1,500 pastors leave their churches every month in the United States because of conflict, burnout, or moral failure. Help keep your pastor from becoming part of that statistic. Use every available resource to encourage, support, and partner with your pastor. This ezine and www.My-Pastor.com give you a good start toward effectively ministering to your minister.

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Date: July 1, 2011

Issue Number 026

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In May we introduced the concept of clergy burnout. We noted that burnout is not simply being exhausted. Burnout actually has three elements - each of them must be present to truly qualify as burnout. The three are as follows:

• Exhaustion - the feeling of being emotionally overextended and completely worn out by his or her ministry.
• Cynicism - a withdrawal from people to whom the pastor ministers. He or she may become cynical about people ("They will never get it!"). He holds back emotional attachment from congregation members and just goes through the motions.
• Ineffectiveness - An overwhelming sense of personal failure. Depending on the circumstances, he may actually be quite effective and successful in ministry. However, he feels like a failure.

That's what burnout is. But what causes burnout? There are six elements in a ministry position that can be causes of burnout. A person usually experiences more than one when they are getting burned out. But depending on the situation, one of these areas will haunt a person more than the others. We will look at the second set of two today.

But first, a little review from last month. The first two potential causes of burnout are...

• Work overload - There are two ways that ministry can produce work overload. First, there just might be too much work that any one person can accomplish. Any pastor will tell you that the work is never finished. No matter how many hours a pastor spends ministering, there is always something else that he or she can or could have done. This becomes an issue with pastors when they can't walk away and leave the work at the church. Second, the work may be too intense. I've had periods in my ministry where I was dealing with severe conflict, peoples' emotional scars from abuse, and church financial difficulties. A pastor doesn't have to work 60 hours a week to experience work overload. The intensity of the ministry may just be too much for one person to handle.
• Lack of control - Pastors often find themselves in a strange predicament: they are given the responsibility for leading a congregation but not given enough control to actually lead effectively. He is charged with moving the congregation forward but then is criticized for doing just that.

That's what we discussed last month. Now lets take a look at the next two potential causes of clergy burnout.