Many religious congregations faced a crisis point in the year 2020. Members accustomed to gathering together struggled to deal with mask mandates and stay-at-home orders. Family and community members died from COVID-19. George Floyd was murdered. And it was an election year. 

For City Reformed Church in Milwaukee, another crisis came to a head that year. “I had to fire an associate pastor who was a very close friend,” said lead pastor Christopher Ganski. “I almost left the ministry. I started seeing a counselor.

Knowing the right theology just wasn’t enough. The Center for Pastor Theologians’ program integrating theology and psychology helped him approach it all differently. Ganski attended three annual symposiums on the virtues of love, hope, and humility hosted by the Center for Pastor Theologians (CPT) with funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Earlier in his ministry, Ganski said he underappreciated the emotional aspect of community life. Many Christians are prone to diagnose any failure in ministry or church life to be a failure of doctrine—orthodoxy—or a failure of conduct—orthopraxy. But going through the recent tough season, he’s come to realize there’s another “ortho” that doesn’t get enough attention: orthopathy, which focuses on having right emotions or affections. People have failed to integrate core virtues in their lives, he said. 

Ganski, along with about 100 other pastors, visited Chicago for the three-day symposiums led by different psychologists, who provided reading material, gave presentations, and led discussions on the virtues.

 said Joel Lawrence, president of the CPT. “The things you have to be attentive to about the human person to do the overall work of virtue formation demands a knowledge base that a lot of pastors don’t naturally have.” 

The timing couldn’t have been better for Ganski, who describes that season as his “therapeutic turn.” The shift didn’t change his theology but awakened a sense that ministry and pastoral care in his congregation should be vitally connected to a virtue development that understands the emotional nature of humans. “I became more attuned to that… in part because of things I was going through,” he said. 

Narcissism among pastors

Psychologist Steven Sandage’s session on humility and narcissism resonated with many pastors, including Ganski, who recognized the role of his associate pastor’s narcissism in the conflict at his church. “If you’ve been in ministry for some time, you’re just bound to encounter narcissism in the church,” he said. “Five out of six of us have gone through challenging seasons dealing with narcissistic people to whom we were close.”

According to Sandage’s work, clergy may be particularly prone to narcissism given the circumstances within their congregations. For example, pastors are often idealized by some congregants, both individually or in their marriages. Thus, becoming a clergy member may be a strong reinforcing pull for someone who likes to be admired. Pastors sometimes also enjoy community influence and often work autonomously, without reporting to other leaders.

Some narcissists suffer low self-esteem and may feel the need to prove themselves in Christian service, which can lead to anxiety and burnout when expectations are impossible to meet.

“We’re all on a spectrum of it right?” said Ganski.

Rebecca Randall is an independent writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She writes on religion, psychology, the environment, and social issues. She is the former science editor for Christianity Today.

Lawrence said pastors began asking what needed to be reformed in the church social culture and structure to address this unbiblical tendency. They asked: “Why is church set up in ways that are oppositive of what scriptures tell pastor should be?” Lawrence said. “What is success (as a pastor)? What does it really mean to be a humble pastor especially in our time when bravado is held up as a virtue?” 

The conflict in Ganski’s church—which started in 2012 as a vibrant church plant of 120 adults plus children—ultimately split the church in two. He estimates 40 percent of the congregation left, probably mostly related to the staff issue. But maybe also because of how he handled the George Floyd moment or the pandemic. In that regard, the church’s ebbs and flows haven’t been much different from many others across the country.

“But this very personal thing—that magnified everything else and created a lot of distrust,” he said. “When you lose trust (as a leader) it takes a lot of time to earn it back.”

Since then, he’s realized in a deeper way “how I show up emotionally impacts everything,” he said.

For Ganski, belonging to a denomination helps create accountability in his church. He’s also tasked with finding new pastors for the denomination, for which he’s grown in being attuned to an individual’s orthopathy not just their orthodoxy. He’s also looking for leaders who are OK with simply belonging in the community for couple years without feeling the need to step up or take charge. 

So, how does a mindset shift trickle down to the congregation? 

Ganski said the outcome of his CPT fellowship isn’t one program or sermon that he preached. It’s simply an orientation in his ministry. He’s even begun to think about the question: what is the emotional center of my congregation? 

When he’s preaching, he’s trying to address the deeper vulnerable places in people’s lives the way the Psalms do. His sermons don’t simply address what people should learn about the faith, but also delve into how they can think about their “emotional connection or disconnection” in the world, he said. “I’m really going at the issues of the heart and trying to put my finger on the most intimate aspects of what makes us tick.”

It’s a buzz word, but Ganski thinks some of what pastors can do is create emotional resilience. “As a community you need to cultivate that as you endure the world,” he said. “Part of my job is to prepare you to suffer and even to die. All of that requires a kind of emotional resiliency. Where ultimately is my heart rooted? How do I make sense of the world in this emotional register?” 

While the CPT did not focus on joy as a virtue, Ganski thinks it’s joy that has been the emotional center holding them together despite community struggles and national divisiveness.  

In the book of Acts, suffering is often portrayed in contrast with joy. Peter and John were arrested, but soon they’re rejoicing. He sees the same in his church: they’ve been under a lot of stress, but they engage the world in joy. “To experience joy is to recognize that joy comes from outside of this world,” he said. It comes from “the resurrected Lord.”

The end of Acts chapter 2 is the emotional portrait of his church, he said. It reads: “breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God.” 

Within the church’s community group meetings, kids play, dogs run around, meals are served—it’s craziness, he said. Ganski likes to talk out his sermon texts with his community group before preaching for the whole church. One recent night, he shared Acts 2, and then everyone shared why they keep coming to church. 

“One of our values is eating and drinking,” he said.

Rebecca Randall is an independent writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She writes on religion, psychology, the environment, and social issues. She is the former science editor for Christianity Today.