By Rev. Rich Füss
What I’m Noticing
Our congregations are very anxious, and I think it’s time we said so out loud.
Lately I’ve had a window into this from several directions: in my own congregation, in conversations with colleagues across our conference, in conversations with folks in other denominations, and in gatherings where clergy and laity have talked honestly about what they’re carrying. The settings differ. The details differ. But the pattern underneath them is remarkably consistent.
None of these are stories about bad people. They are stories about good, faithful people under strain. I’m writing because I’ve come to believe that the strain itself has a shape, and that if we can see the shape, we can respond to it with more wisdom and more grace, toward each other and toward ourselves.
Why we’re anxious
Let’s start by being kind to ourselves: there are good reasons to be anxious right now.
We are living through a season of deep civic turmoil, and that might be a huge understatement. Many of us are uncertain whether the institutions and shared commitments we once took for granted will hold. The news arrives faster than we can absorb it, and much of it lands in our bodies before it reaches our minds.
Meanwhile, our churches are being asked to do a great deal with very little. Buildings age. Budgets tighten. Volunteers who carried the load for thirty years are tired, and the next generation isn’t lining up behind them. Words like “merger” get floated around. Many of our most faithful members have watched the church they love grow smaller year after year, no matter how many programs they launched, how many casseroles they baked, or how many “Welcome!” banners they hung.
That is real grief. It deserves to be named as grief, not dismissed as negativity. But grief and fears that go unnamed rarely stay quiet. They find other ways to come out.
What anxiety does in a congregation
The late rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman spent his career studying how anxiety moves through families and congregations. In A Failure of Nerve, he described what he called chronically anxious systems. Peter Steinke later applied that work directly to churches in Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times. Their observations read uncomfortably like a description of many of our beloved churches right now:
- We get reactive. Small things become big things. A change to the bulletin, a misread email, or a budget line can set off a disproportionate response.
- We herd together. The pressure to agree grows stronger, and people who raise a different view get treated as disloyal rather than as honest.
- We look for someone to blame. It feels better to locate the problem in a person than to sit with a problem no one person caused.
- We want a quick fix. We grow impatient with slow, patient work and grab for whatever promises relief as soon as possible.
- We long for a leader who will make the anxiety go away. And that is the one I most want us to look at.
If you recognize your congregation in that list, take heart. You are not uniquely broken. You are human, and so is everyone sitting in the pews around you, and so is the person in the pulpit.
The Fix-It Trap
Here is the pattern I see most often right now: an unspoken expectation that the pastor will fix things.
Fix the decline. Fix the budget. Fix the young-families problem. And sometimes, though it’s rarely said so plainly, fix the world, or at least make Sunday morning a place where it no longer feels broken. When the fixing doesn’t happen, the disappointment has to go somewhere. More and more, I hear it land on the pastor. I’ve heard more congregations say “we need a new pastor” this year than in any year of my ministry.
I want to be careful here. Sometimes a change of pastor really is the right thing. But the hope underneath that sentence is usually this: a new pastor will take this feeling away.
Friedman would say that when a system can’t bear its own anxiety, it puts the anxiety on one person. Sometimes that person is cast as the savior who will turn everything around. Sometimes that person is cast as the problem whose departure will bring relief. These look like opposites. They are actually the same move.
Both hand our shared anxiety to one person and ask them to carry it away.
What usually follows is predictable. A new pastor arrives. There’s a honeymoon, and everyone breathes easier for a year or two. Then the old anxiety returns, because the forces producing it never left. The building is still old. The culture is still shifting. The grief is still unprocessed. And the cycle starts again, a little more tired each time.
A brief note: sometimes we locate this “anxiety fix” on something like a merger as well. In my current appointment, Hope UMC, a newly merged congregation, we are learning that a merger is not a magic pill or a quick fix. At best, it gives us a slightly longer window of time to work on “adapting” (see the next paragraph).
The leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz offers a helpful distinction. Some problems are technical: they have known solutions, and an expert can fix them. Others are adaptive: they require the people themselves to learn, change, and grieve. Most of what our congregations face right now is adaptive. No pastor, however gifted, can do a congregation’s adaptive work for it.
A word to my clergy colleagues: we are not innocent in this. Many of us quietly believe we should be able to fix it. So we over-function. We say yes to everything, absorb everyone’s worry, and call our exhaustion faithfulness. That isn’t leadership. It’s anxiety wearing a stole.
The boat and the wilderness
Scripture is not surprised by any of this.
In the wilderness, after the long walk out of Egypt and with the promised land still a rumor, the people turned to one another and said, “Let us choose a captain, and go back to Egypt” (Numbers 14:4). Wanting a new leader when the journey gets hard is about as old as the people of God.
And then there is the boat. The storm is raging, the disciples are bailing water, and Jesus is asleep on a cushion in the stern. They shake him awake: “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38). He does calm the storm. But then he turns to them with a question: “Why are you afraid?”
I find that strangely comforting. Jesus takes their fear seriously enough to ask about it. He seems to care as much about what’s happening in the disciples as about what’s happening to the boat.
That is the invitation for us. The storm is real. We should keep rowing, keep bailing, keep doing the faithful work in front of us. But we also need to ask ourselves the harder question about what our fear is doing to us and to one another. The God who was present in the wilderness and resting in the stern is still in the boat with us. As John Wesley said near the end of his life, “The best of all is, God is with us.”
Questions for Reflection
None of us can lower the anxiety of an entire system by ourselves. But each of us can notice our own part in it and choose to respond with a little more calm and curiosity. Steinke calls this being a “non-anxious presence.” I prefer “less-anxious presence.” It’s more honest, and more achievable before the second cup of coffee.
Here are some questions to sit with, alone or together.
For laity:
- What am I hoping someone else will lift off my shoulders?
- When I feel frustrated with my pastor or church leaders, what am I actually afraid of?
- Is there grief about our church I haven’t let myself feel or say out loud?
- What is one piece of the adaptive work that belongs to me, not to the pastor?
For clergy:
- Where am I over-functioning, and what is it costing me and my people?
- Am I staying connected to my congregation without taking on everyone’s anxiety as my own?
- What would it look like to trust that my people can bear some of this work?
- Who is caring for me while I care for others?
For SPRCs and church councils:
- When we talk about wanting change in leadership, are we naming a real mismatch, or hoping for relief from a feeling?
- When did we last name a problem without naming a person?
- Are we making decisions in haste because waiting or going slowly feels unbearable?
- Have we invited our district superintendent or a trusted outside voice into the conversation early, before positions harden?
A Word of Hope (That Isn’t a Fix)
I don’t have a five-step plan to end congregational anxiety. If I did, I’d be guilty of exactly the quick fix I’ve been warning against.
What I do have is a conviction based on experience. Congregations that learn to name their fear, grieve their losses, and share the work among many hands become sturdier over time. That doesn’t necessarily mean bigger. It means more resilient, more honest, and more able to be the body of Christ in a frightened world.
Pastors cannot fix our churches, and we cannot fix the world. But together, clergy and laity, we can practice being the kind of people who don’t turn on each other when the waves come up. That might be the most countercultural witness we have to offer right now. So let’s be gentle with one another this season. Let’s keep rowing. And let’s remember who is in the boat with us.
Rev. Rich Füss serves as pastor of Hope United Methodist Church in Bellevue, Washington.
