When many people enter ministry, they do it because they believe they are following a divine calling to share the Gospel and to help people in the name of Jesus.
What they don’t always account for is the tremendous demands on their time, the stress of trying to meet so many needs of their flock, or the pressure of trying to look like they have their lives together when, behind closed doors, the opposite might be true.
For 40 years, Bob Russell lived that life. As senior pastor of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Russell watched the church explode from worshiping in the basement of a home, to becoming one of the largest congregations in the country. When he retired from that role in 2006, he knew he wasn’t done with ministry, but instead wanted to equip young pastors with some of the coping tools he wished he had when he entered ministry.
“One of my biggest challenges, frankly, was learning to balance church and family because it was so easy to be consumed with church,” said Russell, who now holds eight, three-day mentoring retreats a year for pastors.
“It’s just kind of a spiritual (rest and recuperation) and oasis for preachers in which we do some study, and we do some fun things to try to send them back home with their well replenished a little bit,” said Russell, who added that he also frequently fields calls and emails and has lunch with preachers who reach out to him for help navigating various ministerial challenges.
(Full interview podcast is further below)
Those challenges, left unchecked, could prove detrimental to young pastors.
Russell cited a study he participated in with the Center For Church Leadership, funded by a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation, that showed that 70 percent of pastors who start out in ministry quit in the first 10 years and 43 percent who remain seriously consider quitting.
“It’s really a problem of discouragement in ministry, and there are a lot of reasons for that,” Russell said, adding that chief among those reasons is “a gnawing sense of failure, and a sense of inadequacy.
“Nobody can meet all the time demands that are on them,” Russell added. “And no matter how well things go, there are always things that aren’t going very well. It’s very hard to measure wins… A lot of preachers get very discouraged in ministry because they know they don’t quite measure up to what they should be, spiritually, and they don’t see the kind of tangible results in the church that they would like to see.”
So how can churchgoers support their pastors?
“First of all, support them with your involvement in the church and your participation (by) volunteering and being dependable,” Russell said. “I look back and some of the people I appreciated the most were easy to get along with. They were low maintenance. They showed up every time and they did their job and we didn’t have to pay a lot of attention to them.”
He added that during Pastor Appreciation Month, or the other 11 months of the year, subtle but meaningful gestures mean the most.
“Maybe a small gift card or a note that says ‘Hey, we appreciate you. We’re standing behind you and we want you to know we’re praying for you.’ Don’t underestimate the value of a note of encouragement.”
Russell said pastors also like to hear from congregants when a particular sermon moved them.
“That means a whole lot because sometimes you preach and you don’t know the kind of long-term effect that is having,” Russell said.
And on Pastor Appreciation Month, Russell said, it’s also important to remember the families of pastors, who often make large sacrifices they didn’t necessarily sign up for, including missed dance recitals, scarce date nights, attention-diverting phone calls at all hours of the day and night, or an often-empty seat at the dinner table.
“Sometimes, the way you best appreciate the pastor is appreciating his kids or appreciating his wife,” Russell said. “Maybe you send a gift card or buy some diapers or you send a complimentary note about what you saw one of his kids doing, and that boosts him up big time.”
Russell writes a weekly blog at www.bobrussell.org that helps Christians look at worldview issues from a Biblical perspective.
We invite you to listen to our complete podcast interview—just below—as Bob shares more about his early days in ministry, how he now equips young pastors and how others can encourage their pastors.