Next week, I'm bringing my Teaching Pastor as a special guest to our Board of Directors' monthly meeting. He's been asked to share some of the lessons he's learned about both the benefits and challenges of working in a PBG church.
He's got some great insights to share. In addition to working at a PBG church now, he helped lead his previous congregation into PBG as well.
I asked him yesterday to give me a sneak preview of some of the things he'll be sharing with our Board on Tuesday. The first words out of his mouth have really stayed with me. He said,
"One of the dangers of PBG is that it can make senior pastors victims of their own success."
In other words, as soon as you do something well, the Board asks you to do more. And when you do that well, they ask for more yet. But at some point, it's just not possible to do more without it taking a serious toll on the physical, emotional, and/or spiritual well-being of the pastor and staff. And because Senior Pastors and church staff want to do well and be seen as "team players" and "hard workers", they rarely share their feelings of burn-out. They simply suffer in silence.
His words made me think of Dallas Willard's thought-provoking book, The Great Omission. In it, he says of pastors,
"The need to achieve is too great. Invariably, it is the personal & spiritual life of the minister that suffers. . . he often comes to feel strongly that the circumstances in which he works are in conflict with the very goals for which he entered the profession in the first place." (TGO, p. 32).
What's your church doing to make sure that your pastor and staff are not becoming "victims of their own success?"
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Reading Anne Jackson's "Mad Church Disease" popped right in - the book applies equally to non-church where we can lose focus on the big picture and die in the details.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your posts!