Today I’m writing about pastoral hardships on my blog, or — more specifically — some pastors’ responses to them. Please allow me to make both my heart and my thesis remarkably clear from the very beginning: My aim in this brief essay is to uphold the dignity and sanctity of the office of the pastor by critiquing a particular online habit embraced by some pastors (and received positively by many Christians with some church cultures) that I am convinced ultimately denigrates this same office while doing a disservice to the Church at large.
My request: if you’re not able to read this little article all the way through or not able to give me the privilege of your trust when I say that I’m not referencing any pastor in particular or have a chip on my shoulder toward any denomination or church, then please accept my invitation to peruse elsewhere. I’m not writing to kick up dust or criticize anyone in particular; I’m no firebrand, and have no interest or stake in playing a role like that.
Instead, my goal is to raise a red flag about a troubling pastoral trend of posting some lengthy prose or even a meme that conveys just how hard the ministry is, how lonely the pastorate is, how difficult Monday mornings are, and how many times they’ve been betrayed over the years. Such a post is usually accompanied by something like a photo of an old cowboy standing in a field looking into the distance, or perhaps an AI-generated image of a pastor weeping into his hands in his office while the calendar not-so-subtly displays “Monday” on his desk. Maybe you’ve seen one or two. Saints, here’s my point in this essay: it is amazing to me that this practice is even tolerated, let alone venerated in our Christian culture. Consider the following examples of what one might find on social media or even in an old-fashioned church bulletin:
- “70% of pastors fight depression constantly. 80% believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. 90% say they are exhausted all the time. Today, I am carrying the weight of a spiritual war that most sitting in the pews will never see. It’s Monday morning, and while the building is empty, my mind is still full of the critics, the heavy hearts, and the sheer isolation of this office. If you love your pastor, text them today. We are breaking under the pressure.” [Note: these statistics are completely fabricated.]
- “Being a pastor is hard to explain unless you’ve stood in the pulpit yourself. One week you’re walking with a family through their darkest valley. The next, they’re gone without a word. You’ll be praised and misunderstood, often by the same people in the same month. Some days you see God move and go home full. Other days you lie awake rehearsing every word, wondering what you missed. Everyone has an opinion of how you should pastor. You quickly learn you cannot preach with one eye on the crowd. But then…a soul saved, a marriage mended, a grieving heart given comfort. And suddenly you remember why you answered the call. Ministry is heavy. But it’s a high calling. And it’s worth it all.” (This one was liked and shared over one thousand times within a single day of its appearance on Facebook.)
- “Pastors don’t get a 9-to-5. We get calls at 2:00 AM. We sit by deathbeds while our kids wait for us at home. We carry your secrets, your marital breakdowns, and your financial stresses in our bones, all while smiling on Sunday morning. Yet, it’s so easy to complain about the sermon length or the music. The spiritual exhaustion is a different kind of tired. It’s a tired that sleep can’t fix.”
- “Pastoral ministry is the only job where you are expected to be a CEO, a dynamic speaker, a professional counselor, a financial wizard, and a saint, all for a non-profit salary while your family lives in a fishbowl. The loneliness at the top is a silent killer. Ministry is a battlefield, not a playground. The spiritual warfare is real and it takes a toll on the body. Unless you’ve carried the weight of souls, you have no idea how heavy the air is on Monday morning. We bleed in private so we can lead in public.”
And so on and so forth.1 Whether it’s the unsourced data claim that sounds like “98% of us are teetering on the verge of suicide by Monday morning” or the vague paragraphs about “pouring from an empty cup” while hinting at another sabbatical to a friend’s campground in Aspen, I think you get the idea. And look, I understand it far more than most would, as I’m writing from a unique vantage point of having lived in both worlds — I’m no longer in the pastorate,2 but I pastored for over a decade through some really tough times, and I am also the son, grandson, and brother of a pastor. I’ve seen it from nearly every perspective. So I can tell you for sure that ministry has its unique weights and deep sorrows, and I have personally felt pastoral pain deeply.
However, I’m writing this article because the sheer volume of public pastoral mewling has reached a fever pitch. And it really needs to stop.
HERE’S THE BIG DISCLAIMER
I want to be overly, massively, super clear here about three things I’m not saying. First, I’m not saying ministry is always easy. It’s often hard and sometimes — even for long seasons — very hard. We’re talking heartbreakingly, cripplingly hard in a way that no other calling or vocation can do. Also, I’m certainly not saying pastors don’t need rest. They often do. Why, my own pastor takes several weeks off a year and I’m all for it. I should have done that much more when I was pastoring. And lastly, I’m not saying that pastors don’t need emotional support, a trusted shoulder to cry on, or maybe even a friend to which he can just…vent. I needed friends like that in the ministry, and I know from experience just how awful it is to try to minister in isolation. So please — I implore you: don’t distort my essay to convey something I don’t mean to convey at all. Ministry is hard, sometimes uniquely hard, pastors do need rest, and they do need support.
What’s more, I’m well aware that around 35% of pastors in the United States are bivocational.3 I, too, was bivocational, though by choice (my small church could support me financially and did for about six months until I nearly went stir-crazy not being out in my community, building relationships with others and making extra money to contribute to the church). But I still received, like many of you bivocational pastors, some of the benefits of ministry such as a parsonage, the use of the church vehicle, and other accompaniments inherent to the pastorate. So while the general excoriation may not apply as completely to my bivocational brothers, there’s still plenty to be gleaned, to be sure.
And lastly — just to ensure I’m not misunderstood on that front either — I’m not of the persuasion that pastors should have to be bivocational. On the contrary, I think many shouldn’t be. While Paul clearly had his strategic reasons for doing so (at least most of the time), it doesn’t appear that all pastors in the New Testament (nor the Priesthood in the Old Testament, for that matter) were bivocational. So just as one could easily build a case for a patterned bivocational pastorate in the Scriptures, one could just as easily build a similarly powerful case for a pastorate that does not require the pastor to work outside the church. It all depends on the situation and circumstances.
So I hope to have been clear with my disclaimer: I believe pastoring is very demanding calling, and I believe that pastors should be treated just as well as anyone else (if not better than4) others in any other calling. I don’t think pastors are required to go without breaks or vacations like anyone else, and I don’t think they should be underpaid or unappreciated. Nor do I think they shouldn’t have hobbies (my pastor loves sports and plays a lot of golf and I’m downright glad he does). Nor do I think that they should be bereft of creature comforts or amenities that the rest of us get. Nor do I think that…well, you get it. I hope.
With that under our belts…
Let’s begin. Now that I have fully acknowledged and validated the very clear and present hardships of being a pastor, I am writing to address and critique this pestilent pox of publicly posted pastoral pouting. I will accomplish this by way of three separate approaches. First, the biblical approach, followed by the historical approach, and lastly, the practical approach.
THE BIBLICAL APPROACH
Biblically speaking, the correct response to suffering and endurance is a quiet one. You’ll remember that Jesus told us to wash our faces when we fast so that our suffering isn’t obvious to others.5 And when our wallets suffer from sacrificial giving, we’re to go to the extremes to make sure people don’t know what we’ve doing.6 And if you’re acquainted with Scripture at all, you’ll know that time would fail me to copy and paste all the Scriptures that tell us to “do everything without grumbling” (Philippians 2:14, NIV) or the command to “consider it pure joy…whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2, NIV), and on and on it goes. If Bob the oil rig tech or Diana at J.C. Penney are expected to do their jobs without complaining and give their alms without complaining and fast without complaining in order to protect the testimony of Christ, then it certainly stands to reason that the pastor should not be in possession of a free pass just because his job has a different description than theirs. In fact, I’d submit that, if anything, the shepherd is held to a stricter judgment (see James 3:1 for this)!
For a minute, please consider the following lines from the viral pastoral post I linked earlier in the article, the one entitled Pastoring is Weird: It reads, “I’ve publicly honored people who chose to slander me,” and also “I’ve done hours of counseling with people who later deleted me.” Pastor, how many times did Jesus complain about Judas? I shudder to think what some of you would post if you’d experienced the same hardships and betrayals that Paul experienced. Further, did you ever consider why you’re publicly proclaiming this kind of complaint? Is it perhaps because it feels like a safe way to settle scores with people who’ve hurt you? Pastor, we are to love our enemies and bless them (Luke 6:27-35), not drag them through the mud on social media (even if we don’t post their names or specific events).
Too, please consider the irony here: a pastor nods to himself as he finishes his social media post: “We pastors bleed in private so we can serve others in public. Pray for your pastor.” I recognize that this seems a bit obvious, but it bears mentioning that when you broadcast your “private bleeding” to thousands of Facebook friends, it isn’t really private anymore. In fact, I submit to you that it can and often does come across as performative and validation-seeking. Whatever happened to “take it to the Lord in prayer” and “tell it to Jesus alone” like all the old hymns wisely and Biblically advise? Pastor, in our current age, the secret place of prayer and pain is more important than ever.
Pastor: find your solace in Christ. Find your comfort in Christ. Find your consolation, appreciation, and approval in Christ. I do not deny that you need these things; to truly know and be truly known is among the greatest needs of humanity. But you’re looking in the wrong place if you’re searching for this on social media. I am imploring you to direct your complaints and sorrows to Christ and the inner circle of support that he has sovereignly provided you instead of the digital fora of social media.
THE HISTORICAL APPROACH
For this historical approach, I will simply humbly ask you to picture with me the Apostle Paul, confined (possibly actually chained) to the dark underbelly of some Roman house, or possibly prison. He pulls out his phone, snaps a selfie holding up his restraints, hops on Instagram, and posts the following pathetic prose:“Can I be real today? I’m exhausted. Dealing with a lot of critical attitudes and spiritual resistance. Pray for your pastor, guys. You don’t know how lonely it is. You wouldn’t understand unless you were a pastor yourself.” No, that just wouldn’t happen. The only reason we know of Paul’s struggles at all are because he relayed them by way of constructing a convincing argument or two in his letters to errant churches.
You see, Paul — like every other minister of the Gospel worth his salt — counted his afflictions and sorrows to be a true joy and a net positive in nearly every way, not the least of which was the opportunity to suffer like Jesus, allowing us to identify with and share in the fellowship of our Divine Savior and Brother in a way unique to those who do the work of the Gospel, pastors or not. From Apollos to Aquinas, and Whitefield to Warfield, you simply don’t see the level of navel-gazing and self-pity in our forbears as you do today.
Okay, so you all know how I feel about AI if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time.7 But my goodness, I am pleased as punch with how this example came out after I asked Gemini to help me out with an idea:
John Wesley, who happens to be a theological and pastoral hero of mine, was a veritable giant of the faith, traveling 250,000 miles on horseback and preaching 40,000 sermons in his lifetime. But he wouldn’t ever have posted anything like this — no, this is a joke, and it’s funny because it would have been so wildly, wholly against his character and scruples and maturity to post something like this. Further, it would have been proof that he wasn’t taking his burdens to the right place. Pastors, the pity and validation provided by friends and strangers on social media is a paltry substitute for the deep wells of grace and sustenance afforded to us when we take our burdens and hardships to the Lord alone.
The point is clear, I should think: none of the disciples, Paul, or any of the early church leaders sat around and posted on X or made little videos with sad background music on TikTok to raise awareness about how challenging it was to be a pastor, and they didn’t have anywhere near the amenities, pay, or perks that today’s pastors have. Why? Because these men were grown-ups. They didn’t need everybody to know just how hard it was. They just did the work. This doesn’t mean they didn’t struggle. It doesn’t mean they didn’t need help at times. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have a circle of friends to share with at times. It doesn’t mean they never needed to take time away and rest. But it does mean that they just worked and suffered and took the good with the bad like the rest of us do in our daily lives.
What I mean in all of this is that our spiritual forefathers, pastors or not, were not so attached to emotional validation that they had to fly the flag of their afflictions for all to see. And my goodness, did their troubles and hardships dwarf ours. If anyone could be excused for whining a bit, it would have been them. Why, the early American circuit riders died so young from exhaustion and malaria that they weren’t even eligible to buy life insurance!8 No, they were too mature for this sort of thing, and thank God for it.
THE PRACTICAL APPROACH
Lastly, let’s get a bit practical. And to do that, we’ll start with something of a reality check: Pastor, you are largely a white-collar worker throughout the week. When you’re not visiting folks in the hospitals or in their homes, you’re spending your week in an air-conditioned office with a desk, some bookshelves, a nice PC or Mac, and a Keurig machine, all likely provided for you free of cost. You get paid to study a Bible you love, talk to people on the phone, answer emails, craft powerful sermons, and visit people who are more often than not actually very, very glad to see you. You have an amazing opportunity and privilege to make a spiritual difference in people’s lives, and you get compensated for it. That is the life! And it’s a really, really good one.
But let’s keep going: most of the men (and plenty of women) in your congregation work a full 40 or 50 hours a week doing back-breaking physical labor, mindless customer service work, or high-stress corporate endeavors just so that you, the pastor, can sit in that comfortable office or visit folks in their homes or hospitals. So you’ll forgive me if I object to you publicly complaining about the “trenches” of the ministry online. This is an insult to the working class sitting in the pews making sure you still have a roof over your head and a car to drive and a suite of hobbies in which to indulge. To be sure, your occupation is a mentally taxing and spiritually draining one, and it is indispensably important. But it is not appropriate for a solider to publicly complain about his battlefield, even if it is under the guise of “asking for more prayer” or “just wanting others to be aware.” Pastor, we all have battlefields, and it is not fitting to complain about yours to the very same parishioners who are paying you to write social media posts about how hard your Mondays are.
In case it’s not clear by now: I fully understand the toil involved in pastoring a flock in addition to properly researching, preparing, and finally delivering a sermon to God’s people up to three or four times a week. Not to mention planning activities, shoring up membership, discipling people, correcting sinful behavior, and more. It’s a lot, and it often involves large degree of mental fatigue, battling insecurity, and sometimes dealing with some pretty difficult people, as well as a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking. I really do get it. I remember the deep sorrows, the intense frustrations, and wondering why I was even still pastoring quite a few times. But let’s not lose sight of something here: this is your calling, just like Bob is called to the oil rig or Diana is called to J.C. Penney; we all have to work hard. You are not an exception. So hopping online and making sure everyone else knows just how hard you have it is — well, at least it would be in any other industry, anyway — in very, very poor taste.
Now let’s look at the practical economics of the average situation. Bob and Diana are bringing home the median household income, paying full federal taxes on every dime of it, and rightly and obediently (and joyfully, we hope!) surrendering a good bit of that money to the church. Meanwhile, the pastor’s full-time compensation package is often sitting comfortably into the high-five or low-six figures, insulated by a federal tax-exempt housing allowance and other personal tax exemptions in addition to benefits, opportunities to travel, and other church perks. Pastor, hear me on this: that’s just fine that you make that much money, and I’m all for good, hard-working pastors being worthy of double honor,9 but I sure do hope you can see why I believe that passive-aggressively making a sad-eyed case on Facebook for Bob and Diana to feel bad for you is a level of chutzpah that would make even Michael Scott of The Office blush.10
Lastly on this point, I want to briefly dismantle the myth that pastoral ministry holds a monopoly on emotional fatigue or carrying heavy burdens or being betrayed. Yes, dealing with messy human lives is draining and hurtful — been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But this is not unique to the ministry. ICU nurses work 12+ hour shifts on their feet, school teachers manage classrooms full of kids who come from broken homes, police officers deal with trauma that’s unspeakable, and the list goes on. Why is the pastorate singled out as this uniquely soul-crushing endeavor when it is far from alone in this regard? Here’s the rub, and you might not like it: Secular professionals seem to understand a basic rule of maturity and professionalism and resilience that apparently evades today’s modern Western pastors: you do not get to demand pity or pats on the back from the very people you are being compensated to serve.
Hey, Big Guy — Sun’s Getting real low
Listen, the real tragedy of these woe-is-me-but-hey-I’m-#blessed posts is that they completely reverse the taxonomy of Christian leadership. Jesus told us to go to him when we suffer so that our pain remains hidden in the secret place with God the Father. Paul boasted in his shipwrecks and beatings and imprisonments to magnify the sufficiency and merits of Christ, not to probe for attention and emotional validation from a digital crowd. Instead, you are using the sacred office of the shepherd to demand that the sheep comfort you, and it’s a total abdication of spiritual authority. If anything, your main priority should be, just like Paul’s priority was, showing the church that you’re there for them, not the other way around. Be man enough to not need everyone to know about the difficulties you experience.
Whether you’re a pastor or a parent, personal trainer or payroll processor, don’t waste another moment trying to figure out how you can better advertise the difficulties of your calling under the guise of “awareness,” reminders to pray, or just a noble-sounding acceptance of your heavy lot with the occasional morsel of reward. Such a thing is completely contrary to the joyful acceptance of your vocation before God, hardships and all. Let’s be people characterized by gratitude, joy, and humility, even when the going gets rough. Especially when the going gets rough.
You have been called by our God to be a pastor, sir. It’s often a heart-wrenching, soul-rending, impossibly difficult job, but I’m writing to implore you to approach the throne of God and find the grace and consolation and approval and recognition you need there, not on social media. Besides, it is as you say: “you wouldn’t understand unless you’re a pastor.” I’ve got good news for you: Jesus is.
- Here’s a longer example of this kind of performance-as-vulnerability post with the “No, no guys — really, I’ll be fine. Honestly, I get to do this” trope at the end. ↩︎
- For those wondering why I left (or “quit the pulpit like a sissy,” to paraphrase some less-than-charitable acquaintances of mine), I wrote about it here. ↩︎
- Chaves, Mark, Anna Holleman, and Joseph Roso. 2025. Clergy in America. Durham, NC: Duke University, Department of Sociology. ↩︎
- I Timothy 5:17 reads, “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” (NIV) That word “honor” here means financial compensation in general. ↩︎
- See Matthew 6:16-28 for this. ↩︎
- See Matthew 6:3-4 for this. ↩︎
- See my brief rant here. ↩︎
- William A. Powell Jr., “Methodist circuit-riders in America, 1766-1844,” and early archival data summarized by the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History (umc.org). ↩︎
- See Footnote 5 above. ↩︎
- “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. and Mrs. BOB VAAAANCE!” ↩︎
