4 Disciplines to Keep Your Anger in Check

I suspect that there are many pastors who are angry but don’t know it, and if you’re one of them, I also suspect that not knowing it may be negatively impacting your ministry. Why? Because unacknowledged anger can be easily transferred to many other areas of ministry life. In place of this lack of awareness, a wholesome attention to anger is an important pathway to a more profound knowing of ourselves and our communities.  

Over the past year, I’ve experienced a rather unpleasant education in anger. I was significantly wronged by some people in my ministry, and their harm impacted not only my life but the life of my family. I was not able to defend myself. I have reason to believe that I have been the subject of slander. In the process, I was prohibited even from accessing a full account of what had happened. The situation even impacted the ability of my children to have confidence in the life of the church. I have been on the receiving end of an injustice and have been rendered frustratingly powerless to address the situation. Perhaps the most painful aspect of all is that, as a pastor who cares about his people, I was cut off from community in a way that prohibited the restoration of relationships. The experience has left a ragged and unresolvable tear that I am simply left to myself to deal with. Like I said, it has been profoundly unpleasant. 

In the wake of this season, I have taken consolation and challenge from Paul’s words in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin” (ESV). If you’re familiar with Greek, you will know that the first word of that verse is a command. It’s difficult to translate into English, but the King James captures it somewhat more clearly: “Be ye angry”! How do we respond to this command to be angry? Regrettably, I think that we have inherited a lot of bad theology around anger—that it is always bad, that it has no place in the Christian life, that pastors—especially pastors!—as people who are to be above reproach, should never be ruffled, always peaceable and easygoing. And yet Paul commands us to “be angry.” This means we should probably do a better job of attempting to understand what anger is. 

Anger is an emotion like any of our emotions. It is part of that complex system of awareness, knowledge, and community life that returns information to us about what is going on. Just because we feel our emotions doesn’t mean we are beholden to respond to them. But we must acknowledge and be aware of them if we are going to live, and lead, wisely. I think it’s helpful to think of anger as something like the pain sensor for our emotional life. You understand how pain works—hold your hand over an open flame and the nerve endings will quickly return a signal to your brain that says, “Pain!” This signal invites you to move your body out of harm’s way. In a similar manner, anger is telling you something about your life—that something is wrong. That something may be that you have been wronged, or that someone you love has been wronged, or that something you care about is wrong. Anger is the natural response to a situation of injustice.  

But like all emotions, anger must be queried. Just because you feel that something is wrong doesn’t mean that you are right. You may have misjudged the situation. You may not have all the relevant information. You may be hungry, or tired, or lonely, or upset about something else entirely, and the experience of anger is manifesting in conjunction with those secondary factors.  

Taking our cue from the apostle Paul, we’re very much supposed to feel our anger. But alongside his command is a clear warning as well: the second half of the phrase, that we “do not sin.” When I think about sinning in our anger, I am first of all struck by the episode at the close of the book of Jonah, where the prophet has seated himself at a distance from Nineveh in hopes of witnessing God’s righteous judgment on the city. He wants to see it destroyed! But it doesn’t happen, and Jonah stews in his anger at God’s inaction. He becomes enraged, and God challenges him with a question: “Do you have any right to be angry?” (see Jonah 4:4) A good question for Jonah. A good question for us, as well. Do we have any right to our anger? Is this the right emotion at this time? Is my response appropriate? Is the information being returned to me by my emotional life actionable?  

I’ve had many opportunities to ask myself that question over the past year. For me, the answer has been pretty continuously, “Yes.” Yes, I have a right to be angry about this situation. But anger is not monolithic, and it has siblings that must be carefully monitored. One of the images that has come to mind in this season has been that of a garden. Picture it with me. My heart is a kind of garden, and right now it has quite a number of plants that are bringing up anger. But I have to carefully examine each plant, because not all of them are the same. Some of the plants are anger’s forbidden siblings—bitterness, malice, vengeance, and rage. Bitterness means that my anger is making me lose faith in God’s goodness, that I am willing to think the worst of others. Malice grows up when I allow anger to grow into a spirit that hates others. Vengeance is when I begin to daydream how I can manage—or at least witness—a comeuppance appropriate for their sin. And rage demands that every other emotion give way to the supremacy of anger, blinding me to anything else. Each plant has to be ruthlessly plucked from my heart. I can be angry, but I must trust in God’s goodness. I can be angry, but I may never hate. I can be angry, but vengeance belongs to the Lord alone. I can be angry, but if anger begins to crowd out any other feelings, I must trim it back. This is one of the ways that we can be angry, but not sin.  

What may be surprising is that these processes—both of querying our anger and of ruthlessly ripping out the weeds of bitterness, malice, vengeance, and rage—are vital components to growing in self-knowledge. There are a few things to say about this. The interrupting question—do I have a right to be angry?—has the power, and potential, to render us more discriminating of our emotional lives more generally. Why am I feeling what I am feeling? This may be especially important for those moments when our anger is sourced, not in a specific episode from the present, but in a memory from the past. A coworker or congregant speaks to you in a way that you don’t like, and you become angry. But Jonah’s query, executed faithfully, may reveal that your anger is sourced in a historic wound—a slight from the past, or a bitter memory of unresolved pain.  

This power of transference is one of the signal characteristics of anger, and likely one of the reasons why we have often pursued a tacit policy of avoidance. Anger in one place can lead to anger in other places, and the burning power of anger can lead—in rage—to it taking over our whole emotional life. You might think, “All the more reason to leave it alone!” But I want to suggest that anger doesn’t go away. Unacknowledged, unprocessed, unredeemed, it will be inevitably transferred to other aspects of your life. It will manifest in arguments with your spouse, with your children, with contempt for coworkers, with self-hatred, and sometimes perfectionism. Most vividly, I think unprocessed anger in pastors shows up in our preaching. Listen, sometime, with fresh ears, to preachers who begin to get “hot” in the pulpit. They may describe—and you may have felt this as well—that they are really “preaching.” When I hear those preachers I am often struck by how . . .  angry they sound. We must ask ourselves, how much of our heat is genuinely coming from the Spirit, and how much is coming from our unprocessed anger?  

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So a godly response to our anger invites us to question our motives and also to become more discriminating in evaluating our inner emotional lives. Ultimately, it is an invitation to grow in self-awareness, a process I believe we neglect to our peril. I want to offer four brief tips for helping us to engage fully in this process.  

Tip #1: Journaling. Lots has been written about the spiritual value of journaling, so much that I don’t believe the practice requires justification. Where we need help, as professional writers, is with the challenge to write for yourself. So much pastoral writing is for consumption—a sermon, a newsletter, a blog post, or a book. My guess is that most pastors, reading this advice, are tempted when journaling to think about a readership! But when we journal to grow spiritually, we must write for no audience in order to keep us honest. Document your anger. Write about why you are angry. Chase the threads of memory that tether out to why you feel the way you do. Acknowledge quickly when your anger has blossomed into bitterness, malice, vengeance, or rage. Allow the journal to be a mirror you write and look into and which reflects your soul back at you.  

Tip #2: Stillness. Pastors have incredibly busy schedules, with frequent and unpredictable demands on our time. Sometimes I would guess we suppress our anger simply because we don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it! But it is vital that we find spaces and times of stillness from which we can faithfully evaluate our emotional lives; ask the first question, “What am I feeling?”; and then ask the Jonah question, “Am I right to feel it?” It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, but it needs to be regular. Ultimately, stillness provides a buffer against the bleeding power of transference.  

Tip #3: Confide. Excessive introspection can be as harmful, in its own way, as ignoring our emotional lives. A profoundly helpful discipline is that of processing our lives—and our anger in particular—in the context of a trusted confidant or confidants. I use the word “confidant” in a specific sense, taken from Heifetz and Linsky’s book Leadership on the Line. They point to a critical difference between allies, who are temporary and can have mixed or confused loyalties, and confidants, who are more permanent and are not in danger of feeling conflicted between a loyalty to your organization (the church!) and you. Processing anger with allies is risky business, because their stake in the organization may make them feel defensive. A confidant, like your spouse, a mentor, or a group of fellow friends in ministry, can help you to draw out your anger and see it for what it is. Then you will be better equipped to respond wisely to whatever situation has precipitated your anger.  

Tip #4: Apologize. If you are at all like me, then you can name a dozen or more times when you took something out on someone who didn’t deserve it. Your words were too sharp with your children at dinner, or you picked a fight with your spouse, or you came down too hard on an employee or board member. Get used to saying the words, “I’m sorry”— “That wasn’t your fault.” “My response wasn’t what I want it to be.” “Please forgive me.”  

This past year I have been very angry. On the whole, I think I am right to be angry. But I am also aware that I have had to labor pretty ceaselessly to keep myself from sinning in my anger. I don’t always get it right—you won’t either—but the process is vital for our health, the health of our families, and the health of the churches under our care.  

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.