From a pastor-friend in the U.K.:

Life continues to be a bit of a battle – with enemies of disappointment, frustration and apathy. I am sure that I have told you that to help me recover from my depression I have been seeing a counsellor. Now, it just so happens that he is a former clergymen! He suffered a breakdown himself and was so helped by a councillor that he ended-up retraining. So what makes him helpful is that as well as being a fully qualified psychotherapist, he is familiar with and sympathetic to the particular strains of Christian pastoral ministry. Apparently he counsels a lot of Pastors!! His comments have been fascinating and I thought you might like to hear some of them – I am obviously paraphrasing but these are some of his comments to me in sessions;

‘The problem with the church is that we have a reputation for shooting the wounded… It’s hard work to keep a congregation together these days, if you started with fifty and five years later you’ve still got fifty then you are doing a good job… No church is finding it easy, they’re all struggling, very few of them are growing… The ones that are growing tend to be these huge mega churches, and how many of them are there? A lot of the time they’re just catering for Christian consumerism. It’s fun and easy to be part of a huge, successful church isn’t it… Very few people in our society care about church or Christianity today. It’s hard work…’

Just recently (as in last week) a close friend, whom I look up to, and who pastors a church of over 200 said to me ‘sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it. I spend so much of my time doing all sorts of things that I never trained to do and never thought would be part of ministry. Some times I feel like a filing clerk.’

Personally, I feel that I have come to an impasse; I am comfortable here, in the worst sense of the word! I am not sure that I need to move my church forward. I think I need to move me forward! That is probably the issue. But I don’t know how. I also feel that unless I can move out of this huge rut that I am in then I really ought to get out of pastoral ministry, for my health’s sake if nothing else! The problem is that pastoral ministry, to me at any rate, often seems lonely work, dull work, difficult to evaluate work, and often nothing-to-show-for-it work. It’s also proving SO unfruitful. What’s more, I no longer believe that there is some, easy, off-the-shelf answer. I used to think that ‘this book’, or ‘that’ conference, or ‘this’ idea would solve all our problems. No. Not any more. We are facing a disinterested, secular, consummerist, third generation unchurched soceity, and our basic posture as church in the UK is still pastoral, not missionary – pastroal in structure, pastoral in outlook, pastoral in expectations, pastoral in training, pastoral in leadership, pastoral in practices and programs. Gosh, if they gave Nobel Prizes for moaning about the problems then I’d have several. How to be part of the answer? That’s the problem, Rowland, I honestly feel like part of the problem, not part of the answer!