3 Practice Areas to Protect Pastors from Burnout

It wasn’t until I had nearly six months of distance from my pastorate that I realized I had been dealing at the time with significant burnout. 

The burnout grew, as far as I can tell, from a toxic combination of unavoidably overlapping circumstances. I had been hired for one job—to lead a church—but shortly after my arrival, a key staff member resigned and (chiefly for financial reasons) I inherited her portfolio. I now had both my new job, and another full-time job to manage and delegate. Added to this, I found out that the church had neglected what might be called “best practices” in managing church transitions, so to my lead pastor and executive pastor job descriptions was added the shadow portfolio of “transitional pastor.” None of this was clear at the outset. For that matter, none of it was clear as things progressed. But, as it happens, I’m a high performer and love the church. I was willing to go along for a time.  

In the course of this triple-job-billed-as-one-job, we got a lot done. I should be more specific: I got a lot done—preaching, teaching, counseling, restructuring, revising policy, and much more. After eventually leaving this pastorate, I revised my résumé with things accomplished at the church and sent it to a friend for review. His response surprised me. He said, with some concern, “That’s a lot.” This was before my six-month realization of burnout, and at the time he said that, I didn’t see what he saw. But after some time I came to see it from his perspective. It was a lot. It was all good, but it was too much.  

The process of responding to constantly challenging situations and attempting to move the church forward faithfully led me to discover (as always happens) the skeletons in the church closet, architecture, and governance. And things began happening to me that I, unwisely, ignored. It became difficult to rest effectively. I was having a hard time getting away from the work. I became moderately obsessed with online Sudoku puzzles (I could solve them even if I couldn’t resolve other pesky problems). I had no bandwidth for rejuvenating relationships. Most distressingly, I lost the ability to read for myself. I could read books for pleasure, but any time I sat to read something substantive, I would lose attention or fall asleep.  

At the time, I chalked all of this up to the “startup cost” of a new ministry. In reality, I was burning myself out. Badly.  

Burnout, like so many things in life, is something I didn’t understand until I experienced it. The language of “burnout” today is fairly new, and all things considered, it is a relatively under-researched concept. That doesn’t mean it’s a new phenomenon. In the same way that PTSD preexisted its first real diagnoses following the horrors of World War I, burnout has been a reality of life, if often unacknowledged and untreated. Today, it is a problem that appears to be impacting more and more pastors. Based on my own experience and what I’ve learned through my contacts with fellow clergy, I’m not sure that many pastors are in fact prepared to recognize it and respond accordingly. 

What is burnout? And what causes it? The second question may be easier to answer than the first. Allow me to draw together four factors (and there are likely more) that feed the experience.  

In the first place, pastors are, for the most part, highly responsible people. No doubt there are some—few, I would reckon—who as Paul says in Philippians 2:3 preach Christ “out of selfish ambition” (NIV). But in the main, pastors are people who have answered a call to serve—who feel a sense of obligation to our God and the communities He has entrusted to us. This sense of obligation, intrinsic to our pastoral call and identity, makes us susceptible at the outset to overwork. The call makes it difficult for us to let things drop.  

To this sense of obligation is added a second factor: the ballooning of the pastoral job description. No longer are we merely quiet clerics in country villages, who preach, catechize, visit, baptize, marry, and bury. Now we are underqualified counselors, administrators, business managers, culture warriors, visionaries, bloggers, podcasters, brand managers, and “public figures.” A signature feature of the modern world is the breakdown of family connections and with it the new mobility of people across cities and regions. This means that, added to all the aspects of the jobs that have become part of the pastor’s portfolio, we must also somehow provide a family connection for an increasingly psychologically fractured population. The amount of work is simply overwhelming.  

A third factor is what we might call the burden of care—something pastors share with the other caring professions that appear to deal with significant burnout (nurses, doctors, counselors, teachers, etc.). When you are in a caring profession, you are there because you, well, care. Leaving your job at the office becomes almost impossible, because your job and your personality, heart, motivations, and dreams are all intertwined. You don’t invest an hour in counseling a suicidal congregant and then stop thinking about that person five minutes after the meeting. It sits with you through the day, stays with you at dinner, niggles at you while you sit to relax, and even murmurs to you after you go to bed.  

Intimately tied to the burden of care is a fourth factor, that in pastoral ministry the lines between personal and professional life blur unavoidably. When you are clergy, most of your social connections are also congregants. They can join a small group and voice their concerns and fears about life, family, and jobs. But you can’t show up and complain about your job—your job is them!  

These factors are pretty much always at play in pastoral ministry, a simmering pot of stresses that constantly threatens to boil over. And what happens to the pot when additional stresses enter the fray? A building project? Church conflict? Recalcitrant elders? Uncooperative staff?  

I mentioned earlier that burnout may be easier to explain than define. When we look at it from the perspective of its causes (and my list is not intended to be exhaustive), I think a definition presents itself: burnout identifies the state of your soul when the implicit costs of ministry exceed, for a prolonged time, your ability to be renewed and restored. Maybe you’ve experienced that state. Maybe you’re in it right now.  

This may bring us to a place where some really unhelpful advice gets tossed about—often but not always—by well-meaning but ill-informed people. Some people, listening to pastors speak about their feelings of burnout, immediately spiritualize the situation, and will tell you that you should simply “trust the Lord more.” This may rankle, not least because it implies that you are not trusting the Lord. In which part of my portfolio am I displaying a lack of trust in the Lord? Should I care less about sermons? Should I stop thinking about and praying for the personal crises of congregants? Did you want me to ignore your phone calls? (For the record, I suspect that these are the same people who think that pastors only work one day a week.) These “solutions” make the listener feel better about a problem he or she doesn’t fully understand.  

Another unhelpful category of advice is the admonition to do more things. Have you read this book on management? What about this podcast on church governance? You should exercise more. You should sleep more. You should eat more healthily. You should pray more. You should date your spouse. You should play with your kids. You should go to this conference. Each piece of advice may be meritorious, but the one thing missing is the simple and bald understanding that you don’t have any time. Pastors with burnout and approaching burnout are drowning in the tasks of ministry. The advice to “do more” is like giving us more clothes to wear while we thrash about in the water.  

One last piece of unhelpful advice is something I’ve heard preached by a prominent evangelical pastor. I won’t name him, because that’s not the point, but in effect he says that burnout is fake. After all, who ever heard of a laborer experiencing burnout? The concept is absurd, and the truth of the matter, he believes, is that the pastors who claim to experience it are getting above themselves—they think they’re too important. There you have it. You are burned out because you are immature, aren’t working hard enough, and have the wrong expectations of ministry. Case closed.  

I suspect that responses like these drive pastors to disclose less, open up less, and suffer in silence.  

I would be a fool to suggest that I have the solution to burnout, but in the wake of my own experience I want to offer three areas of practice that might help to protect pastors from burnout. Then I want to offer one admonition directed at elders, councils, and boards of governance.  

The first area of practice is Sabbath. I don’t need to preach to you about the Sabbath. You know you’re supposed to set aside a day of rest from the work. What you need to do is do it. Set apart a day when you don’t touch the church or anything to do with the church. Keep it slavishly. Schedule no meetings. Decline to attend any meetings that have been scheduled in your absence. Answer no phone calls. Check no emails (this one is hard!). Communicate to everyone in your ministry your anticipated unavailability on that day, and graciously rebuff those well-meaning people who presume, “Well, he can’t mean me!” Yes, Margaret, I’m afraid you are included. We can talk tomorrow. Not long ago I saw a job posting calling for a senior pastor, and one of their stated qualifications was that this individual be “on call, 24/7!” (The exclamation point was part of the post.) Not only is this unwise, it is foolish.  

The second area of practice is retreat. Sabbath is a vital part of the rhythm of our life’s work, but retreat is something different. It’s not a vacation, but it is very much a getting away. Our church environments can become claustrophobic, oppressively urging work done and not-yet-done upon us. Ironically, sometimes we simply have to vacate the premises in order to reset our souls and get back in touch with the Lord of life. I’m blessed to live in an area where there are several retreat centers nearby where I can book a night or two to get away. You may not have access to such a place, but I urge you to find something like it. Even if it’s for a day, get out the office, taking your Bible, a journal, and some spiritual reading, and spend time (with notifications turned off) out of contact with anyone but your spouse. The change in perspective is vital to restoring your own perspective on ministry.  

The third area of practice is friendship. Loneliness is a pretty unique problem in ministry—although you’re surrounded by people, there are few to whom you can entrust yourself. That makes it all the more important to cultivate spiritual friendships outside the church. This may be extremely challenging, especially as it is compounded by the alienating effects of digital social spaces. But true friendships have the power of reinforcing your sense of self, of drawing out your personality, of reminding you who you are and want to be. Time spent with the best of friends leaves you more yourself than before.  

These three practices are things that we can arrange ourselves, by degrees—although admittedly, friendship is the most difficult. But to these three I also want to levy an admonition—this directed at governing councils and boards of elders. People who are selected for church councils are often people who present themselves as both spiritually mature and good at business. Rarely are they in a position to understand the scope of demands placed upon a pastor by virtue of the call. It is incumbent upon them to educate themselves about the difficulties of pastoral ministry, and then defend their shepherds against burnout. It is they who must insist upon things like sabbath, regular retreat, sabbatical, and even preventative counseling as necessary. It’s simply a matter of good stewardship.  

 Burnout may be a challenging concept to understand, but it is an awful thing to experience. I pray for my fellow ministers and their governing boards, that we may learn more, be proactive, and support one another more profoundly in navigating these difficulties. 

Dr. Jeremy Rios is from the Chicago suburbs and holds a PhD in Theology from the University of St. Andrews. He has been a pastor in three churches in British Columbia and has written or co-authored five books. He blogs regularly at jmichaelrios.wordpress.com.