Burning hope or burned out?

Burnout: “'the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.' Herbert Freudeberger (who coined the term) quoted in EMQ, July 2008.

"In a word, burnout is the loss of the spirit of adventure.” Gregory Waddell

If your church participates in the ministry of missionaries, how often do you consider their spiritual, emotional and physical needs?

I became very aware of the physical needs of missioners in the Balkans during a trip to Bosnia. How much more so then for those serving in the 2/3rds world?

Sarajevo, Bosnia 2002

But for all, including those like my teammates, who serve in the materially affluent, spiritually impoverished West, burnout, “the condition of being spiritually, emotionally, and physically spent, of having nothing more to offer… a condition that does not go away with a good night’s sleep and a day at the beach” can also be a pernicious bane.

And burnout is just one of the many issues that we will discuss at the shepherds’ workshop that begins Friday at the German Missionary Fellowship headquarters in S. Germany.

In preparation for the workshop I read an article by Gregory Waddell. Waddell described his own slow journey toward burnout as a missionary in Uruguay then Argentina, in the Evangelical Missions Quarterly article “Missionary Burnout: Who is Adequate for These Things?”

To sensitize you the needs that those in the ministry have (whether it be pastoral, church planting, etc.), here are a few excerpts from the article on burnout:
“Missionaries often go to the mission field with a view to conquer, which is couched in the terminology of planting churches. They arrive on the field knowing what they want and what the people need. They go with their plans, strategies, objectives, and goals.”

Describing his own journey, Waddell says,

“We intended to be a blessing to the people, whether they liked it or not. We thought we were giving them what they needed. In reality, we were out to achieve our objectives.”

“Yet there is a major problem with approaching missions purely from the perspective of our objectives. God has created people to be free moral agents. People do what they want, not what the missionary wants them to do. I had my plans and objectives; however, the people didn’t cooperate. It seemed that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how innovative our methods, no matter how detailed our strategies, nothing worked.”
Now he is expressing how he felt in order to make a point because Dr. Waddell actually planted three churches, started a Bible institute, training and youth centers and a soup kitchen! But underneath this success was his spiritual-emotional state was eroding. He says,
“It was like plodding through a dense, muddy forest, always seeing just enough light ahead to keep our hopes from totally dying out, yet never seeming to draw any nearer to that open place, never reaching the goal.… A deep, suffocating sense of frustration sets in that eventually expresses itself in anger. The missionary senses that the people are not cooperating with his or her plans.… Even though he or she may be able to keep it hidden under a facade of hard-nosed perseverance, anger can eat away at the missionary’s inner life."
"Even efforts at benevolence can breed contempt rather than gratitude.… Burnout may be experienced as a sense that one is falling into a pattern of growing anger, frustration, and cynicism.…a feeling of emptiness.”

I did my undergrad studies in business at Penn State. I remember vividly, classmates discussing their hopes to land a first job with accounting firms that paid well, used up their CPAs in a matter of two years, cast them away and recruited a fresh crop.

Well, as director of a group of people that bears good news I do not want to be guilty of employing a disposable approach toward church planters. Abraham, Moses and David were all shepherds before they were asked to care for God’s people. So this upcoming workshop will be quite instrumental in helping me care for (or ensuring that they are shepherded) for the team of about forty missionaries entrusted to me.

Fortunately, Waddell explains that there is hope and help. He says,
“If burnout is the extinction of motivation or incentive, then recovery is the reverse. It is the igniting of motivation and incentive, and the rekindling of hope that one can achieve the life purpose to which he or she has been called. This begins with a return to the source of that calling, a return to God. For me, this meant learning how to pray again—not as a missionary, but as a soul in need of God’s grace and loving touch.”
Oh by the way, if you are a church member, have you ever considered the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of your pastor and those of the pastoral staff? How are they being shepherded? What can your church do for them to help hope burn brightly rather than burnout?