Pastors

I have been disheartened to see many small group curricula give pat “Sunday School answers” as to why bad things happen to good people. Trauma, like life in general, doesn’t always have cookie-cutter explanations, even for Christians. When the rubber meets the road, and the worst imaginable happens, simply reading Scripture verses doesn’t always immediately heal the broken hearted, even for the most disciplined Believer.

This video is from the 2021 Thrive & Cultivate conference, their first year of bringing pastors and church leaders to the table to hear and learn more about mental health. This topic shares how pastors who are working with individuals or families that need more clinical care can make referrals to a counselor. Further, as Christian counselors, it is our job to connect clients who want more support within their faith with Christians, pastors, and ministries that can support our clients.

If you want to sign up for the Thrive & Cultivate All-Access pass to see all of the videos from 2021 & 2022, click our affiliate link here.

Pastoral work includes a plethora of activities, each of which can dominate your attention and entire day. Job descriptions tend to be vague and you can find yourself fulfilling the “other duties as assigned” that can stretch a work week past 60 hours for little to no additional compensation or appreciation. Nevermind the training needed for a senior or youth pastor that they may not get for social media marketing, video editing, or crisis counseling.

There are many needs and stressors on this job. (Sneak peek: we are announcing something next week that helps this issue that you can find here. Also we have an eBook you can use for yourself, your congregation with small groups, or for Christian counselors in session on how to get unstuck and find motivation.) But what about the personal lives of pastors, what they need help with, and where they see the biggest difficulties at?

We talk a lot about mental health within the Church, but what about the mental health of leadership and pastors? Being spiritual leaders, working 40-60 hours a week, and many times working with broken people can be hard. Pastors face exhaustion, may struggle with their own pastoral anxiety, and experience pastoral burnout. If we are wanting to truly make church a place for healing, we ourselves need to take the first steps as Christian counselors, pastors, elders, and leaders. Church Communications, the people who put on the Thrive & Cultivate conference, along with Faithlife, together a survey for pastors about mental health, burnout, and leadership.

If you want to download the results, you can get them here. It’s a quick read but I feel is also telling of our current situation. Three points that I pulled out from the survey? Pastors are feeling burn out more than they should, pastors have a broad set of emotional regulation techniques (some I don’t agree with), and happily, many pastors are going to see a counselor.

Pastoral Burnout

Pastors work a lot. Sometimes boundaries are hazy, sometimes they don’t exist. Many times your roles include youth pastor, technician, and janitor. Senior pastors are in charge of leadership, sermons and prep, as well as leading the compassion and hospitality ministries. And while the chart below says that under 25 have not yet experience burnout compared to 25-60, they may be single without children, and still hoping to work “hard enough to get kids to come” which is part of that poor boundaries. The 60+ population are definitely those who are tried and true and it would make sense they have better rates of burn out.

Pastoral Coping Skills

Let me define up front that a coping skill is a way to regulate your emotions. It is not a way to distract yourself from your problems. While I did not create this survey, I read “how do you unwind” not as a coping skill, but will look at the results in a similar vein.

When I look at the chart below, I love that prayer is a coping skill used along with being with people, hobbies/reading, and exercise. Because it says unwind, I understand television and internet being on here, but in a clinical setting, this is a poor long-term coping skill as it’s only a distraction. I will say as a clinical counselor, the 9% of people who put alcohol, it’s more concerning as this is where people can end up using alcohol to deal with their emotions.

Pastors Seeing Counselors

I’m going to be honest, 27% of pastors seeing counselors is a great percentage as the general population “[i]n 2019, 19.2% of adults had received any mental health treatment.” [CDC] I don’t have any research to support this claim but pastoral work is more stressful emotionally than many other careers so I’d love to see that percentage even higher if it is is needed. (For my counselors out there, the same is true for us)

So having read through the survey, what are your thoughts?

This year has been hard on everyone, especially pastors. Whether because tithing is low and so needing to let go of staff, people not showing up and having to re-strategize evangelism and discipleship, or the religiosity-political arguments dividing congregations, many pastors are stressed and leaving ministry due to being burnt out.

[This article is part of a youth ministry series we have been writing about for years. Click the link to check out all of the other articles we have here.]

If there is one thing I hold our teenagers up as doing better than any generation still alive, it is their openness, willingness, and ability to talk about mental illness and good mental health. While they do not have it all figured out, we do not as adults either. So I want to make sure we educate ourselves with 12 facts to know about teens and mental illness, so we can have more educated conversations and better empathize with them about what they are going through.