Pastor David Oceguera (Bolingbrook Church) recently led a cohort of ministry colleagues on a retreat to explore the themes of resilience in ministry, which is a topic of Pastor Oceguera's doctoral work as well as a vital area of interest among ministry professionals. In honor of October as Pastors Appreciation Month, Matthew Lucio (Assistant to the President for Communication) asked Pastor Oceguera to share more about his work to help others in ministry.
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
What led you to focus on resilience in ministry for your doctoral studies?
PASTOR DAVID: The official title for the doctoral program I enrolled in is Leading Organizational Change. During my time in ministry, I had noticed the shifting landscape of culture and the lagging influence of the church in the world. Early on it became clear that the health and well-being of a pastor was crucial for their success in leading a church in this rapidly changing world. I began to focus on what kinds of tools pastors needed in order to develop the resilience they needed to lead well, especially when they experienced the resistance and sabotage that come with leading change. During ordinary times pastoral ministry is difficult, but then with the onset of COVID-19 upending so much of what we thought as normal, and the rapid rate of change in our world, it has created a perfect storm for burnout among pastors.
My interest in resilience began 18 years ago. When I first started out in ministry, I was assigned a two-church district. I was unmarried at the time and found myself often working 60-70 hour weeks because I wanted to succeed. I wanted the churches to grow and do meaningful ministry. I didn’t know any better, so what I did for one church, I did the exact same thing in the other church. I did not pace myself. I tried to do so much that without really knowing it, I was starting to burn out. One night I woke up at 3 AM and felt like I could not breathe. I realized I was having a panic attack. My life was good by all standards, at least that’s what I thought, but in reality, I was prioritizing my work and the church over my own well-being. This experience helped me pay attention to my own well-being and began a journey to cultivate a deep resilience that would allow me to pastor from a place of overall well-being health.
While I was working on the proposal for my doctoral project, I had a long conversation with John Grys, my conference president. Through that conversation, he really pushed me to get more clarity about my goal and what I wanted to measure through my project. By the end of our talk, it was crystal clear that resilience was what I was after. As a result, I set out to create a 12-month program to equip nine pastors with tools for resilience so that they could lead with confidence in a rapidly changing world.
You talk about helping pastors who are burning out. Do you think pastors have always wrestled with these issues or have things gotten harder on pastors lately?
PASTOR DAVID: In a study done by Richard P. DeShon, an expert in “job analysis”, he reported that he had “never encountered” a job as “complex, varied, and impactful as” that of a local church pastor. Deshon reported that the role of a local pastor required up to 64 different personal competencies. This led him to conclude that “it is almost inconceivable to imagine that single person could be uniformly high on the sixty-four distinct knowledge, skills, abilities and personal characteristics.” It is clear that being a pastor is more than preaching a good sermon on the weekends, but demands many more competencies to be successful. Pastors run into problems when they try to be experts in each of those competencies. If that was not enough pressure on a pastor, every single member of the church also has their own expectations of what their pastors should do.
The reality is that when a pastor is burned out, the interventions to help them dig out of that state, can take longer to take effect because it usually means reshaping their lives. My approach to resilience is to help pastors cultivate a proactive resilience by helping them identify their most resilient form and then helping them incorporate habits and practices into their daily lives to maintain that form. In pastoral ministry, there will invariably be seasons that are more challenging than others, but being aware of a pastor’s resilient form can serve as their guide when the red lights on the dashboard of their soul start lighting up.
There are several ways a pastor’s job is more difficult today.
1. Pastors are hyper-connect via their mobile phones. It used to be that a pastor had a landline and they could only answer when they were home. They could pace their responses to their church members when it was convenient. Today, every pastor has a smartphone in their pocket, and church members have access to them 24/7.
2. People's attitudes about religion have changed. I read recently that people are more spiritually hungry than ever before, but they do not view the church as a place to go to have their spiritual needs met. That is a troubling thought. Maybe 40 years ago when Biblical literacy was more prevalent and church attendance was a common practice, the church was where people would go to have their spiritual needs met. But as the world has become more secular, people’s sources for spirituality are found elsewhere, in places like youtube, tiktok and other sources on online.
3. In a post-Christendom and increasingly secular world, life can be disorienting for churches, and when that happens, anxiety rises in the church. I have pastored churches where the members showed me black-and-white pictures of the days when the church was full and even needed an overflow room. These pictures were followed by stories of the “good ole” days. As a pastor, I’ve felt the pressure to try to fill the church, and not to do so would be considered a failure. The church wants quick fixes to their lack of attendance, giving, and volunteer engagement because it’s painful, and they have the pictures of the days when the church was full. Furthermore, because our churches are so pastor-dependent, they look to the pastors to fix the problems and ease the pain, but many of us were trained for a world that no longer exists.
You’ve given some seminars for pastors on this topic. What has been your experience with working with pastors so far?
PASTOR DAVID: I always begin my talks with a session called “Fill Your Cup.” The purpose of the talk is to encourage pastors to seek intentional time of solitude with God in order to feed their souls. I look at what burnout looks like in pastoral ministry and the dangers of leading on empty for too long. Pastors know they need to spend daily time with God, yet every time I give that talk, the discussion time is lively, filled with reasons why it is so hard for pastors to do that. I think our churches place pastors on pedestals of what a man or woman of God looks like, but in reality, pastors are normal human beings. Pastors struggle with a lot of the same things their church members struggle with; the only difference is that pastors are not as free to share their struggles for fear of losing influence, trust or worse, their jobs. Our system is just not built in a way to support pastors.
I hear three takeaways from pastors whenever I speak, especially after leading the two-and-a-half-day Pastoral Resilience Retreat in Chicago recently.
1. Pastors need safe spaces to be vulnerable and work through things.
2. Knowing that other pastors are going through the same thing they are, helps them gain a healthier perspective and find more hope for the future.
3. Pastors need strong support systems. The weight of Pastoral ministry is heavy, but that burden can be made lighter by having a strong support system.
What do you hope to achieve with your work?
PASTOR DAVID: The purpose of my work is to help pastors cultivate resilience using the three-part framework I developed:
A Strengthen Inner Life,
A Competent outer life
A Life-giving Communal Life.
As many churches face the challenge of navigating an increasingly polarized world, pastors can feel like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. What would you like them to know?
PASTOR DAVID: You are not your job. Your identity is not “being a pastor,” but rather, your identity is rooted in being a son and daughter of God. In my experience, pastors tie their identity to their role as pastors and their self-worth becomes dependent on how well or how poorly their church performs or whether they are loved or hated by their church members. A pastor must learn to become well-differentiated and be able to differentiate between their role and their identity. This is really hard for pastors to hear because we talk about being a pastor as a calling, which it is, but a calling is not an identity. The pastoral calling is a vocation; it is a work given by God, but long before anyone was a pastor, they were a son and daughter of God, and long after a pastor retires, they are a son and daughter of God. I believe that if more pastors led from a place of the loving acceptance of God, they could endure resistance and hardship in healthier ways.
What's next?
PASTOR DAVID: It’s already gone beyond my doctoral work. I received a grant from VersaCare as a result of my doctoral project. Their financial support allowed me to launch my very first Pastoral Resilience Retreat and Cohort. We flew in ten pastors from all around the US to be a part of this retreat.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak for pastor’s meetings, usually spending several days with them and leading them through my work. It is an honor and awesome responsibility to be able to minister to the pastors.
The retreat was a great success because it spoke to the real pain point pastors face of feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and many, on the verge of burnout. As a result of the positive feedback, I am in the process of seeking more sponsors so we can continue to do this work with more pastors. Healthy pastors lead healthy churches. There is more at stake than the pastor’s well-being and resilience — this work has eternal consequences.
I’ve learned that for pastors to really benefit from this process, they need time to implement what they learned, a safe place to be vulnerable, and a support system when things are hard.
I believe God has given me this gift, and I want to be faithful to help as many pastors develop the resilience they need to lead their churches well and restore the joy of pastoring. It’s really easy to lose the joy of ministry, and I want to help fix that.
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