Burnout and resilience in the wilderness

You know you’re in trouble when your colleague recommends their antidepressants.

I was a midlife pastor coming down the pandemic’s awful crest when things started to fall apart for me. It wasn’t that I lost my faith. I loved the church and (mostly) loved ministry. But everything at once swamped the baseboards of my life, and my ministry sagged. That’s when I found myself talking to a couple of pastoral colleagues—and when it became clear that this time something was different. I couldn’t name it just then, but I was experiencing pastoral burnout.

I know I’m not alone. We could try to explain the rise of pastoral burnout by rehearsing all the glass splinters of the last few years—the pandemic, the politics, the mask wars. We could acknowledge that the problem has in fact been with us much longer. But it does seem like something is up. We pastors all lost our mojo at once.