When Your Passion Burns Out

At one point in my leadership at our church, we were internally going through some really difficult times. Let me count the ways…

• For various reasons there was a depressing disunity between myself and the board;

• I had personally been named in a $1M+ lawsuit that had no merit (after years it made its way to the Ohio Supreme Court and eventually tossed out);

• A few years earlier we went through an entire restructuring of our governance model, and, to make matters worse, had flatlined in our growth, which created a strain in our finances with our new facility;

• After hiring a high-powered “change agent” in our leadership structure, we experienced thirty-percent turnover in a single year among our 100+ staff. The ripples of those departures, however justified they may have been, created a simmering unease in our church;

• Eleven months later the “change agent” quit. The staff looked at me like, “What the #%$@&! are you doing? ”

The problems had become the center of all my conversations at home and seemed all-consuming. I felt like a complete failure and found myself in a depression.

One day I was having lunch with a fellow pastor named Dwight. We had been in a small group together for several years. Dwight was a big dude; he came out of the projects to play football at Ohio State University during the Woody Hayes era, even going to the Rose Bowl back in the day. Years later, he would surrender his life to Jesus.

With his tell-it-like-it-is personality, Dwight suddenly stared hard at me across the restaurant table. “Do you like what you’re doing?” he point-blank asked.

I smiled and mumbled a semi-enthusiastic, “Yeah.” There was a long pause. I finally asked, “Why? How come you asked?”

He just looked at me and said, “It just doesn’t seem like you do. I don’t see a lot of passion.”

I responded with some lame excuse, but he was absolutely right. I felt dead inside.

A few days later I had a quiet, shy woman in the church tell me that she had been praying for me and sensed God prompting her to tell me, “Don’t let the skirmishes cause you to miss the war.” I had not chosen my battles carefully and had allowed the problems to steal the deep, abiding joy that God promises his followers. What’s more, it had robbed me of my passion for the top-line mission of the Kingdom of God and his heart for people.

Without passion, I was dead in the water. It took another year for me to recover. I have no other words to describe it, but God visited my desperation and brokenness with a radical outpouring of his Spirit and reaffirmed my calling: a “leadership switch” was flipped on in my heart. A year later we launched our biggest initiative ever with a renewed church-wide excitement. At the risk of sounding leader-centric, the very energy of the church had been affected by my passion-depression.

Spiritual leaders must foster genuine passion if they want passionate organizations. It starts with you: what stokes authentic excitement and dedication in you for God and his mission? Nurturing and developing passion at a personal level is another post altogether, but you probably intuitively know what your spiritual and emotional pathways are. For me, taking the time to worship God via music, reading apologetics that challenge me intellectually, or simply asking trusted, passionate people to lay hands on me and pray, can each renew and increase my awe of God.

And don’t forget counseling.

What is the passion-factor in this season of your leadership? 

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

Adapted from “Elemental Leaders: Four Essentials Every Leader Needss...and Every Church Must Have.”

---

Every healthy organization is marked by four essential traits: Integrity, Passion, Servanthood, and Imagination. With a practitioner perspective, author Dave Workman offers common sense guidance and tools to maximize leadership. Filled with insight, humor, and reflective exercises, this is an indispensable exploration of these four universal values. Check out Elemental Leaders: Four Essentials Every Leader Needs...and Every Church Must Have.