Once More, With Feeling: Leadership and Emotion

Marc basically gave up at home. He fell into a cycle every week for months: “After making it through Sunday, I would go home and collapse in bed for two days. I would muscle myself into some kind of functional capacity on Wednesday, work hard to prepare for the weekend, get up at 2 or 3 a.m. on Saturday to finish my message, and on Sunday, do my best impersonation of what a healthy pastor looks like. I need to be responsible, I felt. I need to be the grown-up. In our culture, the idea of a high-functioning depressed person doesn’t make sense. But they are all around us. I hid my weekly crash well, and ran a successful church even while spiraling out of control. The only people who suspected were my staff and my wife, and I had a lot of complicated reasons why their concern was wrong.”

He clears his throat. “I lived in that cycle for months. Then I began to break.”

Breaking Character

Marc’s staff finally pressured him to simply take a sabbatical, allowing them to run the church without him. “That was a challenge to my view of myself,” he says, laughing. “I needed them to need me more than I knew.”

Marc’s friend, a trauma therapist, pushed him to seek out a therapist. At the same time, Marc began meeting with a former pastor who’d burned out during a church plant, having to close the church. “I thought I was the one reaching out in that relationship to care for him,” Marc remembers. “It was the other way around. I felt safe to talk about the things I was experiencing. I felt seen, but not judged or condemned. That was a new reality for me. It became really clear that there was a cost coming. It might be my ministry, my marriage or my faith, but it was coming.”

Before that time, emotion simply meant discomfort for Marc. “The only emotion I could really name was anger,” he says. “I interpreted every negative emotion as being mad. There was no nuance. I was playing a character—the person who’s stable in the middle of a crisis. That could only happen when my emotions weren’t overwhelming me. As a result, I was a flat character. And that wasn’t just a projection, it was my interior reality.”

Marc describes the flatness of this emotional experience—no color, no texture, an inner life seen in blurred black and white. “I was having emotions, but couldn’t even describe my true feelings. ‘I’m not angry! I’m just really frustrated!’ would be an example of this disconnection from the truth that was happening in me. Anger would come out in weird places, like a customer service phone call with someone trying to help me. I had a lot of body problems—gut issues, and more. I would chalk it up to a bad meal or too little sleep. I was so disconnected from myself.”

What broke Marc out of this were relationships with those willing to see what Marc couldn’t. His relationships with the former pastor and the trauma therapist encouraged him to seek formal help. “My wife was getting less willing to be accommodating,” Marc remembers. The pressure at home grew. The couple began to go to marriage counseling—but after a short time, the therapist suggested that Christina not come back for a while so that Marc could spend some time one-on-one dealing with his stuff.

“How was that?” I ask.

“It was great. No, it was awful,” Marc replies. “What it did for us was great.”

What Marc had thought counseling was for—getting “more tools” or “exercises” to fix the presenting problems in his marriage (read this as “more avenues for control”)—became about actually looking at the problems underlying the presenting symptoms. It became not about medicating the disease, but asking what emotional health was. “Our counselor wasn’t giving me more skills,” Marc says. “She was helping me hear.”

Helping the Heart Hear

Helping Marc hear the story of his life for the first time was a key contribution of his counselor to his healing process. “It was brutal. I would hear for the first time that things I believed about who I was were objectively not true. ‘If I were the kind of person I say I am, what would I do and say?’ OK, what do I actually do and say? No comparison.”

Marc’s self-image was lovingly deconstructed. His therapist also helped him be attentive to what was happening in the moment, making connections between emotions like anger and anxiety with that certain tightness across the shoulders, that certain twisting of the gut. He began to learn what emotions felt like—not in the abstract, but the concrete.

Marc, for the first time, became able to know and tell the truth about his own inner life. “As a pastor, I wasn’t supposed to be angry. So, in my mind, I couldn’t be angry. I might be ready to pop, but still saying things like, ‘I’m not angry right now. Why do you think I’m angry? I’m not a yeller. No! I DON’T yell at you! THAT’S NOT WHO I AM!’ My therapist helped hold up a mirror, asking, ‘If you were watching you, how would you describe yourself?’”

During this process, Marc attended a small retreat about emotional health hosted by a relative of his. At one point, the leader taught a whiteboard lesson about feelings. It offended Marc with its simplicity. “He put things on the board like: ‘Sadness—sadness is the emotion you feel when you experience loss.’ It felt so stupid. I felt like an elementary student being introduced to the colors. I’m a grown person, I thought. I know what sadness is.” Then he realized that he had no recollection of anyone ever teaching him this: what each emotion was, where it comes from, how it affects your body. No one had ever taught him the meaning of what he felt. So was it any wonder that he thought feelings were meaningless?

“I was struck by it,” Marc remembers. “I wondered, ‘What would be different about my life now if I had been taught this? If my family or church had told me the reality of my feelings?” Marc saw, all of a sudden, that his relationship with his emotions had been antagonistic, when he should have simply been attentive. “Emotions had always been an out-of-control reality. From the time my dad died, and watching my mom lose it, and feeling the things that I felt—they all led to me feeling affirmed for controlling my feelings. But it was not a good thing.”

Slowly, things began to change.

Circling Around

Marc approached his church, unsure of how they’d respond to their pastor admitting that he was, for lack of a better term, an emotional wreck—but in a hopeful way. He expressed the need to make emotional health a priority. He expressed the need to change his relationships with staff, to be more vulnerable and honest. He wasn’t sure what to expect. “I don’t know what this means for you,” he says, “but I can’t keep doing this work the way I’ve been doing it.”

That initiated a conversation that the board took on—“What does leadership in our church need to look like?” A question emerged from the board’s discussion that shocked Marc: “Has our expectation of leadership contributed to this problem?” they asked. “Do we need to see leadership differently?” The discussions—months of them—began.

The end result was that Bridge City canned their previous leadership structure. They changed their bylaws, moved to a plurality of elders, and transitioned nearly everything in the church’s life and ministry. But core to the transition was a new understanding of inner health. “This was about knowing each other,” Marc says. “Being known had never been part of my ministry life before.” Marc cut his hours back at the church to a more reasonable schedule. A key shift away from what Marc now describes as “consumer-oriented” church meant fewer programs, less-polished worship and a different ethos for the body. Rows of chairs in the sanctuary were replaced by a circle of them. The stage was unused.

Personal and Universal

“I’m in control of my emotions!” Spock chants as he fights back tears in “The Naked Time.” But he isn’t, of course, as the virus runs through him, and neither was Marc (though he got good at faking it), and neither are you or I. Neither, I’d guess, were Zeno or Seneca, nor are Joyce Meyer or Josh MacDowell. No one is truly in control, whatever appearances may be. Emotions: We may deride them, suppress them or work to ignore them, but control them? At best, that only works for a time, and at what cost?

But what if, instead of seeing feelings as something either to control or be controlled by, emotions do not need to be about control at all? Sure, emotion is powerful. And the Stoics have one thing right: Strength is needed. But what if the needed strength was not a strength of control, but of understanding? What if maturity did not mean subduing the “feeling” part of us, but bringing it into balance with the rest of our person? What if our emotions were meant to dance in step with our will and intellect to encourage us, and to point us away from danger, toward life and health?

It is not a given truth that our emotions must either control us or be crushed. There is a better way. A way of heartfelt wisdom that understands the reality of our emotions, embracing them as a means of knowing God, self and world. We should not ride our feelings like a wave, but read them like a tide. For the one who understands, moving toward emotions with insight and care means moving toward health.

“My story is about giving up control,” Marc says. And beyond control, he has found freedom. His value is no longer bound up in ministry success, appearing capable or needing positive outcomes to every conversation. “I’m more a true shepherd today than I ever was before. I am truly with my people, not just out in front of them. None of that would be possible without having become emotionally healthy.” Emotional health isn’t just about overcoming negatives, but encouraging positives. That’s changing the way he pastors.

Marc sees telling his story—and the wisdom emotional health is bringing to his ministry—as the deep calling behind his book. He hopes for a gentler but just as profound change in others like him, and dreams of younger leaders simply being taught the truth about emotion and health in a way that he wasn’t.

We are sitting in the back of Bridge City’s sanctuary. Marc looks forward, past the circle of chairs, toward the cross on the front wall. He smiles. “Emotional health helps us enter the presence of God. Churches need to disciple people to know and grow in their emotional health.”

He looks back at me, right in the eyes. “This most personal thing is universal.”

Paul J. Pastor is editor at large for Outreach magazine and author of The Listening Day: Meditations on the Way (Zeal Books). For more: PaulJPastor.com

Paul J. Pastor
Paul J. Pastorhttp://PaulJPastor.com

Paul J. Pastor is editor-at-large of Outreach, senior acquisitions editor for Zondervan, and author of several books. He lives in Oregon.

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