Spiritual Hiccups - Anxious and Busy

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
     from God comes my salvation.
God alone is my rock and my salvation,
     my fortress; I shall never be shaken.

For better or worse, pastors in Protestant Churches are often viewed as the CEO of the congregation.  People look to the pastor for direction and leadership.  And while pastors do have a critical leadership role to play, the CEO model sometimes builds congregations too much in the pastor's image and undermines the notion that Christ alone is Head of the Church.

Pastors seeing themselves as corporate CEOs can also be a great anxiety producer.  If the congregation rises or falls on my skills as a CEO, then it all depends on me.  I had better do the right things, say the right things, give the correct instructions, run the institution efficiently and effectively, organize the structures for optimum performance, and so on, or things could go badly.  And I suspect that this sort of thinking is one of the reasons that pastors report significantly higher levels of stress in their work than they did a generation ago.

One of the things I have learned as a pastor is that stress and anxiety make me a much worse leader.  When I am anxious, I tend to be more reactive.  Under the right (wrong?) conditions, anxiety can morph into upset and even anger.  Anxiety also leads to a kind of frantic busyness.  There is never enough time to get it all done; never enough hours in the day.  A common lament among pastors is how this busyness squeezes out time for prayer, time for quietness and silence, time for stillness and Sabbath. 

Congregations sometimes encourage pastoral busyness.  I recently heard a story about a church member who came to see the pastor during the week and was told that the pastor was in time of prayer not to be disturbed unless it was a dire emergency.  The member insisted on seeing the pastor, and informed him that he should pray on his own time.

Of course such pastoral busyness cuts us off from God and makes leadership more about us and less about Jesus.  If prayer is not part of a pastor's work, how on earth will that work be attuned to Christ's call?  And how will our leadership call others to a deeper, fuller relationship with Jesus?  How will congregations be places people come to learn a deep faith and spirituality, if the pastors are too busy to wait silently for God?

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