At one point in my ministry, I ran across an interesting church situation: A quaint country church who couldn’t seem to keep a pastor. This church, like many of our SBC churches, was a smaller church outside a small population center. The 30ish congregants were farmers and blue collar families with an average age around 60, however, they could usually only hang on to a pastor for about a year, with lots of itinerant preachers to fill the gaps. As I came to learn more about this little church, I ran across a couple of discoveries. First, their was one prominent family in the church that liked to call the shots. Second, this family had “donated” the land on which the church was built, but third, the land was still in the family’s name. So, whenever an issue arose that a family member (usually, one particular family member) disagreed with, threats were made, arguments ensued, and whomever the pastor was at the time felt a little more discouraged on the road to burnout.
Over the course of almost 30 years in ministry, I have had the misfortune of running across multiple situations where someone has been wronged. Sometimes, these are issues between church members, sometimes a pastor has been wronged by his congregation, and others, the pastor has harmed his flock. According to statistics from 1998-2012, somewhere between 18,000 – 20,000 pastors leave the ministry each year, and many of them attributing forced termination as the reason why. A recent Barna study gives even more information about struggles facing pastors and how they have been responding before, during, and since COVID. The reality is that many pastors face hard situations like the one described in the beginning, and if the pastor is not careful, he could move in the direction of never wanting to pastor again.
One fast track toward burnout for pastors is unforgiveness. Scripture does not speak much about “unforgiveness”, but it does spend a fair amount of time on the importance of forgiveness and the result of unforgiveness – bitterness. For anyone, lack of forgiveness is an issue, but for pastors in particular, it is an even greater concern.
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
Ephesians 4:31 (ESV)
Scripture talks in specific ways about bitterness. It appears in phrases like “bitter gall” (Acts 8:23) and “root of bitterness” (Hebrews 12:15). Let’s consider each of these briefly. One way to define gall is poison. It causes us harm. A root is something that is designed to pull life giving nutrients from one source to feed another. So, taken together, we can understand that bitterness tends to feed on joy and peace from us in order to feed itself while simultaneously poisoning us, our relationships with others, and ultimately our relationship with God. We are meant to steer clear of bitterness.
See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled
Hebrews 12:15 (ESV)
For anyone, for all of us, there is a clear pathway forward to deal with bitterness – Forgiveness. It is our mandate from Jesus. And, like many things that are spiritually good for us, we have gotten forgiveness wrong in several ways. There are common myths about forgiveness we tend to believe. We tie forgiveness to reconciliation, which while related is not the same thing. So, over the next few posts, we’ll take the time to process myths of forgiveness and a clear pathway forward to exercising forgiveness.