Why so many pastors quietly burn out

Published 1:30 am Saturday, April 25, 2026

By REV. TRYGVE JOHNSON

There is a man in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks who has always stopped me cold. He sits alone at the counter of a late-night diner, his back to the street, half his body in the warm light of the room, the other half dissolving into shadow. Outside is darkness. Inside, a light burns against it. And this man — this solitary figure — seems to live in both worlds at once, belonging fully to neither.

Martin Luther called this condition simul justus et peccator: we are sinner and saint simultaneously, held in tension, never fully resolved. Solzhenitsyn put it another way: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Hopper painted it. And every leader I have ever known has felt it.

That tension — inhabiting the light long enough to serve others, then stepping back out into the dark — is, I think, the truest picture of what pastoral leadership actually feels like. It is not a picture of triumph. It is a picture of faithfulness in difficulty. It is not depressing. It is, if you let it be, quietly inspiring.

Pastors are leaving ministry at an alarming rate. The statistics are not secret, but the reasons behind them mostly are, because we have not created the kind of culture where a pastor can tell the truth about what it costs to lead.

The cost is loneliness, first and foremost. Most pastors — particularly men — do not have meaningful friendships outside of the role. They carry the weight of other people’s crises, marriages, deaths and doubts without anywhere to set it down. They cannot always unburden themselves to a spouse, because the spouse’s own community is the congregation. They cannot confide in a staff member without risking the power dynamics of the relationship. They cannot be truly honest with a parishioner without the conversation becoming sermon material or local gossip by Sunday.

Many pastors bear the burdens alone. That kind of loneliness does not announce itself. It simply accumulates, quietly, over years.

There is also the particular vulnerability of leading volunteers. In a business, accountability has teeth. In a church, disagreement can cost you giving, attendance or your reputation by the following weekend. This is not theoretical. It happens constantly. A pastor who dares to address a conflict, to hold a standard, to disappoint someone’s preference — risks a kind of retaliation that is often invisible to everyone except the person on the receiving end of it.

Leadership in any organization is difficult. Leadership in a congregation of people who love each other, grieve together and hold conflicting ideas about God, meaning, and authority — while also having opinions about your sermon length and your mood — is something else entirely.

Something strange has happened in recent years. We have developed an entire cultural vocabulary for criticizing pastors — narcissism, toxicity, abuse of power — and there is no shortage of voices eager to apply those terms broadly. Books are written. Podcasts are recorded. Platforms are built on the diagnosis. And sometimes, the diagnosis is right. There are pastors who have genuinely caused harm, and those situations deserve clear-eyed reckoning.

But the conversation has tilted. The loudest critics are often people who have left the local church themselves, who no longer attend anywhere, yet feel qualified to issue verdicts on the men and women who show up every week to preach, counsel, bury the dead and welcome the stranger. That asymmetry should give us pause.

Nearly every pastor I know is hard working, compassionate and committed. They are not toxic, they are tired. Many are underpaid. They are doing their best in a cultural moment that treats Christianity as either a joke or a threat, and many are doing it without adequate support, without meaningful peer relationships, and without anyone asking them the simplest possible question: How are you, really?

Burnout does not usually arrive because a pastor was unfaithful. It arrives because they were faithful for too long without anyone helping them carry it.

What we can actually do?

The Christian life is not a contest. It is a communion. And if we believe that, it has practical consequences for how we treat the people who lead us.

You could start simply. The next time you see your pastor, instead of an observation about the sermon or a question about the calendar, you might try asking: What’s it like to lead a church in this particular moment? What’s it like to be you on behalf of us? Then listen. Not to formulate a response. Just listen. You may be the first person to ask that question in months — or ever.

You could use whatever platform you have — a conversation, a text, a social media post, a word in a hallway — to say something encouraging rather than critical. You could show up not just on Sunday but in the ordinary weeks, at the ordinary events, picking up a shovel alongside the people who are already there. You could pray for your pastor the way your pastor prays for you — specifically, persistently, with genuine care about the weight they are carrying.

What you probably should not do is write a lengthy critique of pastoral culture from the comfort of a church you no longer attend. That kind of engagement costs nothing and contributes less.

The man in Nighthawks will step back out into the dark. That is where his life is. That is where the work is. But for a little while, he sat in the light. Someone made coffee. The room was warm. That mattered. You can see in the painting a that the man at the counter exhales at the end of a long day — or week — or month — a disquiet solitariness that is also his strength .

Your pastor steps back out into the dark too — into a culture that is exhausted, fragmented and skeptical; into a congregation that needs more than any one person can give; into a public that measures every word to see what “side” of the divide they represent, into a life that asks them to be strong for everyone else while finding their own strength somewhere in the margins of an already-full week.

You are the diner. You are the warm light in the window. You are the person who can make it worth stepping back in. That gift may be enough for your pastor to offer that to many, many, others in your community.

Don’t abandon your pastor. Love her. Support him with a word of encouragement. Rather than look for fault, or focusing on what they didn’t do, or say, focus on the what’s happening between the margins, those invisible spaces where they do show up, speak into the pain, and bear the burdens of the other. And then let he or she love you in return. That is not a program or a strategy. It is just what the church has always been meant to be.

Rev. Trygve Johnson, an Oak Harbor High School graduate, is the CEO of The PreachFor Foundation, an organization working to identify and empower a new generation of talented young leaders through experience, education and mentorship, to help churches reach their full potential, and make a positive impact in their communities. Trygve is ordained in the Reformed Church in America. He is also the brother of Island County Commissioner Jill Johnson.