Rebuilt to Last
Restoring the Foundations of Pastoral Excellence
We have all seen it—a high-flying pastor suddenly crashes and burns, taking others down in flames as well. The cause might be burnout, an emotional meltdown, a stress-induced physical crisis or an immoral misadventure. Whatever the case, the consequences are painfully familiar—a devastated congregation, a traumatized family and a shattered ministry career.
But, is this just the tip of the iceberg? Is it possible that much so-called excellence in ministry is achieved through unhealthy patterns of pastoral motivation and behavior? For every pastor who crashes and burns, do several others manage a dead-stick landing with much public acclaim, but hearts filled with pain and brokenness?
For nearly a decade, the Sandberg Leadership Center and the faculty of Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio, have been researching and addressing the issue of personal brokenness and its relationship to the pastoral vocation. Now, with our Pastors of Excellence program, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc., we are gaining valuable new insights into that relationship and crafting and testing remedies for pastoral brokenness.
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So far, the program has been a remarkable success. Indeed, an overwhelming majority of participants have shown significant improvement in such areas as spiritual vitality, leadership effectiveness, and stress processing, according to a battery of personality, spiritual and other assessments administered before and after the program.
But in addition to the very real and positive transformation that is taking place in the lives and ministry of our participants, our Pastors of Excellence initiative is also yielding or confirming several key learning points or paradigm shifts. While all these lessons present rich possibilities for insight and reflection for the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence community, perhaps the most intriguing finding concerns this relationship between personal brokenness and pastoral excellence.
Professional success in ministry, we have found, is sometimes the fruit of personal dysfunction and not pastoral health.Clearly, pastoral health and ministry fruitfulness are not inimical to one another, but we have learned that there are different types of ministry fruitfulness. Some fruitfulness, we have found, is nurtured, growing from various life-affirming sources and practices. Other fruitfulness, however, is pressured, and stems from dysfunction and various unhealthy drives and stressors. Our hypothesis is that nurtured fruitfulness is more sustainable than pressured fruitfulness.
Certainly, this is not what any of us would want to hear, suggesting as it does that the problem of sustainability in pastoral excellence has far deeper and darker roots than we previously thought. Sure, we all hunger for heroes. We all want to believe there are men and women who, by the sheer quality of their character and work, give us the hope that we too can rise above our own unique dysfunctions and be excellent, without remediation or struggle.
Unfortunately, our initial experience has shown us that, while some of these paragons do exist, many “excellent” pastors have been hounded to excellence by their own inner demons of grief, brokenness, loss and dysfunction. At the beginning and again at the end of our Pastors of Excellence experience, all our participants complete a validated assessment tool called the Life Styles Inventory, which provides valuable information on thinking and behavioral styles. Among high-achieving pastors who in the course of our work together admit to having significant personal wounds, we have observed two different patterns of “pastoral pathology” in their small-group interaction, which in turn correlate with their Life Styles Inventory results.
The first pattern is associated with what the Life Styles Inventory calls “Aggressive/Defensive” styles of thought and behavior. According to the inventory manual, these characteristics reflect “self-promoting thinking and behavior used to maintain status/position and fulfill security needs through task-related activities.” This focus on tasks seems to be a compensation for various forms of personal wounding and results in pathology that we call “performance addiction” in pastoral ministry. A pastor with this profile attempts to assuage the pain of personal wounds through ministry achievement and impact. People close to this type of leader characteristically see and experience this pathology manifested in perfectionism, competition, power and opposition.
The second pattern shows up in “Passive/Defensive” styles that represent “self-protecting thinking and behavior that promote the fulfillment of security needs through interaction with people,” according to the inventory manual. Characteristics such as conflict avoidance, dependence, conventionality and approval-seeking combine to create a “people-pleasing” pathology. In this pattern, the pain of personal pastoral wounding is assuaged by popularity with and constant affirmation from the community, the congregation and church leadership team, and denominational overseers.
In both cases, the wounded pastors are willing to go to great lengths to minimize their pain and optimize their pastoral situation to get what they want, to achieve the results they believe will be beneficial: i.e., high levels of achievement for the Aggressive/Defensive pastor and popularity or affirmation for the Passive/Defensive pastor. Basically, these wounded individuals become high-performing pastors who are willing to outperform their peers in the areas of task achievement or relational accommodation. But such performance comes only at great cost in imbalanced life and lifestyle, which predictably adds further to their pain and misery. For many such pastors, recovery is complicated by the fear they will lose the comfort of compensating behaviors if they were to adopt a healthy, balanced mindset and lifestyle. They fear that if they change their behaviors, their ministries will fail.
Fortunately, our Pastors of Excellence experience, with its emphasis on relationships, long-term reflection and interaction, has resulted in measurable progress with both of these “pathologies,” as reflected in significantly changed scores on the Life Styles Inventory and a separate assessment that measures their ability to process and cope with stress. Anecdotally, “recovering” pastors report an actual increase in pastoral effectiveness and not the ministry implosion that they feared. The work is difficult, but the potential of sustainable pastoral excellence seems well worth the effort.
A friend of mine, an entrepreneur who retired at 30, recently bought a gentleman’s farm with a run-down house and about ten acres of land for half its market value. The foundation of the house was severely damaged and in danger of collapse. With characteristic boldness and less expense than one might think, he hired a house mover, lifted the house off its foundation, removed the old foundation and built a new stronger one in its place. It was a lot of work but it substantially increased the value and utility of the home.
At the Sandberg Leadership Center, we are working to help wounded pastors replace and rebuild their foundation for pastoral ministry. It is a daunting task, but a rewarding one. If we are truly serious about sustaining pastoral excellence and not merely unleashing it in short bursts that often end in burnout or tragedy, then it is work we must all prayerfully pursue.
Terry Hofecker, D.Min., is pastor of Northwest Chapel, Dublin, Ohio, and mentor training coordinator for the Pastors of Excellence program at the Sandberg Leadership Center, Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland, Ohio.
