Where does it hurt?
A Feature Review of
Wounded Pastors: Navigating Burnout, Finding Healing, and Discerning the Future of Your Ministry
Carol Howard and James Fenimore
Paperback: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Abram Kielsmeier-Jones
Given the absurd number of instances of pastors inflicting harm in their churches, pastors who themselves are hurt in churches might feel too self-conscious to acknowledge their pain—to others or even to themselves. The greatest strength in Wounded Pastors is the authors’ willingness to see and name pastoral pain. Carol Howard is a congregational pastor and James Fenimore is a former congregational pastor, now practicing psychotherapy. Both have been hurt in the church and by church folks, and they bring their personal experiences to bear in their writing.
Hurt pastors reading the book are likely to feel seen, a great gift. A mere 14 pages into the book, for example, the authors have a powerful Reflection Prompt (these prompts end each chapter): “Reflect on the wound. After setting aside 30 minutes of uninterrupted time, write, ‘Where does it hurt?’ on the top of a page. Answer the question as honestly as you can. Think about the pain in your present call and your past ones.”
Some pastors may never have received this simple but generative invitation. The invitation may instead have been, “Stuff the wound.” Or, “This is just part of pastoral ministry.” Or, worse, there may be no acknowledgement of the pastor’s pain at all.
The invitation to reflect on the wound is just the beginning. After “Identifying Our Pain” (Part One), Howard and Fenimore guide the pastor-reader through “Healing Our Lives” (Part Two), and “Nurturing Our Growth” (Part Three). Some of the chapter titles alone beckon the wounded pastor to dive in: “Finding Our People,” “Telling Our Story,” “Setting Our Boundaries,” “Renewing or Releasing Our Call.”
The authors are adept at drawing the pastor out. They think expansively in how they encourage pastors to frame and reframe wounds in a broader context. (My favorite example of this comes in a footnote: “We affirm that God calls us to ministry, but sometimes our ministry is larger than the particular position we hold” (167).) And they offer action steps that pastors at various places in their journey can actually take here and now, “I determined to write sermons during office hours (as opposed to writing all day Saturday)” (164).
And they write as pastors who have been there. They know that even in the healthiest church, being a pastor can be hard: “We feel exhausted, working at maximum capacity, and yet we hear constant feedback that we do not do enough. The endless list of people we should have visited, things we ought to have done, and ways we need to improve looms over us. The work is never complete” (13).
They know that there are also unhealthy churches whose relational patterns mirror family systems dynamics. These congregations may refuse to stand up to bullies in their midst, working instead “to protect and placate the saboteur” (16). Like families, congregations can have corporate “unresolved trauma” (56) which can “heighten anxiety levels” (54). Acting out of this anxiety, a church may push for homeostasis amidst perceived danger (54-55), when in fact they would do better to define themselves and embrace healthy change. This kind of analysis was the best part of the book.
Yet somewhere along the way, my marginalia went from Love this, good from the beginning on p. 13’s Reflection Prompts to Weird last sentence. Book could have been way better on p. 166.
I confess some reluctance in offering my critique here, because the fact that Howard and Fenimore are writing this book at all is a boon to ministers. That they are sharing their own pain is sacred. That others have hurt them in the ways the authors describe is not okay. Not only that, but people process pain differently. So what if they process their pain differently from how I might in their situation? I honor the spaciousness here that allows for difference.
But I fear that Wounded Pastors, in its heavy reliance on family systems theory applied to the church, calls for an overfunctioning on the part of the pastor that will only compound pastoral pain. Yes, Murray Bowen’s call to both (a) be self-differentiated and (b) stay connected is as good as gospel in some settings. One might even argue it can be derived from the actual Gospels: “Love your neighbor [stay connected] as yourself [stay differentiated].” But how connected do pastors need to remain to a congregation or to congregants who hurt them, and what shape does this connection take? And what about the responsibility others have to be self-differentiated, too?
For example, I was frustrated by yet another systems-thinking call to not take sabotage personally. I’ve read the literature—I know how to reframe sabotage to see it in its larger setting, what it represents, how to respond, etc. But I recoiled at this: “Foreseeing the reactions and reminding ourselves that ‘this is the system’ will help us not to take the resistance and sabotage personally” (61).
Sabotage is not personal insofar as the saboteur may be acting out of their own family history and may even be projecting someone else onto the people they are hurtling toward. There’s a graciousness and love of others to practice here. But that’s only part of it. If sabotage is interpersonal, then it’s also personal—if not intended as such, then experienced as such. It’s nothing short of a Herculean ask to tell a pastor not to take sabotage personally at all. Unpack it, reframe it, yes. But it is personal, at least on some level.
Further, “foreseeing the reactions” in a congregation is possible only to a point. I’ve heard of some wild things happening in congregations. Less and less would surprise me anymore. But if I task myself with developing the ability to foresee all or even most of the potential reactions in a church, I’m setting a standard that is not only impossible but also inadvisable to meet. Sometimes people are just destructive in the church, and sometimes it comes from a person or from dynamics that even the most seasoned pastor couldn’t have predicted. The ways in which people wound others often doesn’t make sense.
My concern, then, is that the authors are calling for a pastor to overfunction in a church system. I am almost certain they don’t mean to do this, since they have a whole section that is against pastoral overfunctioning. Of congregants who triangulate, they write, “Remember that they are part of the system that is generating the anxiety, and although they may blame you, they are not your enemy” (81). Fair enough, but then they say, “They are pawns of the system.” This to me sounds like Jesus on the cross saying, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but we are not Jesus, and if healthy systems call for taking responsibility, it should be more than just the pastor taking responsibility. The “pawns of the system” can’t stop at just being labeled pawns—they need to take responsibility too. What does this look like? How does it shape the pastors’ expectations of themselves and of their congregants? Is “staying connected,” functionally speaking, really just the work of the pastor?
Along these lines, I had hoped to see in this book more acknowledgment that pastors are finite. (It strikes me that wounded pastors are acutely aware of their finitude.) We’re not always-non-anxious, ever-non-defensive, expert-reframing, all-foreseeing Jesus machines. We can pretend sabotage isn’t personal, but poll a group of wounded pastors with, “Did you experience your sabotage as personal?” and I’ll bet you a large majority say yes. This is what I wish the authors had addressed more—the human, limited side of being a pastor, where some hurts just aren’t predictable or preventable. With apologies to Hanif Abdurraqib’s lovely homage to Michael Jordan’s iconic 1985 slam dunk photo, even the highest jump (or most intensive reframing) can’t make us “unkillable.”
Worse, when it comes to “Forgiving Our Antagonist,” the authors say, “In extreme cases, a person might not just be a wounded pastor but a wound-collecting pastor” (110). “Wound-collecting” made me feel like the carpet was being pulled out from under me. Presumably, any pastor reading this book will identify as a “wounded pastor.” How are we to know if our situation qualifies (to the authors) as an “extreme” case, whatever that means? Am I not just wounded but wound-collecting, somehow a treasurer of the pain people cause me? Is there some unspecified standard of resilience a pastor has to meet to avoid being labeled “wound-collecting,” or is there a limited number of hurts a pastor can really feel, before being delegitimized with this label? In a book written for wounded pastors, this came across to me as victim shaming. As did the question: “Do you need to forgive yourself?” (118) A more measured read on forgiveness is Forgiveness After Trauma, by Susannah Griffith.
I hated this what-have-YOU-done-to-contribute-to-your-pain turn in the book, a feeling exacerbated by how beautifully the authors had drawn me in so far. It didn’t feel trauma-informed. And for the authors to go on to say forgiveness is taking place when the story of the “victim” “begins to change to include the perpetrator’s story” (147)?! That’s not only disappointing; I worry it could be damaging to those who read it. I am responsible only for myself and my story—not my perpetrator and their story. What’s more, the authors ask, “Can you tell the story from the perpetrator’s point of view?” (119) Why on earth, especially accounting for cases of abuse, would this be a desideratum, let alone prescription? Inhabiting one’s perpetrator’s story is not the job of the perpetrated-against. That can’t be what “staying connected” means—it’s not safe. The question sounded enabling, and for me it eroded the author-reader trust that had been built up to that point of the book.
So I’m torn. Half the book was amazing—wise, comforting, generative, and with insights and questions I know I’ll revisit, even share with other pastors and church leaders. But that set of powerful experiences was marred for me by a turn toward what felt like overfunctioning, enabling, and a lack of trauma sensitivity, especially as it relates to “forgiveness.” I can’t see myself handing this book to a wounded pastor, sadly—although there are still some powerful suggestions and questions I’ll carry with me.
Abram Kielsmeier-Jones
Abram Kielsmeier-Jones (Abram K-J, for short) is husband to Sarah and father of three wonderful school-aged children. Abram pastors a diverse Christian church in the heart of Boston. He has been a trainer in Accordance Bible Software since 2015. He has spent more than twenty years in youth and pastoral ministry, working at small, mid-sized, and large churches in Illinois, Virginia, and Massachusetts. He loves to run, box (heavy bag only! not people), play guitar, write music, and advocate for children, youth, and other vulnerable people wherever he can. He writes at Words on the Word.
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