When Role Eats Soul: The Spiritual Needs of the Pastor’s Family

In her youth, Anne Jackson vowed never to enter full-time ministry. She had grown up in a pastor’s family and seen firsthand how the congregation had mistreated her father, witnessing the verbal abuse he suffered from people they’d counted as their brothers and sisters. Her father resigned that position and took another with a church that seemed much healthier.

But three years into the new position, another crisis loomed. Her father had been encouraging members to share the gospel with their neighbors. An influential faction of the congregation took a stand against this, arguing that he was the one being paid to evangelize the community, not them. To the extent that he taught others to engage in outreach, they insisted, he was shirking his duties. Not long after, at a business meeting, her father read aloud his resignation letter. Some of the church members were shocked. Some defended him and his position on evangelism. His detractors, however, jumped on the opportunity, even threatening his family if he didn’t follow through and resign.

The teenaged Anne was at that meeting. Angrily, she stood and interrupted the proceedings. Bible in hand, she chastised them for the un-Christian way they fought all the time. Then she stomped out, slamming the door on a stunned congregation.

Wounded and burned out, her father retired from ministry altogether and tried to find another job. The family rarely went to church anymore. Anne herself was traumatized, and her life spun out of control as she tried various ways to numb her painful emotions. Years later, when she went to hear friends play music at a church, she had what appears to be an anxiety attack: “The moment I stepped into the church, my heart started pounding and my stomach tightened up into an uncomfortable little ball. I couldn’t breathe. I started to sweat.”¹

Yet for all this, Anne never entirely gave up on God. She soon found herself working full-time at that church, despite her fear of being hurt all over again. The good news was that she loved the work and threw herself into it. The bad news was that after a year, she was physically exhausted and spiritually dry. In her own words, she would have to learn for herself the difference between “spending time with God” and “spending time doing things for God.”²

If the ministry literature is any indication, she was not alone in needing to learn that lesson. Pastors must tend to their own spiritual lives and maintain the vitality of their relationship to God. The ever-present temptation is to substitute doing for being, breadth for depth, scurrying about trying to keep everyone in the congregation happy. This can have negative personal consequences not only for clergy but for their families, who may only get what is left of a pastor’s time, energy, and attention at the end of the day. In this article, therefore, I will briefly sketch an overall picture of clergy stress before drawing out implications for the spiritual life of the pastor’s family.

Clergy Stress and Burnout

By now, it is commonplace to recognize that congregations demand much of their leaders, and that burnout and emotional exhaustion threaten when the demands are not managed well. There can be ongoing tension between a pastor’s own developing sense of vocation and the congregation’s expectations of what the pastor “should” do, as well as contradictory expectations within the congregation itself. Clergy must wear many hats, being thrust into a variety of roles for which they may have received little to no training. They may have been taught to exegete Scripture, for example, but not how to manage staff; they may preach with passion but feel lost when trying to navigate conflict.

Congregational conflict, unfortunately, is distressingly common. In one study, only one-fifth of pastors surveyed reported that their churches had been conflict-free for the past six months. A full 61 percent, however, reported some minor conflict, while an additional 19 percent reported major conflict—and nearly half of the latter cases resulted in the departure of church members or staff.³ If such numbers are at all representative, then some congregational conflict is the norm rather than the exception. It should not be surprising, then, that many pastors struggle with exhaustion, burnout, and their mental and spiritual health.⁴

When there is a long and ever-growing list of things to do for God and the church, clergy may let their personal relationship with God atrophy. As one pastor put it, “We cannot assume because of the position we’re holding that we’re connected to God.”⁵ As Donald R. Hands and Wayne L. Fehr write,

The alienation from God is concealed by the cleric’s immersion in “the things of God”—teaching, preaching, visiting the sick, praying with others, presiding at liturgy. While sincere, this kind of activity can coexist with an almost complete absence of private, personal presence to God.⁶

Unfortunately, as reported by the Barna Group, 44 percent of pastors find it at least “somewhat difficult” to find time for their own spiritual development, while an additional 9 percent find it “very difficult.”⁷ Roughly half of pastors, it seems, struggle in this arena.

Like Jackson, Ruth Haley Barton is another pastor’s kid who found herself in ministry as an adult and on the edge of burnout. In an unguarded moment with a friend, she was surprised to hear herself say, “I’m tired of helping other people enjoy God; I just want to enjoy God for myself.”⁸ Similarly, Barbara Brown Taylor laments that before she left the parish ministry, she had “become so busy caring for the household of God that I neglected the One who had called me there . . . As long as I fed them, I did not feel my hunger pains.”⁹ Or put even more pithily: “My role and my soul were eating each other alive.”¹⁰

Caring for the needs of a congregation and helping them grow in their relationship with God: this is good and holy work. Yet the work, while important and deeply rewarding, can also be endlessly demanding, particularly when clergy and their congregations have not established realistic expectations, appropriate boundaries, and a shared vision of colaboring in Christ. The demands can take a toll on the minister’s physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. As we’ll see, they can also take a toll on the well-being of the pastor’s family.

External Pressures on Clergy Families

Much more has been written about pastors than about their families, so the empirical research on pastors’ kids (often known as “PKs”) is sparse compared to that on pastors. Still, several PKs have written of the challenges of growing up in a minister’s home.

Some pastors manage the pressures of ministry relatively well, to the benefit of their families. Many PKs, however, complain that their needs end up taking a back seat to the needs of church members:

At times I didn’t feel as important as the ministry. The main reason is the time commitment. Most “ministry” occurs in the evenings and on weekends when the family has the most available time to be together. All ministry is supposedly of God and seems more important than family commitments (the family will “understand”).¹¹

The children do, in fact, understand. They know that ministry is important, and that it requires much of their parents’ time and energy. What they need emotionally, however, is to know concretely that they are cherished and valued. Parents need to help their children feel loved and supported.

In a demanding ministry environment, then, it is important for parents to set firm but flexible boundaries that protect time together as a family. As one grateful PK told me,

Although Dad’s schedule was extremely busy, he always took time for us—a day off a week, if at all possible, for family times. Also, no matter what the schedule, we always met for dinner as a family—this continued through our teen years.¹²

For their part, many pastors recognize the need for such boundaries, as the following comments from pastors suggest:

“I fear losing my family because I am too busy.”

“If I did everything I needed to do for the church, I’d wind up divorced—on grounds of abandonment.”

“I need to learn how to better structure my time so I can accomplish more for the kingdom and spend more time with my family—making sure I don’t neglect my own personal growth as a Christian and a leader.” ¹³

Clergy also wish that church members would be more respectful of these boundaries:

“I wish my congregation would show more respect for my personal time with my family. That would be a great stress reliever.”

“I wish my congregation realized that all of my life doesn’t center around the church, but instead, I work toward a time balance between God, family, marriage, kids, church, self, and community.” ¹⁴

Congregations, however, may need help recognizing and accepting the need for such balance. This is particularly true when the shared church subculture strongly emphasizes sacrificial service and implicitly or explicitly accords greater status or honor to those who give their all, even to the detriment of their personal well-being or that of their families. Pastors in such environments should do more than merely advocate for appropriate boundaries for themselves and their own families; they should advocate for what all families in the church need to thrive.

Internal Pressures on Clergy Families

The challenge of ministry is not merely about time demands and external pressure from the congregation. The challenge is also internal. People pursue ministry careers for a variety of reasons. The theologically or ecclesiastically correct reason is that they sense a “call” from God—though the nature and evidence of that call may vary from tradition to tradition. Such a calling, however, is not easily separated from the more self-serving reasons that motivate ministry involvement. Sadly, as recent highly publicized church scandals have shown, this can sometimes take the form of narcissistic abuses of power.¹⁵ But other, less extreme expressions of narcissistic need are common to many who enter the pastorate. We need to be needed, to be admired, to be told that we are doing great things for God (even as we point heavenward in a gesture of humility).

Some pastors are busy, in other words, not merely because there are so many things to do but also because they need to be busy to drown out the internal chatter of shame, inadequacy, or failure. To some extent, of course, everyone relishes admiration and fears criticism; everyone wants to be liked and to believe that their lives have significance. But to echo Taylor, the public nature of the pastor’s role can begin to cannibalize the soul. Churches want pastors who project confident, impressive exteriors, giving pastors ample reason to play the part and mask whatever drama may be occurring at home. As one PK lamented:

My father preached from the pulpit about love and respect and then came home and hurt us. My mother wanted perfect children who were no trouble. My dad was also an alcoholic. People saw him as the most wonderful minister there ever was. At home, he was drunk, sometimes maudlin, often abusive. Mother did not protect us.¹⁶

This is the even darker counterpart to Jackson’s story. On the one hand, PKs may struggle to make sense of the bad behavior of congregations. On the other hand, however, the bad behavior and hypocrisy aren’t just “out there” in the congregation—they can be “in here,” within the pastor’s family itself.

Children are always trying to make sense of their world. Imagine what the ministry environment and congregational relationships look like from a child’s point of view. Imagine the questions, and sometimes the confusion. What do you do when you hear the gospel preached but don’t see it lived? Ideally, you would go to your parents so they could help you figure it out. But what if your parents also felt the need to keep up appearances? What if you had internalized the message that you shouldn’t make waves or speak inconvenient truths, lest you be shunned? Where do you go, and to whom do you turn? And what becomes of your own spiritual development, your perception of God and the church?

The Spiritual and Emotional Needs of Clergy Families

Pastors need to be attuned to the spiritual and emotional needs of every member of their family, including themselves. Their own personal spiritual practices not only embody their devotion but support their resilience to stress and burnout.¹⁷ For the children growing up in a pastor’s home, such practices model discipleship and lay a foundation for the PK’s own spiritual life.

Spiritual needs, however, cannot be neatly separated from other social and emotional needs. While that is true of any family, the additional challenge for pastors’ families is the push and pull between role and soul. To be clear, it is not always a matter of hypocrisy. Sometimes, for example, the ministerial role can colonize the parental one in ways that unintentionally skew the PK’s spiritual development:

My father would occasionally take us into his room when we were being bad and would make us read passages from the Bible, ones that usually applied to lying or fighting or cleanliness or temper . . . That really bothered me and gave me some negative feelings toward Bible reading. If all the Bible did was condemn, then I wasn’t interested.¹⁸

PKs don’t want to be preached at, as if they were just recalcitrant parishioners in need of pastoral correction. They want their parents to be parents first, pastors second.

In church and at home, PKs witness things that have direct bearing on the steadiness and authenticity of their faith. In the face of hypocrisy or even trauma, pastors’ children need help making sense of what has happened, and its implications for what everyone says they believe. At stake, potentially, is the conviction that God is good or the gospel is trustworthy.

For pastors, an attuned sensitivity to the spiritual and emotional needs of their children may require some honest self-examination. To that end, I offer the following list of questions for pastors to consider prayerfully:

• How depleted are you, physically, spiritually, and emotionally? Exhaustion makes you less available to your family, not just with respect to time, but also energy and attention.
• What boundaries do you need to protect your ability to be fully present to your family? Both quality time and quantity of time are needed to keep family relationships strong; intimacy and togetherness aren’t established on a hit-and-run basis. Remember that the same is true of all the families in your church, so consider how to establish this as a shared value in the congregation.
• How comfortable are you dealing with conflict or dissension? The path of least resistance is often to lay low or give in, to “keep the peace,” even if it compromises deeply held values. This is playing a role at the expense of the soul, and such “peace” is both illusory and temporary.
• How do you understand your own pastoral vocation, especially with respect to how you are supposed to handle conflict? This is an extension of the previous question. As some ministry experts have suggested, many pastors believe that it is their job to keep people happy, to help them in whatever way possible to avoid anxiety and discomfort.¹⁹ But such a belief, coupled with a personal need to be needed, liked, or admired, is more likely to result in the hypocrisy of being nice to church members while complaining about them in the privacy of your home.
• To what extent are you willing to listen fully and compassionately to your children when they say things about the ministry that stir your own anxiety? This is where trustworthiness is built. You don’t have to have all the answers. What matters is that you show that you understand and empathize, and are willing to keep talking and exploring even as you wrestle to make sense of things yourself.

The tension between role and soul is typical to the ministry environment, and the children growing up in that environment are watching to see how their parents deal with that tension. They will form their own perceptions of what is real and what is not, of whether the faith has substance or is more of a high-stakes social game. If allowed, they may have hard truths to speak. For the sake of their spiritual development, someone needs to listen.