Get a Life: The Anatomy of Emotional Health in Ministry
8
Aligning the Heart
The Emotionally Healthy Youth Worker
Nothing is going to change . . . until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror.
Donald Miller
It is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.
Peter Scazzero
Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
Proverbs 4:23
Sadly, the longer you are in youth ministry, the longer your list of sidelined and flatlined comrades becomes. And the obvious question is Why?
Mike Higgs
Little did I know about the monster that decided to tag along on my first mission trip to Mexico.
I was barely twenty years old, serving as an assistant youth director, deeply committed to being “radical for Christ,” to pushing kids out of their comfort zone. I made it a point on the trip to meet with kids individually to challenge them in their discipleship, to pray with them, to push them to never settle for less than God’s best in their lives.
Though we worked in one-hundred-degree heat every day, most mornings I led a group of our most committed students on a predawn jog for a few miles (after waking from four to five hours of sleep to have my own quiet time first). Each night, we’d go to a local park and do children’s ministry, as well as have time together as a group. Leading fifty kids or so, traveling around Mexico on an old church bus (which I often drove) and keeping the kids motivated to work (many seemed to require my perpetual prodding) made for ten very intense days. But I loved every minute of it.
Well, almost every minute.
In our evenings at the park, the guys in the group would throw together a quick, full-contact football game (as if we needed more exercise!). And each night, I would line up against the same guy. He was much bigger and more muscular than I was and he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to throw me to the ground, play after infuriating play.
On the last night of the trip, when we had returned to our football ritual, things had moved from frustrating to tense, as I found myself flat on my back on each successive play. Returning to the line of scrimmage for what would be the last time that night, my gridiron adversary gave the slightest smirk across the line. And when the ball was snapped, so did I.
I jumped across the line with arms flailing, fists searching for any target I could find on my tormentor. As slack-jawed kids watched my demonstration of Christian love in action, I yelled a few angry words at my opponent and stormed off.
At least it wasn’t a kid I was attacking.
Or a parent.
It was just my boss.
He pulled me aside and took me on a long walk, as slowly, very slowly, I calmed down.
I would like to say that a light bulb went off in my head at that moment, and I immediately realized that, physically and emotionally, I was a powder keg ready to explode. But instead I chose to focus on my boss’s pugilistic pummelings, rather than deal with my own unhealthy pattern, my lack of self-care and boundaries, a drivenness I excused in the name of being wildly committed to following Christ.
The Cost of Ignoring Our Own Hearts
We simply cannot build a healthy, sustainable youth ministry on the backs of those who are not healthy themselves. Peter Scazzero was right when he wrote in The Emotionally Healthy Church, “The overall health of any church or ministry depends primarily on the emotional and spiritual health of its leadership.” We may be able to build “dynamic” ministries, “magnetic” ministries, even “radical, sold-out, on-fire” ministries without it, but not healthy or sustainable ones.
The youth and parents at Al’s church discovered this principle with crushing clarity. In the five years Al worked as a youth director for Eastside Church, he turned his youth group from floundering to fabulous. And fifteen years or so after his departure, he had become legendary, larger than life in the memory of many parents and young adults in the church. In focus groups, person after person affirmed, “If only we could get another Al. Now he was amazing!”
But over a decade later, Al’s church was still languishing in a post-hero stall, hoping against hope that their next hire would live up to their dream of “another Al.” Though the church had gone through a series of youth workers, none ever got close to the high bar set by Al.
But five years after Al’s departure, the church received staggering news that stopped them in their tracks, news that, at first, they refused to believe was even possible: Al had taken his own life.
When I heard this story, I had to wonder, what if Al’s “success” was part of the problem? More to the point, what if Al died from the toxic combination of a church culture with extraordinarily high expectations and his own willingness to sacrifice his emotional health to meet those expectations? I began to ask myself if there is something in the chemistry of some churches that rewards those who produce a highly visible ministry, even at the cost of their imploding lives.
What gets sacrificed in the busyness of youth ministry is not our “to do list” but our hearts.
DOUG FIELDS
Sadly, we frequently find ourselves working in youth ministries in the wake of youth workers who spent almost all their time investing in ministry and little to no time tending to their own hearts. We’ve heard a litany of tragedy—broken families, addiction, embezzlement, pornography, prison terms and suicide—enough evidence to show a clear pattern of once-revered high producers who, it was later revealed, had busily built their ministries over a crater in their own hearts.
I’m not suggesting for a second that the men and women I’ve just described did not love God. I’m not suggesting that they weren’t people of prayer, that they weren’t fully devoted to following Christ. I’m not suggesting that they led ministries that didn’t “work.” In fact, just the opposite seems to be true.
Most of them are remembered in their churches for their phenomenal visible results. Kids loved them for their ubiquitous availability. Parents loved them for their people pleasing. Church leaders loved them for their workaholic tendencies. What I’m suggesting is that in their pursuit of a successful ministry they forfeited the most important asset they had to bring to their kids: the integrity of their own souls.
On one list of concerns of professional youth ministers, the number-one response was “feelings of personal inadequacy.” Those of us who do ministry from a foundation of inadequacy can be driven to grow our groups to bolster our own confidence. We get angry with parents who don’t cooperate with our compulsion to find our worth in their children showing up at our programs. We blame our students for their lack of “commitment” when they aren’t willing to miss a soccer tournament for a youth retreat.
The church can no longer afford to hire eager young adults who know very little about themselves. We can no longer afford to assume that solutions to youth ministry problems lie in placing the entire weight of a ministry on an enthusiastic leader’s shoulders. Because youth ministry, like every ministry, is life-on-life, we reproduce who we are, and the fissures in our own heart are only magnified in the ministries we build.
Hard Is . . . Well . . . Hard
The young youth worker looked across the table at me, tears brimming. “This is hard,” he said with understated clarity. He had stepped into his youth director position with the absolute confidence that only the inexperienced know. After six months, he sat before me a broken man. The combination of an intensely anxious church climate and his own defensive spirit had driven him to the pavement again and again, leaving him seeing no option but to turn in his resignation, a decision he made soon after our conversation.
There was a kind of sad gaiety about the way they went about their work. The sadness stemmed, I suppose, from the hopelessness of their task—the problems were so vast, their resources for dealing with them were so meager—and the gaiety from a hope beyond hope that, in the long run if not the short all would some holy and unimaginable way be well.
FREDERICK BUECHNER
Sometimes by their own complicity, sometimes by the unhealthy expectations of the multiple constituencies they serve, sometimes simply by being caught innocently in political crossfire, enough youth workers star in their own church horror stories to convince us that my young friend was right: this is hard.
Youth workers who don’t feel over their heads, who don’t feel they’re overwhelmed and failing at times, may simply not understand their jobs. In fact, this recognition may be the first step in approaching youth ministry from an emotionally healthy place.
Julian of Norwich wrote that our wounds are not ends in themselves. She suggests that our wounds have a way of becoming a womb in which God’s new creation can be birthed. I’ve heard some scholars suggest that Job was actually the first book of the Bible written, as if the first idea God wanted to communicate to his people was that this life is hard, that pain is real.
The emotionally healthy youth worker does not run from pain, but keeps his or her eyes open to the ways that God is at work, even in the pain, transforming the fertile fields of brokenness into something entirely new.
Freeing the Victim
The first step toward doing ministry out of emotional maturity is to take responsibility for our own emotional health. It begins when we recognize that our circumstances don’t make us happy, sad, mad, ashamed or afraid; our circumstances simply reveal those emotions in us. Working from a place of emotional maturity happens when we know our hearts well enough to see the ways we’re choosing our own stuckness.
The first step was always the most difficult: getting a young leader to recognize that before circumstances could change, he [or she] might have to change.
ANDY STANLEY
When we become stuck, our ministries can become stuck as well. In his work with thousands of small-business owners, Michael Gerber discovered,
The “dream” is rarely realized; most small businesses fail. And the reason is obvious. We bring our chaos with us.
We don’t change. We try to change “out there.” We try to change the world . . . but we stay the same.
Most of us would rather externalize our problems—an overcritical church, fanatically apathetic youth, too many expectations. But no lasting change can happen in our ministries until they happen first in us. In coaching youth workers, we have discovered that one of the first roadblocks we must overcome is the victim mentality, which has become epidemic among youth staff.
We hear victim catchphrases like, “The church won’t let me . . .” and “My senior pastor just won’t . . .” and “Our community has soccer practice on Sundays.” If it’s not the senior pastor, it’s the elders. If it’s not the bratty kids, it’s their apathetic parents. If it’s not the music minister, it’s the women of the church, who always seem to have another volunteer project for the youth to do.
As true as these factors might be, this sort of thinking keeps youth workers in a victim state, trapped in emotional ruts. I’m not talking about denying that problems exist. I’m talking about facing those problems with brutal honesty, not just the problems “out there,” but more importantly our own toxic tendency to become enmeshed in, defensive about or overwhelmed by those problems.
When we first met with Bob, he wore his anger like a tattoo on the forehead, obvious to everyone but him. When confronted with the defensiveness and anger he brought to almost every encounter, he quickly justified his negativity by pointing to “ridiculous” expectations or inconsistent behavior in those offering criticism.
Having been on the receiving end of intense and disproportionate criticism, Bob had chosen to localize his anger around his disappointment with the senior pastor, who “never backed me up.” As we probed to find out the content issue, it became clear that this youth worker had a number of expectations for his senior pastor that were clearly not being met. We kept hearing one complaint over and over: “I’ve been here three years, and my boss has only once had a meeting with just me!”
I asked the obvious: “When is the last time you asked for an appointment?” Bob let me know, in no uncertain terms, that his boss needed to take the initiative to set up those kinds of meetings.
To move out of the victim role, Bob needed a shift in focus—away from what the senior pastor wasn’t doing to what the youth pastor could do. We could have, of course, stayed mired in the debate about whose responsibility it should have been. But debating about who should take responsibility would only increase Bob’s anger without moving him one step closer to what he wanted. If he wanted to have more-frequent one-on-one meetings with his senior pastor, he could (in fact, must) step out of the victim role and get on the pastor’s calendar. We start doing ministry out of a place of emotional maturity when we take responsibility for our own schedule (and for our own defensiveness).
Too many youth workers step into ministry with a passion to change the world, a passion that, if harnessed and healthy, has the potential to draw us more deeply into the work God created us to do. But when we seek to change the world out of our compulsions, without being willing to face our demons, the changes left in our wake may be anything but holy.
Get a Life: The Anatomy of Emotional Health in Ministry
Those called to youth ministry often assume that if they’re gifted in ministry, if there is visible fruit, they must be on the right track. Others assume that if they’re spiritually disciplined, theologically trained or well informed in their fields, they have sufficient emotional health to sustain themselves in ministry for the long haul. But it doesn’t take many years of observation to recognize that there’s simply no correlation between giftedness for ministry and the emotional maturity to manage it.
Without appropriate boundaries, without intentional habits of self-restoration, without accountable and intimate relationships, none of us is equipped to carry on a healthy and sustainable ministry for long. As I shared some of these principles recently with the students at the Center for Youth Ministry Training in Nashville, a young woman asked the very logical question, “So how do we do that?”
I’ve given a good bit of thought to Jill’s question and have developed a few of my own in response, questions designed to help those of us in ministry do our work from a place of emotional maturity.
Do I have a life outside ministry? Our ministry will be severely limited if we bring to it little more than our obsessive focus on ministry. If we have little or no life apart from ministry, we can easily have unrealistic expectations of our colleagues and the organization we serve. Eventually, we simply become a faint (and boring) echo of what the ministry already is.
I was fascinated to learn from Michigan State University’s Robert Root-Bernstein’s research that Nobel Prize winners and most members of the National Academy of Sciences were “universally artistic and/or musical, most had several arts-related hobbies as adults and they utilized a wide range of arts-associated mental thinking tools such as three-dimensional imagery, kinesthetic feelings and pattern formation.” The research also discovered that “high aptitude in arts and music [is] much more predictive of career success in any field than the results of grades, IQ, achievement or any other standardized measure.”
When we have little or no life outside our ministries, we can easily develop unrealistic expectations, thinking that the church should “parent” us, provide a close circle of friends for us, offer worship and teaching stimulating enough that we always “get something out of it.” But when we have a life outside work, we approach our imperfect institutions with a peace that can lead to long-term change. When I begin to take myself and my situation too seriously, it helps to remember that, in the animal world, it’s the most intelligent creatures that play.
Do I have an emotionally healthy schedule? Emotional health does not come automatically. What does come automatically is the pursuit of our own compulsions. We don’t naturally step out of the need to be needed, the need to be perfect, the need to be special, the need to win, the need to be wise. Instead we assume our compulsions are allies, and too often we follow them with blind, passionate obedience.
Though there are many things we can do to stay emotionally healthy, one of the most universal among those who lead sustainable youth ministries is a habit we call the “rhythmic week.” Here’s the way the rhythmic week looks for one of our full-time clients:
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Morning
Program time
Balcony time
Personal time
Sabbath
Flex time
Flex time
Afternoon
Flex time
Sabbath
Flex time
Evening
Program time
Personal time
Flex time
Program time
Sabbath
Contract work
Personal time
Figure 7.
The blank sections are the time when the youth worker goes at full speed. Sabbath and personal time are protected times—to be intentionally away from work. Flex times could be designated either for work or for time off, depending on the demands of the week. (See the description of balcony time in the next chapter.)
The rhythmic week begins with the discipline of the Sabbath. Regardless of how many hours we pack into a week, the habit of one full day of rest each week makes a huge difference in our emotional health, often preventing us from being emotionally driven or emotionally empty.
Interestingly, the vast majority of youth ministers we’ve worked with were not taking a full Sabbath day each week. Some even laughed at the idea of a day off, as if it were a luxury for someone with less important work to do (this, in spite of the fact that the whole idea of the Sabbath comes just one commandment away from the prohibition against murder).
Young people need youth workers who have God— rather than youth ministry— first and foremost in view.
MIKE KING
When we fail to keep our bodies in the rhythm they were designed with, we reveal what we really believe about ministry: that the work of transformation is up to us, not God. Like anxious gardeners trying to force plants out of seeds, instead of cultivating change, we kill the very seeds that were meant to produce change.
I’m not talking about a reactionary legalism. I’m talking about practicing the rhythm God designed for our bodies, the rhythm of six days of work and one day of rest. Those who fail to practice Sabbath or other disciplines of emotional health become victims of their job descriptions rather than architects of them.
Remember the story of the goose who laid the golden eggs? The impatient owner of the goose decided he simply didn’t have time to wait for the egg to be laid, so he killed the goose to get immediate access to the gold. Reminds me of the way many churches treat their youth workers.
One of the most important lessons I had to learn as a youth pastor was that one of the greatest gifts I can bring to my ministry is myself. If I sacrifice my joy in Christ or my passion for the gospel on the altar of “successful ministry,” everybody loses. As a dear brother in ministry told me just after his divorce, “If you sacrifice your family for your ministry, no one will ever thank you for it.”
Our controlled frenzy creates the illusion of a well-ordered existence. We move from crisis to crisis, responding to the urgent and neglecting the essential. We still walk around. We still perform all the gestures and actions identified as human, but we resemble people carried along on the mechanical fire in the belly dies. We no longer hear what Boris Pasternak called “the inward music” of our belovedness.
BRENNAN MANNING
If I don’t take care of the goose, no one else will. I’ve tried to manipulate others into taking care of me, sometimes by “sharing” how exhausted I was or how much pressure I was under and other times by trying to be so helpful to others that they’d eventually return the favor and take care of me. But those strategies never work for long.
We don’t have to wait until the goose is nearly dead to do something. Every now and then, the emotionally healthy youth worker must do a “goose check,” and if the goose is getting sick, he or she must find help nursing the heart of the goose back to health.
How much do I know about what I don’t know? Jim Collins suggests, “Great decisions begin with really great people and a simple statement: I don’t know.” Godly leaders approach problems, whether in the ministry or in themselves, with a curious humility, recognizing just how much they don’t know.
When youth ministries fail, it’s not because their leaders don’t know enough about small groups, organizational leadership, relationship building or developing volunteers. Those things can be learned. Youth ministers fail because, instead of investing the effort to learn something new, they spend their energy defending what they think they already know. The first step is self-awareness, acknowledging—day after day—how much there is to learn.
Our team has assisted with enough transitions and tracked the effectiveness and tenure of those hires enough to recognize that the most counterproductive hire in youth ministry is the one who brings a spirit of anxiousness and defensiveness. I’m not talking about the natural jitters that come in a job interview. Rather, I’m talking about a pervading spirit the anxious person brings into a room.
With few filters for what criticism to pay attention to and what criticism to ignore, these anxious youth workers ward off would-be “attackers” with tears, defensiveness, “facts,” anger and preemptive attacks that discredit those who might bring complaints. Because the anxious person may be capable of cranking out a lot of work, churches are easily wooed into hiring this kind of person.
Anxious youth workers also bring one unignorable deficit: they seldom have the time (or the orientation) to build a team, to manage a system. They often work at a feverish pace, which is initially celebrated by those who, from a distance, observe the immediate impact on the program. Though anxious leaders may ask people to help, they seldom, if ever, ask for partners.
When we first met Louise, the young, overwhelmed youth worker at a church we were working with, we hoped she could give us a quick picture of the lay of the land, some clue to what had kept this youth ministry faltering for the past few years. Our conversation went something like this:
YMA: “Tell us about participation. Has there—”
Lousie (interrupting): “I’ve been trying to get an accurate list for years, and nobody seems to know how to do it. We’ve got kids on the list who haven’t been here for years. People will tell you that they had seventy-five kids coming to youth group every week five years ago, when I was just a volunteer. But I was here then. There is no way we had seventy-five kids. We might have had forty-five, maybe even peaked at sixty at one time. But we didn’t have seventy-five kids.”
YMA: “How many—” [intending to ask, “How many kids would the church like to see involved?”]
Louise: “I’m not a big numbers person. I just don’t believe you can judge a program by numbers. This past week, I met with a young man, Jimmy, whose mom committed suicide six weeks ago. You can’t measure the impact of what we are doing in his life. You can’t count it. It doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet or a tracking system somewhere.”
YMA: “So let’s talk about volunteers. Who are—”
Louise: “This is just not a church that knows how to volunteer. In the church I grew up in—now that church could volunteer. But it’s like these people will write a check but they don’t want to get their hands dirty. It’s been a problem ever since I’ve been here, and every staff person will tell you the same thing.”
Though Louise didn’t answer a single one of our questions, she told us volumes about the anxious climate she was bringing to the youth ministry.
Anxious people are notoriously un-self-aware. They easily overcommit and often attempt to manipulate those around them into pity about how much they have to do. They typically have so little ability to say no that when they do say it, they say it with such harshness that people are taken aback. Though most of our clients are grateful for the soultending work we do with them, the anxious ones have a much harder time receiving this sort of care.
Have you ever had the experience of walking into a room with a strong odor and asking someone working in that space, “How can you handle these fumes?” only to hear the quizzical response, “What fumes?”
Knowing how easy it is to be oblivious to those things about us that are obvious to others, the emotionally healthy youth worker takes time to build relationships with wise and faithful friends who will speak the truth—counselors, spiritual directors, older friends in ministry. When we spend almost all our time with those less self-aware than we are (that is, teenagers), we’re inviting stagnation in our own growth.
Emotionally healthy youth workers protect themselves from self-delusion by learning what their gifts are not, by admitting their blindspots and the triggers that create defensiveness or avoidance. They know their own family-system stories enough to know the roles they easily fall into, roles like the hero, the scapegoat, the clown and the lost child, roles they learned in childhood as a key to survival and success.
When we don’t know our own brokenness and the games we play to get what we want, we live out this principle: “The person who hurts the most causes the most pain.” Emotionally healthy leaders have a hunger to learn, not just about ministry but also about themselves; they may not know what they’re doing—in ministry, in marriage, in managing their own heart—but they care enough to find out.
Do I rule my tongue, or does it rule me? Youth ministry is a breeding ground for sarcasm. Quick-witted youth workers can protect themselves from their feelings of inadequacy by being quicker with a putdown than the cockiest junior-high boy. Jeanne Mayo warns,
I’ve known many “cool” youth leaders who have become specialists at communicating with teenagers through sarcasm. Ironically, the students they feel the most connected to are often the ones who get the brunt of their verbal jabs. The youth leader, who doesn’t realize what he or she is doing, thinks, “The student knows I’m only joking. I kid with him that way because I really like him.” Yet Proverbs 26:18-19 describes this behavior in a less than glamorous light: “Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, ‘I was only joking!’”
Whom do I take more seriously—God or myself? Most churches (and many youth pastors) take themselves very seriously, often so seriously that they completely miss the foolishness of their obsessive focus on petty problems within their church. The king of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels comes to mind.
I was with a group of youth pastors recently, at what I can only describe as a “preach off.” This was a first gathering of men and women who had never met before, and like strutting bulls, each wanted to “declare war” on the evil in our city. As we went around the table introducing ourselves, the bravado got louder and the evils got uglier, as each leader spouted the unique and explosive ways they would be transforming the city. I was there just to have lunch with others who know how lonely and hard this work can be.
Too often, we reveal how we avoid taking God seriously by showing how seriously we take our ministries and ourselves. I remember when one of my colleagues left her ministry at our church. After six months, we happened to see each other. During our visit, she said something fascinating: “I discovered exactly what the rest of our city thinks about our church.” I was eager to hear what she had seen from “the real world.” She said simply (and I believe accurately), “It never crosses their minds!”
Emotionally healthy youth workers have escaped the illusion that the weight of transforming their cities and churches is on their shoulders. Because they’ve learned not to take themselves too seriously, when criticized they can simply say, “I’m sorry”—period, with no excuses or casting of blame. They can live with a failed program and stalled momentum, give their best, and trust God with the results.
What am I fighting about? Some youth workers seem determined to take the hard way, to find something to fight about, even when a better, clearer way is obvious. I’m reminded of the story of the old bull and the young bull (slightly adapted):
There was once an old bull and a young bull grazing in the pasture. On the other side of the fence were hundreds of apples, a favorite snack of bulls. The young bull strutted and said to the old bull, “Whadya say we break through that fence over there and eat one of those apples?”
The old bull continued to chew his cud slowly, began walking and said, “Whadya say we go down to that open gate, walk through it and eat all those apples?”
Emotionally healthy youth workers aren’t afraid to continue to name a problem or to disagree when conscience dictates it, but they are able to be assertive without being aggressive. They’re able to stay engaged (they don’t storm out of the room) without becoming enmeshed (taking every disagreement as a personal attack). They have more in their conflict management toolbox than fight or flight.
What do I do after I fail? Hitting the wall can result in one of two responses. Either we keep doing what we’ve been doing, banging our heads against the same wall until we give up in defeat, blaming ourselves and everyone around us. Or we get curious. We find people who are accomplishing the things we’re failing to accomplish, and we ask for advice. We find out what effective people do and imitate those things until we get the same results.
It’s easy to assume that people who are thriving where we are failing are just “better,” more gifted, maybe even “lucky.” But from the nonanxious perch, it’s not difficult to see that these people are simply doing different things than we are doing (and thus getting different results).
Is no a four-letter word to me? Many of us have a hard time saying no. Some have trouble saying no to just one more appointment or one more text message or one more phone call. Others have trouble saying no to just one more video game, one more cheeseburger or one more look at an illicit photograph.
But if we are to say a clear yes to the unique vocation God has given us, we must be willing to say no to lots of other things. We must embrace the fact that no is not a dirty word and that we will disappoint someone when we say it. As Tony Robinson said, “Leadership is learning to disappoint people at a rate they can handle.”
Youth workers who aren’t able to say the clear, nonanxious no on the front end often wind up responding to requests with harsh, melodramatic comments like “I just can’t sacrifice my family anymore!” when a simple “I won’t be able to make that meeting” will do.
Transformations come only as we go the long way round, only as we’re willing to walk a different, longer, more arduous, more inward, more prayerful route.
SUE MONK KIDD
The world is full of people who are waiting for someone to come along and motivate them to be the kind of people they wish they could be. The problem is that no one is coming. . . . These people are waiting for a bus on a street where no busses pass. . . . They can end up waiting forever. And that is what most people do.
BRIAN TRACY
Am I burning out or just burning? There’s one difference between a candle and an oil lantern: the wick in a candle burns itself as the wax disappears. But the wick in an oil lantern preserves itself by burning the oil first. The wick begins to burn only when the oil is completely gone. Emotionally healthy youth workers ensure that the reservoir of oil in their lamps is full.
Most youth workers are thermometers; they can tell you the temperature of their ministry. But they often fail to be thermostats, influencing the temperature of that ministry. They feel powerless to catalyze change, to create climate rather than simply react to it. Of course, the most powerful resource we have for creating lasting change is to initiate change in ourselves first.
Emotional health in ministry begins with being willing to take a hard look at ourselves and to do the courageous and often uncomfortable work of attending to our own hearts.