Invisible Weights of Church Work
Complex relationships are extra loads to carry
When I see women in ministry who are in burnout or on the way to burnout, I usually notice an imbalance of the inputs and outputs in their lives. The amount of ways they are pouring themselves out to care for others, to run their lives, and to stay on top of all of their responsibilities vastly outweighs the ways that they are taking in and receiving care and support themselves.
This is not usually something we can get to the bottom of in just one conversation, because there are so many factors and layers to it. Accordingly, I’m anticipating this may be a topic I cover over the course of several posts.
If this is you or someone in your life, one thing that can be helpful is actually taking stock of all of the outputs in one’s life. What are the things that drain your energy stores - emotionally, relationally, physically, mentally, and so on? If you created a thorough list, it would need to include all your work and personal responsibilities, any relational commitments that are draining (extended family? kids?), and so on.
When you work in church ministry, too, there are a lot of invisible weights that can get added onto this list. Such as:
Your pastor is also your boss… which means that any pastoral care you receive from your pastor is also affected by the employee-emloyer relationship. Thus, this is probably not a relationship where you feel complete freedom to be yourself, since it could impact your job or your working relationship.
Your friends are also your ministry volunteers…. which means you are managing the relationships as part of your job, not just as a friend - and sometimes those lines can get blurry and messy.
Your congregation always expects something from you. They see you first and foremost through your job title, not first and foremost through your covenental ties as brothers and sister in a church body.
Your fellow church members always expect you to be spiritually mature and get concerned if they hear about you struggling, since you are a leader on staff. This likely affects the way you can open up in small group/Bible study settings and be known within your congregation.
You have different levels of relationships within the church - acquaintances, friends, etc. - but you are always navigating how much you can open up to people, how safe people are, and whether it would be a good idea or not to open up about certain things to people within the congregation.
Every time you show up at church, there is a certain stress that comes with it, as you have to have your “I’m a leader” hat on. You can’t just be a congregation member solely.
You might know about a lot of messy behind-the-scenes things at the church, perhaps especially about pastors, how decisions are made, and so on. This can mean that you don’t hear the sermons or experience the worship services in the same way, because a lot of it feels disingenuous to you.
When these things are true, navigating relationships at church involves a lot more energy than it would for the average person. Whereas church may normally be a setting where others get input and get filled up, your experience of church is one of a complex tangled web of outputs... mixed with a level of perhaps diminished inputs. Your relationships with your pastor, your friends, your congregation, and your church leaders (which, again, are relationships that most people likely experience as fulfilling, not as draining) are all made more complex by their dual nature.
Some people in ministry have gotten so used to this that they dismiss it as just part of the reality they have to deal with. But if we’re going to take serious stock of our inputs and outputs, let’s actually name and notice these kinds of things.
I’ve had a few conversations recently where women basically said to me that they had never questioned the concept that church has always been stressful to them for their entire adult life. To me, this is a warning sign, like a light on the dashboard. It could mean that something needs to shift in her thought life, that she’s in an unhealthy church context and needs to find a different one, that she has failed to make good relationships with others in her congregation, or any other number of things. Much like the “check engine light,” it’s a general indicator, and we have to explore further to find the actual cause and solutions. But the least helpful thing we could do is just ignore the light.
So, as you take stock of your own life inputs and outputs, start here: What are the outputs in your life? How does working at your church impact your list of outputs? And what else is on this list of invisible weights for you?
