I’ve been writing about the challenges faced by soon-to-retire or newly retired pastors. Here’s a slightly amended paragraph from my posts: Lame Ducks Can Still Fly: Twelve Projects Retiring Pastors Can Work On and Twenty Ways To Redeem Your Pastoral Retirement.
No other profession that I know of involves so much enmeshment between work and leisure, activity and identity, clients and friends. Pastors play with their co-workers, work with their friends, worship with their board members and may even pray with their enemies. Many of them live in homes that belong to their employers, lose track of their extended families, have Christmas with people who pity them and take work-related phone calls on their vacations. They often don’t know what to do with themselves when they hand over the keys to the pastor’s study.
Let’s start with some factors which will affect the degree to which you’ll experience difficulty, presented as questions.
- Are you staying in the church, staying in town or moving away? I can’t give “blanket” advice on this except to say that in most cases, the retiring solo or senior pastor should stay away from the church for at least a year before he rejoins it, and only with the new pastor’s hearty approval. If the pastor doesn’t have compelling reasons to stay in town, moving elsewhere is often the best solution.
- What is your temperament? Easy-going? High-powered? Take charge? Laid back? Did you do well at taking and enjoying vacations or did you struggle with inactivity?
- Under what circumstances are you retiring from the church? Are you leaving “under a cloud” or are you leaving on a high note?
- How is your spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health? If you’re a “hurtin’ unit,” you’re going to experience the challenges listed below acutely.
- How about your wife: What is she like? How is this going to affect her? Does she have deep, actual, reciprocal, give-and-take relationships in the church?
- How close were you to the people? Were you enmeshed, deeply involved or rather detached? If you have needed to be needed it’s going to exacerbate the challenges.
- Are you going to return for weddings, funerals or other events?
- Are you going to allow yourself to get drawn into the complaints your former members have against their new pastor? Make up your mind now that you’re not going to be triangulated, and communicate this (gently) to your church.
- How is your financial condition? A strong financial position will mitigate some of the challenges while a weak one will exacerbate the problems.
- Do you have children or grandchildren, and if so, where are they? Moving in their direction can be wonderful, or not.
- How assertive/bossy/meek/willful are you? Do you really think you can go from being the leader of your church to being a follower without experiencing or causing major stress? (Ask your wife.)
- How long were you the pastor of the church you’re retiring from?
- Are you going right into a new career or other type of part or full-time ministry or do you have no idea what you’re going to do with yourself?
Here are the challenges that you may face: Again, in light of the factors listed above, these may affect you profoundly or they may only affect you slightly.
(1) You will experience grief, the inevitable outcome of loss. You will lose relationships and you will also lose the esteem/respect that came with being a leader (see Psalm 42:4). You may be shocked that the church you led for so long no longer wants to hear your opinions.
(2) You may find your relationships with former parishioners to be awkward. You can expect the unexpected from the people you are leaving. Some whom you expected to be your friends for life will forget you quickly. Others, whom you didn’t identify as having “attachment issues” will be crushed by your departure. Others will simply not know how to relate to you when they see you in the grocery store. Did you have a personal relationship with them or was it just a professional relationship? You’ll find out after your resignation. Still others will expect you to keep “pastoring” them forever.
(3) You will be going from being needed to not being needed. You will feel like some moms feel when their kids go off to kindergarten or leave the nest at 18 (or is it 38?). Sunday mornings may seem strangely quiet. You always wanted to have weekends but now you don’t know what to do with them. You may wish that the phone would ring a little more often.
(4) You may suffer an identity crisis, even though you’ve preached for decades about the importance of finding our identity in Christ alone. Besides feeling bad because you don’t know who or what you are anymore, you may also feel ashamed of yourself for feeling this way.
(5) You will increasingly be treated as “just another old person,” and this may include the way you are treated in your new church home. It’s one thing to be a “veteran pastor” but it’s another thing to be just an old guy.
(6) You may have a very hard time being a generic member of your new church. You may find yourself to be undervalued, unnoticed or even invisible. “I could help them with this; why don’t they let me?”
(7) You may struggle with knowing how to act in your new church. You may behave badly or you may even behave well and be accused of behaving badly because of the pastor’s insecurity. You may “mess up” in your first post-retirement church and have to try again elsewhere. Some retired pastors find that they can’t even ask questions of leaders in their new church without being treated as if they’re trying to change things.
(8) You may find that your denomination very quickly puts you “out to pasture.” I’ve heard retired pastors express the wish that their denomination would do something for them or with
(9) You may struggle with coming up with enough income. In order to make ends meet, you may have to work at a low-paying, low-status job that does not take advantage of your wisdom, knowledge and skills.
(10) You may want to be preaching on Sundays and find that you’re not wanted. If you preach like an “old guy” you’ll be considered “irrelevant.” If you try to preach like a young guy, you’ll be considered pathetic. You not only are not cool anymore, but you may find that there’s no way for you to be cool anymore!
(11) You may have forgotten how to make and enjoy actual friendships.
(12) You may find that you no longer have any authority over anything. Your wife may not know what in the world to do with you. Don’t even think about re-organizing her kitchen. Working in a nursing home I learned about the pain of men (some women also) who had lots of authority during their working lives. A sudden illness put them into a nursing facility where they had absolutely no authority over anything or anyone. Yes, these were some very grumpy old men, but not without cause.
(13) You may experience what some call the “stages of retirement.” Someone called them: Go-go, Slow-go and No go.1
1Before You Move by John Cionca, page 282. This excellent chapter, Retiring or Repositioning, is also on John’s MinistryTransitions.org website: http://ministrytransitions.org/articl
