Broken People

Pastoring people has been an interesting journey for me. Not only have I learned some things about people in general–I’ve learned a lot about myself, including some stuff that was very hard to look at.

For a good part of my earlier years as a pastor, I felt personally responsible to fix people who were broken. I thought it was my job, and I thought I’d be failing as a pastor somehow if I didn’t. In my sincere efforts to fix people, I’d stick my nose into places where it didn’t belong, speak the “truth” to people when they were not ready to hear it–or my perception of the “truth”–and all sorts of other things like that, justifying my actions by saying it was my job. In fact, one of my favorite things to say in these moments was, “I wouldn’t be doing a good job as a pastor if I didn’t say this to you.”

Gasp. What was I thinking?

The intense irony in all this was that looking back, I can see that my sincere attempts to “fix” people were actually symptomatic of my own brokenness. This is one of the reasons why I’ve said sometimes here that so many pastors suffer from codependency. I know not every pastor is like me, but I do know the pressures and fears pastors face, and their typical responses to them; and having now been through some recovery myself, I can see how many codependent tendencies are typcial pastoral behavior. Things like:

• Taking inordinate responsibility for other people’s behavior (sound familiar?)
• A need to remain in control, sometimes obsessively
• Deriving one’s value from the approval of others
• Deriving one’s value from the success of others

These traits, and others, flavored my own pastoral approach for a long time. But when I began to face my own brokenness and seek God’s healing in my own soul, something very interesting began to happen. I found I no longer felt so compelled to try fix other broken people. I found a new sense of patience with the brokenness of others, just as I had to have patience with my own broken state. And the realization that it was not my job to fix people has actually become a great sense of relief. Because overall, it wasn’t working, and in some cases it was making things worse.

The truth is, we are all broken people in a fallen world–and that includes spiritual leaders. Every one of us has sustained some wounds. And becoming a Christ-follower doesn’t automatically fix us; that is a process, sometimes a life-long process. So when Christ-followers come together in community, those communities consist of broken people that Jesus has gathered to Himself, and that’s a lot messier than most people care to admit. And here’s the reality: we cannot fix each other–only love each other while Jesus does the “fixing”.

And something else I’ve found in this process–loving people goes a lot farther toward fixing them than just pointing out their brokenness.

Now, this isn’t to say that sometimes it isn’t appropriate to lovingly confront. Sometimes that is the best way to love someone, and when I’ve done that sort of thing at the right time, and in love, it has actually served a great purpose–just as I’ve had people confront me when I needed it. But I’m learning there is a time and place for that sort of thing, and God picks the time and place–not me. If Jesus is the healer, and I am not, then at best, as a leader, I am an assistant to facilitate what Jesus is doing in His people. Nothing more.

And so, I’m learning to be part of this broken, beautiful mess of a church, this collective of broken people that Jesus is healing. I’m learning to love others–and myself–in our brokenness. And I’m looking with hope to the day when we discover the miracle–that God has taken a group of messy, broken people, and transformed them into a beautiful Bride.