Our Journey

Our journey,  in a nutshell, is that we were in pastoral ministry for 26 years before we stepped down because of exhaustion and burnout.  After that, we spent several years coming to grips with the mental, spiritual, emotional and social struggles we were under. By the grace of God, the Lord led us step by step through recovery that transformed our lives. 

Everyone's ministry journey is unique. This was ours....

Chapter One: Associate Pastors - 2 years

After  graduating from Bible College with one young baby, we became associate  pastors at a small church in a city that was rapidly becoming a bedroom  community. The church was undergoing a pastoral change, and suddenly the church began to grow rapidly... from about 30 to over 200. 

On  a personal level, our lives were both hectic and exciting. Vance was  working bivocationally at a mobile home factory, while Katie worked as a  stay-at home mom. By the time our associate pastorship wound to an end,  our family grew once with the addition of another son.

Vance:  Our intro to ministry was an exciting time for me. It was a chance to  test the ideas and principles we learned in Bible College in a real  church setting. When that church ended up in the midst of a small  revival, I became  convinced that everything I had learned was correct. I  was convinced that God was moved by faithful servants who correctly  teach the truth. In hindsight, I realize that I completely missed a much deeper truth. It isn't my success  or failure that moves the heart of God. God's heart moves because God loves me. Warts and all,  God loves me.  It isn't about me. It is about him. 

Chapter Two: Church Planters - 5 years

Our  first foray into being lead pastors came when we felt led to plant a  church in a college city. As a young couple in our 20s, we were excited  about the prospect of reaching young students. We were able to see God  do some great things in peoples' lives, and we learned a lot about  leadership and about ourselves.During  this time, our family grew to 6 with the addition of our last two   children. Vance worked bivocationally as a janitor at the college,   working until 4am each morning. Meanwhile, Katie opened an in-home   daycare. Together, we found a way to pay our bills and keep the church   afloat until the merger happened. Yet after 5 years of blood, sweat and  lots of tears, we reached the point where our dream could no longer  continue after the resignation of a key family. It was at that point  that we made the painful decision to merge our church with another  church in a neighboring community.

Chapter Three: The Merger - 2 years

In  many ways, the merger of our church plant felt like a death had  occurred. The one saving grace of this period was that the pastor of the  other church was an amazing guy. In his 60s, Bill had both experience  and wisdom to spare. He knew what we were going through, and he helped  us as we pieced together our dreams and our future. The dark side of  this period was that the new church was in the midst of a huge church  fight. Literally, there were two factions in the church sitting on  opposite sides of the sanctuary. It was a very confusing time for us.

Vance  became the janitorial supervisor at the college, while Katie started a  cooperative  elementary school among a group of homeschool parents in  the church. Although  this period provided some much needed rest and recovery, it was also  unnerving to discover how Christians could act so ugly to one another.  Bible College did not prepare us for dealing with church infighting.  Nothing is quite as destructive as self-righteous "warriors of truth"  who feel morally justified in their un-Christlike attitudes and actions.

Chapter Four: Lead Pastors - The First 10 years

Our  return to leadership happened when we became lead pastors at a tiny struggling church in a small town. It was one of the oldest churches in  the denomination, and we were the 34th pastors in its 76 year history.  The average pastor stayed less than 1-1/2 years, with the shortest being  2 months. The church had dropped to an average attendance of about 15,  so the addition of our family of 6 was a big change. 

The  pastoral position came with a parsonage to live in and a very modest  salary, So Vance was determined to be a full-time pastor for the first  time. As before, Katie began doing in-home daycare to help meet our  expenses.

During  this time, the ministries of the church expanded quickly. Fueled  primarily by our family's influx of kids, we began a boy's ministry, a  girl's ministry, and eventually a youth group. As these ministries grew  locally, Katie ended up joining the state leadership team for the Girl's  ministry, while Vance joined the state leadership team of the boy's  ministry. After hiring a part-time youth pastor, our church took on the  task of putting on a summer youth camp that quickly grew to hundreds of  campers. Things were looking so good that we failed to notice the storm  clouds on the horizon.

Vance:  As life and ministry became more hectic, I found myself feeling more  and more frustrated. I had bought into the belief that churches were  expected to thrive and grow in amazing ways. When any modest growth  happened, it was at the expense of my time and energy. I was feeling  more and more like a failure, but tried to bury that under the  never-ending busyness of ministry. In the midst of this busy time, Katie  won a call-in radio contest at a Christian station. The prize was a  paid trip to the Creation music festival, featuring dozens of well-known  Christian musicians. When she told me that she had won, I was  overwhelmed with the thought that God had blessed her for her  faithfulness to him. And God had blessed our kids for all the sacrifice  they had given as our kids. But I felt like I was tagging along on the  coat tails of their blessing. I felt like I was such a failure that God  would not  have ME in mind when He gave us the gift. I didn't realize it  yet, but my faulty thought processes... my depression... and my burnout  had taken root.

Chapter Five: Lead Pastors - The Final 8 years

The biggest  change to our family happened when we were finally able to trade our  small parsonage home for a larger home of our own. Since our church  salary had not increased, we found ourselves needing to return to  bivocational ministry. Katie got a job at the local school and Vance  became the school's athletic director.

Our  busy lives became even more hectic when one of our teen children told  us about a friend of his who was homeless and sleeping on the streets.  After checking out his situation, we welcomed him into our home. This  led us down the path of becoming certified foster parents. Within the  next several years, we ended up taking in 10 different teen foster  children. 

Meanwhile,  our church ministries were taking more and more out of us. Despite the  fact that our ministries were growing, the number of volunteers helping  us were dropping.  Not surprisingly, we felt that it was our obligation  to plug all the different holes as they happened. And despite numerous  attempts to hand off these roles to others, we were unsuccessful. 

Between  the stresses of ministry...and family...and jobs...and foster care, we  quickly found ourselves becoming overwhelmed. The concept of "a day off"  became a rare treat that we savored whenever it occurred. The concept  of a week-long vacation became a distant memory. In this 8 year span we  managed to take just two of them. Everywhere we looked it seemed like  there were people wanting more and more from us... but few to help us.  We were at the end of a very frayed rope.

Chapter Six: Running and Recovering - 3 years and counting

The  tipping point came when we found out that our youth pastors, who were  doing an amazing job, were being led by God to help a friend plant a new  church in a different city. Suddenly we faced the prospect of having  youth ministry added to our overwhelming responsibilities. It was too  much to even consider. 

The  turning point came when we started having open and honest conversations  about what we were feeling. Somewhere in the midst of these talks, we  discussed the possibility of stepping down for pastoral ministry  ourselves. To be honest, there were countless times over the years when  we would pray about quitting. And God's answer was always to stay the  course. This time, however, it was different. God's answer to our prayer  was...silence. We kept praying. We kept talking. We asked for advice  from a pastor we trusted. We prayed more. And then God finally answered  us. After 26 exhausting years of non-stop ministry, we felt released by God to step  down.

We gave the  church 3 months warning that we would be stepping down, and tried to  hand over our responsibilities to others. And then, after 18 years of  ministry, our last service came. It was followed by a potluck...then we  helped clean up the fellowship hall...dropped our keys on the desk we  had used for the past 2 decades...and walked out of the church for the  last time.

Some people  may have a smooth transition out of pastoral ministry, but we did not.  We were physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. Anxious.  Confused. Frustrated. Hurt. And didn't know how to start this new  chapter of our lives. The first question we faced was...what do we do on  Sunday mornings? Do we go to another church? Neither of us had the  energy for that, so we opted to stay home and watch a church service on  TV. To be honest, we often watched services while multi-tasking on  Facebook. And often we never quite got around to turning on the TV.

People  who have never faced burnout may be shocked, but we didn't feel like we  were just walking away. We were running. Running from God, running from church, even running from "being good".  We had no desire  to attend church, read our Bibles, or even pray. The suggestion that we  get involved in a ministry would result in us laughing uncontrollably.  Out of guilt, we attended a few local churches...but we hated it. We  found it difficult to connect with people and it was hard to sit through  a service when we could predict what would happen next. Eventually we  drifted back to our TV/Facebook routine.

After  about a year, we reluctantly felt the need to find a church home. We  opted to try a church that was an hour away from us because we knew that  no one would know we had been pastors. We attended it several  times...and much to our surprise, we loved it. We loved the energy of  the people. We loved the messages from the pastor. But mostly, we loved  that it was unpredictable. The songs were unknown to us. The Bible  translation was different than what we were used to. The worship service  changed each week. It was completely unpredictable. It  was...refreshing.

After  attending for 3 or 4 weeks, the moment we feared the most happened.  Pastor Gerry and Kim met us at the door before the service and asked  about our story. ("So what's your church background?") Reluctantly, we  told them. Much to our surprise, we found that they had a similar story.  They knew what we were going through, and they gave us the  grace to  just "come and be". They didn't ask anything of us, and they didn't tell  people that we were pastors. They just loved us and supported us. In  fact, it was almost a year before anyone else in the church found out  that we had been in ministry.

This was the beginning of a three year journey of recovery for us, where we first learned how to relate to a loving God as individual people, rather than as pastors.  Step by step, lesson after lesson, God led us back to a deep relationship with Him. And like the  prodigal son, we found that God was waiting for us all along.

In the process He showed us some a number of things that we had done wrong while we were in ministry, which led to our struggles. We learned  about failures, addictions, spiritual warfare, grace and mercy.

Chapter Seven: A New Journey

Along our journey of recovery we were shocked to discover how few resources are available for ministry families who are struggling. Opinions and teachings abound. Even judgment abounds. But people willing to reach out and help? Unicorns are easier to find. 

We  know that there are literally thousands of other ministerial families  going through the same thing. That is why we decided to launch this  website. If you are one of those people, know that you are not alone.  And we would love to connect with you on YOUR journey. Because we've been there too.