book excerpt
Beating Burnout in Congregations
by Lynne M. Baab
Alban Institute, ISBN: 1566992745

Introduction

Burnout

1. A state of emotional exhaustion caused by the stresses of one’s work or responsibilities. 1
2. The body’s doing the work, but the spirit’s not present.2

If I had to pick out one story of burnout in a congregation most typical of what I have heard, I would tell you Pam’s story.

After serving a year on the fellowship committee in her church, she agreed to chair the committee. She was full of enthusiasm, vision, and ideas. The fellowship committee in her congregation is very active, overseeing coffee hour every week, serving a monthly dinner open to the congregation, and sponsoring several other special events each year.

During the year Pam had served on the committee, she watched the committee members struggle to stay on top of the workload and strain to get volunteers to help with all the events. She came into the role of committee chair with a strong desire to provide support and encouragement to the committee members.

Pam began a new plan for the monthly committee meetings. Formerly, the meetings had centered around all the tasks that needed to be done. Pam introduced a significant time devoted to Bible study and prayer at each meeting. She felt that focusing on business for two hours was draining, and she herself experienced Bible study and prayer to be restoring, so she figured the committee members would find energy if they studied and prayed together. Pam really enjoyed designing these study and prayer times, and sometimes they got quite lengthy. Once or twice they took up three-quarters of the meeting time. The committee’s business—dividing up tasks for immediate events and looking ahead to future events—had to be squeezed into the remaining short time.

The members of the committee were uncomfortable with the new structure. They would not have minded 15 minutes of devotions, but they felt Pam’s extravagant and creative study and prayer experiences left too little time to accomplish the essential tasks of the committee. None of the committee members were comfortable with conflict. They all had the quiet gift of service, and they were more at ease doing things than talking about them. So they said nothing to Pam, hoping they could endure until she was finished with her year as chairperson.

Despite the committee members’ attempts to be polite and submissive, Pam was affected by the withdrawal of their support and encouragement. She could not really put her finger on it, but after every committee meeting, she felt let down and dissatisfied.

The year wore on, and she became more and more discouraged without knowing why. Her energy for giving support to the committee members faded away. Her enthusiasm for the congregational fellowship events drained away as well. At the end of her year as committee chair, she stopped attending church entirely. After a few months, she sat in the pew at another church from time to time. It was 18 months before she could think about returning to her church without feeling heaviness and pain just from imagining being there.

Unlike many people who experience burnout, Pam never really figured out why she grew to be so uncomfortable in her role of committee chair. She did learn enough to know that when she returned to church, she would avoid anything related to coffee hours and church dinners.

Defining Burnout
Pastoral counselor John Sanford, in his book Ministry Burnout, points out that only recently have we begun to use the word burnout to refer to human exhaustion. He wonders if widespread human exhaustion to the level that we call burnout is a relatively new phenomenon. Surely in the past, people became exhausted in a variety of ways. He hypothesizes that this problem has now become so widespread that a special word is needed to describe the condition.

In the past, Sanford notes, the word burnout had three meanings not related to people. Burnout can refer to a fire that completely burns the contents of something, usually a building. It can also refer to the breakdown of an electrical circuit caused by high temperatures. Third, burnout is used when a forest fire has been so severe that even the floor of the forest is left bare and deeply damaged, severely slowing the ability of the forest to rebound after the fire.

When we apply these images to human beings, Sanford writes:

We must imagine a man or woman who has been devoured from within by a fiery energy until, like a gutted house, nothing is left. Or we may imagine a person who once carried a current of psychic energy but now, like a burned out electrical conductor, cannot supply power anymore. Or an individual who, like a burned out forest, feels that her power to renew herself has been destroyed. . . . The word “burnout” is drawn from the imagery of fire, and fire is a form and symbol for energy. So in its broadest scope, the problem of burnout is a problem of energy.3

Most definitions of burnout do address this issue of energy; most definitions have the word exhaustion or depletion in them. When we are considering congregational volunteers, exhaustion, which manifests itself in lack of interest or enthusiasm for a task, is indeed serious. What helps people maintain their interest in a volunteer position? What helps people continue to bring their whole selves to the task?

The Heart
Susan S. Phillips, a sociologist who teaches the ethics of care at seminaries and who coedited The Crisis of Care,4 has some answers to the questions about why people lose their ability to serve with their whole being.5 She believes that burnout is caused not by the number of hours a person serves, but by something about how they engage in service. The normal response to a concern about burnout, she says, is to recommend various kinds of disengagement. Don’t work so hard, don’t do so much, pull back, get more rest. A large body of literature recommends all kinds of coping strategies to avoid burnout, strategies such as lunch with a friend, a vacation, a massage. All of these encourage a balance of engagement and disengagement as the solution to burnout.

The literature on caring, Philips notes, indicates that the solution does not lie with disengagement. The deeper issue, she believes, is the way we engage with our work or serving. When we engage from the heart, we are more likely to be energized and full in our serving, rather than being drained. This kind of engagement enlarges our capacity for love and promotes growth in us that is rewarding and does not eat us up. This is a moral model rather than an economic model, looking at the concerns of the heart rather than striving for a sophisticated ledger sheet that shows a balance between sources of stress and methods of coping.

The Bible is full of passages that emphasize the heart. Phillips notes that Hannah prays in her heart, Samuel is said to be a man whose heart is turned towards God, David is the man after God’s own heart. The psalms attributed to David frequently mention the heart. We are commanded to return to the Lord with our whole heart and to keep our hearts on right paths. The Bible says our heart melts, trusts, is broken, and is an acceptable sacrifice to God. And in the New Testament, we are told that God searches our hearts.

The recipe for prevention of burnout, Phillips believes, is rediscovering the emphasis on the heart that runs throughout the Bible. The key to healthy serving is an open heart that welcomes God’s guidance and correction, a heart that listens to instruction from God. So often, we have a false sense of what the church should be, and we kill ourselves trying to make it happen. These desires originate in a good place with the best intentions, a desire to please God, to build community, to serve others, but we so easily begin to clutch at our own vision. We have our list of things we need to do, and then when we are finished, we can know that we have done them. The mistake is that we have moved into a closed posture that shuts out any awareness of the ongoing presence of God in the tasks to be done, and denies God’s ability to guide and shape the tasks as we do them.

Phillips suggests that congregational volunteers consider their place of service and ask themselves what about their serving makes them feel right and energized and full, and what makes them feels like they are doing what they ought to do or makes them feel empty and despairing. As we ask these kinds of questions, we will often find ourselves more aware of old and unresolved issues. She suggests that we need to work to clear out the inner messages from our past that are self-destructive and that keep us functioning in ways that do not engage our hearts.

Our culture so emphasizes the efficiency/management model of control, and congregations fall into that trap so easily. We set a vision, we move forward, we pat ourselves on the back for reaching our goals. It is hard to maintain a heart that is open to God; it is much easier to stay in the saddle with the reins in our own hands. Remaining open to God might involve not meeting a goal. It might involve changing the vision in the middle of a project. It might involve tears. It might be messy.

God Will Provide Healing
I believe God calls congregational leaders to do everything they can to make burnout a rare event in their congregations. But when burnout does occur, congregational leaders can come alongside their members with confidence and anticipation that God will be about the business of bringing healing and enabling restoration. That healing will probably involve physical rest and renewal, as it did in Elijah’s case. It will involve expression of all the maelstrom of negative feelings; congregational leaders will probably hear more than they want to about the pain and frustration that has come from intense service. In the midst of listening, they can encourage the burned-out person to bring those feelings to God as well.

In time, God’s healing for burnout will involve a renewed call to service and a renewed involvement in community. In time, healing will result in renewed energy, renewed desire to risk whatever it takes to experience God’s grace, and a renewed ability to serve from the heart. We can pray and watch for these signs of health as we come alongside people in pain.