Dying the big deaths

An honest evaluation of life priorities and ministerial performance

William L. Self, DST, is senior pastor of the Johns Creek Baptist Church, Alpharetta, Georgia, United States.

A deacon in the church I pastored was nicknamed by his colleagues at the newspaper as "Dr. Death" because his job was to update biographical files on 500 prominent people just in case one should suddenly die and the newspaper had to quickly produce an obituary. Just imagine how sobering, humbling, indeed, mortalizing it would be for the mighty Master of the Universe-type personality Tom Wolfe depicted in his novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, to face this mild-mannered reporter one morning and hear him say, "I'm here to update your obituary."

Occasionally, Dr. Death pays me a visit to update my file, more (I suspect) to rattle my cage than anything else. But it causes me to muse like an eighth-grader in English composition or a freshman journalism student in his or her first assignment on how I would write my own obit. I always thought it would read something like, "Bill Self, Warrior Prince for the Forces of Good, was borne from his pulpit on his shield today. Heavens darkened. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled. And, in the study of Judge Paul Pressler, the black curtain that separated the leader of the Forces of Evil within the Southern Baptist Convention from the real world, was rent from top to bottom."

But not long ago I stood in that pulpit and told the congregation that I'd tried to shepherd and serve for 26 years that I was simply quitting. The stress of the job had become too much. I had updated my own obituary, and I didn't like the way it would read.

Walk-on-water syndrome

Not Bill Self, the fire-breathing preacher who a month earlier delivered a sermon from that same pulpit to 350 ministers from a cross section of mainstream Protestant churches urging them to die "big deaths," not the little ones Carl Sandburg referred to in his poem. I talked about nails and crosses and crowns of thorns. I wove into that the symbolism of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, the lonely, wise old fisherman who conquers the magnificent marlin only to have it chewed to pieces by sharks before he could get it to shore. As for me, I said, I want to be measured, not by artificial standards and statistics, but, like Santiago, by my tenacity, my faithfulness to the task, by the way my boat put back to sea, ever proclaiming that I'd rather go down fighting the sharks than be nibbled to death by minnows.

Unfortunately, I think that, instead of putting that sturdy old boat to sea in the face of strong adversity, I subconsciously had navigated myself into the age-old "walk-on-water" syndrome that has been the undoing of many a preacher. Simply defined, the "walk-on-water" syndrome is the notion that, because you're a preacher, you can accomplish anything.

These inflated expectations come from two sources: from members of your congregation and from yourself. No matter what their origin, I have learned that these expectations are totally unrealistic.

The stress factor

There are some who will write their own version of my obituary: that "after losing the race for the Southern Baptist Convention presidency in the 1978 watershed election that tipped the balance of control to the fundamentalists in the convention, Self became obsessed with the imminent split in the convention and lost control of his congregation at home."

No doubt my sense of frustration and hopelessness took its toll. But what I saw when I updated my obituary was not a symptom of positions I'd taken on convention-related themes but something else entirely. And it was this: The Annuity Board of the Southern Baptist Convention administers health and medical insurance programs for both fundamentalist and moderate pastors in our convention. The board reported in mid-1990 that, aside from maternity benefits, the greatest identifiable portions of the S64.2 million paid in medical claims during 1989 were for stress-related illnesses. Most of the medicines ordered through the prescription drug program were for stress-related problems like high blood pressure and ulcers. The number one diagnosis in the total cost of hospital claims was for psychosis. Psychoses ranked tenth in the number of hospital admissions by specific groupings of causes. John Dudley, the administrator of the program, said that we paid more for stress-related illnesses in 1989 than for new babies.

When I updated my obituary, what I saw was not just a Baptist problem. In Atlanta, I have two good friends who are rabbis. They report the same stress-inducing pressures among their peers. The pastor of a nearby church of another denomination told me that, because of his own experiences, he conducted an informal survey of pastors of some of the largest churches in the country and found them all suffering from stress-related health problems or family distress.

I know of no single source of quantitative data on the subject, but all we have to do is look around and see that preachers and rabbis and priests are leaving their ministries to become teachers in colleges or seminaries, 9-to-5 chaplains for corporations, or bureaucrats in denominational jobs. They start selling real estate or, like me, head up a small corporation. Before some can quit, the stress erupts into headlines. We seem to hear more and more stories of clergymen jumping into bed with the wrong people, pastors running off with members of their congregations, or counseling sessions that end up as trysts.

Sure, some of these things are attributable to basic immorality, dereliction, stupidity, or hyperactive glands. Look deeper, however, and you will find a lot of it to be directly attributable to stress.

Great expectations

From time to time during a ministry, a pastor must decide whether to preach prophetically or "run for Congress," kissing all the babies in the congregation, shaking all the important hands, saying all the right things. That decision alone is a constant source of stress.

There are always those in a church who believe a pastor is nothing more than a hired hand, a signature to go on wedding certificates, a talking puppet that is wound up to preach, and played for the amusement of the faithful. Others have a romanticized vision of the pastor they grew up with, complete with warm and fuzzy reminiscences. Older people want a pastor who can comfort them, hold their hands, and empathize with them as they face the fears and uncertainties of growing old. Younger people want a star. In between are those who want their pastor to be a corporate guru who can run the church like an IBM executive and raise more money than the Republican National Committee.

Like the major stress that affects most families, most churches today are experiencing serious financial difficulties. Al though we like to believe that people tithe or contribute to their church because of their religious or moral commitments, we know that many give because of economic or other incentives. As a pastor, you are forced to haggle and pinch pennies with would-be CEOs in your congregation. Then you look at their pledge cards for tithes and offerings to help you plan the next year's budget and see that some of those who dis agreed with a decision you've made say they plan to give "zero" to their church in the coming year.

We are faced with more stressful issues. It has only been in recent years that pastors have had to deal with issues such as AIDS, abortion, and homosexuality. We not only have to deal with those things on the personal level when they affect members of our congregations; we're also expected to make public pronouncements that push the right buttons.

All of this is stirred in the same cauldron, brewing with the poison gasses of the theological controversies and the controversies of political control from the varying factions. These definitely were affecting me as a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention. But they are no different from the pressures that clergy in every other Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations are experiencing.

Pastors must make stressful decisions. With 40 to 60 hospitals scattered throughout an urban area like Atlanta, Georgia, it takes about two hours, in normal traffic, to make one bedside visit. What happens when a single secretary with no close circle of friends lies dying alone in one hospital and the wife of a prominent member of the congregation enters another hospital for a few days of tests and requests a visit from the pastor? What do you do when you're expected at a dinner party thrown by a prominent contributor when a parent who has just learned a child will be born with Down's syndrome walks into your office? In both instances, you know where you ought to be; you also know where you'd better be.

A more realistic view

Pastors deal with these strains every day and, after awhile, they start to wear us down. While young, we think we can leap over tall buildings with a single bound and walk on water too. And many times we do it until we get old and start breaking apart.

As pastors, we handle holy things, but we are not that holy. We say holy words, but we are not divine. Jesus, whom we live to emulate, was Holy and was Divine. But not even He, during His walk on earth, satisfied everyone He met.

The solution, on the one hand, is to get congregations to take a more realistic view of the clergy. In a dispute, the congregation is quick enough to point out that a preacher is only human. But, day to day, it demands more.

After awhile, the tiny scars from the small battles meld together into bigger and bigger scars, forming a patchwork of uncertainty and, yes, anger. The countless squabbles leave in their wake debris and carnage. The time comes when all that just has to be cleaned out and swept aside so the church can go on with its mission.

I suppose what this all means is that, from time to time, we have to update our own files and make revisions of how we want our obituaries to read. Dr. Death isn't going to do it for us. And, not too long ago, I made my decision on what I didn't want mine to say: "Today Bill Self sank like a rock, beat up, burned out, angry and depressed, no good to himself, no good to the people he loved."


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William L. Self, DST, is senior pastor of the Johns Creek Baptist Church, Alpharetta, Georgia, United States.

March 1998

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