If there were such a thing and perhaps there is as a survey designed to measure which specific aspects of pastoral practice produce the most stress in the pastor, what feature of ministry would your answers identify?
Looking back over my years as a pastor and as a ministerial secretary (a consultant to pastors) I would say that some of the most difficult times are those that have to do with finding just pathways through the divorce situations that come to virtually every congregation.
The degree of seriousness such struggles take on depends a great deal upon the primary attitudes of a particular congregation and the amount of significance or meaning attached to divorce in the congregation and in the value systems of a denomination at large. Many "conservative" Christian groups including Seventh-day Adventists, alarmed by skyrocketing divorce rates in the world at large and among their own members, have acted to strengthen the stand that many already have taken against divorce. Debates about the biblical legitimacy of divorce and thus the way the Christian should deal with divorcing couples are quite common among us.
In raising this issue I'm sure I've already at least stirred some interest.
Perhaps you're wondering what position or direction I will take when it comes to this loaded question and how much trouble that might generate for me among the general readership of this journal! But let me unsettle you by taking a quick swerve to the left or right, which is it? and come to a halt on the berm of this rather potholed road. It's altogether too easy, isn't it, for us pastors to be suckered into debates over this and kindred matters while the truly critical issues go untended? Let me clarify where I'm going, and quote (with permission, but with names withheld) excerpts from some letters that recently came into my possession.
"I am recently divorced; my husband of 15 years just walked out....Loneliness, depression and a great deal of questioning as to why I am here are day-to-day issues ..."
"My marriage of nearly two years, at times appears to be headed for divorce. The truth is, I don't have anyone to discuss it with."
"I believe the bitterest part of my marriage break-up ... centers around the total shut-out by my fellow church members, people I'd grown to love and with whom I'd fellowshiped for years. I was devastated by the hostility, rudeness, and judgmental attitudes of those who really knew nothing about what was happening in our home... and who censored me in my pain... It really hurts when the pastor also rejects you and talks about you behind your back."
"I am a struggling Christian/ Adventist. Since my divorce, I have felt out of place everywhere I go, especially to church, where family issues are highly important... I felt every one had deserted me; my parents, church members, of course, my husband, my children, co-workers, and even God. I felt totally alone.... My life is a mess. I so want to seek God first..."
"The separation and divorce were not my decisions and I remember wondering how God could let me hurt so much ... Several years after [the divorce] I met another church member in the parking lot of a local store. She too had just divorced and we talked right there for a long time. She was verging on a breakdown but had found a divorce support group in another denomination and felt she was getting help. Surprisingly, she is still a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church."
These words grasped at my soul and my pastoral conscience. They were not written to "the Church" or as a complaint against the system, but are genuine expressions of what people have gone through and are going through in our churches. As I read them, I realized quite dramatically that in far more than one divorce situation I have been involved in, I have been too preoccupied with the theological Tightness or wrongness of the divorce, the guilt or innocence of one or the other of the couple, the opinions of significant local and corporate church leaders, the potential negative effect the divorce may have in my congregation and on my ministry and the fires of congregational controversy I might have to fight.
That is, I have been more concerned about those realities than I have about the agony of the divorcing couple themselves, the rending disorientation of children who may be involved, the bewildering death of love even while love lingers, the excruciating fear of the present and the future, the guilt, the palpable sense of personal failure and the literally awful sensation of loss and aloneness that almost inevitably comes with divorce, which is all too often crowned by the rejection and destructive judgment of fellow church members and others. And this, of course, covers only a part of what a divorcing person faces.
The question is, What is our ruling attitude and objective as pastors, when we deal with families who are going through divorce? I find it impossible to believe that I should become so concerned about what I will call necessary ecclesiastical and theological considerations, that I all but forget the absolutely essential human, Christian, and pastoral realities that cry out to my soul in divorce situations. Am I first of all a "churchman" or am I a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ?
