises. Others see local church ministry as a safe place to have a career: “The pay may not be great but at least there people will like me.” Still others, because of guilt, are hoping to work out their salvation: they feel they’ve never measured up, so they think, Perhaps I can serve enough to compensate for what I’ve done or be significant by doing something that really matters.
Unfortunately, the church is not a warm, safe place to acquire power, be liked, or atone for sin. If you’ve been called into ministry by such motives, instead of by Christ, ministry is bound to undermine your self-confidence. It will constantly disappoint you and make you feel like a failure, when in fact you’re just not in the right calling.
• Go back to the roots. Our childhood environment figures into our adult internal struggles. Some people survive childhood believing they’re okay no matter what they do. The majority of us, however, enter adulthood attempting to compensate for feeling negatively about ourselves. A major factor influencing our adult self-worth is our childhood family and peers.
I’ve counseled several pastors with learning disabilities. Growing up they weren’t able to learn at the pace of their classmates. They were mocked and called derogatory names. One pastor told how in junior high school one of her teachers openly ridiculed her because she wasn’t able to pronounce a word.
These incidents attach easily to our fragile psyche. Gather enough of them and soon we come to believe we’re inferior, a nogood loser. Pinpointing the origin of our poor self-image goes a long way toward making changes. But it’s not enough.
• Reprogram your thinking. This does not come naturally. What we’ve come to believe about ourselves over time is not easily erased. Yet it is possible.
In an earlier chapter, I told about the pastor who came to Marble feeling threatened about who he was. We talked at length about his childhood problems of acceptance and identity. The messages he had received from his parents growing up were mostly negative. His adult conversion had turned his life around, but he still agonized over his adequacy.
His two weeks at Marble were life changing. Besides him and his wife, three other couples there were working on their struggles as well. For two weeks, the four couples functioned as a support group. Each day the group met to talk about the common pressures of ministry and their effect on their lives. One of the discussion questions the group was asked to answer was simply “What’s new?” By the end of that week, this pastor would reply, “What’s new is me.” Finally he had begun to soak in the truth of his infinite worth in Christ.
Upon his return to the trenches, this pastor regularly used this question to reprogram his thinking about himself. When he caught himself saying, “I’m a failure,” he would say, “What’s new is me. I’m loved by God, who delights in me.” He is still in process, but the change in him is real.
There is no magic wand for becoming more secure in Christ. It takes hard work, and even then, attacks of low self-esteem will likely hound us to the grave. But learning to rest in God’s love is worth the journey. It instills in us a confidence to give to others even while feeling insecure.
Two Key Habits for Tough Settings
The root of our lack of confidence may be low self-esteem, but as I mentioned, this often gets aggravated by the environment in which we work. I give pastors who work in self-image-challenging settings a couple of habits to develop.
First, stick up for yourself. No one respects a doormat. If, for example, you feel pressured to produce beyond what you can physically handle, go to your elder board and say, “For me to continue to be effective as a pastor, I need to set limits on the number of things I’m responsible for around here. I’m finding I just can’t get everything done. Let me give you some of my suggestions for dealing with this, and then I’d like to hear yours. I’d like us to come to a new agreement.”
Instead of withdrawing into his office, if Dan had confronted those who complained about his changes in the worship service, explaining why he did what he did, enlisting their help in forming a vision for the church, he might have been able to short-circuit his eventual firing.
Second, work to be heard, not to be right. Truth can be presented one of two ways: with horsepower, which puts everyone on the defensive, or with tact and gentleness. Too often, especially in the church, truth is presented in a combative way. As a result, the messenger draws unnecessary fire, and the message is dismissed.
You don’t have to shout or even be angry. Just a calm, simple, steady explanation is all that is usually necessary. Happily enough, once you respect yourself well enough to speak up for yourself, others gain greater respect for you as well.
In recent years, I’ve found myself concerned enough about several social issues to write letters to the local newspaper editor and to make public statements that were unpopular. This has taught me that even tough subjects can be handled peaceably. My community may not agree with what I say, but they heard my message. When I’m faced with delivering an unpopular opinion, I’ve learned to be more concerned about communication than conversion.
Ministry Goes On
I think it’s fair to say Jesus encountered his share of disrespect. His troubles wound up getting him crucified. Yet while despised, put down by the media elite of his time, and even betrayed by his friends, he continued to serve. That’s easy for him, we might think, he never had the doubts and fears that I do.
Maybe, maybe not. But I know that you don’t have to wait for your self-image to be completely renewed before you minister to others. Otherwise we would never get around to ministry! Instead, even while grappling with these issues, you can be an effective pastor.
Years ago a pastor who attended Marble because of marital problems got divorced. It was his second. In his denomination, divorce didn’t disqualify one from ministry, but after two failures, no church was knocking his door down to be their pastor.
The urban church that finally hired him was desperate; they were about to shut the place down. A few years earlier, they had built a new facility, saddling themselves with a large mortgage. Instead of growing, the church began losing members and consequently couldn’t service the debt. Surveying the hopeless situation, the denomination essentially said to this pastor, “Give it a shot. See what you can do.”
Though dogged by self-doubt and feeling like an outcast, this man went to pastor this dying church. His plan was simple: love the people. He did this by visiting everyone in the community who needed a pastor. When he learned a family had lost a child or a grandparent, or that someone was having problems, he would drop by the house and say, “I pastor one of the churches in the community. I know you must be going through some tough times. Is there anything I can do to help?” Because of his own doubts and struggles, he was able to empathize with others. Instead of the cheap answers he might have suggested earlier in his ministry, he simply offered only his presence and his ears.
Slowly the church began to awaken. Eventually it paid off its debt and even added an educational wing. Today the church is a thriving fellowship. Their pastor still has periodic battles with selfdoubt, but in the meantime, while he is working to integrate Christ’s love into his own life, he is loving his people as best he can.
And it seems to be enough.
Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today
