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.
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