By Jamie Sipsma, NL Moore Senior Ministry Consultant
Earlier this summer, I received the following auto-response from a pastor I had emailed: “I will be out of the office on sabbatical until __________. All emails received during this sabbatical time will be deleted and not responded to upon my return. If you are in need of something, I would encourage you to reach out to another staff member. Thank you.”
My first thought was, “What’s with this guy?” I had never received an email like that before, let alone as an out-of-office autoreply!
The next morning, I received this email from a different pastor:
“I am out of the office all summer while on sabbatical. I will not be answering any work email nor reading any of the emails I get over the summer. So, if you’d like to get in contact with me, please email me after __________. Thanks for understanding.”
Then this one:
“I am on a three-month-long sabbatical right now so I won’t see this. Also, when I return, I’ll be deleting all emails I received while I was gone. If what you have communicated to me is vital for me to know, please re-send your email after ________.”
Over the course of the next several days, I received about ten more auto-response emails with similar messages. I felt guilty for judging the first one I read, as I came to understand this one glaring reality: Pastors are fried.
Imagine feeling a deep, burning passion in your bones that you were created for the ultimate purpose to love people and lead them to a deeper connection with God. You spend years investing in this mission, going to school, moving your family, and devoting all of yourself to this call.
Then a global pandemic hits, and along with it comes a seemingly unending spectrum of passionate opinions. Political rancor and fighting are experienced in a manner that is unlike any in recent history. Words like “truth,” “faith,” “science,” and “freedom” now have completely different implications. Opposing, entrenched camps have formed in churches that until now never existed. One telling the pastor, “You can’t let the government tell us what to do. I can’t believe you are letting them tell us we can’t meet the way we did before, and we have to use masks. I thought you loved us.” The other saying, “You can’t let people dictate the safety of others. It is dangerous to meet in person, not get vaccinated, and not wear masks. I thought you loved us.”
Friends and families that used to worship together, share meals together, pray for one another, and chat after church in the lobby, now won’t speak to each other and avoid each other if they can. No matter what the pastor does, it is seen as wrong. All this compressed into twelve months. A return to normalcy has begun to happen in some areas, but generally, it is returning at a glacial pace rife with setbacks. As we now head into the fall and the ministry year kicks off again in earnest, many of the same tensions, tones, and weariness remain. Vaccine debate, COVID variants, political nastiness, and disinformation have seeped into the collective church milieu. Welcome back from your sabbatical, pastor. Buckle up.
I say all that to say this: give your pastor a little extra grace. The current rate of burnout, sabbaticals, or leaving ministry altogether is the highest I’ve seen. Your pastor has been pulled in multiple directions for well over a year, fielding passionate and disparate opinions on a variety of topics, all while feeling the need to be an anchor for everyone regardless of personal opinions. Many have nothing left in the tank. If you’ve ever been on “empty” but told you have to keep going, you know it’s a lonely place.
To the pastors out there, I say this: give yourself a little extra grace, too. The need for soul and self-care has never been higher. Remember that you matter. God cares more about who you are than what you do. More than being His worker, you are simply His.