How are you doing?
For real, though. How are you?
If you’re doing well, I’m glad. But don’t stop reading. The following will probably help you help another church production staffer or volunteer who’s not doing so well.
One of the things I learned to do in therapy is to stop occasionally and take an assessment of my life. We get lost in the trees rather easily, so focused on finding our way that we don’t realize we’re actually too tired, too stressed, and on the verge of collapse. So, let’s admit some things.
First, this is a hard job.
Any kind of production is inherently stressful, and if you’ve learned to manage or otherwise mitigate that stress, well done. But maybe you haven’t yet, and maybe you’re feeling it. Do you look forward to Sundays, or do you dread them? Do you want to engage with your team, or do you find yourself checking out on TikTok or social media? How’s your relationship with leadership? Good, or strained and contentious? Production leaders live in this weird space between spiritual leadership and operational leadership, and I’m not sure many first-tier leaders (executive pastors, lead pastors, campus pastors) understand that. You are often a hinge under a warping and leaning load, not uncommonly hearing more criticism than praise. If you’re having a hard time, you need to admit that to yourself and then to a trusted friend or trusted leader. Ask for some help and a listening ear.
Second, many first-tier leaders are emotionally unhealthy, and you might be working for them.
Additionally, you may also be emotionally unhealthy. Are you getting yelled at by your leaders? Often pulled into meetings about how your performance isn’t cutting it even though things are running smoothly and excellently? Are you being pressured to work more hours that cut into family and personal time? When you bring criticism or ideas for improvement are you dismissed or made to feel you're not being loyal to your leader? That being said, how do you handle criticism and conflict? Do you get defensive or dismissive? Angry? Self-deprecating? Do you easily feel defeated? If you’re answering yes to these things, it’s time to pump the brakes and make an assessment. If it’s leadership that’s the trouble, you need to ask yourself if it’s time to go. I will tell you from personal experience that trying to right a listing ship when you’re not at the helm is impossible. You need to have some hard conversations with your leadership about how you are being mistreated and how that can be solved. On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time with any criticism, if you’re feeling irritable all the time, overwhelmed by just about everything at work, you need to have a hard conversation with yourself.
Emotional health isn’t about controlling your emotions or the emotions of others. It’s about hearing what your body and your mind are trying to tell you and how you respond to those signals. Negative emotions are akin to physical pain–they’re signals that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Determining if that issue is inside of you or outside of you takes prayer, discernment, and conversations with trusted friends and trusted leaders.
Too often we try to squash our negative emotions with prayer, worship, and positive thinking, but that’s a trap called spiritual bypassing. Emotions were made by God for our good; God himself is an emotional being and he made us in his image. If you’re finding yourself quick to anger, sadness, or despair, you need to get curious about those emotions and start working to parse why you feel that way.
I should warn you, though—once you start turning over the rocks in your soul, you’re going to find all sorts of bugs and rotted earth you’ll need to remove and repair. Thankfully, you’re in the company of the good Gardener and he has friends he’s taught to help you restore the soil. It might be as simple as a few long conversations with your spouse or a good friend, or you might need to get with a good therapist for a while. And that’s ok. It’s how God designed you to work. We all want to hear from God like Moses did, face to face, but even Moses needed Aaron and Joshua and Caleb. God speaks to us as much through his image bearers and he does directly to our hearts.
There’s a couple of resources you should know about, good books on the topic. First is The Emotionally Healthy Leader by Pete Scazzero. He details the good and hard work of transforming our inner lives in order to transform the good things we steward–our families, our churches, and our marriages. Second is Managing Leadership Anxiety by Steve Cuss. He’s a pastor who’s married to a therapist and this book digs into the nitty gritty of working through stress specifically as a church leader. Last is Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and although it’s secular, it’s the first book that got me working on my emotional health nearly ten years ago. It brings a practical approach to assessing yourself as a leader and practical steps to start getting yourself together.
Third and Finally, you cannot separate your personal life from your work life and your spiritual life.
We often want to perfectly compartmentalize our lives, and while some compartmentalization is good (you probably shouldn’t let an occasional morning argument with your spouse overflow into being crabby at your morning meeting) we are meant to be integrated beings. Integration is a foreign idea to the vast majority of evangelicals but wasn’t so foreign to the church fathers and mothers who sought to be fully present to every part of the life God had given them, to integrate their calling with their being. A both-and as opposed to an either-or. A great example is Brother Lawrence, a non-descript monk from the 16th century whose collected letters to a personal friend now comprise the very short but very weighty book The Practice of the Presence of God. He talks about living his whole life as worship and prayer, not just in the particular acts of prayer and worship themselves, but even in the mundane chores he was assigned by his brothers at the monastery.
Integration has completely changed my spirituality. My leadership is worship. My fathering is worship. My marriage is worship. My production is worship. In all these things I am communing with God alongside my brother-king Jesus by the lifting of the Holy Spirit. And that beautiful trinity is present with me in all things at all times. It’s the abiding that Jesus talked about in John chapter 15.
If you need help or want to share how you’ve worked through hard times, please reach out.
I can be contacted at all of the links in my connected bio. I’d love to connect with you.
Grace and Peace.
