Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving by Bob Burns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve watched pastors burn out and drop out. While it is a privilege to shepherd God’s people, it is also just plain hard and demanding work. You don’t do pastoral work, you are a pastor. In some sense, you are always on. The project of this book is to explore what is necessary for pastors to burn on, not burn out. And it is pastors in fact who developed the content of this book as part of a Lilly research project in which pastors were gathered in Summits that explored the keys to sustaining pastoral excellence. Out of these summits five key factors emerged:
1. Spiritual formation: resisting the temptation of workaholism by building rituals, maintaining accountability, growing through hardship, and practicing spiritual disciplines.
2. Self-care: resisting the pressures of work and fostering spiritual growth, emotional self-awareness, relational depth (particularly helpful here was identifying who can pastors share with), and intellectual and physical self-care. Self-care, the authors point out can actually be self-denial as one refuses to heed the siren calls of ministry to tend to the self in a way where you are able to bring the best to those you serve.
3. Emotional and cultural intelligence. Does one understand one’s own emotions and is one aware of the emotions others are manifesting? Likewise, they explore how we all work out of a cultural context and a growing awareness of both one’s own cultural identity and the cultural differences we encounter among those we minister is critical to ministry success in a culturally diverse world.
4. Healthy marriage and family life. Normal life stresses marriages. The ministry lifestyle means one may never feel off the clock and spouse and children get the leftovers or are often the dumping ground for pressures of ministry. Sometimes this may lead to conflicting loyalties or even abandonment of one’s family to ministry. There is the question of who ministers to the spouse. There were a number of practical recommendations in this section ranging from setting aside intentional time together and pursuing shared hobbies to annual marriage “check-ups” with a therapist.
5. Leadership and Management. The authors described leadership as “poetry”, that which captures the imaginations and has systems in place to channel the energies of people. Administration is “plumbing”–modeling, shepherding, managing expectations, supervising conflict, and planning.
The book concludes that it isn’t enough to have summits that recognize these themes or even to make resolves to change. Negotiating these changes with spouses and church leadership and finding continuing support from cohort participants is necessary to consolidate these insights. It seems to me that this may be the most critical insight in terms of pastoral transformation in the whole book.
The book includes appendices with various tools, the most helpful of which may be the emotions checklist, which helps one give a name to the emotions one feels (especially helpful for men). I would recommend this book as a resource to pastors, others in ministry, and to church or ministry leadership, who need to understand the stressors and key factors to pastoral success in order to support their pastors.