It’s 12:30am. My husband has just got home from a long day at work and is making himself the lunch that he skipped. He started at 8am today. Oh, I mean yesterday.
There was event planning, home visits, administrative tasks, phone calls. There’s not enough time to eat or sleep, let alone spend time with his family. He is becoming severely burnt out.
His church thinks he doesn’t work. But you don’t see everything your pastor does, and indeed not all of it can be shared.
There are many highlights of the job. Your pastor is most likely in it because they delight in seeing people give their lives to Jesus. Sometimes, home visits and Bible studies are so pleasant it’s hard to believe you could be paid for it.
There are also struggles. Your pastor is probably carrying burdens you know nothing about. Supporting people with marriage struggles, loneliness, mental health, and other problems.
Your pastor may listen to all of the problems in the lives of those around them but never share their own struggles. There is compassion fatigue, wearing too many hats and managing complaints from church members.
In my time as a pastor’s wife, most of the persecution and hardships we have faced have sadly come from within the church.
Not all pastors look the same. The last pastor might have visited you several times a year and the next might focus on community outreach. Neither are doing it wrong but rather working with their own passions and strengths.
My plea to you is to try to imagine what it’s like to be a pastor. To be in leadership in a place where everyone has different ideas on what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. Where every few years your life is uprooted and you leave behind your friends and churches and everything you knew while losing tens of thousands of dollars in the process.
The life of a pastor isn’t glamorous. It’s paved with difficulties; fraught with persecutions. Most of them do it for their love of Jesus and people, despite all of this.
Be kind to your pastor. Remember that they are also a person in need of grace. Assume they are doing their best and are well intentioned unless proven otherwise.
When a church and their pastor are supportive of each other and catch the same vision, the results are powerful.
