Boundaries for Singles in Ministry
You don't have to wait til you're married to learn to prioritize your personal life
Most youth ministry staff start working in the field when they’re really young — likely when they’re straight out of college or within the next few years, and perhaps while they are unmarried. For those that stay in youth ministry and make the transition from singleness to marriage, there’s often a sentiment that they had to adjust the way they did ministry at this point in time. If you ask about it, you’ll hear something like:
“Once I got married, I realized that I couldn’t keep using all my energy up for everyone else — for my students, volunteers, and families — during the day and come home with nothing to give to my spouse. So I had to adjust the way I was doing ministry.”
Or perhaps, “I used to spend most of my nights out with students, watching their games or grabbing dinner. But now that I’m married, I want to reserve a lot of my evenings to connect with my spouse. We’ve had to decide how many nights I can be out and how to make sure we are getting enough time together.”
Or even, “Part of how ministry and marriage both work together for me is because my spouse is also a volunteer in the youth ministry. So we are both committed to being at youth group on Wednesday nights, and we both go to retreats together. This means we still get to see each other during those nights or retreats, and that our schedules are already aligned in ways that get us on the same page to keep other nights open.”
It’s been occurring to me recently that, in all these statements, there is a wisdom that singles also need to learn and implement. It’s healthy to not use up all your energy at work and leave nothing for your personal life when you go home. It’s healthy to prioritize time to connect with important people (like close friends, if you’re single) in your life.
I’m so glad that people who make these kinds of statements learned to renegotiate boundaries and priorities once they got married. That’s great. What I want to say is that you don’t have to wait til you’re married to learn and implement these things. Just because you’re single doesn’t mean you should spend all your energy and leave nothing for yourself at the end of the day.1 Just because you’re single doesn’t mean you can get away without prioritizing rich relational connections for yourself. You need a personal life, a social life, and community, too.2 You will suffer without it.
The church at large has done a pretty decent job of teaching married couples to prioritize their marriages and time with their spouses. For this reason, we tend to see the need for these boundaries and priorities better once we are married. They’ve been brought to our attention at that point. I’ve heard plenty of married people in ministry express their sense of conviction when they realized they were giving their spouses their leftovers rather than their best.
But if you aren’t married, don’t let your lack of marriage make you overlook the need to be in close-knit, Christ-centered relationships with others.
If you find that, at the end of the day, you regularly lack the emotional, relational, and physical energy to participate in life-giving community and relationships, then you might be giving yourself and your “significant others” your leftovers — and that’s not any better for you than it is for a married person who is doing so with their spouse.
In fact, you will put yourself at risk for burnout if you keep it up. In the book Flourishing in Ministry: How to Cultivate Clergy Wellbeing, Matt Bloom shares research from over a decade of study of thousands of ministry leaders across denominations, ages, races, genders, and years of practice in ministry. In discussing interviews with ministry leaders who burnt out, he writes,
“Each person thought he or she could go on at least a little bit longer: no one realized the severity of his or her burnout. These stories make clear that declines in resilience often go unnoticed. People overlook the chronic fatigue they experience and keep pressing on. …One important place for churches to begin addressing the deep causes of low resilience and eventual burnout is to help create reasonable workloads for their pastors…. I suggest a simple but potentially very helpful approach. Find a way to alleviate or end at least one-third of the pastor’s duties. Try to reduce the pastor’s workload by one-third. For a while, the pastor will feel like he or she is underperforming because his or her days are not overwhelming. But that is the way work should be: most days should end with the pastor feeling energetic, like he or she could give more effort to ministry. Most days should end well, not end with exhaustion.”
If your title isn’t “pastor,” just replace that word with the phrase “ministry leader,” and take Bloom’s words to heart. You shouldn’t be ending your days with no energy left to give to your personal life, even if you’re single.
So, if you’re single, what boundaries do you have to protect your relationships, energy, and personal life? How would you be doing ministry differently if you were married, and how might your answer to that question give you some insights as to what you might need to consider doing differently right now?
Where singles have implicitly believed this, I would guess it’s been through a sloppy teaching or misapplication of 1 Corinthians 7:32-35. These verses do not teach that singles need to exhaust themselves and have no personal life for the sake of the kingdom.
For more that I’ve written previously about this, check this post: