Four recommendations emerged from my research. First, pastors must pursue emotional maturity through self-awareness and resting in God’s love. Second, pastors should stay connected to people by utilizing healthy differentiation, family systems theory, and spiritual practices. Third, pastors must embrace a shared mission that emanates from the covenant with Abraham for the church to be faithful to God’s mission in the world. Finally, pastors must fear the Lord and abide in Christ to pursue emotional maturity and to be faithful to a shared mission.

John is a natural leader with an outgoing personality and a sincere interest in people. The church he planted five years ago grew fast, starting with 25 people and growing to a weekly church attendance of 250. With many young families attending, the church had an energy that promised good things to come.

But as the first few years of the church plant passed, John began to change. Reports surfaced that he wasn’t in the office much and that staff kept their distance from him. Why would staff, all whom he hired, retreat from him?

The most public effect of the change in John showed in his preaching. What once sounded endearing and vulnerable now seemed inappropriate to Sunday mornings and to children with listening ears. But church leadership dismissed their pastor’s lack of discretion and joy. “He is just worn out by all he does for us,” they reasoned. “He may be like a bull in a china shop, but we need that kind of leader, right?”

John’s leadership style soon drove people away from the church. Staff that once richly embraced the church’s vision and enjoyed their work resigned. Elders and church members also departed, or, as they put it, “escaped.”

With anxiety rising in the church, John reacted with fierce accusations of insubordination, saying that those who left were not committed in the first place. As church members fled to other churches, elders were unsure of what to do.[1]

Have you experienced something like this?

A Pattern Emerges

Was the staff to blame for the change in John? Or were deep-seated problems in his life now surfacing? His story is not an outlier. An alarming number of PCA senior pastors show an inability to regulate their own emotions in times of stress. The spate of PCA senior pastors who implode professionally suggests that they struggle with self-management of their internal states, impulses, and resources and that they also struggle with relationship management.

Church members suffer the weight of this emotional immaturity as senior pastors either unravel through calamitous sin or so mistreat and exhaust their staffs and congregants that that their staff resign and church members seek refuge in other churches.

Why do some pastors become self-absorbed, demanding, and even abusive while others develop into joyful and mature pastors? I’ve spent my last five years studying this question.

I found that an astonishing number of senior executives unravel due to a lack of emotional maturity. Kerry Bunker, Kathy Kram, and Sharon Ting offer from their research that “about one-third of senior executives derail or plateau at some point, most often due to an emotional deficit such as the inability to build a team or regulate their own emotions in times of stress.”[2] They explain:

The problem is a lack of emotional maturity, which doesn’t come easily or automatically and isn’t something you learn from a book. It’s one thing to understand the importance of relationships at an intellectual level and to learn techniques like active listening; it’s another matter entirely to develop a full range of interpersonal competencies like patience, openness, and empathy. Emotional maturity involves a fundamental shift in self-awareness and behavior, and that change requires practice, diligence, and time.

The problem lies deeper than a need to develop social skills and instead arises from a lack of emotional maturity.

I interviewed six PCA pastors ranging in age from their 40s to their 80s to learn how I can become by grace a pastor with emotional maturity and joy. Here is what I found.

The Value of Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

In the last 30 years, the field of emotional intelligence has flourished with publications that herald its value in the workplace. Daniel Goleman, a pioneer in the field, writes that emotional intelligence is “the sine qua non of leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”

Goleman defines emotional intelligence as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing our emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.” He shares that his neurological and psychological research further indicates that a leader’s emotional intelligence “is carried through an organization like electricity through wires” and thus profoundly affects people:

A leader’s emotional intelligence creates a certain culture or work environment. High levels of emotional intelligence, our research showed, create climates in which information sharing, trust, healthy risk-taking, and learning flourish. Low levels of emotional intelligence create climates rife with fear and anxiety. Because tense or terrified employees can be very productive in the short term, their organizations may post good results, but they never last.

Given the far-reaching effects of a leader’s emotional intelligence, Goleman maintains that emotional leadership is the leader’s premier and primal task.

Pastors Need More Than Emotional Intelligence

While emotional intelligence can improve workplace efficiency, pastors are called by grace to far more in their life and ministry. Pastors must stay connected to people while also leading them in a shared mission.

Jim Herrington, Robert Creech, and Trisha Taylor describe emotional maturity in a pastor as the capacity “to call a congregation to discern and pursue a shared vision, to remain connected with those who differ with the leader or the majority, and to remain a calm presence when the anxiety rises.”[3] Emotional maturity for pastors functions like a reservoir that holds the water of inevitable anxiety in a congregation.

They further offer that pastors who stay connected to people while managing anxiety and encouraging people toward a vision “create waves of growth toward maturity capable of spreading through the congregation and the surrounding community, even in these interesting times.” Pastors who provide a non-anxious modifying presence as they stay committed to a shared vision foster a community where people feel free to engage fully with their spiritual gifts.

A Biblical-Theological Framework for Emotional Maturity

Emotional maturity for pastors is the capacity to stay connected to people while staying committed to a shared mission. What should be our shared mission?

Christopher J. H. Wright, in his book The Mission of God, laments that many books anchor the church’s mission in Matthew 28:18-20, known as the Great Commission, and ignore the Old Testament. In contrast to understanding the church’s mission solely from Matthew 28:18-20, Wright says that the Apostle Paul continually directs God’s people to consider God’s covenant with Abraham to understand their mission.

Quoting Paul in Galatians 3:8, “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’”, Wright claims:

And this, says Paul—this dynamic narrative of God’s saving purpose for all nations through Abraham—is the heart of the gospel as announced by the Scriptures. …The ingathering of the nations was the very thing Israel existed for in the purpose of God; it was the fulfillment of the bottom line of God’s promise to Abraham.

Wright says that Paul desires that God’s people understand that their mission in Jesus Christ is to be a blessing for all nations and that this mission springs forth from God’s covenant with Abraham. Anchoring our understanding of the mission of God in God’s promise to Abraham has serious and far-reaching consequences according to Wright:

One of the reasons for the appalling shallowness and vulnerability of much that passes for the growth of the church around the world is that people are coming to some kind of instrumental faith in a God they see as powerful, with some connection to Jesus, but a Jesus disconnected from his Scriptural roots. They have not been challenged at the level of their deeper worldview by coming to know God in and through the story that is launched by Abraham.

For a mature and growing faith, our shared mission must be understood from the foundation of God’s promise to Abraham to bless the whole world through his descendant the Lord Jesus Christ.

How Pastors Pursue Emotional Maturity

Through interviews with six PCA pastors ranging in age from their 40s to their 80s, I sought to understand how pastors pursue emotional maturity.

These pastors shared that they pursue emotional maturity through spending time with mentors and counselors, embracing a Sabbath day of rest weekly, reflecting on who they once were compared to who they are now, and engaging with books and podcasts.

Pastors shared that their greatest motivation to pursue emotional maturity comes from their closest relationships, that is, their immediate nuclear family. Their wives offer frequent counsel for how these pastors can grow in their emotional maturity through listening, repentance, reflection, and surrender to God and others. All pastors interviewed pursue emotional maturity with friends outside their vocational ministry work whom they referred to as “confidantes.”

Pursue Self-Awareness of Your Story, Heart, Emotions, and Body

To relate to another person maturely, with their best interests always in mind in light of our shared mission, we must understand who we are and what we are experiencing as we spend time with others. Without such self-awareness, we will emotionally fuse with others, meaning that we will react to others’ anxiety with ever more anxiety.

Reflective practices can grow a pastor’s self-awareness. Pastors I interviewed offered that their work studying their family-of-origin provides new insights as to why they think, feel, speak, and act the way they do now. “The best leaders have the best family relationships,” contends Roberta Gilbert of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.

Pastors who refuse to look into their past, inquiring about what they experienced and the coping behaviors they developed, lack self-awareness. They run over their family, friends, and church members in pursuit of ever greater ministry glory.

Pastors I interviewed shared that they grow in self-awareness of what they feel in their bodies and hearts as they engage in cardiovascular exercise. One pastor mentioned that while running, his tears flow easily. He finds this to be relieving and clarifying, too, as he considers while running what in his life is leading him to cry. Our bodies give signs that can lead to meaningful reflection about what is happening in our hearts in the present.

Pastors can exercise their bodies to gain insight into their emotions, to increase self-awareness and self-management of emotions, and to experience relief of difficult emotions such as anxiety, shame, hurt, anger, and loneliness.

People tend to continue with regular exercise as long as the exercise is fun. What exercise is fun for you? We make appointments in our calendars to meet with people, and we keep them. What would happen if you scheduled exercise in your calendar as an appointment and honored that commitment as you do to meet with people? What fun exercise can you schedule in your calendar right now as an appointment for yourself? Walking, swimming, running, biking?

You can do it! And the people you live with will benefit from your increasing emotional maturity and patience gained from exercising your body. Do you see your exercise as a way for God’s grace to empower you to be more present with people and to love them more deeply with the love of Christ?

Deeper Into Emotional Maturity By God’s Grace

Four recommendations emerged from my research. First, pastors must pursue emotional maturity through self-awareness and resting in God’s love. Second, pastors should stay connected to people by utilizing healthy differentiation, family systems theory, and spiritual practices. Third, pastors must embrace a shared mission that emanates from the covenant with Abraham for the church to be faithful to God’s mission in the world. Finally, pastors must fear the Lord and abide in Christ to pursue emotional maturity and to be faithful to a shared mission.

As you do hard and rewarding work to grow in emotional maturity, take heart! We have all we need in Christ Jesus “who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). And the Apostle John reminds us, “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16).

Andrew Flatgard is an associate pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church (ARP) in Decatur, AL. His research on how pastors pursue emotional maturity is available here.

[1] This story is a consolidation of accounts.

[2] Kerry A. Bunker, Kathy E. Kram, and Sharon Ting, “The Young and The Clueless,” in HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence.

[3] Jim Herrington, R. Robert Creech, and Trisha Taylor, The Leader’s Journey: Accepting the Call to Personal and Congregational Transformation.