Church work can be a tough business. It’s never done. The needs—as I’ve heard so many people put it—are endless and nonnegotiable. It follows you home. It goes to bed with you.
Lots of folks’ work follows them home. Lots of folks do work that encounters endless human needs. So I’ve put off writing this post for days trying to find a way to write it that didn’t feel whiny or ungrateful or self-serving.
Here’s the deal: Church work changes you. Once you’ve committed to it, it shapes your life. It works itself into every nook and cranny.
Keeping it from changing parts of your life that you don’t want it to transform becomes more and more challenging. A tug of war goes on. What will your life center around? Church work or something else? (Like friends and family.) And if it’s not church work, should you even be in church work?
I have found no way to mark off parts of my life as free from the influence of church work. Church workers on the whole haven’t either. My google kung fu is failing me, so I can’t find the numbers,1 but clergy suicide, divorce, and alcoholism rates are higher than most other groups.2 (Or at least they were ten years ago when I was in seminary.)
I’ve known dozens of clergy and other church staffers over the years, and all of them struggle to avoid being consumed by the work–those who love it and those who hate it, those who excel and those who suck. I’ve come to realize that my inability to find a way to cordon it off from friends and family isn’t a failure. It’s just part of the gig.
It can’t be helped. It can’t be solved. It’s just something you learn to manage, well or poorly.
What do you call something that effects someone to this degree? That places them at a clear and present risk for serious health problems? That colors their ability to relate to loved ones?
Is it unfair to say ministry acts a lot like disability?
- All my searches turned up stats on clergy helping with suicide, divorce and alcoholism, not on clergy suffering from them. [↩]
- Case in point. [↩]
Church life is indeed intense and overpowering and can run your life. It’s a dangerous business and we don’t realize just how dangerous until we’re swimming in it. It’s deep water with lots of rocks. And it’s also exciting and challenging and even fun. There are many days when I say to myself in wonderment, despite the awful moments, “And they PAY me to do this work!” I love ministry, it is my life, and I was born to do this.
You call it your calling.
I wonder if this is the difference between a calling and a job in general. I’ve known people in other fields who were clearly “called” to their work (is it sacrilegious to write that about something other than ministry?) who expressed nearly identical thoughts to what you’ve written. I guess the question is whether you can last in ministry at all without that calling.
i think this is true of any service kind of job in which your work is intensely important to others, is emotionally entangling and can pop up at all hours. teaching was like that. i imagine that social workers and certain types of medical professionals do too.
i think that ministry and elected officials have it worse, though, because not only do you have the sublimation of the self to deal with, but it’s also much much harder to do when you serve professionally folks with whom you interact socially. i didn’t have that problem so much with the sixth graders, though we had a saying at the time that teach for america breeds marathoners and alcoholics. ;)
it is really stressful, and you have to be the sort of person who thrives on the deep sense of internal satisfaction you get from doing whatever flavor of important work you choose because a lot of that life sucks. i guess that’s what a calling is, after all: an activity that feeds you spiritually so well that you are willing to put up with the shitty stuff.
i suppose it is a bit like a disability in the sense that there are inescapable limitations on your life but that balances with other parts of your life that are enhanced and enrich your life in often indescribable ways.
the comparison is tricky though, given that you choose church work and you can choose to leave.
maybe it’s more like an addiction?