Disappointing Discipleship
The Overlooked Pastoral Task of Disappointing People
A couple of weeks before we moved from Hillsboro, OR, to Belgrade, MT, I made a phone call. We were about to move to a new place, and I was about to be the new pastor - my first pastorate in a lead pastor role.
Eager to learn all that I could from people older, wiser, and far more experienced, I called a professor of pastoral theology who had spent decades as a pastor.
He recommended a book to read. Ironically, it was a book that was recommended to me about ten years ago. I still have the screenshot on my phone of the book. I guess it was about time I read it.
He recommended The Art of Pastoring by David Hansen.
This book was well worth the time. The insights were rich and plentiful. The stories were inspiring. Fascinatingly, the author, David Hansen, pastored in Montana when he wrote this book. One of the churches he served is in Belgrade!
One of the insights I gleaned from Hansen came through his writing on a pastoral challenge that is rarely talked about but universally experienced: transference.
Transference
Have you ever had an unpleasant conversation with someone in which the emotions of said individual felt disproportionate, out of left field, and unwarranted for the present situation?
After I graduated from college, I worked at a pet store while I attended seminary. One of the (many) unpleasant instances at that job included a customer blowing up at me. In that moment, it took all of my self-control mouth off at her.
Fortunately, I didn’t.
Looking back on that moment, I can see that below the surface of her cantankerous behavior, she was a deeply hurt, angry individual. It makes me wonder what her story was and what she carried into the store.
And that’s what transference is: unconsciously bringing into our conversations the baggage of our past.
“You're just like everyone else who’s overlooked me!”
“You’re just like every toxic boss I’ve had!”
“You’re just like every pastor: judgmental and power-hungry!”
According to Armand M. Nicholi Jr. (as quoted by Hansen),
All feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of our conscious experience of the person in reality, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience of him in reference to experiences with significant people in infancy and childhoodespecially parents and other family members. We tend to displace feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if the person in the present has features similar to the person in the past.1
Hansen then points out that, “Pastors are special candidates for transference, since they are authority figures.”2
How many pastors have received emails with reactive, venom-laced words? The unfortunate reality of serving people is sometimes they, due to their wounds, seek healing via wounding others - the pastor in particular. Hansen points out the following:
These people’s anger at their parent is unleashed on the pastor. The pastor still symbolizes the parent, but now the parent being symbolized has shifted. The pastor is no longer the ideal parental figure the parishioner loves. The pastor is now the failed parent the parishioner hates. Without warning, the pastor who yesterday represented all that was right in the world today represents all that is wrong in the world. From Jesus to the devil in one hour.3
When transference happens, the worst thing a pastor can do is cater to the dysfunction rather than set a boundary with the toxic behavior.
People-Pleasing
Confession: I am a chronic people-pleaser. Maybe a people-pleaser in recovery. It depends on the week, I guess.
The reality is, my default modus operandi is to people-please. Such an approach is detrimental to sustainable and effective pastoral life and work.
I know I’m not alone. I remember a friend of mine sharing a frustrating situation with a congregant who was texting him late at night, expressing his grievances, and making demands. When you’re a chronic people-pleaser, even the requests of others become the demands of authority figures who need appeasing. You text back, no matter how late, acquiescing whatever the request/demand.
This concoction of transference and people-pleasing is a recipe for pastoral burnout. What are we then to do?
Disappointing Discipleship
It’s been said that leadership involves disappointing people at a rate they can handle.4
There are many expectations on pastors. Many are biblical expectations: integrity, loving the community, and feeding them the Word of God. But then there are additional expectations people bring. Some might be good expectations, but not something the pastor signed up for: a great organizational leader, the TED-Talk level speaker, a funny preacher. And then there are the unrealistic expectations: the pastor is one’s best friend, constantly available, and is the source of healing for our past wounds.
In our consumeristic culture where the “customer is king”, it takes courage to disappoint people. It may be costly. They might leave the church. But these are pastoral realities and risks I am thinking through in the early days of my new assignment. I must resist the temptation to be anything more or less than what God calls me to be as a pastor of these particular people. Playing the people-pleasing game is not leadership. Instead, I need to guide people to recognize that, though I am not trying to be, I will be disappointing. And yet, the task is to re-orient that disappointment to the one who truly satisfies.
I wonder if in the consumeristic culture of the American church, the antidote is disappointing discipleship. Disappointing people to the one who is far better than their expectations and the true healer of wounds: Jesus of Nazareth.
To build up immunity from the toxic system of congregant transference and people-pleasing pastoral practice, one must disappoint them towards a deeper discipleship to Jesus - their true source of healing, friendship, and life.
Armand M. Nicholi Jr., “The Therapist-Patient Relationship,” in The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychiatry, ed. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 9.
David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without all the Answers [Revised Edition], (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2012), 138.
Ibid., 139.
I first read this quote from Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountains. Unfortunately, that book is packed away so I cannot find the exact reference. Dr. AJ Swoboda also quotes it attributes it to leadership practitioners Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky.