Pastors and Christian leaders may not be as stressed as the poor worker in the article below (yes, friends, it’s a joke!), but many are under plenty of stress and concerned about their emotional health.
This was obvious to me last Wednesday, Sept. 22. As you know, Peter Scazzero came to Champaign-Urbana and led a one-day seminar based on his book The Emotionally Healthy Church. I told you a little about it in a post from last week. What I couldn’t get over was the fact that the seminar actually attracted 165 pastors and Christian leaders from the East Central Illinois area. When you get that many pastors together from this area in the same room for an entire day, you had better take notice. Indeed, there’s a huge felt need in this area. I’m nearly certain it was the largest gathering of area pastors for this kind of thing I’ve ever experienced.
I was so impressed by the day I felt compelled to write my column for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette on the event. This weblog gave you my initial thoughts last week. I thought you might enjoy my fuller thoughts expounded in my religion column for October 1st News-Gazette religion section:
Keep smiling and working on your emotional health, brothers. Anyway, here are more thorough reflections from the day with Scazzero as seen in my Oct. 1, 2004 religion column…
On Wednesday Sept. 22, I joined 165 area pastors and Christian leaders to spend the day addressing how to better understand the pastor’s emotional health and the emotional health of their churches.
Peter Scazzero, author of “The Emotionally Healthy Church,” (Zondervan 2003) came from New York City to the Urbana Assembly of God Church, and led a day-long seminar for one of the largest gatherings of pastors I’ve seen in East-Central Illinois for this kind of event. They gathered to hear Scazzero expound this central thesis: Emotional maturity and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.
Scazzero began by having the participants answer four questions: What are you mad about today? What are you scared about? What are you sad about? What are you glad about? He noted that all of us constantly have these emotions churning inside, but we often tend to ignore them.
Having worked and interacted with pastors for 25 years, I know that pastor’s emotions are no different from anyone else’s. But Scazzero is right. Many tend to discount their emotions. Sadly, I know pastors who are filled with hurt, anger, fear, guilt, condemnation and stress.
Those emotions accumulate and eventually reach their limits. And guess what happens? Life keeps going. It keeps pouring in painful emotions, and pretty soon the emotions spill over. This can leave pastors as miserable as anybody else.
The positive emotions of joy, contentment, happiness and romance get thrown out the window and hurt, anger, fear and condemnation take over. I’ve known pastors who were in bondage to their unruly emotions, but actually thought the relational chaos they were experiencing was purely circumstantial.
So you know what they did? They moved, thinking the chaos would leave. But it wasn’t long before the same problems began to surface, and they moved again. There are plenty of pastors who change locations, thinking their painful emotions finally will resolve themselves. Sadly, they never do.
That’s why Scazzero says the first principle in emotional health is a willingness to hit the pause button and to seriously consider what lies beneath the surface. When pastors do this they often find a lot of false, internalized beliefs. Some feel like they have no right to assert their God-given power. Others feel like they are unlovable, even by their own parishioners. Some feel stupid and out of place in the churches they serve.
To really comes to grips with some of this erroneous thinking, Scazzero contends that pastors must get away and be alone with God to really understand that God loves them, and that the self-image many have carried for years simply is false.
If, say, the average pastor suddenly opened up to you, you’d be surprised how many pastors live under a blanket of anger, fear or condemnation. And yet, pastors courageous enough to look beneath the surface have a good chance of getting in touch with the past and speaking truth into bad circumstances. Truth always is the answer to condemnation.
To Scazzero’s mind, the principle work of introspection merely is to be able to love God and others more fully. One of the main reasons pastors might resist this reflection is because it always forces them to see their limits.
Honestly, though, accepting your limits is very good. One of the best things pastors can do is accept the gift of their own limitations. But because pastoral identity often is wrapped up in what other people think, they may find themselves trying to prove to people that they can do it all. Truth is, all of us are limited. We have limited talents. We are limited intellectually. Our bodies have limitations. We have only so much time. And, of course, pastors have only so much spiritual understanding.
The beauty of accepting limitations leads to the ability to embrace grief and loss. Grieving is crucial in the Bible, and Scazzero encouraged his audience of leaders to grieve bad decisions, to grieve people moving away from their congregations and to even grieve the fact that each of us is getting older.
Scazzero hopes his seminar will create mothers and fathers of the faith who can be present for others as the father was present for the Prodigal Son. We need pastors who are emotionally healthy enough to appreciate themselves for who they are and to then willingly come alongside those who are struggling. This will lead to the emotional well-being that God wants each of us to enjoy. (Copyright 2004 by the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Champaign, Ill.)</
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