📖 Pastoral Ministries — Unit 11: The Pastor's Family and Self-Care

Orientation

Pastors burn out. Pastors quit. Pastors fall morally. Pastors lose their marriages. Pastors become strangers to their own children. Pastors die early from preventable diseases caused by stress, poor sleep, and bad eating. Pastors wake up in their fifties and discover they have a thriving ministry and an empty home.

These outcomes are common enough that every honest pastoral training program must address them. The pastor cannot care for the flock if he is destroying himself. He cannot lead a healthy church out of an unhealthy life. He cannot give from an empty soul. This unit examines the practical disciplines by which a pastor protects his marriage, his children, his body, his soul, and his long-term endurance in ministry.

The unit may feel less theological than the others. That is by design. Most pastors know the doctrine. Few practice the disciplines. The disciplines are what keep a man in ministry for forty years instead of seven.

I. The Pastor's Marriage

The first ministry of every married pastor is to his wife. She came before the church did, and she will be there after the church is gone. Among the qualifications Paul lists for pastoral leadership, one of the earliest is this: "A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2). Whatever significance its place in the list carries, the substance of the qualification stands on its own: the man who cannot keep his marriage cannot lead a church.

The pastor's wife is not a staff member. She did not sign up to be the unpaid director of women's ministry, the church secretary, the pianist, and the hostess for every visiting missionary. She signed up to be a wife. The faithful pastor refuses to let the church load expectations onto his wife that are not hers to carry. She may have her own gifts and ministries, freely chosen. She may have none. Either is fine. The pastor protects her right to figure out, in the Lord, what God is calling her to — not what the deacons' wives think she should be doing.

The marriage itself requires deliberate cultivation. A regular date night that the pastor refuses to cancel for church business. Honest communication about the pressures of ministry, the difficult members, the financial worries, the temptations. Physical affection that is not subordinated to exhaustion. Spiritual partnership — praying together, reading Scripture together, attending church together not as pastor-and-wife but as husband-and-wife who happen to be in their own pew. The marriage that thrives in ministry is the marriage that gets fed. The marriage that withers in ministry is the marriage that is taken for granted.

Let me share something I rarely teach in the abstract, but I believe future pastors need to hear it from a man who has walked it. I was married to my first wife, Andi, for forty-five years. She was my partner through pastoral ministry, prison chaplaincy, seminary teaching, and decades of walking alongside the Lord. About ten years ago she went home to be with the Lord after a battle with cancer. There is no preparation in seminary for that loss. The man whose wife of forty-five years dies discovers what grief actually is, and he discovers what it means to keep walking with Christ through the valley of the shadow of death. The Lord did not abandon me in those years. The brothers around me carried me through. The Word that I had preached for decades held me when I needed holding.

In time the Lord brought a beautiful Mexican woman into my life, and we married. Her children are my children, and my children are hers. The blended family is itself a picture of God's grace — that a man who thought a chapter of his life had ended could be given a second season of love and family and ministry. Not every pastor will walk this particular road. But every pastor will face seasons that change everything, seasons in which the only thing left is the gospel he has been preaching to others. I write this to encourage any pastor reading it: when those seasons come, the Christ who has been your subject for years becomes your only refuge. He is sufficient. He carried me. He will carry you.

What I have learned through all of it is that the marriage covenant is far deeper than the comfortable picture of two people growing old together in an unbroken line. It is a covenant of two people walking with God, side by side, in whatever shape that walk takes. While Andi was with me, I tried to give her the best of myself. After she was gone, I grieved her well. When God brought my second wife, I gave her my whole heart again. The pastor who lives this way through whatever the Lord assigns him is the pastor who finishes well.

II. The Pastor's Children

The pastor's children did not choose ministry. They were born into it. Their father's vocation will shape every year of their childhood — for blessing or for harm. A great deal depends on whether the pastor handles the role wisely.

The phrase "preacher's kid syndrome" exists for a reason. It refers to children of pastors who grow up resenting the church because the church always took their father away from them, who develop performance-based identities because everyone expected them to be perfect examples of godliness, who walk away from the faith in their twenties because the version of Christianity they saw at home was hollow.

These outcomes are not inevitable. They are the result of specific failures the pastor can avoid.

Be present. The pastor's children need his time more than they need his sermons. A pastor who is at the church seven nights a week, even doing good things, will lose his children. The discipline of being home at dinner most nights, attending the school events, coaching the team, reading bedtime stories — that discipline pays dividends for the rest of those children's lives.

Do not weaponize them in the pulpit. The temptation to use a clever story about your child as a sermon illustration is real and dangerous. The child becomes uneasy walking into church, never knowing if today will be the day his private moment becomes Sunday morning entertainment. The pastor's children deserve privacy.

Do not demand performance. Your children are not extensions of your ministry. They will sin. They will fail. They will go through phases. They will, in adolescence, embarrass you. The pastor who insists his children represent his ministry well will produce children who learn to fake faith for an audience and lose it as soon as they leave home.

Let them see real Christianity at home. The Christianity that survives is the Christianity the children watched their father live when no one else was watching. They saw him pray for his wife. They saw him forgive when wronged. They saw him grieve a hard week with honesty rather than performance. They saw him love Jesus because he loved Jesus, not because it was his job. That is the faith that lasts.

III. The Pastor and Sabbath

Jesus, in the middle of the busiest season of His earthly ministry, looked at His exhausted disciples and said, "Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while" (Mark 6:31). He had just heard about John the Baptist's death. The crowds were pressing in. The needs were endless. Jesus said: rest.

If Jesus prioritized rest in His ministry, the pastor should too. Whether the fourth commandment binds New Testament believers as a specific Sabbath law is a matter of real disagreement among faithful evangelicals — some hold that Christ fulfilled and transformed the Sabbath rather than continuing it as a binding command (Colossians 2:16-17), others see a Christian Sabbath principle carrying forward in some form. Whatever one concludes on that question, the wisdom of the underlying principle is not in doubt: the pastor who never rests is not proving his devotion. He is setting himself up to break.

The Sabbath for a pastor is not Sunday. Sunday is the busiest workday of his week. A wise weekly rest day is some other day — Monday for many pastors, Friday for others, whatever day works in the rhythm of his church. On that day, he does not study for sermons. He does not return non-emergency calls. He does not check email. He does not visit hospitals unless someone is dying. He rests. He spends the day with his wife and family. He sleeps. He worships informally. He laughs. He plays. He recovers.

The pastor who guards a weekly rhythm of rest gives himself the best chance of pastoring at sixty with something like the energy he had at thirty. The pastor who never rests at all is far more likely to be empty before forty.

IV. The Pastor's Friendships

Pastoral ministry can be uniquely lonely. Friendship with his deacons is possible and often good, but the pastor still carries a role his deacons do not, and few congregants should be made his sole confessor in ways that burden them or compromise his ministry. He cannot dump his struggles on his congregation as a whole; they need him strong. His wife is his closest friend, but a wife alone cannot bear all of a husband's burdens. The pastor needs friends.

The friends usually have to come from outside the church. Other pastors are often the best fit — men in similar roles in other congregations or other denominations, with whom genuine peer friendship can develop. A monthly lunch with two or three brothers in ministry, where everything can be said honestly, where prayer and laughter and tears can flow without performance, can keep a pastor sane through the hardest seasons.

The pastor who has no such friends is one bad week away from despair. The pastor who has them rides through hard weeks because the brothers are praying him through.

My experience over many decades is that genuine ministry friendships are among God's greatest gifts to His servants. Some of the men I have known in pastoral, prison, and seminary settings have walked beside me for thirty years and more. We have buried each other's loved ones, prayed each other through diagnoses and dark seasons, and laughed at the absurdities of ministry together. Without those brothers, I would not be standing today. Every pastor reading this needs to find his three or four men and never let them go.

V. The Pastor's Body

Paul reminded the Corinthians that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). The pastor often forgets this when applied to himself. He gets four hours of sleep before Sunday. He eats fast food because the day is full. He skips exercise because he has too much to do. He drinks too much coffee, sits at his desk for ten hours straight, and wonders why he is exhausted at fifty.

The body is part of the man. A pastor whose body is breaking will preach with less power, counsel with less patience, and lead with less wisdom than he could have. The faithful pastor takes care of his body not out of vanity but out of stewardship.

That means sleep. Most adults need seven to eight hours. A pastor who runs on five for twenty years is borrowing against his future health. It means exercise. A walk most days, a sport, time on a bike, work in a garden — something that moves the body and clears the head. It means eating reasonably. The pastor does not need to be on a diet, but he should not be drinking soda and eating fried food at every meal. It means medical checkups. The annual physical, the dental cleanings, the recommended screenings. Most pastors who die early die from causes that were detectable years before.

VI. The Pastor's Devotional Life

The pastor must read the Bible for his own soul, separately from reading it for sermons. This is one of the most easily lost disciplines in ministry. The man whose only Scripture engagement is sermon preparation will, within a few years, find his soul running on fumes. He has handled the Word of God all week as a tool. He needs to come to the Word as a hungry man comes to bread.

The same is true of prayer. The pastor leads in public prayer constantly — pastoral prayer in the service, prayer at the bedside, prayer at the wedding. He must also pray in private, for his own soul, with no audience. Daniel prayed three times a day, with the windows open toward Jerusalem, knowing the king's spies were watching, and he prayed because he needed to pray. The pastor needs to pray because he needs to pray.

Worship is also for the pastor. On a vacation Sunday when he is not preaching, the pastor should be in someone's pew, singing the hymns, hearing the Word preached by another, taking the Lord's Supper as a worshiper rather than a server. If he never does this, his own worship withers and his congregation eventually senses that the pastor is going through motions rather than meeting God.

VII. The Pastor's Mental Health

Pastors get depressed. Pastors get anxious. Pastors burn out. Pastors have suicidal thoughts in dark seasons. The pastoral guild is full of men who needed help and did not get it because they thought asking for help was weakness or that pastors are not allowed such struggles.

The faithful pastor must reject this lie. Depression is not unspirituality. Anxiety is not unbelief. The man wrestling with these realities is not a worse Christian than the man who is not. He is a man who needs help. The faithful pastor recognizes the symptoms in himself, confesses them honestly to his wife and his close pastor friends, sees a Christian counselor or psychiatrist when needed, takes medication if a doctor prescribes it, and does not pretend everything is fine when it is not.

If a pastor reads this and recognizes himself in the description, the next step is not to feel guilty. The next step is to make a phone call this week — to his wife if he has not been honest with her, to a brother in ministry, to a Christian counselor, to a doctor. Help exists, and it helps far more often than despair tells a struggling man it will. The kingdom of God needs faithful pastors for the long run, and that begins with taking care of himself now.

If what he recognizes in himself right now includes thoughts of ending his life, that is not a someday problem to raise at the next lunch with a ministry friend — it needs help today. Call the emergency number in his own country, go to an emergency room, or call a crisis line right now; in the United States, that is 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available by call or text. Tell a trusted person immediately rather than carrying it alone even for one more night. This is not weakness or unbelief. It is the same wisdom that sends a man with chest pain to the hospital rather than telling him to pray it away.

VIII. The Long View

Add up the disciplines of this unit and what emerges is a portrait of a sustainable life. A protected marriage. Children who actually know their father. A weekly Sabbath. A handful of trusted friends. A body that is cared for. A soul that is fed. A mind that is honest about its own state.

A pastor who builds his life this way can serve for forty years. A pastor who does not is a candidate for one of the casualty categories at the start of this unit — the burnout, the moral fall, the empty home, the early grave. The choice is the pastor's, made not in a single dramatic moment but in a thousand small decisions every week.

It is striking that Paul's pastoral letters return again and again to the pastor's character and personal life rather than to ministry strategy. "Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine" (1 Timothy 4:16). Paul commands attention to both together, and the sheer frequency with which his pastoral letters return to personal character is itself worth noticing: the man who keeps himself well will keep the doctrine well too. The man who lets himself crumble will eventually betray the doctrine he is supposed to be guarding.

Closing

The pastor is a man, not a machine. He has a wife who needs him, children who need him, a body that needs sleep and exercise, a soul that needs feeding, a mind that needs honest care, friendships that need cultivation, and a Sabbath that needs guarding. The pastor who treats himself as a machine breaks. The pastor who treats himself as a man — God's beloved son, called to a ministry that requires the long obedience of a healthy life — endures.

The Lord Jesus, in the middle of His three years of public ministry, regularly "withdrew into the wilderness and prayed" (Luke 5:16). If the Son of God needed that rhythm, the pastor reading this needs it more.

May every pastor reading this commit afresh to the disciplines that protect the man, so that the ministry can endure to the end.

"He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:29–31).

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset