I went to church today and my brain went to work…..

I always find it good brain fodder when I go to church these days. First up, they’re an indicator for how well I’m improving. I can tell by how I feel while deciding. If I feel dread, anxiety, or sadness, I know I’m still recovering. Today it didn’t feel too bad lying in bed at 07:30 wondering if I should get up and take the kids to church. In the end, it was either that, or I was going to have to find something else to do with them or they’d climb the walls.

Secondly, I can monitor my feelings while I’m there. Today didn’t feel too bad. Ideally, I would have loved to have crept out during the last song, but it’s too hard with three kids, because I have to go find them first, rather than have them find me afterwards. Besides, I do like to say hi to friends although probably not all at once after the service.

I felt ok today. I wasn’t anxious enough to consider having a beer before going, and I didn’t take my friendly weed either (see last post). I just took everything slowly and deliberately – mindfully I think is the correct buzz word going around.

The highlight was the multimedia church news for me. Strange I know, but this was an area I loved because media was an outlet for creativity. The low point was the sermon. My replacement is doing a series on grace and using a chair to demonstrate that we have to balance all aspects of grace or we become unbalanced. But I thought grace was totally unbalanced!

Anyway, he explained that the first leg of the chair, was grace toward us (saving grace), the second leg was grace in us (changing grace), and the third leg was grace through us (God wants us to do stuff) which is where the sermon majored. He explained that 22,000 kids will die in the next 24 hours from preventable disease but then said we can’t do a whole lot about that, but we can all do something in a 25 mile radius of this church.

For me, the message got pretty heavy. The atmosphere by the end was really gloomy and quiet. I think the pastor realized that because he asked the band to come up and “play something nice”, and tacked on at the end after the closing prayer something to the effect that it would still be OK to enjoy lunch today. Phew!

The take home was that we should all do something, because God’s grace is in us. But your honor, I object. First, the people know all this already (as my wife said “you used to preach this stuff” – gotta love pastor’s wife’s) . The reason they’re not doing stuff, isn’t because they lack information. Secondly, if people had been transformed by grace, you wouldn’t need to tell them to do something, they’d be unstoppable.

My key thought out of all of this, is that pastor’s believe that they need to teach and rightly so (Paul charged Timothy to do it). Unfortunately we live in a culture with a modern Greek teaching style which consists largely of disseminating analytical information in the form of a lecture. This is a really important thought. Analysis focuses on breaking stuff down to understand it, and then the modern style is to just announce the findings to a group of people, who should listen, understand, learn and remember it. The problem with all of this, is that it is totally antithetical to what Christianity is all about. Teaching today, simply wasn’t anything like the teaching that the New Testament was suggesting.

My experience of Christianity is that it is first and foremost a faith. We are called to walk by faith, not by understanding, yet all our teaching is in an effort to understand! Secondly, I have found God to shroud himself more than he reveals himself, and there is more mystery than mastery going on everywhere I’ve looked. Paul says we look through a glass darkly and I concur. Yet everything pastors do in their sermons is to try and clarify stuff, inform the masses, make it easier to understand and do, and God just doesn’t seem to play the game.

OK, enough bashing. Want to know my thoughts on an alternative? It’s a bit post-modern, so if you have a modern brain, it’s not going to make much sense. If I had my time over again (relax, I’m not living in the past), I would ask more questions. I would help people ask good questions. I would ignite people’s wonderment. I would be a trail guide and rather than try and sit them in a room and lecture them about the trail, I’d take them out there and point at all the amazing sights and sounds and smells. I would appeal to their ability to dream. I would try my very best to involve them in a three way conversation between me, and them and the One who knows everything.

In this scenario, I don’t need to be the font of all knowledge. I don’t need to lecture. I don’t need to analyze, theologize, sermonize, or criticize. I just need to be a catalyst for a relationship, a guide for the adventure, your friend and a friend of The Friend.

Clergy Burnout

The New York Times report that “findings have surfaced with ominous regularity over the last few years, and with little notice: Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could.” The full article is here.

Pastors have a lot going for them. In general because we live and work in a highly relational environment, we have the opportunity to build good supportive relationships with others. Furthermore, we have a faith that sustains us in difficult times and beliefs which help us understand our “tribulations” in a bigger context. We also pray. All these elements have been proven to increase one’s resilience and wellbeing.

But the results are contradicting what one would intuitively think. There are complications;

Pastors aren’t equipped to self-care or monitor their own mental wellbeing. Pastor’s overwork and don’t take sufficient time off (as pointed out in the above article). Often pastors are isolated and unable to develop transparent supportive relationships with congregants. We tend to have triumphalist theologies of overcoming, abundant life, standing firm, believing in the face of opposition, and simplistic ideas that prayer, faith, reading God’s word and serving Him faithfully will result is us gaining victory over such temporal issues such as stress, anxiety and the odd inconsequential feelings of depression. After all we walk by faith not by feeling – which generally means we can become unfeeling through supression and denial.

Pastors don’t debrief with a professional. We often deal with extremely difficult people who are often experiencing extreme difficulty in their lives, yet we don’t have the level of training to be able to manage the drain on our personal resources. Pastors are spread too thinly, expectations are inflated, vision can border on magical thinking. We can even tend to buy into our own charisma and the cult of personality.

And we’re probably the least likely to get help, because that would show just how weak and ineligible we are to lead God’s people. We lead by example after all, and if we are offering life and life more abundantly, but can’t demonstrate it, then we’re a sham. So we fake it til we make it until in my case, I got too sick to even fake it.

Here’s a really practical thought. Maybe all pastors should attend a mental health first aid course. This would help destigmatize mental illness, educate on warning signs and hopefully help get early diagnosis and treatment for those who are already suffering. And all the congregants who have a mental illness all said – Amen!

Overreaching. How a Mighty Church Falls.

In Gordon MacDonald’s article How a Mighty Church Falls, he talks about research by Jim Collins (Good to Great and Built to Last) on organizational decline. One of the reasons for the decline of a great organization surprisingly, wasn’t complacency, it was hubris. A sense that because we’re good at a few things, we should be good at everything. He calls this “Overreaching” and defines it as the undisciplined pursuit of growth accompanied by the neglect of those core principles upon which an organization was originally built. It is about getting larger and larger, more and more expansive, even if it costs the organization its soul.

Overreaching is definitely an issue of today’s contemporary church and it’s the offspring of the idea of excellence. I’m not going to get started on excellence because I’ve just got too much to say on that one! Overreaching is what contributed to my burnout and it’s based on several things. I won’t unpack them too much, because naming and shaming will probably be enough to get you thinking.

1. A conquest or revival mentality. Brian McLaren discusses this well in his “A New Kind of Christian”. The idea that church is going to conquer the world and take over and be victorious isn’t much different to the conquistadors who sought world domination in the name of religion. Ours is a little more subtle obviously, so we roll our conquest ideas in a veneer of revival, even though the bible never mentions revival. Sure they happen at times in history, but they’re never sustainable, and visit any place that revival took place today and they’re usually pretty dark places. How often have you heard “we’re going to take this city in the name of Jesus”? I’ve said it. Loudly.

2. Pseudo faith, or should that be hyper faith? We’ve moved on from the “name it claim it”, “blab it grab it” kind of faith, but the idea never went away. It’s still there. You only have to listen to contemporary preaching that asks “what are you believing for? You’re insulting God if you aren’t believing for a miracle. Your God is too small, God is attracted to great faith etc. etc.” So if we are faith-filled leaders, we’ll be believing God for massive churches and we’ll preach about it and cast the vision, and come hell or high water, we’ll kill ourselves attaining it.

3. Our personal needs for identity, significance, recognition or acclaim (depending on where you’re clingling on that slippery slide). Ahhh so much we can say here right but we probably don’t have to. Personally, my identity was wrapped up in my performance. I was driven to perform so I could feel ok about myself. When our church is growing and getting bigger than other’s we feel successful, and significant. The pats on the back and acclaim of the people who attend the biggest church in town doesn’t feel too bad either. If you get big enough, you get more invitations to speak abroad and wait for it – you get to go to the green room at major conferences. This all sounds ridiculous when to me now I’m out of the system, but it all made lots of sense when I was in that little bubble.

4. Wrong theology – Living things grow. Heard that before? This theology (call it what you will) suggests that if the church is healthy it will or worse SHOULD experience limitless growth. Last time I checked, I was alive, but I’m not growing in size. Eugene Peterson is famous for saying that he’d rather pastor a small church where he could know everyone than a large one where he couldn’t know all his parishioners.

5. Consumer mentality – more is better, when sometimes less is more. We get sucked into consumerism and import its’ values into ministry and figure that bigger is better, having the latest and greatest is necessary, and we spiritualize the importance of it.

In all of this hubris, we overreach and just as Collins suggests, it does indeed cost the organization its very soul. That’s why you’ll find that if you scratch the surface of many churches who are overreaching, you’ll find angst, anxiety, tiredness, striving, desperation and burnout underneath the thin patina of faith, growth, excellence, busyness, and the whiff of victory which is always just out of reach.

How Churches Stop Christians Being Christian

Michael Frost, professor of Evangelism and Missions at Morling College and the pastor of a radical church Small Boat Big Sea in Sydney was interviewed by ABC Radio National. Here’s what he said about how traditional churches tie up believers with doing church stuff which actually prevents them from living an authentic christian life:

“I think that churches are made up of people who mean well, and who are genuinely seeking to live out their faith…. But I’d much rather fashion something which is more organic, more relational which frees people to be able to live their faith out loud, and large, and in a dynamic fashion, rather than kind of squeezing into a mould where six days a week they’re one thing and then on Sundays they’re another thing. ….some churches can simply, by their structure, fashion this separation between the sacred Sunday meetings and then the rest of life, I’m pretty critical of that. I’d love to see us start to unleash hundreds and thousands of followers of Jesus who are able to follow Jesus in all of life, not just say in a worship meeting.

I’ve been going on this journey for a long time. I’ve been the pastor of some traditional-style churches in the past, but I guess it was just a growing dis-ease that I found that it was as though the structure of church, as I just mentioned before, was operating against all the best intentions in the world. I mean, I would speak to people in my churches about the need for us to be generous, and hospitable, and to live our lives in close relationship with those who don’t necessarily attend church, to be committed to the poor and to the environment, to practice hospitality, I never get anybody say to me, “Oh, Michael, I don’t think we should do that.”

I mean everyone will agree with you, but the requirements of sustaining a lot of the institutional style Christianity actually draws people out of their world. It makes them too busy to be able to then practice genuine hospitality, and to partner with their neighborhoods and their communities. So I would much rather disassemble some of that, free people up, give them more time to be able to actually do what I think they’re intended to do, rather than just to be on committees and to set meetings up and to run from one kind of small group meeting to the next.”

What do you think? What’s your experience been? Do you agree with the prof?

It’s one year since my serious examination of suicide

I got onto my Facebook this morning and posted the following note. I love how you can get all kinds of perspectives from the rank non-christian and the most saintly of saints. I friend them all because I’m such an obsessive networker.

12 months ago i took a few days off work – ok I buggered off and camped on the shore of a large lake. No-one knew where I was. I disappeared.

I had decided that the best way to deal with my situation was to top myself. The problem was I didn’t want my kids to grow up thinking their dad had bailed on them. I was bailing, I just didn’t want them to have to deal with the thought that they weren’t loved enough for me to stick around.

So the dilemma was, how does one top oneself and make it look accidental? If you’ve never spent much time on that question, then you probably wouldn’t think it’s very hard but I did. And it is. The main problem is you can’t fix up the scene afterwards, because you’re dead. I could give you my best answers, but it might not be good for someone in a similar place to be given ideas.

I couldn’t figure it out, so I came home and continued on doing what I did.

This raises lots of questions.

First, how does a pastor come to that point? Second, how does no-one in the church have any inkling if we truly are a community with deep relationships? Thirdly, what does that say about my ability to hide, and is it good for a pastor or christian to have that ability? Finally, what does it say about our brand of Christianity and faith?

Pearl:

Thankyou for your honesty. I’m reading with continued interest.

Simone:

All good questions. Authentic human relationships are still imperfect, sin and such get in the way. The world says we need (!) our own stuff, number 1 first, where as true community is about a shared experience without exception. With that, I suspect, comes accountability and transparency of emotions etc. I’m not sure it is possible in our western culture. To be honest I don’t think it would be a good idea for a pastor to be completely transparent to a congregation about all feelings and thoughts. Sharing struggles on a one on one may be appropriate, but every single person will hear what you share through their experience and interpret it accordingly, not always to their benefit. Everyone needs someone to regularly debrief with, especially leaders. We have been placed in this society by God at this time in history to minister to this generation, so cannot covet another era or culture their type of community, but continue to do the best we can with what we have where we are at. Suicide is also a spiritual battle. Those with great gifting on their lives are noticeably targeted. You are a great man Jack who has and will continue to accomplish great things. We love you and believe in you, just as and where you are.

Alix:

Our faith is just that – OUR FAITH… there are things ppl will never know about my life and the dark places I’ve been. Many a time I’ve questioned why no-one was able to pick up on things, but i guess now i understand that it was all only obvious to myself & that it was up to me to find help, also not to assume that ppl dont care because how do i know if they arent suffering also. I would hate to think how many times I may have missed seeing others problems. Therefore I’m cautious to jump to conclusions. Ultimately it is God alone that i can rely on & only He is the reason i am where i am today – faults, issues & all.(I know that sounds cliched but it is the truth)

I hope you can find the answers, but i’m always cautious about where I get them from – there are always ppl ready to feed the negative, thinking they are on your side but in reality they are encouraging your negativity so how can they be helping?… sorry, but i dont call that friendship.
To your first question – I believe it’s easy for a pastor to get to that point, these days. For a start – if you’re a pastor, you are basically walking round with a target on your back. You have to constantly fight off the devil, carry the weight & burdens of a lot of ppl on your back & still have to deal with the pressures of every day life. That is a damn tough job.
You know what, you gained a lot of respect as a pastor, whether you realise it or not – so you did something right. Whoah, sorry that kinda turned into a sermon! I just hope you dont feel alone with it all, there are many of us out there.

Jack:

Hey pearl, just thought i’d commemorate the anniversary of my grimmest moment by fessing up…

Simone, I think the pastor should b a window to another world. We really don’t have the authority to be an authority… so we can only offer a window to the christ who lives in us. All christians are called to be windows, but the pastor is one who is called to b a window for the community of believers in some sense. so I guess I’m wondering how good a pastor can be if he pulls down the shutters and hides what is happening in his soul. Then we resort to dishing out pithy pseudo spiritual information – which in the information age is not the greatest idea.

I agree, I’d never stand up and say “hi there folks, I’m suicidal”. Not helpful, but wouldn’t you think that if someone was suicidal and lived in true community that someone would know?…

Every leader should definitely debrief. This is a biggie. Why don’t pastors do it?

Thanx 4 yr affirmation, makes me teary. Haven’t had that for years…. bc of the antidepressants….

Alix, you’re a real thinker. I didn’t get to know you well enough to see that. There are dark places in all our lives that no-one will know about except God, and that’s ok. I’m certainly not blaming anyone, just asking the questions in the hope that the answers will maybe help some pastor somewhere…

I guess yr right about having the target on the back. I always thought the enemy would get me by the good ol David/Bathsheba trick, so i’ve been watching that one, and wouldn’t u know it, he gets me some other way. I think he may have won.

And yeah, I’m so glad I’m not alone. That’s probably why I want to speak up about it… so none of us have to walk our little black dogs alone anymore. Maybe we could have a virtual little black dog beach and go walking together…? 😛

Abbey:

I’m glad you didn’t. And wherever you are at right now, i’m praying that you are able to meet with God and he is able to heal that part of your life. I hope you never figure something like that out. There is a reason for your life. So much to comment….I would hope so much that you don’t reach that point again.

Wayne:
Jack, I hear and I can relate. I would never say understand, because no matter how similar the stories, each persons pain is different.

Anyway, I also found myself in the same situation, you think about the kids, the wife, you think about the people who will find out and how that will affect them. In the end I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to use the car and to put it into something jutting out that was about chest/head height so the airbag would be useless – quick and effective….

Ashley:

Hi Jack, you know what, I’ve been worried about you for quite a while now. Not really sure why but I just had this notion or something. So I wanna say sorry that I didn’t write to you sooner or say hi or pray for you or something. I think what stopped me was that I thought you might not remember who I was and just think I was a loony, but we are siblings in Jesus so it’s too bad! So I’m writing to you now 🙂
So you’ve been feeling down? What’s been going on?
Just to share, I went through a patch of depression in 2004-2005 so I know how it feels (well you don’t feel anything actually, but you know what I mean).
Can I say one thing? You can get through it 🙂
Chuck out stuff you might have learnt from church or counsellors about you making your life happen, and just go back to Jesus. Honour him as King, follow him humbly, thank him for taking away your sin, hold fast to him. This life is temporary but life with Jesus is forever so keep your eyes on him.
Hugs!!!!!! Love A.