George Robertson: Pastor, You’re a Whole Person. It’s Okay to Need Help.

So I couldn’t be a I don’t think I could be an itinerant preacher. I always feel like a fish out of water if I’m preaching somewhere else. I enjoy that in its it’s in a different way. But what I really love is preaching to my people over a period of time, living with them in a book, and not just, not just living in that study, but living with them as we’re studying that text and seeing the application of it to their various life transitions and griefs and pains and celebrations. And it’s very It feels very New Testament, like I came to Christ when I was in late middle school and the people who led me to Christ knew their Bibles, and they taught me their Bibles in a very contagious way. And I was so fascinated by that, liberated by that, because I didn’t really grow up with I grew up religious, but not with confidence in Scripture. Certainly hadn’t had heard the gospel. So the it was so it was, it was such a miraculous experience, my conversion and that it, it came about from people who knew this book, and this book found me and gave me hope that I didn’t really know what, what it meant more than that, but that I wanted to learn how to teach that book and preach that book started out I was trying to cut a deal with God because I also loved flying, so I was going to be a missionary pilot and kind of weave them both together. And the Lord took away the flying and just left me with the preaching. Flying hasn’t come back yet, but I’m still hoping you I want to say something to pastors who are struggling in whatever way. I think every pastor who’s honest or who is trying to preach the gospel Be faithful through COVID and all the cultural entailments with it, struggled. Lot of us resigned. A lot of us imploded.

A lot of us lost our joy for ministry I did myself, I’d say, only recently, as the Lord restored the joy of my pastoring, maybe the joy of my salvation. It was a trying, very trying time, but I naturally battle anxiety and depression anyway, and have so since I was. Was in middle school, and it was out of a real severe bout with clinical depression that the Lord saved me. And I just want to, I want to encourage pastors who we can sometimes think that this disqualifies us, that if I battle if I’m struggling with faith, if I’m struggling with depression and anxiety, and then that’s an indication that my faith is weak and defective. How can I lead other people? There are plenty of reasons to believe that that being united to Christ in his sufferings also means being united to Christ in His spiritual depression. If this, if the Psalms, for instance, if the if the Psalms, as Bonhoeffer and other saints have said, are the records of Christ’s prayers through David, then think about all the things that Jesus prayed.

I mean, if it’s his emotional life turned inside out, then that blood that Jesus was was sweating in the Garden of Gethsemane came out of a broken heart and broken soul that had to be experiencing those things that he had spoken through David, long before My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Was not it was not Jesus saying, and I quote David, those were his words. And the darkness is my closest friend. Those were Jesus words. So far from disqualifying us for ministry, it qualifies us to walk if we’re if we know the fellowship of His suffering, that’s the fellowship of His sufferings. And who are we as pastors to say that we should be exempt from that? We wouldn’t tell our fellow, we wouldn’t tell the people in the pew, or hope we don’t, because you’re going to say you’re you’re being called to know the fellowship of His sufferings, which included these moments of anxiety and spiritual depression. I, I was taught a very important lesson by a colleague. When I was on seminary faculty, I was pastoring a church. I have gone through all kinds of things, and I was teaching, had four kids and and I hit a wall, and my natural anxieties and my form of depression, which is just to get stuck in overdrive, was taking over, and I felt myself burning out. So I called it the seminary prof who is a psychiatrist by training and taught our counseling program. And I said, Richard, you just taught a class on burnout in the ministry. I said, Can you send that syllabus over to me?

Why do you want the syllabus? I said, I want to read it. Why do you need to read it? I said, Because I’m burning out and I’m going to read my way out of it. And he said, he’s British. He said, whom else have you told I said, nobody. I don’t need this congregation helping me my my wife doesn’t need another child to raise. I’m telling you, send me the stuff. I’ll read it. I’ll get better. And he said, You’re stupid. You need to tell people. You need to disclose it, because you need them, and they need to know your struggle. How can they believe your message? They need to you need to come down into the pews, take them by the I said, what if they reject me? What if my I’ll send fear through the whole system. What if my What if my staff quit following? He said, let the chips fall where they may. What? What’s what’s better to continue to live, to to continue to lead in a in a false, a fake. World or to be real, so that you can all come to the same savior for grace. So I started, I put my toe in the water, and I told a few staff members, and then over the next number of years, I just let it out in leaks. It wasn’t really until I went to the next pastorate that I that I started out in the interview process saying this is who I am. Saying to the elders, I’m on medication, saying to the whole congregation, you know, early on in this deal, we’re getting to know each other. It’s just going to tell you right off the bat, anxiety, depression on medication, need counseling. If that’s if it’s a deal breaker, we need to know everything about each other.

People let it. I mean, it set off a, not a firestorm, but, uh, it opened floodgates of conversations and people saying, we’ve, we’ve really haven’t felt that freedom, not casting aspersion on my predecessors, but we haven’t felt that freedom and and so now it’s it, it’s it’s come to be something I talk about quite a lot, not because I want to. I don’t really like to talk about it frankly, and I get asked to speak about it a lot, and I think, you know, I, I do know some other things I could talk about, but what’s the but this seems to be where so many people, especially pastors, need a bit of encouragement that God has made us holistically. We’re multifaceted, beautiful creatures in his image, which means we need, we need the Bible, and we need, we need worship, and we need people to be with us. We need physicians, we need psychiatrists, we need exercise, we need emotional refreshing in creation and to not not to access those things is like coming to your mother’s best meal. The table is laden with an array of food that she has worked her fingers to the bone and preparing, and you’re saying, Oh, I’m only going to take a carrot because I don’t want to trouble you. I don’t want to, you know, I want to show I’m strong. God has given us all these graces for us to flourish as human beings and as pastors, and to think that any of them is unspiritual or a sign of weakness is really to display A lack of gratitude to the kind Heavenly Father.