Ministry Is Hard: What I Did When I Wanted to Quit
Have you ever been in a funk? Where it feels like you are walking through mud with every footstep just to get to the next place? Sometimes a personal funk is attributed to recovery from a traumatic incident, the loss of friends, a chemical imbalance, or a lack of purpose. Sometimes you can’t even figure out the reason: You just know that every step is hard, every conversation is laced with multiple agendas, and when you try to get even the simplest thing accomplished, there are roadblocks at every turn.
This type of funk can also happen in an organization. Or even at a church. All of us experienced this together during the global pandemic. Pastors felt like they couldn't win. Whether they chose to stay closed or open back up--half the church was upset. If they required masks or didn't, people were angry. Leaders spoke up about George Floyds murder and hundreds left the church. Others said nothing, and hundreds left the church.
Several years before the pandemic, the church team I was serving on went through a funk that lasted more than four years. Looking back, I would describe those years as a season of malaise. We had gone more than a decade with wind in our sails as everything we touched seemed to work without effort. But then we hit a season where it just stopped working. From the outside, it looked like business as usual. But it didn’t have the sense of “movement” and “revolution” as in the early days.
Of course, we could never admit out loud that we had lost our passion or energy. I’m not even sure we knew it at the time. We kept trying stuff that would have some degree of success, but things were so unclear. It was like running toward a finish line through a dense fog and trying to course-correct without being able to see past your nose. We’d launch an initiative that we were sure would get us back on track—and it would start with a bang but then fizzle out after awhile. So we’d try something else. And then something else. We weren’t being driven toward a new vision. We were being driven away from failure.
During the season of funk, some of our relationships got sideways. We spent more and more time in our senior team meetings arguing over what was broken and how to fix it, and we let it damage some of our friendships. When things are great, you don’t have to spend much time evaluating (“it must be working, right?”). But when you are in the season of funk and the numbers are decreasing and you can’t figure out how to get out of it–you tend to blame people and cancel programs. And sometimes we blamed the wrong people and canceled the wrong programs.
In a season of funk, you can lose good people. Sometimes they will physically leave—taking their bat and ball and going to play on someone else’s team…a team that is winning more games and looks like they have some momentum. Others will check-out mentally. They are wired by God with a purpose and for a purpose—so they will find their fulfillment doing something else, outside the organization, until your passion returns and your vision grows big enough to be worthy of their focus.
Sometimes, in a season of funk, you will think about leaving. I know I did. During this season, I was experiencing the most difficult days of my professional life—having just laid off eight of my friends whom we could no longer pay. Additionally, I was struggling to work through daily tension with one of my closest friends and ministry partners. And neither one of us could fix it. I wasn’t sure he wanted to work with me anymore. On top of all that, it was ten degrees below zero with more than two feet of snow on the ground. And the call I received was from a church in a warm climate with a leader I had respected for years. I’ll be honest—I thought about leaving.
It took us way too long to get out of our own way, but eventually we did some things to help get us out of the funk. These are in no particular order, and I’m not sure they are universal, but I know they contributed to our journey out of the valley:
We were too stubborn to give up.
We kept getting out of bed, every day, and showing up to work on the problem.
We kept our focus on having the right people on the team and developing them into leaders.
We brought some consultants in to help us rethink our leadership team structure.
We purposed not to do anything to hurt the Church or cause of Christ even though sometimes we felt like it.
We began talking less about methods and fixes, and more about our underlying vision.
We became open to rethinking the very essence of what we had done for 20 years.
We brought new people with fresh eyes onto our senior team to give us a broader diversity of thought.
We prayed and begged God to show us the way out.
We argued tenaciously in private, but regardless how much we disagreed or how hurt we were, we supported each other publicly.
It's not easy being in an organizational funk. It's really easy to find a reason to leave. And maybe you should. But for some of you, you will be called to stay, to gut it out, to find a path toward a more hopeful season. If that is you, I'm cheering you on and hopeful some of these ideas will support your journey.