If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready.
Jesus (Matthew 24:43-44a)
They say pro football quarterbacks fear one thing almost more than anything else: being blindsided.
When you take the snap and drop back into the pocket, you become a tasty morsel dangling in front of hungry defensive ends and blitzing middle linebackers. These wolves weigh 265 pounds apiece and can sprint the distance between the line and your tender body in two seconds flat. Their trip to the Pro Bowl depends on how many times they can slam you to the Astroturf.
But as long as you can see them coming, you’re pretty safe. You can dodge; you can duck, scramble, get a pass off, or head for the sidelines. Roger Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys great, describes the dynamic in a play against the Los Angeles Rams in the early seventies: “I took the snap, dropping back to pass. A defensive lineman broke loose on my left. I ducked and he went over me. I rolled to my left and Mike Montgomery, sensing that I might run, knocked down the linebacker on that side, Isiah Robertson. I took off for the first down.”1
It’s when you can’t see them coming that there’s trouble. You cock your arm to throw, you’re concentrating only on that tight end cutting across midfield, and WHAM! Your head snaps back, and the wind’s knocked out of you. Then you crunch the turf.
The situation’s not too different for pastors trying to dodge discouragement. If only you could learn to read when discouragement might come at you, you could keep from getting blindsided.
Reading the Blitz
I asked veteran pastors who have learned to “read the blitz” when discouragement and down times were most likely to come.
The first key time, oddly, is following a big event, a major victory. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the brilliant preacher at London’s Westminster Chapel earlier this century, explains: “Another frequent cause of spiritual depression is what we may describe as a reaction — a reaction after a great blessing, a reaction after some unusual and exceptional experience. Consder the case of Elijah under the juniper tree. There is no doubt in my mind that his main trouble was he was suffering from a reaction after what had happened on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19).”2 The great prophet had called down fire from heaven to display dramatically that Jehovah, not Baal, is the one true God; yet scant verses later he is in the throes of depression and self-pity. Valley follows mountaintop.
What happened to Elijah happens also to spiritual leaders today. “One time when I’m vulnerable to discouragement,” reflects a Baptist pastor, “is following big events such as weddings and funerals. After a week of being up I’ve found I crash, sometimes for three days. I try to think about why I’m discouraged, and there’s no apparent reason. Then I look at my previous week’s schedule, and I think, Of course you’re discouraged. Look what you’ve been through.“
Says another church leader, “I’ve learned simply to look at my schedule when I’m down. Blue days invariably follow my periods of most intense activity. Now I try to plan days of rest to recuperate.”
But many ministers say they struggle to accept the fact that they have good reason to be discouraged. Confesses one: “I don’t consciously think that way. Instead I think, What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t be down. I just had a great week — a top-of-the-mountain challenge. Besides, I’m a leader. I should be able to forge ahead.“
But the fact is, following a big event most people experience a drop of adrenalin. An emotional drop is the natural accompaniment.
This principle helps us to interpret down times not solely as indictments of our own spirituality or character. It helps us put them in perspective. These down times following a major success or goal reached may be the most normal possible reaction. That knowledge brings some comfort; it keeps us, as Presbyterian minister Bruce Thielemann put it, from “adding to the weight of discouragement the burden of blame.”
Weak During the Week
Discouragement also comes at predictable moments during the week, according to many pastors. “After Sunday’s service is the worst time,” says Robert Norris. “You begin to say to yourself, Everything I’ve done is in vain. Who was helped?” So much emotional energy has been expended in the preparation and delivery of a message that following this high point, optimism and energy drop off.
Often the emotions fully bottom out on Monday. “In my first pastorate, I would be really irritable and grumpy every Monday,” says Glen Parkinson, minister at Severna Park (Maryland) Presbyterian Church. “That was my day off, so it ended up being the day when my wife and I would have our fights. It would be just terrible.
“After four years of that somebody told me, ‘That’s no big surprise. Look at what you do on Sunday. It isn’t the amount of work; it’s what you put into it. And preaching is a very emotional thing. Of course you are going to drop!’
“Well, the next week I got up on Monday morning, and I felt terrible. But it wasn’t so bad because I thought, Of course I feel terrible. That’s okay. I don’t have to get mad at anybody. It was wonderful.”
Recognizing this, some ministers have switched their day off to some day other than Monday so their spouses and family don’t get them at their worst. They use Monday to catch up on light office work. As one minister quipped, “Hey, if you’re going to have an off day, do it on company time.” One who made the switch was Steve Harris. His evaluation: “I take Thursdays off now, and though it seems like a small thing, it has made the rhythm of the week much better. Sunday used to be the end of the week, and I’d think, If I can just get through the day, I’ll be off tomorrow. But when I take Thursday off, I hit my peak around Sunday.”
But again, a low period during the week signals nothing more than normalcy. Recognizing that has given Phil Sackett, pastor of Excelsior (Minnesota) Bible Church, staying power. “I’ve made a deal with the Lord,” he says, “never to quit on a Monday or the day after a board meeting. Anything I do has to be thought out longer than that.”
Weathering the Year
With that kind of weekly cycle, pastors can expect, in the words of veteran Methodist minister Phil Hinerman, “some mornings each month when I feel like nobody loves me and nobody cares about me. So I just get up and go to work and believe the feeling will pass.”
Lows cycle through the year as well, usually following the “right after highs” pattern. “A couple of weeks before Labor Day you really start cranking,” says Chuck Smalley, associate pastor of Wayzata (Minnesota) Evangelical Free Church. “You start all the new small groups, hold a couple of conferences or retreats — from Labor Day to Thanksgiving you run full blast.
“Then in November you usually bottom out emotionally because you’ve gone through that intense period. And here in Minnesota, November is the pits for weather — brown, cold, muddy, yuck. All the leaves are gone, but the snow hasn’t come yet.
“The other time I tend to get low during the year is right after all the activities leading up to, and around, Easter. Now that I’ve identified the cycle, I just plan to take a couple of days off at those points.”
Chuck’s description raises another factor in the yearly cycle: the weather. There’s good reason why people often describe times of discouragement as gray, cold, or rainy. A real estate agent once told me, “If you can love a house in November or February, you really love it.” And the same applies to churches: If you can feel positive about your ministry in November or February, that’s a good sign. In the last few years researchers have documented an intriguing depression they call sad (Seasonal Affective Disorder), which strikes certain people only during the winter months. Not that cold, short days are the major factor in pastoral discouragement, but it helps to keep in mind the counsel of Bruce Chapman, pastor of First Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis: “I had a denominational leader tell me, ‘In Minnesota, never make a decision in February.’ He wasn’t being sarcastic. And I agree. Don’t make a major decision when you’re feeling down.”
Career Culverts
Even more helpful is asking the long-range question: Across my entire ministry, when am I most likely to get discouraged? What ages and stages in ministry make me prone to it?
Church consultant Robert Dale identified three times in the pastor’s life when difficulties may become insurmountable:
• three to five years out of seminary
• around age forty
• near retirement.
These three career culverts bear a closer look.
Three to five years into ministry. The feeling of fading ideals was captured by one fifth-year pastor in a letter to a friend at the same point in ministry: “Early in my first pastorate, I remember my wife and me visiting our hometown and going to the church pastored by the man who married us. After the service, we greeted him and said how great it was to be in the ministry. I expected him to agree it was a great calling and that he was enjoying it just as much after twenty years in the pastorate.
“He shocked us both by saying he was glad we were enjoying it, but for him the ministry was full of heartache and pain. I quickly chalked it up to his carnality and obvious disregard for the calling he had received.
“But now, five years later, I know what he was talking about. I’ve come face to face with the pain of pastoring. I’ve watched myself become depressive, moody, impatient with my children, impatient with my church. It doesn’t take much to put me in a tailspin over some real or imagined slight. I know I’m not God’s gift to the church, but some people in the congregation seem to feel it’s their duty before God to question everything I do.”
A Leadership Journal study a few years ago isolated the factors that increase the chances of emotional problems for pastors. One of the top factors was shortness of time in the pastorate. First churches often aren’t everything a pastor hoped for. Then, a young pastor faces each problem for the first time ever. It’s no wonder seminary-bred ideals soon get pricked on the barbed-wire realities of a local church.
But another troubling factor, the study found, was shortness of time in the current position. The “at-three-to-five-years” discouragement, according to many pastors, comes not only in your first church, but in each church. Lynn Anderson, who has ministered at the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas for the past sixteen years, sketches the period this way:
“The first two years you can do nothing wrong.
“The second two years you can do nothing right.
“The fifth and sixth years of a ministry, either you leave or the people who think you can do nothing right leave. Or you change, or they change, or you both change.
“Productive ministry emerges somewhere in the seventh year or beyond.”
What’s behind the three-to-five-year problem?
“By then,” explains veteran pastor Ivan York of the Wheaton (Illinois) Evangelical Free Church, “you start to realize idiosyncrasies of your church that you couldn’t see when you first arrived. They are starting to see some of the imperfections in you. They knew all along you weren’t a superhero, yet they were daring to hope — until now.”
A pastor from the East who survived such a period described it this way: “When I came, they said they wanted renewal, outreach, evangelism, and all this stuff. But their understanding of what that meant and mine weren’t the same. In the first three or four years, I kept having encounters with people who had been close to the former pastor, people who in my opinion had deep insecurities and personal problems. They were not people I would ever bring into the inner circle of my ministry. I guess they sensed that and resented it.
“As a result, they accused me of being anti-intellectual, on an ego trip — that I was building my own kingdom. One man, who was an elected member of our leadership, finally resigned and wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter questioning my motives and competence. That was a discouraging time.”
Carl George, director of the Charles E. Fuller Institute of Church Growth, pinpoints the sociological factors that troubled these, and many other, pastors. The first is that usually at about four years in a new ministry, the new guard — those members who have come since the pastor, and largely because of him or her — “nears equality with the old guard in voting power, and the old guard often feels threatened.
“Second, some time after four years, a congregation begins to realize the minister’s agenda for the future may contradict some of the long-established members’ agendas. This period of delicate balance commonly takes place between the fourth and sixth years of a given pastorate.
“The pastor enjoys little security through this period. In fact, the pastor fatality rate at this time is so high that whole denominations have that ‘about four years’ pattern for pastorates.”
Recognizing that may not make the difficulties easier, but it does provide the comfort that the problems are not unusual, not an indication of lack of ministerial gifts.
Midlife adds a new element to a pastor’s outlook on ministry: there’s not all that much time left. Earlier lifetime goals may suddenly, and painfully, have to be revised. Many middle-aged pastors feel they’d like to try something new, take on a new church, give one more great push in their lives before time runs out. But the realistic options may be few. Lamented one pastor on the Leadership survey: “I have feelings of futility, but I’m financially trapped. Middle-aged expositors are not in great demand.”
Early in ministry, they could try new things, tackle challenges, and if the thing blew up — well, they’d just start over. There was plenty of time to learn and give it another shot.
But not so now. Psychiatrist Louis McBurney, who counsels many pastors, capsulizes the pressured feeling: “They’re no longer able to bounce back from disappointments.”
When discouragement hits at midlife, it often comes as a complex tangle of situations and feelings. Because of that, it may well require new coping strategies, ones a pastor had not considered seriously before, as Ed Bratcher found. “Without question, the period in my ministry when I felt the greatest discouragement was right around age forty. The despondency over my ministry coincided with some personal factors. My father died. My mother came to live with us and brought the new dynamic of three generations under one roof.
“I began to feel, because of my age, that I was trapped. I wondered if my mobility had stopped, if there was no place to go. My discouragement sank into a clinically discernible depression, and when I saw a physician, he asked me, ‘You wouldn’t consider getting professional help, would you?’ My stance at the time was a firm no, but I was depressed enough that I really did need some professional help.”
Ed eventually overcame his apprehension that parishioners might find out and react negatively to the fact their pastor had sought psychiatric help. His experience? “I can testify to both the fears and the benefits of receiving psychiatric help. Even though I still find it difficult to admit to members of my parish that my wife and I have had psychiatric care, I can acknowledge the value of such care. My ministry through interpersonal relationships has become more sensitive and of greater benefit to everyone involved as a result of the psychiatric help I’ve received.”3
Knowing when and how to get help is one of the great secrets of staying power for the discouraged pastor, and that may be especially true for the pastor wrestling with midlife questions of self-worth, achievement, and the future.
Nearing retirement. Later in life people hit a psycho-social stage that noted researcher Erik Erikson characterized as “Integrity versus Despair.” The pastor headed toward retirement takes stock of his ministry and wonders, Did I do well? Can I rejoice that I accomplished things, that my life and work had a wholeness and integrity? Or do I look back and only despair?
The turning point in the decision is often whether a pastor can see progress. Did people really change? Were new leaders developed? Did the church grow? Were buildings added? Where there is a sense of progress made, there is usually a sense of integrity as well. One minister, now in retirement, wrote: “It seems to me that the whole of my life as a pastor has offered the kind of affirmation that made me want to stay in ministry. Really, it has been a joy with few down moments, even when dealing with a bishop who seemed to me unreasonable and plain ornery. I enjoy reflecting on my years in ministry.” This pastor adds that he is “still at it, even in retirement.”
For others, though, who see primarily blocked progress and unrealized dreams as they look back, discouragement can hit hard. “The older I get in ministry, the easier it is to feel discouraged,” admits one minister. “You see the same thing coming time upon time, and there doesn’t seem to be any change.”
Preparation for Protection
Knowing that at these times the tide of discouragement will be coming in and the waves may be high, can pastors prepare themselves? Are there ways to brace yourself for the waves? Ministers I talked with described two ways they prepare themselves.
Take a firm footing in God. “The way I prepare myself for dark times,” says Dave Dorpat, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Geneva, Illinois, “is to get my relationship with the Lord in order. When that’s solid, I know I’m on the Rock, and like the Psalmist says, ‘Ten thousand may fall at my right or left, but the Lord is with me.'”
“You can prepare yourself by building spiritual disciplines,” adds Frank Mercadante, youth minister at a large church in nearby St. Charles, Illinois. “When I’ve been spending time with the Lord and the tough times come, they’re still tough, but I have a foundation of my relationship with him, and I can rely on that rather than on myself.”
Frank discovered this once after a program he’d long dreamed of didn’t gain the necessary approval and funding. “That really hurt,” he says, “but as I prayed about it the Lord said to me, ‘Frank, there’s nothing that can hold back my will. You’re disappointed now, but I’m God and you’re the servant. Don’t worry; I’m in control.’ And that gave me the strength to go on.”
Find firm friends. The second thing pastors have found helpful is “gathering a group who will care for you amidst discouragement,” as one put it. “You have to assemble those people who will gather around you, support you, maintain you.”
“I can’t overemphasize my need to have leaders whom I relate to and spend time with, people who will pray with me and support me,” adds Dave Dorpat.
“Recently, for instance, I have been helping take care of my father-in-law, who has a broken hip, at nights, so my mother-in-law can get some sleep. Being there every night for the last two weeks and having my sleep interrupted has really been wearing on me. By last Sunday when I came to church, I was wiped out. I was really empty. I didn’t have a conclusion for the message; I just didn’t know what I was going to say.
“We have prayer at 7:15 before the services, and one of our elders, Dean Kroning, came bounding in all joyous and praising the Lord. So I said, ‘You know, I feel really tired this morning. Wiped out. Empty. Could you pray for me?’ And Dean and the four or five other elders who were there gathered around, laid hands on me, and prayed for me. And the message that morning — well, I think the Lord really blessed it. Several people told me it was powerful.”
These people lift your sights. They remind you of the things you easily forget when you’re down — that God is in control, that he loves you, that he’s working in your life. Right now, to use the football metaphor, discouragement may be blitzing, but friends block for you. They keep you playing toward your ultimate goal.
In his autobiography, Roger Staubach tells of the time he was asked by a reporter, “What’s your ultimate goal in life?”
“My ultimate goal is beyond this life,” Staubach told him. “It’s going to heaven.” Then he added, “All your passes are completed in heaven.”
“What about defensive backs?” the reporter came back.
“There are no defensive backs up there.”4
Roger Staubach with Sam Blair and Bob St.John, Staubach: First Down, Lifetime to Go (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1974), 250.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973).
Edward B. Bratcher, The Walk-on-Water Syndrome (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1984), 114.
©1988 Christianity Today
