Top 10 Reasons Why Ministers Quit: #1

Based on my conversations with ministers and my own experience of more than 22 years in the ministry, here are top ten reasons why ministers quit, and why I could do the same.

Here is the #1 reason why ministers quit the ministry:

Forced Resignation

When the typical minister resigns, it may not be a voluntary move. More often than not, ministers are forced or pressured to resign. This pressure may come from the deacons, elders, or other powerful influencers within the church. But when the story is told, it is presented as the work of the minister's own choosing.

The spiritual environment of a church often makes it the breeding ground for saying one thing and meaning another. So, instead of just saying, “You’re fired,” the church, through its power brokers, will use crude diplomacy that leaves little wiggle room for the pastor but to resign.

Sometimes, church members or leaders simply turn up the heat. The fume may even be felt in the atmosphere of the Sunday morning church service, where the minister is made to feel like he's surrounded by nothing but adversaries. He feels like Daniel in the Lions' Den, and this was supposed to have been a worship service, with the minister breaking the bread of life.

When the heat reaches that level of intensity, the minister sees the smoke and finds the exit, while he can.

You see, the Christian way is to do everything "in love". That means it is normally out of the question or game plan to use overt power plays to demand that the minister resign, unless there is proof of some moral lapse, as in the case of the minister being caught in a affair. Without any obvious moral crime in play, church folk must resort to sneakier methods to bring pressure to bear on the minister, while making it appear it was the minister's choice to resign.

In the end, the power players of the church can say with a straight face that since the minister resigned, it was not the church or the deacons who fired him. It was the pastor’s choice and decision to step down. The minister chose to resign, and as such, the church has no blood on its hands for rendering a servant of God unemployed or making him and his family homeless just like that.

Some churches have no idea what divine judgments they might have earned for their cruel and gross mistreatments of many humble servants of God, whom they forced out of the ministry or pastorate.

Top 10 Reasons Why Ministers Quit: #8

Here is the 8th reason why ministers quit the ministry:

The Demands of Moral Excellence

Better believe it ~ the preacher faces and struggles with temptations of lust, sex, porn, alcohol, drugs, gambling, anger, greed, and other breeds of sensual pleasure.

But though some church members are quick to jump to the privilege of setting the preacher straight on just about any issue, they really have no clue just how much the minister struggles to cling to his status as the moral strong man of the flock.

Because the preacher is the one who stands as God’s mouthpiece to show and tell others how to live the godly life, he becomes a beacon of moral excellence to his people. As such, he dares not respond to people, things and situations as others are free to do. And if he does respond like any other person, there is a magnified reaction to him from those he leads.

Sometimes the minister must watch his spouse be mistreated, maligned or ostracized by church members, or the preacher's kids may be singled out and sidelined by their peers.

At some point, in fact, at many points, the preacher may feel incompetent or sinful, even if he is an excellent preacher, teacher, pastor, counselor or good moral template.

Next, he begins to doubt himself, second-guess himself, query himself. “Am I really called by God? Am I cut out for this? Did I receive adequate training? Should I be going back to school? Do I really know what I’m doing? Perhaps I should seek education in a different field just in case. May be I should get out of the way and let someone else do this, someone who can do a far better job.”

Now, because he is first and foremost a moral authority, every feeling of incompetence feels like moral failure in the minister’s mind. And moral failure is the one thing every minister dreads and no minister can survive.

Top 10 Reasons Why Ministers Quit: #9

Here is the 9th reason why preachers and other ministers give up:

Church Hoppers

Every time someone leaves the preacher’s church to join another church is a moment of crisis for the preacher.

It’s like when a company has spent money and resources to train a good employee, only for that employee to leave the company for greener grass somewhere else. In the same way, ministers pour their hearts, time, efforts and expertise into members only to watch them hop over to the next (better) church.

It was the little preacher who took the time to teach that person just everything the person now knows about the Bible, about prayer, about the Lord’s work, about finding his/her calling. Then the person feels too important to be in this little church and hops over to the big preacher’s church, the more prestigious church, the church with bigger and better facilities. And the church hopper doesn’t even realize the emotional damage that little preacher is left to sort out.

In the process of accepting this reality of being abandoned and left to dry, the preacher begins to soul-search and self-examine: “What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me? What could I have done differently? What do I need to change? Why do I keep losing people?”

The minister begins to feel that the other minister who got his member must somehow be better than he. The preacher who loses the member feels inferior, and it will take a while before he recovers and gets his confidence back.

Of course, the typical church hopper may be blind to all this, or the church hopper may have secretly hoped that the hopped over minister would suffer this emotional pain.

Replay the church hopping drama several times, and a minister could become the casualty.

Church hoppers are often minister choppers.