How does burnout happen? What can be done to avoid it?

Gary Morgan and Greg Spears appear to be able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Underneath those button-down collars, they surely have a Superman suit— or maybe something more like what John Wayne would have worn.

They look the part—well over six feet tall, leaders of two of the most successful congregations in the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches.

Morgan is pastor of Waxahachie’s Cowboy Church of Ellis County, first and always the largest of the AFCC’s now 220-plus churches with 1,700 people worshipping there each week.

Spears is the founding pastor of Milam County Cowboy Church in Rockdale, which now runs 500 or more on most Sundays, and he also heads an extensive ranching and cattle-breeding operation.

The two exude confidence and success. Yet both reached a point in their ministries where they literally could not function. Both had to take months away from their pulpits, something their inner drive at first wouldn’t permit them to consider but which became inevitable and unavoidable.
They were burned out, and both believe many others now serving cowboy churches are hurdling hell for leather in the same direction.

How does it happen? How could it happen? What are the signs it is happening? What can be done to avoid it?

Burnout is not just being overworked or tired. It goes much deeper, literally often stopping a person in his or her tracks.

“For me, it meant depression,” said Spears. “I was physically exhausted. I wanted to sleep all the time. I didn’t want to see anyone. My mind told me to slow down or it was going to shut me down, and that is scary. I function best at 110 miles per hour and have the problem of never saying no to people. I was scared of slowing down.”

Spears was elected president of the cowboy church fellowship in the fall of 2009. Only two years earlier, he felt God calling him to be the start-up pastor of the Milam County church. It was thriving, and so was his ranching business, each responsibility more than enough to keep him busy and his mind occupied.

But added to that, his year in the president’s office, 2010, was to be one of change for the fellowship, full of extra meetings and many more phone calls. That year, the organization, which had operated both as the AFCC and the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches decided to operate solely under the AFCC banner. Transition in staff leadership also marked 2010.

Spears began to feel he was beyond his tether—burned out—in March 2011. Burnout, to him, he said, means he had nothing else to give mentally, emotionally or spiritually.

“I couldn’t work, eat, sleep or concentrate when reading,” he said. “I literally couldn’t read the Bible. My mind was spinning a mile a minute. I lost interest in God’s word, spending time with God.” He blamed his lack of interest on God, he said, because he felt God was expecting too much of him.

“If you work for someone, and you think he has unbearable expectations of you, and you’re somewhat unruly, you don’t want to be around him,” Spears said. “That’s the way I became in my attitude toward God. I thought he was putting too much on me.”

Spears recalled that he became disengaged with people, was often “short” with them, and when he realized what was happening “faked it” at church and took out his frustrations at home on his children and his animals.

“They couldn’t fire me or fight back, and looking back on it makes me cry,” he said.

He lost his passion to see people come to salvation, and when re-examining his sermons during that period, he said, he realizes: “I was out of my element and shouldn’t have been in the pulpit. Some of my frustrations came out in my sermons. My sermon content revealed what was going on; I couldn’t fake it any more.”

“Gary Morgan saw the desperation in my eyes,” said Spears.

Morgan, who had gone through burnout and knew the symptoms, saw them in Spears at a meeting at the AFCC Supply Depot in Waxahachie in November 2010. He waited for two hours while Spears presided over an officers/directors meeting and instead of letting him go home to Rockdale took him to visit two counselors with whom Spears spent hours.

Following that, Spears talked to his church’s elders about what was happening to him and then his congregation, using the story of Jesus’ encounter at the pool of Betheda where he told a lame man to take up his bed and walk.

“Jesus had been asking, ‘Do you want to get well?'” and I used that story to tell my congregation that I had a problem and wanted to get well, that I needed some time off. Because rumors started about family issues, I should have said, ‘Your best horse, the one you use every day all day long, is going to some greener pastures and get some rest.'”

In January, Spears went on a five-month sabbatical. He and his wife took a weeklong trip to SonScape, a Christian retreat center in Colorado Springs that specializes in working with ministers who have suffered burnout.

“They taught me at SonScape that trout have to withstand the current to catch food,” said Spears. “But even the strongest have to rest; they go deep or get behind a large boulder where the water is quiet. I was afraid to go deep and get quiet.”

Spears went home and didn’t leave his house for two months. He took off five months from the pulpit and admits even now he is not totally back.

Morgan had been at the Ellis County church eight years when burnout ravaged him in 2008. He had heard about the signs of burnout in March of that year at a TFCC/AFCC pastors and elders retreat at Belton.

Sonny Spurger, who had served as an intervention specialist with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said at the retreat: “The nature of the work (pastoral ministry) produces depression. The minister’s position leads to loneliness. He tends not to know how to relax. He has a distorted idea about ministry where there are no clearly defined boundaries to the work. Often his focus becomes too narrow, and he confuses his role identity with self-image.

“The ministry is often a most frustrating occupation, and divorce rates for people in ministry have risen 65 percent in the last 25 years; 50 percent of ministers feel unable to meet demands; 70 percent have a lower self-image than when they started; and 1,600 (now 1,700) leave the ministry every month.”

Spurger defined burnout and described its symptoms. Burnout is “using yourself up, even the good stuff, past the point of your resources without having them replenished … the result of prolonged stress, overextension and hurriedness. The nervous system is stressed until it loses its resiliency and renewal capacity. It becomes more difficult to snap back from hard work, to get up to challenges and to adequately rest.

“You’re tired all the time, even though you haven’t done much of anything. You feel like withdrawing, even from activities you truly enjoy. Before long, you start to feel worthless.”

Morgan saw himself and his situation in what was presented at Belton—that the burned out minister no longer has the fire in his belly to reach people; he is tired and simply doesn’t care about a lot of things. He has lost his compassion and concern.

But most, he recalled, just believe they are tired, not where they need to be, but rarely believe they have reached the edge, where the burnout line is.

“I will tell you right now,” Morgan said. “You don’t know where the line is; you can recognize the signs but not the line.”

Knowing he was close to the edge, he said, he also went to SonScape for a week. “I was trying to get my head back to being proactive. The retreat unplugged me, and I thought life was good. I came back and plugged back in; but when I came in on Tuesday for a staff meeting, I knew it was gone. I literally couldn’t go to the hardware store and buy a board. I left it with Rick (Associate Pastor Rick McKenzie) and called the elders.”

The elders put him on a four-month sabbatical, with counseling on what to pick up and lay down, and after that, Morgan said: “I laid down a lot of things. I became more realistic with myself and became a better husband and father.”

If there is a common denominator in burnout, it’s wrapped up in Spurger’s summary—prolonged stress, overextension and hurriedness.

“It can also just be a product of being overworked as well as overextended,” said Morgan. “Even if all the things asked of a pastor are in his gift set.”

Some, he said, are tempted to end a thing that seems to have no solution by committing vocational suicide.

He said he had learned the acronym HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, tired—from friends in Alcoholics Anonymous, and there is wisdom in their approach.

“They tell people if one of those conditions exists, it makes the person, in this case the minister, much more vulnerable to act out. I think it applies to everybody. Everybody reacts to stress. And if they are already tired, it doesn’t take very much of these other issues to throw you into something you wouldn’t normally do.

“Pastors, broadly speaking, have to be aware of these things. Being tired is chronic. If you are operating that way, the temptation is to really make it a train wreck and commit vocational suicide. You don’t know how to quit, so you act out, and it’s taken care of. It’s very important for guys to be in touch with the HALT thing. If they are operating in a chronically fatigued level, it is very risky.”

Of course, the answer is getting through burnout to even more productive and satisfying days, not ending a ministerial career, and both Spears and Morgan have done it and have advice for other ministers and churches about how to get there.

Spears noted his counseling responsibilities were a major factor in his burnout. Thirteen couples in his church had gotten divorces, and he was counseling all of them.

“I do no more counseling,” he said. “I will pray with people and show them Scriptures, but I refer them to a professional counselor.”

He assigned elders to help on the church’s care line, and he meets with them monthly just for fellowship. They have told him they had no clue what he was going through. He sympathizes with them, he said, now knowing he had no clue either about what his previous pastors were dealing with and feels a need to go back and apologize to them.

Spears now takes a day away from everything on Mondays. “We have very needy people,” he said, “but I don’t answer the phone on Monday.”

Likewise with Morgan. He has the good fortune of having McKenzie, who is a licensed professional counselor, on his staff. The Ellis County church also added an administrator who deals with the budget and building issues, etc.

“It sets me free to take time, to read, do reflective thinking and to produce what I hope are better messages,” said Morgan. “And it gives more time to go in and do some pastoral care without it being just one more thing to check off the list.”

Morgan is aware many people have difficult jobs, and pastors have had reputations for putting in 70 to 80 hours weekly in the past. A long week 20 years ago, however, often would include a lot of quiet time en route to hospital visits and other ministry assignments that now never are quiet because of modern technology, such as the cellular phone. If he doesn’t turn it off, as does Spears on Mondays, he’s never out of touch.

As has Spears, Morgan also has gotten other help besides turning over things to McKenzie and the new administrator.

The cowboy church is a different, newer model, he pointed out. It comes with different expectations than are found among a traditional congregation, and volunteers can be used to shoulder a lot of tasks.

“If you are a pastor and someone can give some hours to administrative stuff, let them, ” Morgan said. “If a pastor is bivocational or even full-time, there is no reason he can’t train guys to do weddings and funerals. In our church, I have some lay pastors who do them.

“The No. 1 thing is to limit what you pick up yourself. I make choices of what I as a pastor must do, that no one else can do. If someone else can do it, I direct the traffic flow that way. A good secretary is pretty hard to beat in getting it done.”

The key, he said, is the church’s attitude. His church overall was supportive, and he had a “really good elder body.”

“I don’t think everybody understood” what was happening, he said. “They see their job as hard, too, and there is merit in that. But when it comes to operating in the faith world, I have never believed you should operate in it as you would in the secular world.

“A lot of times in the secular world, a person going through burnout would just be let go. He would be seen as a disposable commodity. I would hope the church would never see anybody as a commodity, much less those who have been called to lead. The person going through burnout doesn’t want to be there. I wouldn’t go back for any amount of money at all.”

Morgan acknowledged it took him three years to approach “normalcy.”

“It wasn’t like four months and come back as good as I was,” he explained. “After four months, I was on real wobbly legs,” he said. For a long time, he was held accountable to his elders and counselors about the process.
“That was the right way,” he added. “It’s kind of like when we have the flu. We think we will never get over it, but the day comes when we feel all right.”

Both Spears and Morgan encourage pastors to take advantage of personality tests that reveal strengths and weaknesses and to overlay their abilities with the results.

“It’s important to know how God wired you,” said Spears. “Work in your strengths and find others to help with weak areas.”

They both encouraged churches to help pastors get away from the responsibility from time to time, possibly putting money for a sabbatical to allow a week for a retreat or something similar and every five to seven years send them to SonScape for a week.

The AFCC, they said, should continue to try to educate churches, elders and lay pastors through schools or other means about the tremendous load a pastor is shouldering.
Whether it is the church or the AFCC, the pastor should be dealt with compassionately, the same as would be done with any other church member.
“Embrace him,” Morgan said.

Toby Druin, editor emeritus of the Baptist Standard, is editor of the Cowboy Times, where this article also appeared.