Suicide Rates Climb; Pastors Among the Afflicted

Yesterday a friend and colleague in ministry shared the sad news about a pastor in Macon, Georgia.  He didn't show up for worship on Sunday.  When his family members went looking for him, the found him in the driveway of their home, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He was 42 years old, married, and the father of two.  His 800+ member congregation is fruitful and growing.  He was one of thousands who suffer from severe manic depression.  For most of his life and ministry he prevailed over it.  Something happened, though, or a complexity of circumstances came together, and he simply felt he couldn't go on any longer.  Needless to say, it has left his family and his church devastated.  No one will ever know the full circumstances of this tragic event.  Suicide rates continue to rise in America.  According to TIME Magazine, in the 50-54 year old age range of men the rate of suicides increased 49.4% in the last ten year U.S. Census period.  An alarming number of suicides include faith leaders and professionals.  Three things capture my attention since hearing of the Macon, Georgia pastor's death.

First, it's time to pull our heads out of the sand and to recognize that depression is epidemic.   Many of us know depression from the inside.  Yes, there are things we should and can do to help minimize the effect of depression on us and on those we love and serve.  Depression is curable, and we who are prone to suffer from it must take responsibility to seek health.  But depression is not a moral flaw, a character weakness, a lapse in faith, or an excuse.  It is an illness.  None of us who have ever dealt with it would chose it.  In the worst of it, it is a valley from which there seems no escape.  No one who has never dealt with it could understand this.  Unless you have been in this bleak hell hole, you cannot know how devastating depression is.   We have to start talking about it and deal with it,  long before the option to cease living is ever considered.

Second, I am so very grateful and humbled.   I have blessed as a pastor with amazingly caring congregations, including the awesome congregation I am a part of now, and with strong support from friends and colleagues in ministry.  I've been through tough stretches, and depression rears its ugly head from time to time.   But I've always had compassionate laypersons and assertive support from within and from outside the church who have been there to pray for and with me, to lift me up, to hold me accountable, and to let me know that I am not alone in the journey.   This is not something I have earned, nor is it a function of my ability or being favored in some way.  As is the case for many of us who are church pastors, as we look at the colleague in Georgia whom we have lost, it is literally a case of there, but for the grace of God, go I. 

Finally, even as I consider how graced I have been, I know of far too many pastors and church leaders who are not.   I will even go so far as to say that some pastors I know are in fact victims of abuse.  Some abuse is intentional.   I've heard of church people who go after their pastors with a vengeance, having convinced themselves that they're doing so for Godly reasons.  Some abuse happens by neglect.   Colleagues tell me of congregations who will throw something at their pastor during Pastor's Appreciation Month (October), then use that as an excuse to ignore their pastor and his/her needs for the rest of the year.   Abuse happens in guise of praise,  heaping superhuman expectations on those who lead.   Some churches treat their pastors almost as a third gender - beyond anything human.  Pastors are people, just like anyone else.  They face the same problems, the same needs, the same pressures, the same temptations, the same angers, the same pains as anyone else.  They are faulty, and they make mistakes.  As I have experienced, it is a wise congregation that expects excellence in leadership from their pastor(s) and holds them accountable to that, but which asks about a pastor's personal needs, cares about a pastors human side, and supports their pastor as they would any brother or sister in Christ.

Just feeling pain for a brother in The Lord who is no longer with us.  I'll see you around the next bend in the river.  Never paddle alone.