Why ministry isn’t “just a job”

At the risk of preaching to the choir, ministry isn’t “just a job.”

There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the core reason is this:

Working in ministry takes areas of our lives that would not normally overlap (or at most only slightly overlap) and brings them into a place of overlapping almost entirely.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s what a normal life looks like.

Notice how work has a place amongst other areas of your life, but only overlaps with some areas of your life.

In a normal job, work is just that… work. It is a part of your life, which interacts with some parts of your life but leaves other parts of your life completely untouched.

By contrast…

Here’s what a life in ministry looks like.

When you’re a pastor, your friends can’t be separated from your spiritual community, which can’t be separated from your work, which can’t be separated from your spirituality, which can’t be separated from your income… you get the idea.

Ministry forces everything to overlap with everything.

And that is precisely why…

in ministry the highs are extra high.

If ministry is going well, it’s going really well… because all of your life is going well with it. Your spirituality, your job, your community, everything in your life seems to be soaring.

A win at work isn’t just a “win at work,” it’s a win for every part of your life. And so the highs are very, very high.

At the same time, this is also why…

the lows are extra low.

When ministry is going badly, or if you leave ministry, it feels like your life is over.

Your friends, your spirituality, your calling, your income… all of it is at risk.

This is why losing a job in ministry is so crushing. It isn’t just losing a job. It feels like losing everything.

Our whole life rises or falls with the tide of ministry.

Fortunately for us, there is life after ministry. Your life does not end when ministry does.

That said, ex-pastors have to go through an adjustment if we are going to adapt to this new kind of life.

Life after ministry lessens the extent to which your job is synonymous with your life… and that’s a good thing.

When you work a normal job, the highs are often not as high, but the lows don’t tend to be as low.

Work can be going poorly, but life can be overall pretty good (a novel concept for an ex-pastor).

Or, by contrast, work can be going really well, but it doesn’t create same sense of electric rush that it did when we were in ministry.

And that’s okay.

I don’t think our brains were meant to sustain the intensity that ministry requires. 

The rush of Sundays, preaching, events, emergencies… all the speed and constant commercializing of things that are meant to be slow and spiritual has pastors swinging from one high to the next.

Pastors become addicted to this intense sense of meaning.

And so to step out of that intensity and into a normal life will come with some withdrawal symptoms. Like an addict coming down from their regular high, we’re forced to settle into a reality and adjust to a life that can feel too mundane, too normal.

But if you can push past that, if you can let your system slowly (and painfully) flush out all of that intensity, if you can not just accept but celebrate all of the ways in which life isn’t intense, but rather mundane…

As each individual piece of your life becomes a bit less glued to one another, taking on a separate life of it’s own, and as you uncover pieces of yourself that were hidden beneath the overlapping layers…

The many parts of your one life can bloom, with no single part absorbing the whole. Each part can support, balance, and beautify the others to make for one full and beautiful life.

-Collin