A Lent reflection for church leaders.
There’s an assumption baked into church leadership culture that I’ve watched hurt a lot of good leaders.
It goes something like this: you need to hold space for everyone else’s pain. You’re the one being paid. The one who signed up for this. You know the right Psalm. And so, when Lent comes around, you’ll lead your congregation into a season of honest reflection while quietly keeping your own grief organized and managed inside your tightly guarded soul.
The assumption isn’t that pastors don’t hurt. At some level, people know you’re just a person. But they assume you know what to do with it. I want to push back on that. Because I know that invisible grief has a way of becoming something worse than grief. And Lent, of all seasons, is too good to waste on just perfecting the professional performance.
I think church leaders can become very proficient at facilitating grief solutions for others without ever practicing it ourselves. We can walk a grieving widow through lament. We can name the valley of the shadow with real authority. But we have quietly accepted the idea that we’re the guide, not the pilgrim. The shepherd, not the sheep. So, we skip the thing we’re handing out and we don’t heed our own guidance.
The problem is that your grief often goes undealt with because you’re busy helping other people with theirs. And ministry leaders carry a unique kind of invisible weight that has a cumulative effect. There’s the grief of the person who left angry and never came back. The marriage you carefully counseled for two years that fell apart anyway. The elder conflict that still tightens your chest when you think about it. The difficult funeral that took its emotional toll on you too. The gap between the church you believe God called you to build and the one you actually encounter on a Sunday morning.
None of this kind of grief that makes it into the church leadership books. But it accumulates. And the longer we lead from a posture of “I’m the one who helps people through hard times,” the less likely we are to actually bring our own hard times to God.
Lent gives us a way out of that.
The ancient practice of lament is a practice I’ve re-discovered recently. I also have realized it was always meant to be practiced by me, not just prescribed to others. Jesus didn’t skip Psalm 22 on the cross to model resilience for the disciples. He prayed it. He brought his actual desolation to his Father in the form of scripture, and that prayer is now part of our canon.
The typical pastoral posture of “managed grief” is, ironically, un-Christlike. Jesus wept. He cried out. He asked if the cup could be taken from him. He didn’t skip over the grief to the resurrection. We’ve somehow built a leadership culture where leaders are supposed to.
So, here’s my challenge to you.
This Lent, before you lead anyone else into honest self-reflection, go there yourself. Use the season the way it was designed: as a season of repentance and reflection and taking an honest look at your soul before God.
I’ve included a simple tool we developed for our congregation. But I’ve been using it myself this Lenten season. It’s built around four movements drawn from the structure of the Psalms: Call, Complain, Cry Out, and Contemplate. The sequence important. You don’t get to contemplate your way to peace without first having the guts to complain to God.
Try working through it with your own grief. Yours.
What’s the loss you haven’t named? What’s the unanswered prayer that’s started to feel like a closed door? What’s the gap between what you believed God was going to do and what actually happened?
The most credible thing you can do for your congregation this season isn’t to lead them on a happy clappy journey to Resurrection Sunday without acknowledging the struggle of Lent. What a gift to the people you lead to be able to say, “I’m practicing this alongside you. I’m not just guiding you with the Spirit’s help. The Spirit is guiding me too.”
That’s what the good grief of Lent looks like.
