The real reason clergy are exhausted

Ministers are struggling - but it's not about 'self care'

photo by Cathie Caimano

Hoo-boy. If the church is trying to get my blood pressure up, they have definitely succeeded with this article:

‘The past few years have left clergy burned out and exhausted. But that can change, say experts’.

No, wait. They’re trying to get my blood pressure down. The article is about how stressed out ministers can manage our emotional and spiritual health, with things like:

Monitoring our feelings of overwhelm
Practicing mindfulness
Having a clear health and well-being practice

But reading this is having the opposite effect on me. I am literally clenching my stomach and feeling my heart race.

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I’m not against self-care.

I appreciate the attention brought to how exhausted ministers are. And I am definitely concerned about the stress a lot of us are dealing with day to day.

I just feel frustrated at how we can be missing what is in front of our eyes: the stress is a symptom of something much larger.

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The reason that clergy - and other ministers - are feeling exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed is NOT that we don’t know how to take care of our health. It’s that the institutional church is dying.

We know it. We feel it. We’re scared of it. And we take it on our shoulders and try to keep it from happening.

We’re trying to uphold a whole system that is falling apart.

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And it’s not working.

If we want to clergy to stop feeling overburdened we need to address what’s overburdening them: expectations of our job that are a century old, and no clear idea of what ministry is today.

One of my favorite quotes from the great Rabbi Edwin Friedman:

‘Burnout is not the result of working too hard. It’s the result of doing the work intended for someone else.’

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I can speak from experience that if we reframe the practice of ministry as an exploration of how we bear the Gospel in a new environment - a new age - then the burden of continuing to support what’s not working disappears.

It doesn’t mean we have to quit our jobs. It may mean that we have to re-think how we do them. It may mean that we need to let some things go.

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It’s not ministers who need to change - it’s ministry.

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I feel like the headline of the article should be ‘The past few years have left clergy burned out and exhausted, and it’s time to change before we lose them’.

Let’s not ask clergy to take a few deep breaths and go back to the same stress again. Let’s free them to be the bearers of Good News they’re called to be.