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Your job, young pastor, is to maintain a non-anxious presence within the church you pastor.  Knowing that we live in a time when anxiety is everywhere–a time when religion, in particular, has been whipped into a paralyzing frenzy of anxiety by those who are served by fear.  Easier said than done, maintaining a non-anxious presence.  Where to begin?  Befriend the book of Psalms.
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Here’s a myth about pastoring that will crush you if you mistake it for truth: when a pastor is doing his or her job, the church will be calm. Like any myth, this one endures because it distorts a truth: that good pastoring helps a church manage conflict, tension, and turmoil better than bad pastoring. (And that bad pastoring can generate enormous turmoil in a church.)  The myth hides the reality that we pastor now in an age of very high anxiety, owing to a rapid pace of change all around us.
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Maybe you’ve notice that pastoring seems to be a near occaision to mainline anxiety.  I’ve been battling anxiety for the past year myself, thank you, but I seem to be on the mend.  Thanks in no small part to the best book on leadership I’ve read in years: A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman.  Stop, drop, and read this book if you are a young pastor battling anxiety.
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