God’s Word refers to the Christian life often as a walk, seldom as a run, and never as a mad dash.
Steven J. Cole
In When I Relax I Feel Guilty, Tim Hansel writes of his years as a coach and area director for Young Life: “I would work twelve, fourteen, even fifteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. And I would come home feeling that I hadn’t worked enough. So I tried to cram even more into my schedule. I spent more time promoting living than I did living.”1
Many pastors know what Hansel’s talking about: Long days, short breaks, and the increasing ugliness of being busy, what one called “doing more but enjoying it less.”
One jumbled, crowded page on a Day-Timer follows another. One committee meeting leads to another. One sermon is hardly done when the next one looms ahead. A pastor captured the feeling when he described his weekly schedule as “an overstuffed glove compartment.”
The husband of one minister felt this frustration when he wrote: “The overwhelming, indeed the single, issue is how to support my friend and love in a profession that makes extraordinary and high demands on every aspect of her life. My job is much less demanding, and I can walk away from it every afternoon. But a minister is a target for all the brokenness brought into the church by its people — lay and ordained. A minister is a workhorse trying to pull an overloaded wagon uphill.”2
That load easily leads to burnout. Lutheran psychiatrist Paul Qualben writes of the three stages toward burnout, ones originally described by Cary Cherniss in Staff Burnout:
1. The honeymoon stage, in which enthusiasm, commitment, and job satisfaction eventually give way; energy reserves begin to drain off.
2. The “fuel shortage” stage, characterized by exhaustion, detachment, physical illness, anger, sleep disturbances, depression, possible escapist drinking or irresponsible behavior.
3. Then crisis — pessimism, self-doubt, apathy, obsession with one’s own problems, disillusionment with one’s career.
Stress vs. Distress
Qualben goes on to raise an intriguing question, however: “Why do some pastors … seem to thrive in stressful situations, find satisfaction in their work, and weather the ups and downs of personal and professional life with equanimity, while ones in the next parish burn out?” The Leadership survey responses begged the same question. Many pastors wrote that they felt positive about their ministries and couldn’t imagine doing anything else; others longed to get out altogether. What set them apart?
Qualben concludes: “Most work — in the church and elsewhere — is done by people under stress. Stress is not the issue. The problem is rather distress. Distress is the product of frustration and repeated disappointment.… There must be other factors — within each individual — that account for the difference.”3
Those internal factors crystallize in three personality types that Qualben identifies:
— the Type-A personalities, “hard workers who set high goals for themselves but suffer from ‘hurry disease'”
— the person who bases self-worth on the attendance, budget, and other results of ministry
— the twenty-four-hour-a-day pastor.
Pastors who tend toward these personalities are more likely to feel distress, but the three types reflect a tension felt by every minister: the tension between being a pastor (filling the role, performing) and being a person (relating to people as I am within, apart from what role I take or work I do). Most people balance the two well. In the three burnout-prone personalities, however, the individual has become always a pastor and rarely, if ever, simply a person. When he wakes up, he’s a pastor; when he goes to sleep, he’s a pastor; and somehow the needs of the person get squeezed out.
It’s odd, but all three of these types of pastors may be getting affirmation for what they do. In fact, they’re probably getting more affirmation than other pastors because their constant work pays off in increased visibility, higher attendance, and so on.
And yet distress sets in, because though loved for what they do, they somehow miss being loved simply for who they are. That can come, by definition, only during times of nonactivity, of rest, of refreshment. As a result, often the most “successful” are the most insecure.
The “always a pastor, never a person” syndrome traps even — perhaps especially — the most dedicated, committed, and gifted pastors. Paul Tournier, in Escape from Loneliness, writes: “I have rarely felt the modern man’s isolation more grippingly than in a certain deaconess or pastor. Carried away in the activism rampant in the church, the latter holds meeting upon meeting, always preaching, even in personal conversation, with a program so burdened that he no longer finds time for meditation, never opening his Bible except to find subjects for his sermons. It no longer nourishes him personally. One such pastor, after several talks with me, said abruptly, ‘I’m always praying as a pastor, but for a long time I’ve never prayed simply as a man.'”4
Waiting for the Soul to Catch Up
Pastors say over and over that rest — periods in which they are not “the pastor” but simply themselves — is essential.
Without that kind of rest and refreshment, the soul quickly tires. In Springs in the Valley, Lettie Cowman tells this story:
“In the deep jungles of Africa, a traveler was making a long trek. Coolies had been engaged from a tribe to carry the loads. The first day they marched rapidly and went far. The traveler had high hopes of a speedy journey. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. For some strange reason they just sat and rested. On inquiry as to the reason for this strange behavior, the traveler was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.”5
One pastor felt the same need when she wrote on the Leadership survey: “What gives me the most discouragement is hobbies, or rather, the lack of them. I just ‘veg out’ on my time off; I’m so tired there’s no development of an outside life.” Another minister wrote that his number one struggle is finding “think time — time to meditate, to dream, to plan.” Time to be a person, time for the soul to catch up — it eludes many.
Somewhere in the demanding pastoral schedule there must be a place for becoming refreshed in spirit. As important as it is to be recognized for what we do, there must be a time — regularly — for the sweeter experience of being loved just for who we are. Henri Nouwen confesses: “I’m like many pastors; I commit myself to projects and plans and then wonder how I can get them all done. This is true of the pastor, the teacher, the administrator. Indeed, it’s true of our culture, which tells us, ‘Do as much as you can or you’ll never make it.’ In that sense, pastors are part of the world. I’ve discovered I cannot fight the demons of busyness directly. I cannot continuously say no to this or no to that, unless there is something ten times more attractive to choose. Saying no to my lust, my greed, my needs, and the world’s powers takes an enormous amount of energy.
“The only hope is to find something so obviously real and attractive that I can devote all my energies to saying yes. One such thing I can say yes to is when I come in touch with the fact that I am loved. Once I have found that in my total brokenness I am still loved, I become free from the compulsion of doing successful things.”
The Problem of Prayer
Nouwen identifies the key resting place for pastors and lay people alike — in God’s loving presence. As one pastor admitted, “I would have never had the inner resources to stay through the distresses that have hit my marriage, my children, and my job without finding rest in daily time alone with the Lord.”
But during times of discouragement, many pastors find prayer trying and utterly unappealing. To pray seems the least likely thing to do. Finding rest and refreshment in God’s presence seems unattainable.
Some pastors say that’s because they feel angry at God. Admits a Midwest pastor: “When things aren’t going well in ministry, I think, Okay, God, at least show up here; let’s see some fruit if we’re going to put all this effort into it. And then, just like when I get mad at my wife, I clam up. I don’t talk to him.”
Or prayer may become difficult because of feelings of guilt — for being discouraged, or for certain actions that have led into the discouragement. “There are times when you really don’t want to go into the Lord’s presence,” says a Presbyterian minister, “because the light of his presence is too great.”
Or prayer may simply seem futile since God, apparently, has abandoned us and disappeared. Writes Philip Yancey: “People in pain, especially those with long-term pain, often have the sensation that God has left them. No one has expressed this better than C. S. Lewis in the poignant journal he kept after his wife’s death (A Grief Observed). He recorded that at the moment of his most profound need, God, who had seemed always available to him, suddenly seemed distant and absent, as if he had slammed a door and double-bolted it from the inside.”
How have ministers — those “whose job it is to pray,” Luther said — handled these periods of unappetizing prayer, and thus, been able to again find refreshment in God’s presence?
“For me a big step was learning that prayer was not expressing to God the things he wanted to hear,” says a Baptist minister, “but of getting honest with him — including my anger and doubt. He wasn’t looking for a rote, programmed exercise but a relationship that could include all kinds of feelings.” This minister goes on to admit, “I still struggle with that, though.” Discouragement over their ministry, rather than becoming an unmentionable, has for some pastors become the first item on the prayer agenda.
A second realization that has helped ministers return to prayer is that “it’s either pray or die,” in the words of Steve Harris. “In the last couple of years it has dawned on me, I am either going to do this or possibly lose my ministry or my marriage. I used to give lip service to Ephesians 6:10 about spiritual warfare, and I preach about it; but I’m beginning to see that warfare is real, and prayer is therefore essential, whether I feel like doing it or not.”
Another inner adjustment: recognizing, at least in their better moments, that emotional darkness and God can both be present. Indeed, the darkness may be a sign of his presence. “I love Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Hound of Heaven,'” says Andre Bustanoby, a counselor and former pastor. “There’s a line near the end where this man who is running for his life from God talks about the shadow looming over him. With a burst of insight he says, ‘Is my gloom, after all, the shade of his hand outstretched caressingly?’ I always think of that when I think of discouragement. There’s a shadow cast over my life, but it’s not the pall of doom. It’s the shade of his hand outstretched caressing me. He’s saying, ‘My son, I’m bidding you to growth. Won’t you see that as my purpose in your life?'”
In addition, many pastors have found specific methods helpful for breaking through. “My prayer life is not as vital during the times I’m discouraged,” says Ed Bratcher, “but one thing that helps me is writing in my journal. My writing is for me a form of prayer: I speak about my needs and also try to express my thanksgiving for what God has done for me. I look back later and see what have been the sources of my discouragement and how some of these things have worked out. That renews me.”
In Mark 2, a paralyzed man is unable to get to Jesus to be healed, so four of his friends carry him there on a stretcher. And when Jesus sees the friends’ faith, he heals the man (Mk. 2:5). A similar principle applies to the pastor paralyzed with despondency. The only way to get to Jesus in prayer may be for friends to carry you. Robert Norris, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, knows what that’s like. “When I don’t want to pray, I get my wife to pray with me. Other times I have taken my friends and said, ‘Please pray. I don’t want to.'”
Those recurring battles with prayerlessness are worth fighting, report ministers who have alternately won and lost them. Writes Steve Harris: “Prayer, Bible reading, study, and meditation — though often a struggle to maintain — put us in the presence of God, and for the hurting pastor there is no better place to be.”
“When I go to the Lord, I never walk away discouraged,” testifies Frank Mercadante of St. John Newman Church in St. Charles, Illinois. “It’s gotten now that sometimes I almost look forward to getting down, because I know that will force me to go to prayer. I might start out praying, ‘Lord, this situation really stinks,’ but then I begin to listen, and during that listening time I get reassured of my sonship, the Lord’s call — all the things I need to hear.”
It’s profound, I think, that the book of the Bible that deals most directly with suffering and pain and discouragement and doubt — the Book of Job — does not provide any real “answers” to Job’s dilemma. When God speaks to Job, after a thirty-seven-chapter silence, he gives not one explanation of why Job has been so afflicted. He simply reveals himself.
Yet Job found that more than enough.
So have spiritual leaders since then. As Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, expressed in a recent sermon: “We say to God, ‘Lord, what am I going to do about my problem?’ He says, ‘I am the Lord.’ You say, ‘But God, my situation is absolutely impossible.’ He says, ‘I am the Lord.’… We offer our problems, and he offers us himself. That is not a second-rate answer. That is the best answer that possibly could be given.”6
No Place Like Home
In addition to the daily means of grace — prayer, Scripture reading, and other disciplines — family and vacations are other resting places for pastors, according to the Leadership survey. Pastors listed as leading encouragers my spouse and my family. Family and spouse: these are the people who accept us for who we are, not what we do. On a job interview once, I was asked, “What do you appreciate most about your family?” The question caught me by surprise, but I agree still with my answer: “When I come home, they don’t care about whether I can write or edit. They just want me to be me. There’s something pure in that that refreshes me.”
The Leadership survey asked, “What resources does a pastor have for staying power?” to which one pastor replied, “The love and ‘prejudiced’ support of my wife.” Spouses and family encourage us when we think we’ve failed, as Chuck Smith, Jr., pastor of Calvary Chapel of Dana Point (California), discovered: “One Sunday after the service, I came in and stood in the kitchen next to Chris and said, ‘Can I help you with anything?’ She got me busy with some vegetables, and I said, ‘Boy, I just don’t know about today.’
“‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.
“‘Oh, the message.’
“‘Honey, it was great!’ she said. ‘It spoke to my needs. It was really powerful.’
“‘Thanks, Dear.’
“Then she said, ‘Is that what you were fishing for?'”
That’s the kind of support pastors need; it’s what one writer meant when he said, “A friend is someone who, when you fail, doesn’t think it’s a permanent condition.”
So often, had it not been for a spouse’s encouragement, a pastor might have left the ministry. Recalled one pastor: “On one of those days when nothing was working and I was out of control, my wife said, ‘Remember when we were zealous students attending those great rallies and would sing with much feeling, ‘I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord’?”
“‘Yeah.’
“‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are! This is where he wanted us to go.’
“I was instantly healed of my frustration.”
Spouses also have a wonderful way of keeping us from doing things we’d regret later. One pastor wrote of a time when he transferred his denominational affiliation and “those who supposedly loved me dropped me like a hot potato. My Navy language nearly came out several times. But Lena, my wife, restrained me from writing nasty letters. I went to prayer and confessed my wanting to return evil for evil. Lena’s prayers, love, and caring through the Holy Spirit won the day.”
But of all the things spouses and family do, the biggest is simply loving us as we are. James Stobaugh, pastor of Pittsburgh’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, writes of his wife, Karen: “God knows we need to work on our relationship more. But I discovered seven years into our marriage that she loves me. Really loves me. In fact, I am convinced that she will always love me. That profound but simple fact of unconditional love has transformed my life. We pray together. We communicate. We face the terrors in our lives and our pasts together.”
The Time Tussle
Though spouse and family were easily pastors’ greatest encouragers, the third leading discourager was “lack of time with family.” It’s ironic: the very thing that’s needed most is often the hardest to come by.
Gary Downing, executive minister of Colonial Church of Edina, Minnesota, speaks of the difficulty: “My family is both the greatest source of encouragement in my life and the greatest source of stress. The stress comes with the time issue. I’m digging a hole in the sand of community or parish needs, but I desire to be with my family. You and they both know that’s the way it’s got to be sometimes, but you never get to the point of liking it.”
The “time issue” is a continuing battle, and a fierce one, for it’s not just a matter of work versus family, but family versus family. Explains Presbyterian pastor Robert Hudnut in his book This People, This Parish: “One becomes close to a large number of people. Their joys become the pastor’s joys. So do their sorrows. Before long the pastor feels pulled between family and church-family. Both need attention. Both are in need day and night.…
“The doctor or dentist or lawyer or accountant or mechanic goes home from patients, clients, or customers. The pastor goes home from brothers and sisters in Christ. They are intense competition for sons and daughters and spouse.”7
How have ministers been able to balance church and family? What ways have they discovered to maintain their family, to nurture them and be nurtured by them? Here’s their counsel.
Family Fuel
One suggestion may seem obvious, but it’s often elusive: Explain how you’re feeling. When you come home burdened about something in the ministry, it’s tempting to think, I don’t want to dump my frustrations about the ministry on my wife. Now that I’m home, I want to give to her. And there’s truth in that; it’s wisdom to know when and how much to share with a spouse. But many pastors have found help —and helped their spouses — by being willing to give them fair warning of their internal condition. Says John Yates: “When I’m going early morning, late night, all day in between, and not getting enough sleep, I get on edge; things get to me more. I’ve learned to say to my wife, ‘Honey, I am really tired. And I’m really overwhelmed by this problem. I don’t feel very affectionate. I want you to know I love you with all my heart and I’m committed to you and devoted to you. But I’m really irritable, so if I don’t respond in the way you expect me to, please understand this is why.’
“For years, I would not be very easy to live with on Saturday nights. And she never understood it was because I was burdened about my sermon on Sunday. But one time I said, ‘You know, I’m really burdened about preaching tomorrow. I don’t feel ready. I don’t feel it’s very good. You just need to know I always get like this.’ She said, ‘Boy, I’ve never quite understood that. I’m glad you told me.'”
Block out family “appointments.” One pastor learned this lesson when his secretary buzzed him and said his three o’clock appointment was there to see him — and in walked his wife. Unless we consciously designate time on the calendar for family, they won’t get it. There will always be more work to do, and always “banquets and gatherings and conferences, and they are all good and all important” says Ivan York, pastor of the Wheaton (Illinois) Evangelical Free Church. “You just have to develop the ability to say no and to choose very selectively those things that you are going to be a part of.” Or, as Robert Hudnut puts it, a minister must learn to “cut one’s own family into one’s schedule with a blowtorch.”8
Many pastors have used the system of breaking each day into three segments — morning, afternoon, and evening — and giving one of them to family. But many arrangements are possible; a Lutheran pastor I know blocks out an extended “breakfast meeting” each week with his wife. Another pastor has involved his family in many facets of the ministry, adding to their time together by serving the church as a team.
Realize you’ll always struggle to balance family and ministry was the counsel of pastors who’ve been around for a while. An East Coast pastor told this story: “A long time ago I ran into an older pastor at a wedding reception. He had a wonderful family, and I said, ‘John, you seem to do a great job in your ministry in every way. Your family life seems to be great. How do you do it all?’ He said, ‘The first thing to realize is that you can’t ever do it all. I don’t ever remember a time in my life when my family life has been all I thought it ought to be and my ministry was all that it ought to be.’
“I can’t tell you the relief that was to hear an older pastor say that,” this pastor continued. “I’d always felt guilty that if my ministry was really going, I was neglecting my family. But his comment helped me realize this is an imperfect world and my wife is never going to be thoroughly satisfied with the amount of time we’re having together, the communication, the camaraderie. And my desk is never going to be completely cleared off. It’s just not going to ever happen.
“So you have to live in a state of tension. And it’s hard and I don’t like it. But I’ve accepted it now.”
Vital Vacations
Another pastoral refresher, ranked close behind spouse and family, was vacations. Sometimes ministers feel like Linus when he said of his security blanket, “Only one yard of outing flannel stands between me and a nervous breakdown.” Then it’s time for taking a break, doing something different, getting rest.
The problem with vacations is they come but four (or two or three) weeks a year. There are long stretches, sometimes gray ones, in between. That’s why I’ve found Tim Hansel’s thinking about vacations helpful. In When I Relax I Feel Guilty, he describes not one kind of vacation but five.
First there is the super-maxi vacation — a sabbatical, a vacation coupled with conference time, or some other break from ministry that’s longer than the standard vacation.
The maxi-vacation is what most of us think of when we hear the word vacation — the standard one-week or two-week trip or period of time off.
The mini-vacation is Hansel’s term for one sabbath day per week. But there are still two more types of vacations.
“Midget vacations,” Hansel writes, “fall along the same idea, but take even less time. We’re called not only to structure sufficient time into each week for rest, recreation, and worship — but also into each day. Jim Carlson recently shared with me his idea for ‘a daily sabbath.’ He said that if we’re to tithe 10 percent of our energy and finances to the Lord, then shouldn’t we do it with our time as well? Basically he said that 10 percent of each day would be 2.4 hours — and he’s trying to develop the discipline that will allow him to creatively dedicate that time to knowing and enjoying God more.”
Hansel offers many suggestions for midget vacations. Among them:
• “Do something special for yourself in the morning —make yourself a special cup of tea, kiss your wife, pat your dog, read a favorite section of Scripture. In other words, help yourself set the pace for the day.
• “Choose one word or one line of Scripture and follow it for the day.
• “Thank someone who works at your office, or who services your home, for contributing to your life. For example, thank that secretary who answers all the phone calls.”
Finally, the minute vacation — a sixty-second “pause that refreshes” during the day. Says Hansel: “Odd pieces of time occur everywhere, like little jewels scattered throughout your day. What about those minutes before dinner? Ever thought of taking a photo from the evening paper and asking your six-year-old to try to guess ‘what’s going on here?’
“What about short readings from a book of poems, or a special verse from the Book itself? Minute vacations are the time of quiet miracles.”9
We’re all well acquainted with the maxi-vacation and the mini-vacation. The other three, however, at first seem either odd or completely out of reach. But they are possible. Many pastors told me of the refreshment and staying power they’d found through broadening their vacation repertoire to include midget vacations, minute vacations, and yes, even the super-maxi sabbatical.
Midget and Minute Vacations
The secret of the midget vacation is that doing something, be it ever so small, is critical for refreshment. Most of us, when we’re discouraged, want to sit and think about it, to stew in it. Fred Smith, a Dallas business executive, describes the problem: “I’ve found a sure cure for mild depression and a guarantee for its continuation. The guarantee for its continuation is inactivity. The sure cure for its cessation is activity. If I feel the least bit depressed, I don’t dare sit and meditate, although I’m always tempted to meditate my way out of depression. That’s as impossible as Joseph trying to meditate his way out of the bedroom of Potiphar’s wife. Certain things just do not go together. Meditating your way out of depression doesn’t work.
“If I immediately get busy, particularly with something that makes me physically tired — something that I enjoy doing —I find any kind of mild depression will leave. You’ve got to use your will power in various ways to change unhealthy stress.”
One question on the Leadership survey asked, “What kinds of things refresh you and keep you going during down times in ministry?” Many of the responses qualify as midget or minute vacations. Each is a short, relatively inexpensive, and surprisingly refreshing way pastors have used to deal with mild discouragement:
• shutting myself in my home and listening to sacred music
• playing basketball at the YMCA
• reading great preachers of the past
• working around the home
• wearing blue jeans. Whenever I can, it is just like a day off!
• jogging
• having a guest preacher so I get a Sunday out of the pulpit
• reading over notes of encouragement I’ve saved.
One pastor often drives an hour to a place in the country on Fridays. “I’ve found I need it personally in a way I never understood. About the time I get halfway out there, it’s as though everything just kind of melts off my shoulders and I begin to sing and praise the Lord. I can go out there and just stay an hour and come back so refreshed. It changes my perspective. I come back thinking, Well, that problem’s probably not as big a deal as I felt it was.“
Super-maxi Vacations
Many pastors have found a super-maxi vacation possible through a trip to the Holy Land. “We took about forty people from church and were gone for a couple of weeks,” says a Virginia pastor. “That was so much fun. It was so great to have two weeks together with forty folks in the church, to study Scripture together, to act out Bible stories at those key sites. I had no idea that would be such a refreshing, encouraging time. And I really saw people grow during that time.”
But the ultimate — usually pronounced “unheard-of” — dream for pastors is a sabbatical. “I can’t believe I did it,” admits Eugene Peterson. “About two or three years ago I began feeling tired. I was wearing down. I’d always wanted to stay here, but I didn’t want to be less than my best here.
“So I started thinking, What can I do? The obvious thing was to change churches, but I didn’t want to do that if I could help it. I thought and I prayed and all of a sudden I thought, Why not a sabbatical? The problem was this is a small parish. They can’t afford to do that.”
But gradually, over the next year or so, pieces began to fall into place: an intern to handle the pastoral duties, a generous gift from a friend, a creative housing arrangement. After twenty-three years in the same parish, a dream came true.
The results? “I feel like I’ve got the energy of a fifteen-year-old again. I have embraced parts of ministry I used to avoid and found grace there; it has surprised the socks off me. Everyone has noticed a big difference in me since I’ve been back.”
But is it really possible? “Pastors get no encouragement for it,” Eugene admits. And for some, such an extended break may not be feasible. But his experience — and others’ —shows that for many pastors, even those who’d never thought it possible, it can be done.
“I have a friend, the pastor of a little church in Victor, Montana, who’s about thirty-three,” Eugene says. “He said to his congregation, ‘In ten years, I want to go to Germany for a year and study at the University of Hamburg. Would you help me?’
“Here’s a little church — a yoked parish, actually. But they’re used to having pastors every two or three years. So when he said, ‘I don’t want to move. I want to pastor here. But I think I’m going to need some help,’ they were delighted to think the pastor would be with them for ten years and then even come back and still be their pastor. They could hardly believe that anybody would care for them that much, and so every year now they’re setting money aside so that in ten years he and his wife can go to Germany.”
Going Guilty, Coming Back Calm
For some of us, the tough hurdle in taking a break or being with family is not so much the external difficulties of making sure things will be taken care of while we’re gone, but the internal difficulty of guilt. We think of the desk not cleared, the phone messages yet to return, the people we really ought to visit, and then we hear in our conscience the words of Charles Spurgeon: “The man who does not make hard work of his ministry will find it very hard work to answer for his idleness at the last great day.”
But great work, fruitful work, comes only through rest and refreshment.
It may seem, when we head for the YMCA, the retreat center, the restaurant, that we are wasting time; it’s tempting to think how much we could be doing if we weren’t sitting at our son’s baseball game. But when we’ve spent time with our God and our family and our friends simply as a person — and been loved — we return with an inner vitality that not only fuels our work but is our work.
I shudder when I read of the tireless output of John Wesley, who during his fifty-two years of itinerant ministry traveled 208,000 miles — most of them on foot or horseback — and preached some 40,000 sermons. But Wesley knew a secret: “Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry because I never undertake more work than I can go through with calmness of spirit.” Wesley knew of rest and refreshment.
Tim Hansel, When I Relax I Feel Guilty (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1979), 20 – 21.
Laura Deming and Jack Stubbs, Men Married to Ministers (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute).
Paul A. Qualben, “A Cool Look at Burning Out,” LCA Partners (December 1982).
Cited by James L. Johnson, “The Ministry Can Be Hazardous to Your Health,” Leadership (Winter 1980), 26 – 27.
Cited by Gordon MacDonald, Restoring Your Spiritual Passion (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986).
Leith Anderson, “Unlistened-to Lessons of Life,” Preaching Today (48, August 1987), audiotape.
Robert Hudnut, This People, This Parish (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986).
©1988 Christianity Today
