When Congregants Have to Pastor the Pastors

No pastor should have to pastor alone.

Emphasizing the fact that pastors are just normal people, like you and I; people who, for one reason or another, have chosen extremely tough positions that demand uncanny and inhuman amounts of endurance… that, none of possess. It should, but doesn’t, go without saying, mental breakdowns are to be expected.

The congregation I imagine was small; no more than 75 people on a well attended Sunday; no less than 35 people on an average Sunday. In other words, they all knew each other. It was family. They were family. These 35 to 75 people were all there from day one.

Barely funding his way through seminary alongside have three children, mostly, then, adolescents, their small community began to grow unexpectedly.

Growth is said to be “a great problem to have…” but, when infrastructure isn’t in place, congregations are left scrambling. It’s anything but “great.” One thing happens after another and, far too many times, things [eventually] crumble.

Sure there’s a cross we’re all called to bear; remembering, The Bible says Jesus bore his own cross; it doesn’t say he carried it alone.

Adjustments were tough, he was getting tired, and one Sunday it happened.

He snapped.

What he had signed up for wasn’t what his church was now requiring of him: Questions on funding; where money was going… the list goes on… attacks from newcomers, seeing his family as a target for pushing their own agenda, at the cost of dismantling his family.

What some may call “Dreamlike growth”, turned into a nightmare of a mess.

With tears visibly welling up in his eyes, he spoke out of exhaustion saying, “I’m done! I’m done with God. I’m done with pastoring. And…”

Now, in full breakdown, in front of his new 900+ person congregation, everybody sat there in silence; a palpable silence that deafens your surroundings.

The 50 core members of his former church family had known it wasn’t just his faith, it was his marriage, his finances and a culmination of other factors that were the result of what was happening.

Again, I don’t know the details but I do know these were things in which any other church would immediately terminate a pastor for.

It’s sickening in that, any other church, whose primary focus is money, fame or power… they’d save face; some would even go so far as seeing an opportunity to easily justify and excuse a means for their parting ways with an otherwise unstable pastor (i.e. the face of their profit).

But, this community was different.

It consisted of a different kind of opportunist; opportunists who walk our streets and see humanity in the homeless beggar; one who sees the defenseless and vulnerable and offer them shelter and safety instead of leveraging them for their own gain…

As these people, “elders” if you will, stood one by one and, instead of heading for the exit out of sheer embarrassment, they calmly made their way to the stage; surrounding the pastor as “He wept.” They laid hands upon him and wept alongside him.

Anyone who has been abandoned by family understands the power of presence or, the lack thereof.

The sight of this had the entire congregation in tears. They saw a piece of themselves within this hurting man.

There was no music. There were no words; there was only but a beautiful image of what Christ intended…

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