by: Ron Nydam
11/30/2006

Over the years, I have observed that being “set aside” for ministry often means being idealized in such a way that people do not really believe that clergy couples have emotional and spiritual concerns that invite pastoral care. The actions (or lack thereof ), in terms of care of pastors, of parishioners, churches and denominations bear out this. This comment is not intended to be a judgment, as soon the reasons for this will become evident and understandable. Many times people in our congregations and ecclesiastical assemblies have eyes but cannot “see” that pastors need pastors just as the rest of the congregants do. Our church behavior tells the truth; as congregations we make few provisions to care for pastors.

Every now and then as parishioners we hear about ministries that pastor pastors or denominational offices that offer pastoral care to ministers, but these are usually too-late, after- the-fact responses to pastors who are in trouble in terms of their lives or their ministries or else they are depleted. Their “get up and go” got up and left and only then is there a pastoral response.

Paying the Pastoral Toll

Pastoring takes its toll on pastors. One study by the Alban Institute (“Great Expectations, Sobering Realities”, 2002 ) surveyed 272 pastors on their experience in ministry. Seventy-four percent reported that their greatest concern was “too many demands on their time.” One pastor playfully commented that he felt like “a dog at a whistlers’ convention!” Sometimes pastors in rare moments of personal honesty, express the hurt and anger and sorrow of their hearts about churches that do not care back in good measure for all the work they do. They suggest that giving and giving and giving in terms of the daily life of parish ministry results in little care in return from the parishes that they serve, especially when there is trouble in the church. Conflict nearly always stops love. When care and even civility are in short supply for a long enough period of time, pastors run out of spiritual strength and emotional fortitude and begin to die inside, if ever so slowly...as any human being would.

Rev. Marsh (not his real name), for example, recalls his first ten years of parish ministry in a rural congregation with a mixture of joy and suffering. As is often the case the beginning years of pastoral work were challenging and enjoyable. He remembers the pleasure of preaching, of spending time with the text and bringing God’s Word through himself as a shepherd to God’s people on the farm. He also remembers the pleasure of getting to know God’s people, drinking coffee in the local café where people looked you over, and combing fields of wheat, riding in an air-conditioned combine in the middle of a hot August afternoon. Those first years were productive years of ministry, of weddings and funerals, of baptisms and church picnics, of living among God’s people as a preacher, a spiritual mentor, an at, times, a personal pastoral friend. But when near famine hit the land, when crops were destroyed by locust or hit by hail, when times got tough and his salary was frozen, the people of his congregation began to complain in his direction... as if somehow he could change the weather!

Lofty Expectations=Idealization

No matter how much pastors offer in terms of preaching, congregational leadership, and pastoral care, it can sometimes seem like it’s never enough. There’s the ongoing expectation that the local parish pastor can keep on giving and “keep on ticking” without a battery recharge. And sometimes Scripture supports such lofty pastoral expectations. I Timothy 3, for example, sets a high bar for the ministry of clergy couples:

Here is a trustworthy saying: if anyone sets his heart on being an over seer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be...above reproach...the husband of one... temperate...self-controlled... respectable... hospitable...able to teach...not a dru