Imagine a toxic waste barrel. You know, the kind you see in cartoons - yellow with a big nuclear symbol on it. Now imagine that barrel is you as a leader. Many in your congregation believe you are a great place to unload their toxicity - their doubts about God, their marriage problems, their unemployment, their gripes about the church. Gradually leaders’ toxicity levels rise. And, of course, they don’t have anyone to offload the toxicity on to (except spouses). Unlike social services or counselling professions, for example, most Christian leaders do not have professional supervision as a matter of course, one main aim of which is to have someone objective who can detox us without it transferring the toxins to them.
I reckon there is good evidence that many Christian leaders take about 15 years for our toxic buckets to get filled to the brim. At which point any new toxicity is likely to produce an overspill or an explosion. Let another criticism arrive in our inbox, let alone several simultaneous marriage crises, plus crises in our own lives and nobody copes. But we have to keep smiling and not admit it because we have carefully constructed an image of being unflappable and infinitely resourceful to the needs of others. It is said that ministers don’t drop out of Christian work because they have forgotten how to preach but because they have forgotten how to be human.
I have to confess to feeling something akin to shell-shock at the speed my life has changed with the pandemic. Within two weeks everything I was planning has been stripped away, as has my routine, to be replaced with providing Daddy School for a demanding and anxious 5 year old who can’t be left to get on with anything on his own for more than 3 minutes. I have to say that my emotions are absolutely reeling. I am experiencing an incomprehension about how I feel (don’t know from one day to the next) and how it is appropriate for me to feel. And how other people expect me as a leader to feel, or what is appropriate to express.
My guess is that I not at all alone, but I am part of that set of Christian ministers who feel we are probably expected to be strong, resilient and spiritually dynamic when in fact we are feeling as weak, vulnerable, isolated and worried as anyone else. Just that we can’t admit that we are feeling it. So here is my confession - I am feeling it.
I wonder if, in the stripping back, the Lord is providing some unique opportunities at this time for Christians - and especially leaders - to pare right back to just praying and getting into the Word of God, without many distractions that normally pile in on us. I wonder if there are chances to learn to lean into God in wholly fresh ways that simply aren’t possible when I think there are other things to lean on - idols like my own psychological togetherness or ability to control my comings and goings. I wonder if there might be opportunities to become a better and more positive encourager in ways that are not possible while I am feeling completely sorted or presenting as omnicompetent? Maybe allowing myself to be vulnerable and human as opposed to platform-preacher-teacher-guy will actually make me more human and take away long-held veneers of Christian leader professionalism. Maybe.
But lurking at the back of the mind is whether people want Christian leaders who are weak and vulnerable. Or do we only want leaders who are strong and able? Do people really want to follow or employ leaders who have a deep walk with the Lord, are able to teach the scriptures and encourage a community in prayer, or ones who promise answers, perpetually unflappable and invulnerable - more Terminator than human? I really hope it is the first, even though it is only now that I am starting to realise how frequently I present as the second.
(Promising the undeliverable is a very real danger for Christian leaders from the point of being interviewed for positions with impossible job descriptions onwards, claiming that we can deliver in order to be appointed; and then being trapped by having presented a fantasy version of ourselves, into either wearing a mask or disappointing everyone).
Secretly, I suspect many leaders don’t want 2 Corinthians 12 to be true - boasting in our weakness and inadequacy, Paul being given a thorn in the flesh to stop him being conceited, and to learn that God’s grace is sufficient.
That’s the thing - God’s grace is sufficient for us. But we are going to have to learn that in whole new ways in which our self is stripped away. But then, maybe, 2 Corinthians 1 might come with greater reality - that we are able to comfort others with the comfort we have received from the Lord. If I am impervious, I scarcely need to receive comfort from him. How then can I comfort others if they think I float serenely through life and pandemics with perfect emotional equilibrium and answers for all their questions and needs? I might be able to train them in skills, but not model how to be a disciple in bad times as well as good, or when I don’t know the answers. If the current situation is teaching me anything it is that the total tonnage of things I don’t know the answer to can sink a battleship.
What do we do with these existential issues? A wise friend said to me earlier today that trying to look at the abnormal through a normal lens doesn’t work. These are extraordinary times when the normal doesn’t work. But extraordinary times end, a new normal emerges and we evaluate and go forward from there. I agree with the idea. Trying to plan how to feel, or even what to do, according to our normal principles when the world is literally changing by the hour is impossible and doomed to failure. We are, in the over-used phrase, in unprecedented times and by next week everything will have changed again.
But in another sense we are not in unprecedented times. The times are simply revealing to us how precarious life is all of the time, but usually masked or slightly ameliorated by our systems. And they are revealing how we should live with life’s precariousness all of the time: leaning in to God, trusting his grace only, not my cleverness or insulating mechanisms, praying. What do we want to model to people? That by being strong and competent like us that they too can survive these times? Or that by owning our weakness and vulnerability we might better learn to cast ourselves on a mighty, trustworthy God?
Another friend likes to say that leaders have to be the chief repenters. Otherwise how is anyone else going to see it being modelled and know how to do repent? The same is surely true about being weak and vulnerable. If we are, but pretend we are not for the sake of a veneer of security, how is anyone meant to be helped to seek God by that?
If this does one thing for me, I pray it will be to make me impress the gospel into my heart as relentlessly and deeply as I possibly can, and to make me pray. It is possible that we come out of this period as scarred and vulnerable, but also having grown in trust, waiting on the Lord and in depth. No longer apparently unflappable but shallow, but rather self-evidently broken yet full of grace, the fruit of the Holy Spirit and the consolation that only comes from knowing Him.
When I said “my foot is slipping,” your love, O Lord, supported me.
When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul
Psalm 94:18-19