The Three Stages of a Pastor-Congregant Relationship

Magnification, disillusionment, and the fork in the road

I’m prepping for a session for pastors at the Evergreen Summit (see pinned tweet) and for the church planting concentration I’ll be teaching at Grimké this fall. In both settings, my goal is to help equip pastors for the long haul. So I want to address a very common pastoral experience. Many pastor-congregant relationships follow a predictable arc. At first, the pastor is admired beyond what is reasonable. Later, he is seen more clearly, and disappointment sets in. From there, the relationship tends to go one of two ways: it matures into genuine love and respect, or it collapses into resentment and rejection. It looks like this:

Magnification -> Disillusionment -> Reverence or Rejection

Stage 1 is magnification. This is something like a honeymoon stage. The pastor appears to be the sort of leader they have been longing for, and they magnify his virtues, which leads them to overlook, or at least minimize, his shortcomings. I have seen it said that this stage lasts four years. I have no clue how you could prove that. I will say that, in my experience, it is usually much shorter, more like 2–3 years. I think the more mature the Christian congregant and the pastor, the shorter the duration. That is why I say this is a common pattern, not one that must be fully played out in every single congregant-pastor relationship.

Stage 2 is disillusionment. This stage grows over time. Essentially, the congregant gains enough access to the pastor that he begins to let them down. That letdown may involve expectations the pastor created himself. But it can also come from idealistic expectations projected onto the pastor. Usually, it is some mixture of the two. A lot of this depends on the maturity and stability of the people involved. A less spiritually mature congregant will tend toward more idealistic projections. A less spiritually mature pastor will allow or create unrealistic expectations. The intensity of the disillusionment will roughly track with spiritual maturity. The more they idealize you, or the more you allow them to idealize you, the more disillusioned they will become. Fanboys often become haters. Mature people tend to have more reasonable expectations, and they gain that sort of wisdom either by going through letdowns themselves or by being the one who lets someone else down. I have no clue how long this stage lasts. I will say that by the time the pastor figures out it has been going on, it has usually been going on for a long time.

Stage 3 is the fork in the road: reverence or rejection. The disillusionment stage can only last so long. Its conclusion will hopefully end in what we might call reverence. This is where the congregant comes to see the pastor as a normal but mature believer laboring hard under the weighty office of a pastor. Because he reveres God, he reveres the office. Because he reveres the office, he understands its high calling. And because he recognizes the difficulty of such a high calling, he reveres the man who takes that calling seriously and labors to be an example of mature Christianity. This demystification of the man allows the congregant to actually love and respect him. Something similar has to happen between a child and a parent as they age into near-peers.

The other outcome is rejection. The congregant is so let down and disillusioned that they leave the church because you failed them. If you made yourself appear to be something you are not, then you did fail them. But, as is often the case, if they projected onto you something you never claimed to be, then this is really them failing themselves. They leave and start the process over with some other pastor, and the whole thing begins again.

This cycle will be a constant in the life of a pastor as people come, go, and some stay.

I am wired to be a demystifier in all of life. I want people to see the truth of things. I want them to see the reality of Oz the Great. So I have worked hard to demystify the pastorate. By demystifying, I mean the deliberate showing that while pastors should be mature, godly men suited for their calling, they are not super-Christians or heroes in the old Greek sense of the word. That has not always been the right move.

The truth is, I think some of this was motivated by a desire to speed up the three-stage cycle and avoid being rejected once again as a failed hero. Some pastors, especially those driven into ministry by a desire to be celebrated, eat this up. They lean into the mystification of the pastorate. By mystifying, I mean the deliberate cultivation of a pastoral mystique that shrouds a man’s humanity and magnifies him as a hero, again in the Greek sense. They will eventually pay for this.

There are others, though, and this is more my camp, who have the opposite tendency. We trend toward a kind of radical transparency, trying in good faith to collapse the pedestal, but the result can be just as destabilizing. Forcing disillusionment because of impatience or self-protection is not good. You have to let this process play out.

I think the pastor must be wise about who he allows access to his personal life. This is not a matter of full access or zero access. It is a matter of degrees. Beware of giving fanboys too much access, because they rarely make it through the disillusionment phase without eventually coming to hate you and using whatever they have to prove that you failed them. Your and your family’s little failings will not be overlooked for long. In time, disillusionment will exaggerate them into something disqualifying in the mind of the fanboy turned hater.

The women who appear to want to be your wife’s friend may turn on her once your non-heroicness is discovered. They will weaponize what they have learned. The same thing can happen with your kids. This is part of what makes ministry families want to live in a fortress. I get it. But you cannot do that.

Erecting fortress walls will ironically lead to even more mystification, and your family needs friends. The answer is to have degrees of relationship and degrees of openness. You must be known, and you must know others. But you cannot allow unstable people to define the shape of your whole life. You can build these relationships in your church with members of your congregation. Part of demystifying is being a good example of what a mature household looks like: a household with boundaries, where trust is established over time. I’m stewing on this aspect and will expand on it later.

Note: Some of these thoughts come from an article I read by an Episcopal priest named Warner White. He went deeper into the Freudian stuff that I didn’t care for, but it’s still worth tracking down. I don’t know its title.