Galatians 6:2 says bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
One another. It is a reciprocal phrase. It means this goes both directions. And the text does not include an exemption clause for the person standing behind the pulpit on Sunday morning.
But most churches have an unwritten rule that functions exactly like that exemption clause. The pastor gives care. The pastor receives gratitude, criticism, attendance numbers, and an occasional gift card to a restaurant. What the pastor rarely receives is the same kind of honest, sustained, burden-bearing care he is expected to offer to everyone else in the building.
This is a theological problem before it is a structural one.
The Math of Pastoral Care
You cannot keep making withdrawals from an account that never receives deposits. That is not a spiritual insight. It is arithmetic. And yet most churches are structured in a way that places the pastor permanently on the withdrawal side of the ledger, with the assumption, rarely examined, that God will keep the account solvent through supernatural means.
Sometimes that works for a season. Eventually, for almost every pastor who does not receive care, it stops working. The depletion becomes depression. The bitterness becomes visible. The calling that once felt alive starts to feel like a performance. And the pastor, who has never been given the language or the permission to say so, keeps performing it anyway.
I have walked that road. Not as a cautionary tale but as a person who lived it and came out the other side with a clear view of exactly how it happens and why it is so hard to see coming from inside it.
Why Pastors Don’t Ask for Help
There are a few things that make receiving care genuinely difficult for pastors, and they are worth naming honestly.
The first is role confusion. In a congregation, the pastor is always the helper, the counselor, the strong one. Asking for help feels like a category error. Like a surgeon asking to be sutured. It violates the implicit social contract of the role.
The second is exposure risk. Pastoral vulnerability is complicated because the pastor’s struggles can become congregational anxiety. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person and it becomes a prayer request. Pastoral care requires trust in both directions, and that trust is hard to build in a system where the pastor is also the authority figure, the preacher, and the boss.
The third, and I think the most important, is that many pastors have a deep, mostly unconscious belief that being needed is how they are loved. If they stop performing the helper role, they are afraid of what will remain. That is not a character flaw. It is a wound. And it requires more than better structures to address.
What Mutual Care Actually Requires
A church built on Galatians 6:2 in both directions is not built by accident. It requires a pastor who is willing to be known as a person and not just a role. That is genuinely costly. It means letting people in past the sermon. It means admitting, occasionally and appropriately, that the journey is hard and that you do not always have it together.
It does not mean using the pulpit as a therapy session or turning every sermon into a personal disclosure. There is a difference between transparency and oversharing, and a good pastor knows the difference. But it does mean that somewhere in your life, in your community, in your marriage if you are married, in your friendships, someone knows how you actually are. Not the pastoral version of fine. The actual version.
That kind of community does not usually exist inside the congregation. Which is one of the reasons many pastors need care relationships that exist outside their church. A counselor. A coach. A peer group of other pastors. Some place where they are not the pastor in the room.
You Cannot Give What You Do Not Have
The title of this post is not a management principle. It is a statement about spiritual reality. The pastoral care you offer your congregation flows, over time, from the depth of your own connection to the Shepherd who cares for you. When that connection is thin, the care becomes thin, even if you are still going through the motions of it.
The most sustained, life-giving pastoral care I have ever seen comes from pastors who have learned to receive. Who have let God meet them in their depletion rather than preaching through it. Who have allowed other people to carry some of the weight they have been hauling alone.
That is not weakness. That is what the text actually asks for. One another. Both directions. No exemptions.
If you are better at giving care than receiving it, you are not unusual, but you are running a deficit that will eventually collect. I work with pastors on exactly this, building the kind of honest support structures that make long ministry possible.
Your first call with me is free. Book it here.
