History tends to follow pendulum swings. The church is not immune. As finite and sinful human beings we have a tendency to bounce from one extreme to another—dancing around the truth along the way.
I’ve got a handful of pendulum swings that I’d like to address. Today I want to address one that I’ve termed Avoiding Burnout.
Why the Pendulum Swung
I read an article awhile back from the 1950s (I think) which looked at some of the time-saving gadgets which were being invented. (You’ll have to forgive me for losing the article and now having no idea where I read it). Folks wondered what we would do with all of this time.
“The future” is now here and we have a greater poverty of time than people in the past. We are all so dreadfully busy. As is often the case, the church has followed culture. The attractional model of church which was so prominent in the 80s and 90s left people worn out. After all, somebody has to keep the roller coasters running. Pastors and lay people have become burned out by all of this busyness.
It has been reported that 1500 pastors leave their ministries each month due to burnout, conflict, or moral failure. (See here). If these statistics are to be believed, then this means that every month 1500 churches are impacted by a pastor who was doing too much. With this happening for a couple of decades folks started waking up to this phenomenon and working towards preventing burnout. Search the internet for “burnout” and you’ll be overwhelmed by the 40 million results. Burnout is now a fear in the mind of most churches, most companies, and most people.
The Over-swing
In his book, When People Are Big and God is Small, Ed Welch shares the story of a burnt-out pastor who had been saying “yes” to everything. Welch concluded:
People-pleasers can mistake ‘niceness’ for love. When they do, they will be prone to being manipulated by others, and burn-out is sure to follow. People-pleasers can also mistake ‘yes’ for love. But ‘yes’ might be very unwise. It might not be the best way to repay our debt of love. Saying ‘yes’ to one task might keep us from another that is more important. It might mean that we will do something that someone else could have done better. It might mean that we will entrench the sin patterns of other people. It might mean that we interpret the church egocentrically rather than as a body, thinking, ‘If I don’t do it, nobody will.’ (Welch, 214)
What Welch is saying here is not the over-swing. In fact, Welch acknowledges the over-swing when he says, “we can fall off the cliff of self-preservation as easily as we can the cliff of niceness and people-pleasing”. (214)
This “self-preservation” is the over-swing of which I am referring. Somewhere along the way we’ve bought into an idea that the answer for busyness is idleness. Rather than saying “yes” to everything we say “no” to most things. We wrongly think that our burn-out was a result of our focusing too much time and energy on others and so we start to focus on ourselves. We replace our “yes” to others with a “yes” to ourselves.
But the reason for our burn-out wasn’t too much of a focus on others. Our burn-out happened because we were using other people to fulfill some perceived need within ourselves. Perhaps a pastor has a deep need to be liked and to pastor a congregation where everyone is satisfied and singing his praises. Such a pastor isn’t busy serving people. He’s busy serving himself by means of “serving” people.
We live in a culture obsessed with self. And we are also obsessed with health. Combine these two and a well-meaning Christian can assume that the best way to serve others is by focusing on self. He’ll start saying silly things like, “In order to truly love other people I’ve got to really love myself first”. And so all of his focus will be on self and he’ll somehow become convinced that being spent for other people is one of the chief sins one could commit. Self-preservation becomes king. And he’ll convince himself that the most loving thing he can do is focus on self.
There is such a half-truth in this thinking. We do need to be good stewards of what God has given us—our physical bodies being one of those gifts. Yet why is it that we still exalt our athletes who leave everything on the field, but find ourselves prone to accuse missionaries of neglect when they does the same thing?
It is absolutely true that we can say “yes” to the wrong things and become burnt-out trying to spin plates which don’t need to be perpetually spinning. But the answer to plate spinning isn’t to sit on the couch. It’s true that you don’t have to be in church every time the door is open but you also don’t need an abundance of “me time” in order to preserve your flesh.
The answer to our perpetual busyness isn’t inactivity or self-focus, it is to be good stewards of our time for the glory of God. I like the way Tim Challies says it in his book, Do More Better. Challies says, “You need to structure and organize your life so that you can do the maximum good for others and thus bring the maximum glory to God.”
Let’s not forget that we are following a Suffering Savior on a road marked with suffering and sacrifice. We are to be spent for other people for the glory of God. But we are to be spent wisely and purposefully. There is an elderly lady in our church who is fond of saying, “I want to run out instead of rust out”. I like that, so long as we “run out” for the right things with the right heart.
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