A Pastor’s Tears

One of the surest signs that we’ve built Christian audiences rather than communities is the expectations placed on pastors. Audiences expect their pastors to entertain them, always cheerful, outgoing, full of energy. Audiences applaud their pastors’ ability to remember names, tell jokes, make people smile and feel good about themselves. Those same audiences want compassion and empathy when they are suffering, but an audience member will seldom be aware of the toll the suffering of others takes on a pastor. The audience member expects to be entertained in the presence of the pastor. The community member understands that while the pastor has made a deep commitment to being faithful to God and his Word and to serve the church, he has the same range of emotions, concerns, and challenges as everyone else. The calling to ministry and the ordination by the church is a commitment and expectation for the pastor to be faithful & loving in life, leadership, preaching, teaching, and shepherding. While some may be blessed with gifts that entertain, entertainment is far less a measure of calling than authenticity, faithfulness, and love.

I’m more fortunate than many pastors as I serve a church who increasingly embraces the calling and value of community over the desire to be entertained. At this stage of life and ministry, and while still leading a busy counseling ministry, that’s more important for me than it’s ever been. Looking back over thirty years of ministry, I have, at times, unwittingly leaned toward entertainment. Truthfully, it’s easier. It doesn’t hurt. The entertaining pastor keeps others just far enough away as to avoid any personal pain.

It’s understandable that most pastors feel the draw toward such an approach to ministry, whether they call it entertainment or not. This week, I have listened to the fears, doubts, beliefs, and cries of a friend dying of cancer, a father with twin daughters fighting a terrible disease, parents whose son committed suicide, a friend who just placed a loved one into hospice care, a friend facing a serious surgery, another friend caught in adultery, a couple on the brink of divorce, a man losing his family business, a husband whose wife has just been diagnosed with dementia, and a friend coming to grips with her own mental illness. And that’s just this week. I felt the pain of each, and while it would be easier to not feel their pain, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a hollowness that settles on anyone in a helping profession when we no longer feel the pain of those we serve. Social workers, counselors, medical professionals… must each decide to feel the pain and risk burn-out or to disassociate enough to feel nothing. In the long run, everyone decides. We decide we’d rather feel the pain than feel nothing at all, or that we can’t carry that weight as far as we hope to go, so we simply stop empathizing.

But pastors vow to follow Jesus, and Jesus embraced pain. It’s easy in modern church culture to focus on the tasks of ministry, especially those with some measure of entertainment value, whether that’s onstage, in the fellowship hall, in small groups, or leading meetings. Jesus taught with authority, but he also embraced pain. At times, that pain led him to pull away to be alone with the Father just as the crowds wanted and expected more.

There is hope in the name of Jesus. The pastor’s role is to offer such hope, yet one cannot truly walk the path of someone’s pain or loss without feeling the weight. I’ve learned that pain shared is pain divided, rather than pain eliminated, or always lessened. What does that mean? It means that a compassionate listener not only allows a person in pain to offload some of their pain, but in doing so, takes on a measure of that offloaded pain. Sure, prayer is a common way for the pastor to unload the weight of ministry. But then there are weeks like this week, when there seemed to be more time spent listening to people and pondering their pain than talking to God. It’s not always as clean as handing the deepest and heaviest loads directly to God or somehow throwing them into a cosmic dumpster, washing our hands, and moving on. The caring pastor will carry some measure of concern into other interactions, home, and even to be bed with him.

I’ve never considered myself a crier. As a teenager, I chose the more macho route of stuffing feelings rather than releasing them. Of course, stuffing never works indefinitely, so as everyone knows, the macho route eventually releases all that pent-up emotion as anger, but NEVER through crying. Needless to say, I became a young man with an anger issue.

Through the years, God has softened my heart. I don’t get angry much anymore. I weep. Yes, it’s embarrassing. I cry during concerts. I cry watching movies. Sometimes I cry as I listen to my clients’ stories or pray with friends over the phone. I may even shed a tear just petting my dog and recalling a loved one’s pain. I fear that my increasingly frequent tears during preaching and teaching are being interpreted as attempts to dramatize or entertain. It’s just the opposite. I’m way too prideful to use tears to manipulate (yes, I’m working on pride too). If I cannot influence others through sharing the Word without props, I’ll step down.

My tears are not contrived, planned, or even wanted. But they are cathartic, freeing, refreshing, and restorative. The pressure to be manly seems to prevent most men from crying until they’re in their late 50’s or beyond. I get it. But perhaps we should reconsider our role model. Jesus is recorded as weeping in public at least a year before he was crucified at 33 years old.

Here's my late night pondering on crying:

Tears

They arrive as uninvited guests, as loss trashes our script like an unwanted email. They are the silent, visible, raw expressions of pain. They expose the realness, our realness, that we may otherwise hide. We turn, wipe, sniffle, and cloak. Yet their rise is from the deepest well. That God would choose something so beautiful and so powerful as water to push our deepest emotions to the surface. Living water? Perhaps. For even as we fight for our dignity, to suppress such vulnerability, we are being cleansed from within. Our plastic shiny shells built to keep the outside out collapse as the inside surges outward. Unexpected, yet natural. Embarrassed, yet refreshed. Unguarded, yet not in danger. Uncomfortable, yet authentic. Unnecessary, yet renewed.

Humanity briefly restored.

Then we dry our eyes, replace our masks, apologize, and vow to conceal our real, regretting our progress while blindly seeking the comfort of our own dry regress.