15/09/2026
Dr Vanessa R Brooks wrote: "I pastored a small community church that I planted for 14 years.❤️
My husband and I pastored together, and while we were bivocational, we volunteered as full-time pastors. So we were not in ministry for money. 💰
Our mission to pastor was grounded in our pure and genuine love for Jesus.
My late mama and Jesus modeled the kind of leader I desired to be.
Our church was small but powerful. Financially poor but rich in miracles. We were Christ-centered.
But there’s a spiritually dark side to pastoring a small church that no one ever talks about.
I will today.
Pastoring a small community church can consume you.
The phone calls were constant. Morning, noon, and night, people called with crises, emergencies, relationship problems, financial problems, family problems, and everything in between.
One Friday night, Michael and I were on the interstate headed to a dinner date when we received an urgent call from a church family. We got off the interstate, went to the hospital, and spent the evening there with them.
We never made it to our date.
And that wasn’t some extraordinary occurrence. Stories like that happened all the time.
Before we had a church van, my husband would leave home two hours early to pick people up for church. Sometimes he would drive all the way to their house, and they wouldn’t even come outside.
At one point, we were driving an hour into another county to pick up one man, bring him to church, and then drive him an hour back home after service.
When we finally bought a church van for a couple hundred dollars, we still found ourselves sacrificing. One of our members needed a car to get to work, so we loaned them one of ours. My husband drove the old church van to work instead. That van would overheat, and he would end up sitting on the side of the road.
My husband and I would spend excessive hours helping church members with things that had absolutely nothing to do with preaching or running a church—car trouble, transportation problems, unexpected emergencies, whatever came up. If somebody needed help, we were usually the people they called.
We loaned our cars out.
We babysat people’s children.
We let people live in our church.
We even let people live in our home.
We helped people financially from our own pockets.
We counseled marriages and relationships. We helped plan funerals. We visited hospitals. We answered crisis calls. We raised money for families in distress.
And because it was a small church with limited resources and limited leadership, there wasn’t some department to send people to.
Everybody came to us.
Everybody could see us.
Everybody could reach us.
And somehow, being accessible slowly became being responsible for everything.
We were a self-funded church. We weren’t receiving grants or government funding. We lived in one of the poorest counties in the state, and there simply wasn’t enough money coming into the church for us to draw a salary or to build programs.
So when the church didn’t have enough, sometimes my husband and I pulled money out of our own pockets.
And I don’t think we talk about that side of pastoring enough.
We talk about pastors taking advantage of church members’ money—and I’m sure that happens.
But there’s another side.
There are small-church pastors taking money out of their own household finances to help the people they pastor.
We did.
More than once.
And the people who helped us build and operate our church were volunteers. I am deeply grateful for them. But because they were volunteering their time, I started feeling indebted to them too.
I felt like I owed them something extra because they were giving us their time.
That created another kind of weight.
And then there was the pain nobody prepared me for.
What happened when you couldn’t meet someone’s expectations?
Sometimes they left.
Sometimes they got angry.
Sometimes they posted about me online.
Sometimes they told half the story.
Sometimes they stopped coming.
Sometimes they shut down.
Sometimes they turned against me.
Sometimes they betrayed me.
I’ve even had people rally other people in the church against me.
There was a season when several people from my core leadership team left at the same time. I didn’t know there were people inside the church literally working to destroy what we had built.
And we don’t talk about this enough.
I might get canceled for saying it, but it happens.
Pastors can be deceptive.
Pastors can hurt people.
Pastors can betray people.
And people in the pews can hurt and betray pastors too.
I know because it happened to me.
Some of the people I loved the most would leave during times that were supposed to be celebrations. It felt like a dagger in my chest.
And because ours was a small church, these weren’t just names on a membership roll.
We were like family.
At least that’s what it felt like to me.
It was real to me.
So when people you have loved, sacrificed for, prayed for, counseled, fed, housed, transported, supported, and cared for turn against you, it can destroy a core part of your identity.
I began questioning my calling.
I became bitter but tried to hide my pain.
I stopped enjoying ministry after a while.
It became burdensome.
I felt used and controlled.
And I learned something else nobody likes to say out loud:
The people have the power, not the pastor.
They can leave and turn everything upside down.
I kept pastoring for years with a broken heart because I didn’t want to be called a quitter or a failure.
I didn’t want to disappoint God.
I didn’t want to disappoint the people.
I didn’t want my family to say, “I told you so.”
I didn’t want people to silently win.
So I stayed.
And stayed.
I stayed until exhaustion and bitterness took root.
I stayed until compassion fatigue invaded my spirit without my permission.
I stayed until I completely burned out.
I stayed until I had nothing left to give.
I tried to find someone to pastor the church, but to no avail.
I flatlined spiritually.
And I was afraid I would physically too.
I experienced high blood pressure, insomnia, anxiety, and deep grief.
And I don’t give a damn about the naysayers who will try to gaslight me into believing I was never called or who will say if I was called this wouldn’t have happened.
You can have several seats. 💺
I experienced the same compassion fatigue that Jesus did.
Perhaps you didn’t experience it because you lacked compassion.
But I understand something today that I didn’t understand then.
Love was never the problem.
I loved people deeply. I still do.
The problem was that I had love and compassion without the boundaries, systems, processes, and training necessary to sustain them.
I should have had clear boundaries around my leadership, my relationships, and how I engaged with the people I pastored. Small church or not, those boundaries were critical. They would have protected my heart and protected the people I was called to serve.
I prepared spiritually to pastor. I prayed. I studied Scripture. I sought God.
But nobody told me I also needed to understand people management, systemic pastoral care, organizational culture, organizational leadership, and organizational management.
A church is an organization.
We can spiritualize it all we want, but when human beings gather around a mission, leadership, resources, responsibilities, relationships, and expectations, organizational management matters.
I also didn’t understand my limitations as a pastoral counselor.
I didn’t know how to recognize when someone needed more than my prayer and support. I didn’t know enough about the early signs and symptoms of mental illness. I didn’t know when I was reaching the limits of pastoral care or when and how to make an appropriate referral.
So I took on too much.
Eventually, that experience sent me back to school for my master’s degree in pastoral counseling.
And ultimately, those 14 years of pastoring, counseling, loving, hurting, burning out, learning, studying, and researching became part of the road that led me to my doctorate and the work I’m doing today.
Now I’m building what I wish Michael and I had.
A new standard of pastoral care.
I want pastors to have actual systems in place so they aren’t spending their ministries reacting to one crisis after another and putting out fires.
I want churches to have pastoral-care processes, protocols, boundaries, decision pathways, referral processes, and operational systems that everybody understands.
I want pastors to know where their responsibility begins, where their limitations are, and what happens next when someone needs care beyond those limitations.
Because pastors cannot sustainably care for people if they are not caring for themselves.
And compassion without systems can eventually consume the very person doing the caring.
That’s why I’m building AFFINITY™.
So what happened to me won’t happen to the next pastor.
So pastors don’t get hurt.
So pastors don’t inadvertently hurt the people they’re trying to help.
And so people receive the care they actually need and deserve.
I don’t want another pastor’s love and compassion for people to eventually turn against them and become their enemy.
I want them to have what I didn’t have.
A new standard of pastoral care.
This is my story.
Tell me yours."
