Why Your Pastor Is Probably Not Okay (And What That Means For You)
Forty percent of pastors have seriously considered leaving their congregation since 2020. The Axios headline puts it bluntly: America’s pastor pipeline is collapsing. The role has become low-paid, higher-risk, and less trusted than it has been in a generation. Behind those numbers are real people quietly running out of air, often inside their own sanctuaries.
This post is inspired by our latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast, where Dave Rodriguez sits down with his son Barry Rodriguez, lead pastor of Grace Church in Noblesville, Indiana. Watch the full conversation here. Together they pull back the curtain on what the job actually costs, what keeps a pastor alive in it, and what the rest of us should do if we love one.
If you are a pastor, this is for you. If you have one in your life, this is for you too.
Pastor Is a Job. Not a Calling.
This sentence will land hard for some people. Dave has said it for years and Barry confirms it from inside the role: pastor is a job, not a calling. You have a calling that you operate within the job.
That distinction is not semantic. It is structural. When you confuse the two, the job swallows the calling and the calling becomes invisible. Every committee meeting, every counseling appointment, every funeral, every angry email, all of it gets treated as if it has to feel meaningful or you are doing it wrong. It doesn’t. Some of it is just work. Pastors burn out partly because they have been told their whole career that everything they touch should set them on fire. Most of life is not on fire. Most of life is showing up.
A healthier model: name the calling clearly. Name the job clearly. Do the job because the calling requires it, not because the job is the calling.
“I had no calling whatsoever from God to counsel people. But I had to do it. And you have to do it as well as you can.”
Barry Rodriguez
The Compassionate Cushion Wears Thin
Barry describes a phenomenon every long-tenured pastor recognizes: the compassionate cushion. It is the buffer that lets you absorb the chaos of others without letting it leak into your own family, your sleep, your patience. It is the reason a pastor can hear about an affair, a suicide, a job loss, a cancer diagnosis, and still respond with steadiness instead of with their own grief.
Cushions wear out. Dave puts it this way: pastors are taking the blows of other people’s chaos so they can help them stabilize. That is supernatural-level emotional work, week after week, and most pastors are doing it without the training, the support, or the recovery cycles that level of work demands.
When the cushion gets thin, what comes out of a pastor’s mouth changes. Patience gets shorter. Sympathy gets clipped. Sermons get sharper than they should be. And the pastor often notices it before anyone else does, which adds shame on top of exhaustion.
Real Relationships vs. Deal Relationships
The longest-running study on human happiness, the Harvard study captured in the book The Good Life, has been clear since 1938: the single greatest predictor of a happy life is the quality of your relationships. For pastors, this is precisely the area most quietly collapsing.
Dave names two categories that every pastor knows but few articulate out loud:
- Real relationships are the ones that exist because you exist. They survive your title.
- Deal relationships exist because of your role. They end the day you leave the role.
When Dave stepped away from the lead pastor role in 2020, the percentage of deal relationships in his life became visible all at once. Most pastors are surrounded by people, and most pastors are lonely. Barry admits it openly: after years of friends leaving the church, he is starting to isolate, even as he knows isolation is not what he needs.
His countermeasure right now is Dungeons and Dragons. He runs a campaign. He has new friends. It is intentional, it is unglamorous, and it is working. The point is not D&D. The point is that real friendship for a pastor almost always has to be built outside the church on purpose, or it does not get built at all.
Self-Differentiation Is the Skill That Keeps Pastors Alive
If there is one practice Barry would put at the top for every new pastor, it is this: can you define yourself outside of the church that you lead?
Pastors who fuse their identity to the institution take the institution’s wins as personal vindication and the institution’s losses as personal indictment. That math does not work over a 30-year career. A bad attendance month should not be able to tell you who you are. A scandal you did not cause should not be able to tell you who you are. A congregant leaving in anger should not be able to tell you who you are.
The pastors who last build a self that the job cannot fully reach. That self has hobbies that produce something visible. Barry talks about the value of working with your hands: leatherwork, woodwork, painting, gardening, animal care, anything where at the end of the day you can point at the thing and say, I made that. Pastoring is a vocation of nebulous outcomes. You need at least one place in your week where the outcome is concrete.
Five Practical Moves For Pastors Right Now
- Name your calling in one sentence. Then list five things in your job description that are not your calling. Stop expecting those things to feel like worship.
- Get a therapist. Not next quarter. Now. Both Dave and Barry are emphatic on this. If you are a pastor and you do not have one, this is the single highest-leverage move you can make in the next 30 days.
- Build one real-relationship channel outside the church. A standing dinner, a hobby group, a workout class, a Dungeon Master gig. Same people, on the calendar, no church connection.
- Take inventory of the six dimensions of health. Vocational, Physical, Financial, Mental/Emotional, Relational, Behavioral. Score yourself honestly. Pick one to address first.
- Find your soul friend. Barry calls it an anam cara, the Irish term for a soul friend. Someone with whom your pastor armor does not have to be on.
Three Things Congregants Get Wrong
“I’m not getting fed.” Barry’s response is the line of the episode: you know who gets fed? Babies. If you have been a Christian for more than a few years and you are still expecting the pulpit to feed you the way a parent spoons cereal into an infant, the problem is not your pastor.
Leaving without saying anything. It is possible to disagree with a decision, a sermon, or a direction and still tell the person you valued the relationship enough to say goodbye. Quiet departures are one of the most exhausting parts of pastoral life because the pastor cannot tell whether you left out of disagreement, out of life change, or out of a wound they could have helped repair.
Assuming the pastor is fine because they look fine on Sunday. Sunday is the performance. Look at Tuesday. Look at the eyes. Look at the shoulders. Ask once. Ask again.
A Different Kind Of Vitality
Destiny Works exists for one reason: to help people find their calling and live it with vitality across every dimension of health. That mission is true for entrepreneurs, retirees, parents, students, and yes, pastors. Pastors are not exempt from the work they preach. They need the framework as much as the people in their pews.
That is why Dave is launching The Pastor’s Journey, a six-month mentoring program built specifically for pastors. Monthly one-on-one mentoring, walking through both The Calling Quilt™ and The Vitality Journey coaching frameworks, with the explicit goal of helping pastors get clear on their calling and serve their congregations with vitality instead of from a deficit. If you are a pastor reading this, or you love one who needs it, email Dave directly at dave@destiny-works.com.
If you are still in the pews, do one thing this week. Pick a pastor in your life. Send a text. Ask how they are actually doing. Then listen.
Watch the full episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast to hear Barry and Dave go deeper into pastoral burnout, the death of a Grace Church congregant, the toll of public ministry, and the framework that is keeping them both in the game: https://www.destiny-works.com/the-vitality-journey/
Full Transcript
Dave: I think one of the most difficult jobs in the world is that of a pastor, priest, minister, imam. Now I know this because I was one of them for over 40 years. In this special episode, I want to explore the hidden life of pastors. So if you have a spiritual leader that you care for, get them to tune in. And everyone, welcome back to The Vitality Journey Podcast.
Okay, it’s not necessarily the most physically demanding job in the world, but certainly one of the most psychologically and relationally difficult jobs in the world. You agree with that?
Barry: Yeah, I do agree. It’s definitely taken a toll over the course of my life.
Dave: I completely agree. Yeah, and me too. Over the course of my life. All right, let me introduce you to Barry Rodriguez, who is the lead pastor at Grace Church in Noblesville. We’ll get his story in a minute. And you’ll notice that he and I share a last name. That is because I’m Barry’s dad. And I’m thrilled to have my son as my co-host on this episode today.
So before we dive into this topic of how difficult it is to be a pastor and explore the hidden life of a pastor, let’s tell your story. How did you become a pastor?
Barry: Well, if we rewind the clock 20 years ago, it was pretty obvious. I knew in my gut that I was not going to be a pastor.
Dave: So we all agree that was, yeah, yeah.
Barry: And the main reason is because I watched what you went through in this job. My goodness, it took a toll. The family paid a price. It was challenging to be in a pastor’s family and I saw what it did to you, and so I knew, okay, not interested.
Additionally, before I was a pastor, I was traveling around the world. I was running a nonprofit where I was doing photojournalism and going on all these wild adventures and living in slums and refugee camps.
Dave: And scaring your mom and dad.
Barry: Of course, constantly.
Dave: We thought you were about to die at every given moment.
Barry: So I did all that. I was living the dream and I definitely knew that my calling was not to suburban Indiana. That was obvious to me. I was called to travel. So you want me to get into why did that change?
Dave: Go ahead, you keep going and we’ll come back and fold my story into it, because obviously they overlap.
Barry: So the basic structure of it, you were the lead pastor or the senior pastor and you had begun a succession process to figure out, your philosophy was, I want to get out before I’m aged and decrepit and falling over in the pulpit. I want to get out and let another generation step up to lead. That was your philosophy, at least if I put words in your mouth.
Dave: Let me go back and bring my story up.
Barry: Yeah, let’s start there.
Dave: So I was a pastor for over 40 years. As you know, I was a pastor, started in the Chicagoland area, then Massachusetts for three years, and ended up in Indianapolis where I was a music director and youth pastor at a church, and that church decided to send off a chunk of people and plant a new church.
Barry: Up in the cornfields.
Dave: Yeah, in the northern suburbs. We were in the Faith Missionary Church. That was in the exurbs, I guess that’s what that’s called. Anyway, moved to the suburbs, and we started the church in 1991. I was called senior pastor, and I’d never put two sermons back to back in my life. Two weeks in a row. I preached the opening service for the church and I realized, oh my gosh, I got to do this again next week.
So we didn’t know what we were doing. It was a huge learning experience. The church grew and we relocated over into Noblesville. Long story short, I came to a point where I realized, I think I’m getting done. And there were a lot of reasons which we’ll get into, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the wondrous that happened.
So I decided, we decided, to start a succession plan. It took us five years, I think, to get our act together, and then a five-year process where we would bring somebody in who would overlap with me for my last five years.
Barry: Yes. So you, all right, one of the things that’s helpful for people to know is that you from the beginning were always, when it came to your teaching, always looking for ways to share the pulpit with others. So you had a teaching team and you’d have other voices. It wasn’t just you, which I think is significant.
One of the things that happened is because I was doing this nonprofit stuff and writing all the time about injustice and traveling, you invited me to give a guest sermon about the topic of injustice. So I did, and going back and watching it, I can’t believe it. I was just a squirrely little guy, but it seems to have resonated, and I think you saw something in my preaching style or something that you wanted. So eventually you invited me to do it a couple more times and then I became kind of a part of the teaching team. Kind of an adjunct.
I’d teach a few times a year as a guest speaker while I was traveling and writing. And then, I guess, you could speak more into this, but apparently during the succession process, my name was brought up as potential successor, and then you had to recuse yourself from your own succession team because we really, really were not wanting any kind of nepotism to be involved.
Dave: That was an issue for some people.
Barry: For sure.
Dave: There actually, people left the church because of that.
Barry: Dumb people.
Dave: Well, I don’t know about that.
Barry: I don’t blame them. I would have been skeptical of our own family choice.
Dave: I’m gonna blame them. I’m so skeptical. But the thing that’s important to know is that I didn’t want this. When mom heard that my name had been brought up, her first reaction was, why would you do this to me again?
Barry: Those are literally her words.
Dave: Why would you do this to me again?
Barry: Well, the bad news for mom is that I don’t know that it was you doing this. I think it was God doing this, because, again, I didn’t feel any desire to do this. But I did begin to really sense a pretty clear calling to this. So I won’t bore you with the details, but long story short, I felt like God’s Spirit was inviting me to say yes, to walk through this door, start the process, see what happens. And five years later, in June of 2020, I became lead pastor and you retired in the middle of the global pandemic.
Dave: It was a lovely time for all.
Barry: Not that at all.
Dave: Let me back up because I think one of the things that’s important for pastors to understand is the idea of calling. We can talk about this later. Pastor is a job, it’s not a calling. There are lots of parts of the job we’ll talk about that we don’t enjoy very much, but you have to do them. The calling that drives us is really why you and I were in pastoral ministry.
One of the things I thought was interesting about you, you said early on that because of your travels around the world and revealing what God was doing in indigenous works around the world, you wanted suburban American churchgoers to hear some of the wonderful stories. So am I right that your calling was, okay, what can I do to bring this community up to speed on what God’s doing?
Barry: Exactly. Even when I was traveling, my attention was on suburban America, and the suburban church in particular, because as I was traveling, a lot of it sprung out of spending a year living in Kenya, working with a church there. I realized, oh my goodness, the kingdom of God is so much more beautiful and diverse and provocative and life-transforming than I understood as a suburban American Christian.
I saw so much fruit and so much life and so much joy, and I wanted to bring that back to people back home. I want you to taste the fruit that I’ve experienced while traveling the world. I thought that my job to do that was as a photojournalist, but then when the pastoring thing happened and the teaching thing happened, I realized actually that same calling can take a different form in this space.
That’s when I began discovering other aspects of my calling, things like shepherding, the teaching, storytelling is one thing, teaching is another, but they’re not entirely dissimilar.
Here’s how I put it. I had my dream job already, and it’s over. So that part of my life, I had the coolest job imaginable for me. It was tailor-made for me. It didn’t exist before. I just created it out of nothing. I already had my dream job. I’m here now out of obedience, not necessarily out of delight. My old job, I was doing it out of delight. Every day was a new adventure. I’m a Seven on the Enneagram, so I’m all about new experiences.
And yet I felt God calling me to this community to shepherd it in a new way. So I said yes to the role, and here I am.
Dave: Yeah. And now you started, well, you were for five, we had a five-year transition.
Barry: Yes. And then it’s been six years since you took over.
Dave: So it’s been 11 years that you’ve been in that role. One of the key moments, and this is just, I find this interesting, I don’t know if anyone else will, but do you remember in the spring of 2020, that team retreat?
Barry: The one that COVID canceled, basically.
Dave: All of a sudden we’re sitting there and the news is, we’re getting wave after wave of news, and we’re all sitting there going, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And I remember you started speaking, saying, what about this? Shaping some of our core values. We’re going to be driven by concern for the vulnerable, things like that. I watched that happen and I remember sitting there thinking, oh, this is the transition. It’s not going to be in three months when I actually walk away.
I said, this is yours to run. And at that point, you started, and the rest of the lead team followed your lead and led us into an awful time that we navigated. And then I just said, goodbye. My departure, my retirement, so to speak, I’m not retired, but my leaving, was to a room of socially distanced people all wearing masks. Only what? A hundred people spread out in a room that fits 1,400. And then I say goodbye.
Barry: Everybody had done, we did a parking lot thing where you got out, did a parade, and everybody was out there. But yeah, it was not a particularly encouraging way to end. And it was not a particularly encouraging way to start. My first three sermons were to an empty room. And they were about, there was me trying to set my vision, and the George Floyd protests were going on. So I had to weave the George Floyd protests into my first three messages as lead pastor. So it’s been a riot ever since.
Dave: Every now and then I look at you and say, I’m sorry.
Barry: Well, it’s not your fault. It’s God’s fault.
Dave: So, all right. Here’s something interesting. Axios, the news organization, just published an article called, the title of the article was, America’s pastor pipeline is collapsing. Did you see that?
Barry: I did see that.
Dave: Here’s the big lead. Fewer Americans want to become pastors, accelerating a leadership vacuum inside one of the country’s oldest civic institutions.
Barry: Interesting.
Dave: Here are some quotes. More than four in 10 clergy surveyed in the fall of 2023 said they had seriously considered leaving their congregation since 2020. The Hartford Institute data, they reported that. Here’s another quote: As the pastor role becomes low paid, higher risk, and less trusted, which is another interesting factor over the last 10 years, that pastors used to be some of the most trusted people. And now, not so much.
What Axios said: the US isn’t just losing clergy, it’s losing a key layer of local leadership. Fascinating. Does any of that surprise you?
Barry: No, none of it’s surprising. It makes complete sense. Pastors are trying to be authority figures in a culture that has so undermined the credibility of authority that nobody gets implicit authority anymore. Simply because of your title, you can speak and I’ll listen, that is gone.
So that’s one small reason, but that’s a huge reason why pastors are burning out and why it’s just so easy for people to just skip churches, move from place to place. It is a very painful role to have in this time that we’re living in.
Dave: We’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s start with the upside. What is it you love about what you do?
Barry: Well, I love to teach. I’m a huge fan of taking complicated or odd ideas and finding a way to make them interesting and relevant and exciting for people. For example, I just did a Bible for Beginners class as an experiment to see if people would be interested in me approaching Scripture the way that I approach it.
I didn’t do what normally would happen, which is to start with the big storyline of Scripture and the theological stuff and start with Jesus. The second week was all about the law of Moses, and we talked about Levitical purity laws.
Dave: Always a hot topic.
Barry: But everybody was fired up and they loved it because it helped to lay a foundation of how did the Torah play a role in the people of God. We didn’t get to the New Testament until later. Anyway, I just love teaching. I love it. And I love taking complicated ideas and making them make sense.
Dave: And you’re kind of a nerd.
Barry: I’m a massive nerd. I read, I follow interests, and I dig in deep. Currently I’m in a multi-year deep dive into ancient history, specifically the Roman imperial cult as it pertains to the early church in Ephesus and the rise of Christendom in Constantinople.
Dave: Which somehow you’ve made fascinating.
Barry: I find it incredibly fascinating. Somebody asked me, what is Barry’s preaching style like? And I said, well, this is it. Hey guys, look what I found.
Dave: That’s 100% it.
Barry: It’s like, I will just do whatever needs to happen to get an idea across. I might start with an illustration of some ancient battle. I did a whole thing about the Battle of Carrhae in the first century BC. And then this last weekend, I started by singing a song from Aladdin. You just never know, but whatever needs to get across is what I try to get across.
Dave: I love it. Just so anybody’s wondering, I attend the church. Barry is my pastor, I guess I could say. But we love listening to preaching, and it’s awesome. But there are other aspects of your job that you love.
Barry: Yeah, so this is going to sound super weird, but there are parts that, with lead pastor of a church our size, there are three major roles. There’s teacher, there’s shepherd or pastor, obviously, and then there’s sort of the CEO, manager. I kind of run the organization in a way.
The shepherd stuff, I’ve always loved being kind and compassionate, and I love listening to people and being there for them, but I’ve never had it as a job until being a pastor. And what I’ve discovered is that I’m kind of a funeral pastor, not a wedding pastor. I wouldn’t say enjoy is the right word, but I find great fulfillment in being there for people.
Something about being in a space where I can be that steady, comforting presence. I don’t find that situation to be very awkward. I feel at home in that setting.
And also, weirdly, I don’t know that enjoys the right word either, but I do find great fulfillment meeting with people who are bent out of shape about something, or they’re coming in hot with some opinion on a certain issue. For whatever reason, I seem to be wired in a way that I can go into those meetings, and I have a pretty good batting average of how often those meetings get turned completely around from hostility to unity and excitement.
So I guess those are the things that fulfill me as part of the job.
Dave: Where does that come from? Not from me, I don’t think.
Barry: It did not come from you.
Dave: No, because we won’t, yeah. But those meetings, the whole reason we’re doing this podcast is I’m concerned about the vitality of pastors. The things like those conflictual meetings, which happen more often than people think, that takes a toll. It all takes a toll.
Barry: I kind of darkly joke that my pastoral bingo card is already filled out after six years on the job. We’ve had to shepherd the congregation through a global pandemic. We’ve had a little minor scandal that we had to deal with. We’ve had the death of a prominent congregant. And we’ve had, I led us through a restructuring. So I’ve kind of done all the things. Bingo.
Here’s what I’ll say. When I came in, when I was first there for the first five years, the whole thing was about how young I was. Everybody called me the kid and it was talking about my youth. Nobody talks about that anymore. Not because of my age, but because I’ve got the gray in my beard now. I’ve got the drooping shoulders. It has taken a toll.
Dave: And just so you know this, when we walk into church, mom is zeroed in on, how is Barry doing? I don’t think he’s doing well. Is he okay? I wonder if he’s. That’s your mother, just so you know that.
Barry: She’s good discernment about that. She can tell.
Dave: She’s so perceptive.
Barry: Oh yeah.
Dave: But we’ll get back to the conversation in a moment. I wanted to announce a new offering from Destiny Works. I’m launching The Pastor’s Journey, a six-month mentoring program in which I will meet with pastors monthly, and I’ll walk them through both our Calling Quilt™ and our Vitality Journey coaching offerings. It’s designed to help pastors to be clear about their calling and way more able to serve their congregations with vitality. So check out our website or email me at dave@destiny-works.com for more info. Now, let’s get back to the conversation.
Let me, here was my bingo card. You’ve probably done, how many funerals of suicides?
Barry: Oh, sure.
Dave: And then murders?
Barry: Mm-hmm.
Dave: You add those, those are the, what I would call, the deep interpersonal traumas. And the thing is, when you enter into those deep personal traumas, or a horrible, I mean, one woman said, please come over to my house right now. I’m confronting my husband on his infidelity. So I go to the house. He wasn’t there until five minutes. I’m standing there and he walks in and I’m watching him get attacked, rightfully, because he was wrong. But that kind of thing, it takes a toll.
You are being called or being expected to have kind of almost a supernatural level of compassion, and you’re supposed to be self-differentiated from the chaos of others. But you are expected to bear their chaos without being affected by it. And that can take a toll.
One of the things that I know stuck with you significantly was the death of a congregant during a Grace Church event, and you happened to be there moments after it happened. And then within hours you were having to talk to news teams.
Barry: It was tragic, it was awful. It was a blue smoker machine. He was smoking meats for a big men’s event we had, about three or four hundred men coming to this event. I was in the church putting my microphone on because I was getting ready to speak to the event, and the whole church shook because it blew up and it killed him instantly.
Dave: He was surrounded by fathers and sons who were helping out. The trauma. Not only was it tragic, horrific, catastrophic that one of our own died serving God, but when I walked out the door, there were men, and young men, this is the emotional thing about the young men, on their hands and knees, sobbing. It was so traumatic. In the moments, having to pull everybody together and make sense of this.
Barry: Yeah, you had to be there to help with the initial shock and horror of the people that were there. You then were pulled into the war room that was set up to help deal with, okay, what do we need to do? How do we respond to this? What are we communicating? You had the executive team getting that set up, and then you had the media coming.
Dave: The PIO from Noblesville, the public information officer, he takes me, he says, are you ready to go talk to the press? I’m like, what? So he walks me out to the front, and there are all the TV cameras. And the first question that, she sticks the microphone in my face, and she said, what are you going to tell your congregation about why God would let this happen?
Barry: Unbelievable.
Dave: But that question is what I would call a hidden trauma of pastors when we’re representing God as pastors, priests, whatever. And then we have to explain God. Explain the unexplainable. It’s impossible to explain, and yet people come to us thinking that if you pray for something, it’s more likely to happen.
Barry: Yeah. I guess I’ll modify my earlier statement about there’s no implicit authority with pastors anymore. There still is in some way an understanding that this person is at some sort of different level. A lot of what I try to do is to disentangle that and tell people, actually, I’m just a normal person, and let’s talk.
Dave: But that’s not why they came to you.
Barry: Right, they don’t. They’re kind of grasping. In times of chaos like that, it is just, that’s when it really is difficult. We had a death of a prominent congregant recently. What I noticed is how much of a giant emotional sponge I had to be, especially on the Sunday right after it happened, because one person would come up to me and they’d be fishing for details about what happened. The next person would come up to me and they’d be weeping. The next person would come up to me and they would not even know about it, and they’d want to talk about something that happened with their kid’s soccer game.
You’re just having to switch gears, switch gears, switch gears, and just be whoever they need you to be in that moment, not in a manipulative way, but in a compassionate way.
Dave: Yeah, that’s part of the job. Pastors have to be all things to all people.
Barry: Right. We’ve heard that phrase.
Dave: Well, okay, so we’ve dived in headfirst. What do you not love about what you do?
Barry: There’s plenty of things I don’t love about what we do. One of the biggest challenges for me right now is what I mentioned before about how nobody has to listen to you. It’s so easy to just leave. If I don’t like what you said, if I don’t like what you’re doing as a church, if I disagree with this decision, then boom, I’m out of here.
And unfortunately, what often happens is people don’t tell you that they’re leaving. They build up all this frustration and resentment, and then one day they’re just gone. And then they’re frustrated and resentful that you didn’t reach out or you didn’t care enough. I left and no one even asked how I was doing.
There’s that constant, and at Grace, we’ve been through years of challenge, decline. COVID did a number on us. We made some choices as a church, like I said in COVID, to prioritize the welfare of the vulnerable, which meant that in November of 2020, we made the decision, which most of the other churches in the area didn’t make, to close back down and to go back virtual for a while until the biggest wave was over. And people got furious about that.
It turned political when all I was trying to do is guide us through how to care for our neighbors. With attendance patterns shifting, the average person who’s coming to our church is coming once, maybe once a month.
Dave: Once a month.
Barry: So let’s imagine the average. Now, there’s a core that’s there all the time.
Dave: All the time.
Barry: In one way our church is much smaller, but it’s very consistent and very passionate.
Dave: And stronger in a lot of ways.
Barry: And stronger. But then when you look at the broader congregation, that person is coming once a month, maybe I’m getting 30 minutes a month to convey anything from the pulpit, and then they are getting how many hours a day fed into their subconscious of their algorithm, their newsfeed, everything. Sometimes it feels a little bit like one step forward, 50 steps back with people, because it almost feels like there’s nothing I can do that will keep you involved.
I don’t want to be the kind of pastor that spends my entire time trying to make everybody happy. So trying to navigate that, how do I care for people while also not just completely bending over backwards to give them exactly what they’re looking for? It wears me out. It’s exhausting.
Dave: It wore me out, too. This is where I can be, we can talk dispassionately about the role of a pastor and a calling pastor, but I’m your dad, and I’m watching you go through this, knowing what I went through, and it just complicates.
Barry: I’ve never dealt with, in my life, I’ve never dealt with true depression and anxiety until I became a pastor.
Dave: I’m not surprised.
Barry: I see that as part of the cross to bear in this season of my life, but it really does take a number. And I’ve also, I don’t know that I’ve ever been hated by people before. There are people who, if they saw me in public, will not make eye contact and will walk away. That is a brand new thing for me. I would argue it’s not necessarily because of something that I did or some posture that I took, it’s because they didn’t agree with the decision that was made or something, and they’re blaming me. It’s just really, really hard.
Dave: That gets us to the core of why I wanted to have this conversation. This podcast and Destiny Works, the company I lead, we’re about the idea of vitality, people experiencing life, energy, and passion and joy. We believe that if you address the physical health, emotional health, relational health, behavioral health, financial health, and vocational health, those are the key health factors that define vitality, and we provide coaching on all those things.
So with that context, how does a pastor either pursue vitality, maintain vitality? How do you address those health factors?
Barry: Well, part of this is interesting timing because I feel like I’m in a season of life where I haven’t been doing as well of a job, even just these last couple weeks, months. So I’m speaking more out of managing my own vitality. I’ve been overstretched and overtaxed and not doing as well as I would like.
But I’ll speak in theory and I’ll draw from some of the times when I have been doing well. Yeah, the key for me is to realize that for Grace Church to thrive, I cannot let myself get ground down into dust by this job. I need to be able to lead over the long haul. This is a marathon, not a sprint. If I burn out, then everybody loses, me and Grace. A burnout pastor is no use to anybody.
Dave: Well, and can cause damage.
Barry: Can cause damage.
Dave: Yeah, there are times where I thought I was right on the edge. I was so burned out and I was struggling, and I was paying attention to things coming out of my mouth and I’m going, ooh.
Barry: Yeah. You just, that cushion, that compassionate cushion that you normally are able to have, gets worn.
Dave: That’s really good. Compassionate cushion. Yeah, you’re taking the blows of other people’s chaos so that you can help them stabilize.
Barry: Paying attention to what is my overall vitality, I think, is even more important for someone like a pastor or a faith leader than the average Joe because of how demanding the job is. For me, I found, for me it’s kickboxing, like a 30-minute kickboxing thing that works different parts of my body. I do that several times a week, and that keeps my cardio going, my body in better shape than otherwise it would be.
But yeah, all the different factors. I realized that recently I was kind of a little low on relationality. This is a whole other can of worms for the conversation, but I’ve noticed that I am struggling to even desire real relationships with other people because I’ve been hurt so many times, and friends have left. So I’m starting to isolate myself.
But I know that’s not what I need to do. It is a thing. So I found a new fun avenue to have to build some new friendships, which is Dungeons and Dragons. I have become a Dungeon Master.
Dave: Barry started, Barry things, of course, of course.
Barry: I’m having a ball, and I’m getting to know these new guys that were just kind of acquaintances, and now they’re becoming my friends. I’m working on it, but it takes so much intentionality, because to be completely honest, if I was just doing what I want to do, I would curl up into a hole and come out to be a pastor and then go right back into my hole these days.
Dave: I found myself there numerous times. It’s very easy to get into that habit and then to self-medicate. I will find myself relying on alcohol, drink too much, too frequently. And then that starts to cycle, because if you drink a little too much, you stay up late, you wake up early, you’re not going to go work out, you’ve got a headache the next day, and it’s like, what am I doing? Then that evening you’re exhausted and you’re like, I just might have a beer. So it’s so easy to not even talk addiction, but just to talk justification.
Barry: Like using crutches to get by. I need this. Instead of actually letting your body heal. That’s what I see myself get into, those kind of bad habits all the time. My wife and I, as you know, we run a nonprofit animal rescue sanctuary on the side. So we have dozens of creatures that we care for, potbelly pigs.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s a double-edged sword, because I get great joy out of having this beautiful space for these animals and things I can grow and my fruit trees and all that stuff. And I have to take care of all of that, and these animals get sick or they die. And sometimes it all kind of comes to a head where I’ll be extremely busy or extremely on my last little bit of rope, and then one of the creatures will pass away, and I’ll be out there literally digging a grave for a chicken in the rain, and feeling completely spent for my job, and thinking, what have I done? How did I end up here?
Dave: Sometimes we ask that question too. Let me circle back to the relational thing. Let me give you a perspective. Sorry, you’ve got a cough drop in my mouth.
I’ve discovered, we’ve been talking on this podcast, I’ve brought it up several times, the Harvard study, the longitudinal study on happiness, encapsulated in a book called The Good Life. So since 1938, they’ve been studying what brings happiness to people. What they’ve discovered, as they looked at all these families for this many years, is that there is one element that is absolutely crucial to happiness the older you get, and that is relationship. It is the number one factor.
Relationships are, to put it mildly, problematic for pastors. Here’s what I discovered. You know the difference between real relationships and deal relationships. When I stepped away, I won’t say retired, but when I stepped away in 2020, all of a sudden I had a realization of just how many relationships I had as a pastor were deal. In other words, based on who I was, or my title. That was a shock. I think I knew it all along, but I didn’t really process it till then. Real relationships are at a premium for a pastor.
Can you react to that? Does that sound right to you?
Barry: Yeah, it totally does. And it makes sense, in a very highly relational job, that you don’t often have the energy and the stamina to invest in the real relationships, because you are having to spend yourself out with the deal relationships so often.
Then there’s the trauma of losing friendships. You’ve said, and maybe you could speak to this, but you’ve frequently said that you’ve, because of your role as a pastor, you’ve lost more friends than most people will ever make.
Dave: That’s exactly right. I have lost more friends than most people ever will have.
Barry: Can you explain that a little bit? What do you mean when you say you’ve lost friends?
Dave: Well, first there’s the neutral. Like when you invest your life in somebody, and then all of a sudden they come to you in tears and say, we have to move to Idaho.
Barry: Sad but fine.
Dave: There are a lot of those. Then the next one is people saying, you know, we’ve loved being here, but our kids are really appreciating this other church more, so we’re going to go there. You’re like, oh, all right. So, okay, goodbye. Then there are those who say, you’re not feeding me anymore. I’m not getting fed.
Barry: That’s the big church line. Can I rant about that for a second? Everybody rants about it, but, my goodness. I’m not getting fed. You know who gets fed? Babies. Babies get fed.
Dave: Yeah, unless you’re a baby, in which case, absolutely let me feed you.
Barry: That’s fine. You’ve got to start feeding yourself, person, whoever you are.
Dave: Then there are the people who leave because they’re just furious at you. For whatever’s going on. I’ve had people in, I’m having flashbacks here. Have you had anybody jump out of the couch or the chair that you’re talking to them in your office and they grab your collar?
Barry: No, you’ve had some.
Dave: Here’s the deal.
Barry: I now have a team that is the legacy of what you’ve built, which is a team of other pastors. But you went through a period where you were kind of the pastor. You were a couple pastors, but you guys had to share all the pastoral care. Now we’ve got pastors, associate pastors. Our staff’s 40-something people. So I don’t have as many stories of crazy one-on-one moments as you did, perhaps.
Dave: I wish I couldn’t, I don’t want to forget those moments, but you can’t, because that comes with the territory. Then there’s also the category of people that, because of the way that some decision is made or something that they dislike, they don’t just leave and disappear from their life. They go out swinging, or they go out and they’re trying to bring other people with them. They set things on fire.
Barry: It’s awful.
Dave: It’s awful.
Barry: All that to say, some of you are listening going, why be a pastor? If it’s as bad as you guys are describing. But there are pastors that are watching this going, mm-hmm.
Dave: Right. And that’s why we’re doing this.
Barry: Yeah.
Dave: And if I had to say to our listeners, here’s what I want you to do. Pay attention if you have a pastor in your life that you care for. Just take this podcast and understand their life better. And care for them better than you are right now.
And for the pastors, well, let’s just imagine there’s a young pastor, younger than you, who is just entering into ministry, and they’re listening going, what have I done? Have I made the right? What would you say to them?
Barry: One thing that I have often said to people who are considering full-time ministry is, don’t consider it unless you feel extremely called to it. Don’t do this for the perks. Don’t do this for whatever sort of benefit you think you’re going to get out of it. This is not for you. If you’re doing it, it’s for the church. So do it if you’re called. And if you’re called, follow hard after it.
I think self-differentiation is the main thing. It’s huge. Can you define yourself outside of the church that you lead? Because so often, just the nature of the job, you get wrapped up in the church. The success of Grace Church makes me feel like I’m successful. The failures of Grace Church make me feel like a failure. To some degree, there’s responsibility that I carry. You don’t want that to be the case. We don’t want to have our own well-being based on overall health, how many people were in the seats.
But what ends up happening if you don’t have that differentiation is that you become so wound up with the church that you have no way of healing, because you are bearing every, you’re like an emotional sponge. You’re bearing every injury, every pain.
For me, one of the things that has been incredibly helpful is to have other hobbies or things I can throw myself into that have nothing to do with work at all. Not everybody is handy or works with their hands, but I’ve had a number of different hobbies over the years. Working with your hands, when you have something you can actually make and show the results of, whether that’s leatherworking or woodworking or any kind of crafting type thing, painting, if you’re able to, at the end of it, be like, I made that. There’s something very fruitful, because most of my day is spent with a very vacuous, nebulous sense of accomplishment, which is like, how many steps closer to Jesus did I help this person get in their overall lifelong discipleship journey? That is not a, there’s not a lot of metrics there. You can go on stories, but for every positive story you have, you’re going to have stories of failure too.
You’ve got to find ways to be a whole individual that is not entirely defined by the job that you have. That’s the road to burnout.
Dave: Has your calling changed? I mean, we talked about how your original idea about bringing the kingdom of God to suburban Americans, has it morphed at all?
Barry: That’s a good question. If I had to boil down what the through line has been, from World Next Door, my old nonprofit, to Grace, the overall through line is a calling towards helping people understand what’s possible. I say that a lot in my sermons, like helping people recognize another way of life is possible.
We seem to be in this morass of suburban, all the things that distract us, and the self-medication and the hyper-isolation and individualism and all that stuff. But that does not have to be what defines our life. There is another way of life possible. In a time as divided as ours, it is possible to create a community where people who disagree can still love one another. That’s possible. It’s possible to love your enemies. Jesus would not have expected that of us if it wasn’t at least somewhat possible. We can do this.
So that’s my main overall thing, whether I was telling stories about justice being done for people impoverished on the other side of the world, or whether it’s here talking about, hey, you don’t have to be a slave to the addicting things in our culture. That’s the through line. Here’s what’s possible in the kingdom of God.
I think the only thing that I would modify now, and that is growing in me, is this calling to not just paint the picture of what’s possible, but to also paint the picture of the other road, what is inevitable if we don’t change.
In other words, and this is where all my research about the Roman Empire and the Roman imperial cult and all that stuff has helped to give me concepts about the world behind the text of Scripture that has helped me realize, oh my goodness, here’s where the church so consistently loses its way. It’s the reason why the book of Revelation went from my least favorite book of the Bible to one of my favorite books in the Bible. It’s exactly that thing. It’s the hope of what’s possible and it’s the warning of what will happen if we don’t pay attention.
Dave: So good. So all that to say that’s my, it’s still the same basic calling, but now it’s got a little bit of perhaps a Lovecraft tinge to it.
Barry: I love it.
Dave: So one last thing. Look at your congregation. In your mind, what do you see?
Barry: I’m seeing the fruit of many, many years of faithful labor on your part and the part of other pastors that have helped build Grace, and other staff and leaders and volunteers. But what I’m seeing now is a congregation that’s starting to really blossom into the values that make us who we are.
It’s becoming, at least by our standards, by Grace standards, extraordinarily diverse in nationality, languages, in age. We are seeing a slow but steady growth in people’s capacity to make room for people with disabilities. That stuff fires me up.
I’m also seeing, maybe it’s inevitable with a nerdy pastor like me, but I’m seeing the average person who comes to Grace gets fired up by the world behind the text. They get fired up by the history stuff. They want to go deeper in Scripture, which is awesome. I don’t think Grace is a particularly great church for very consumer-driven congregants. If you’re just coming to get your three Jesus tips for the week and have some worship that’s going to make you feel good, and then you go home, and that’s all that your discipleship journey is, Grace is probably not the one for you, which makes total sense why people have left.
But for people who do want to go deep and they want to get into it and they want to wrestle, and for example, at Grace, because of you and the legacy that you’ve led, we’re very comfortable at Grace saying, we don’t know, or hey, there’s three different ways people look at this, and we don’t know which one it is, or this is the one I think.
Dave: Your famous phrase, I could be wrong.
Barry: I could be wrong, I say it all the time. I could be wrong. So we are a church that I look out and I see people who are willing to do that. To get really grand, in the time that we are living, which is extremely divisive and extremely hate-filled, and there’s domination and addiction to self, it’s a miserable time to be alive as an American, slash to be in church ministry. But when I look out at my congregation, I see a group of people that I feel like they have a chance.
It’s not inevitable, but I can see there’s a chance for us to rise above what the culture has become. So that gives me hope, and that gives me encouragement, and it helps me think, okay, maybe the work that I’m doing is not entirely useless. Maybe it is having some level of impact over the long haul, and maybe I can make it another year. And maybe I can make it another year.
Dave: Exactly. Clearly you and I could talk on and on. We could talk forever. Maybe we should just do this all the time. What would your advice be for young pastors just starting out?
Barry: Well, I would make sure that you actually confront this idea, to make sure that you understand that pastor is a job, not a calling, but that you have a calling that you operate within that job. I think that’s really important.
For example, I struggled so much with counseling. I had no calling whatsoever from God to counsel people. But I had to do it. And you have to do it as well as you can.
I would say that’s one thing. Second thing, make sure you have somebody in your life, a mentor, or an anam cara, a soul friend in your life, who can. I had Charlie for so many years. Somebody that you can just rest in.
And then I would say pay attention to the physical, emotional, relational, behavioral, financial, vocational. Pay attention to the health factors of your life and manage your life as well as you can as you do this thing that is hard.
Dave: Two more last little thoughts that you reminded me of as you said that. One, definitely get counseling. Hey, I’m looking at you. Get counseling, okay? If you’re a pastor, get a therapist. It is so worthwhile to just have somebody that can process. Just do it.
Second is, pay really close attention to how your role is affecting your family, your spouse, your children. It’s more influential than you think. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a disaster for them, but you have to pay attention to it, because it may feel like, when you walk into Grace or when you walk into your church, I’ll speak for myself, when I walk into Grace, I know how to just turn it on and be present and be Pastor Barry to this group of people. But whether I mean to or not, my wife also has that responsibility. Being aware of that and thinking about that and knowing, even you, you’re my parents, you’re mom, people look at you, and they’re paying attention to you. Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I know full well just how everybody’s eyes were on me. So pay close attention, and I wouldn’t even hesitate to get counseling for them as well. It’s valuable.
Barry: 100% agree.