In the first episode of our Will Your Anchor Hold? series, John shares his own experience of serving in ministry while quietly carrying more than he realized. What looked like resilience from the outside was slowly becoming exhaustion, isolation, and a growing sense that something wasn't right.
So many ministry leaders know what it feels like to keep going long after the warning signs have appeared. John reflects on the expectations we place on ourselves, the assumptions that come with ministry, and the moment he finally began to ask for help.
If you've ever wondered whether you're carrying more than you should, this is where the journey begins.
About Rev. John Borthwick
John Borthwick leads Ministry Forum as the Director of the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. John knows intimately the ups and downs of congregational ministry. Having served in congregational ministry for 25 years, John has lived it and, as he would say at times, just survived and often thrived in this unique and challenging role. He is passionate about supporting ministry leaders as they answer the call to serve. During COVID-19, John responded to the needs he witnessed among his colleagues and friends by creating The Abbey, a virtual space for community and learning. He intends to translate his recent experience on a much larger scale as he stewards Ministry Forum. John looks forward to being available to ministry leaders - reach out to him today!
Show Notes
The hymn “Will Your Anchor Hold?” (Priscilla J. Owens, 1882)
TEND Academy — John’s Train-the-Trainer program in secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue (now “empathic strain”), and the organization he became an Associate with: tendacademy.ca
For active members of The Presbyterian Church in Canada's Pension and Benefits plan - you can reach out to the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) here: https://presbyterian.ca/pensionandbenefits/active-members/
Support If any of this resonates and you’re struggling, you don’t have to carry it alone.
Support & Crisis Resources (Canada): If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call or text 9-8-8, any time, day or night. Support is free, 24/7/365, and available in English and French. 988.ca
Hope for Wellness Helpline: Immediate, culturally grounded, trauma-informed support for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples: call 1-855-242-3310 or use the online chat, 24/7. Support available in Cree, Ojibway, and Inuktitut on request.
Kids Help Phone: For children and young adults across Canada: call 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868, 24/7. 211
For help finding local mental health, social, and community services: call or text 2-1-1, or visit 211.ca.
In an emergency, call 9-1-1.
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Transcript
[Introduction]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum podcast, where we believe that you are not alone in your ministry journey. I'm the Reverend John Borthwick, your host, coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. Here we connect, encourage, and resource ministry leaders all across Canada, in the joys, the struggles, and everything in between. I love that I get to do this work, and most of all, that I get to share it with each and every one of you. So, thanks for giving us a listen today. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, this podcast is made with you in mind.
[John Borthwick]
Welcome. This is "Will Your Anchor Hold?” from Ministry Forum, where we are constantly saying, "You are not alone in ministry”, and we constantly say it because we want you to hear it, and especially as we embark on this six-episode journey around a topic that's pretty near and dear to my heart. I'm the Reverend John Borthwick, I'm the curator of Ministry Forum, and I get to do this work through the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. But before we go anywhere together, I want to start where - I've probably mentioned, maybe highlighted, maybe touched on over the three years that I've been in this role, but I want to start today with the truth about myself. That hymn, Priscilla Owens wrote it back in 1882, and it asked the same thing over and over again: "Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?” I love that question, but for a long stretch of my life, I probably no, not probably, I did have it completely backwards. I thought the question was whether I was strong enough to keep everyone else anchored. It honestly never occurred to me to ask whether I was anchored myself, and so this first episode in this series is my story. The one that I am inspired by, motivated by, the one that drives the passion I have to do the work that I do. My story. Now, one quick word before I dive in about who this might be for. My hope is that this series will land as something meaningful for anyone who cares for other people, anyone at all. But I should be upfront with you: it is unapologetically my story, and because it's mine, it comes framed for ministry leaders, often for clergy, maybe specifically, because that's the world that I've lived in from the inside. So, if that's not quite your world, I hope that you'll still choose to walk with me during this series. Whoever you are, wherever you do your caring, my hope is that you'll glean a takeaway or two for your own journey in this world of caring for other people. Before we begin, one cautionary note: to tell this honestly, I'm going to touch on some dark places, including a stretch when I quietly wished I could just stop going on altogether. Now, if that's tender ground for you today, please take good care of yourself as you listen. And if you need someone, we've left some resources in the show notes to reach out for if you need it. So, let's begin. For 26 years, most of my adult life now, I guess, I've served the church as a congregational minister, and if you're listening to this podcast, you likely know the gig; the uniform, the collar, the title, and the ebb and flow of the work-baptisms, weddings, and funerals, the relentless sermon prep and delivery, Sunday in and Sunday out, the quiet crises that people bring only to their minister, the standing and the sitting with people in the thin places between life and death, and the meetings. Oh, the meetings! So, so many meetings. In the community, I sometimes describe myself when I was in congregational ministry as a little bit of a combination. Of the vicar of Dibley, and a whole lot of King of Kensington, and I'm dating myself if you know some of those references. In the city I served for almost two decades, even without the collar, an awful lot of people knew exactly who I was. And my kids, oh my kids, they'd walk on ahead of me because I'd inevitably get stopped by yet another stranger, stranger at least to them, wanting to chat, wanting to talk about something. And you know what? I actually loved it. I loved every part of it.
But I also noticed the way people changed, even slightly, the moment that they learned that I was a minister, and it made real friendship hard for me and for my partner. You see, people make assumptions about us clergy, and if you're one of those people, you know what that looks like. And that's the thing about a uniform; it does a job. It tells everyone around you who you are before you've even said a word, and if you're not careful, it starts telling you who you are too. Mine said this one's the strong one. This one's the steady one. This is the one you can count on. This is the one who copes. You don't have to worry about him. He's here to worry about you. But underneath the uniform was a body, the same man every day, and the body keeps its own accounts. Some have said the body keeps score. It doesn't care what you're wearing; it tallies every hard thing you carry quietly and patiently, and sooner or later, it presents the bill. So let me tell you the truth I kept underneath. If you'd asked me back then, John, how are you coping? I'd have told you, “oh, really well, no big deal. I got this. I can take it”. That's what the one who copes says. That's what the uniform says. Do people really want to know how you're coping, how you're doing? I wasn't sure they did. But was I coping? Was everything fine? Was I doing A-okay? Hmm. Well, I was drinking a lot, and not the kind of drinking of just nature's thirst quencher, but drinking, and I think you know what I mean. Just to take the edge off. I'd always had a long fuse, but it had become a hair trigger. I was angry often, and my boundaries - what boundaries? People need me; they're more important. Even the interpersonal ones got blurred from time to time, and the alcohol didn't help, though that was no excuse. Sometimes I caught myself wishing I could be one of the very people I was caring for. I'll just say it out loud: there were times that I found myself wishing I could be diagnosed with something, just so that somebody might take care of me as opposed to me doing all the caring for other people. And there were darker times still when I wished I could simply just turn it all off permanently. Little did I know it, but I was ticking every single box on what we called back then “the compassion fatigue checklist”, but maybe you already saw that coming, and if you did, well, good for you. You're already ahead of where I was, way back then. And here's the thing: I lucked out, and I'm going to call it pure luck, or maybe in this context I should call it the grace of God. Though the me back then wouldn't have believed I deserved any such grace. I mostly managed to keep it away from the day job, mostly. But there were occasional sharp words and outbursts, but people seemed to let them go, or didn't notice, or maybe just didn't want to say anything. My family bore the brunt of it. My very patient partner, most of all, who'd have had every single right to call me out for account on my temper, my drinking, and my erratic behavior. In those blurry, boundaryless places, I didn't happen to find someone else hurting enough to cross a line that I couldn't come back from, and when it came to the darkest thoughts that I had, I simply never had the means, or the plan, or maybe even the nerve. I knew something wasn't right. I wanted to take a stress leave. But I told myself that I couldn't. It would damage my career. I thought, what would people think of me? I'd be letting people down. There's that sermon that still has to get done. There's that project that's happening. Other people need to be cared for. I'm supposed to be the strong one. I remember saying it as clear as day inside my own head.
I can't take another tragedy, another diagnosis, another visit to hospice, sitting in the very same room I'd already sat in three times over just a few months. I'd see someone walking towards me, and I'd find myself quietly praying that it wasn't to hand me just one more crisis. If anything buoyed me up through those years, it was a strange sort of comfort. I could see that I wasn't alone in this. I had peers who must have been feeling exactly what I was feeling, or maybe even worse, and who never said a word. And for some, it was worse. Just as I never said a word, they never said a word. And today I'm saying a word. Because all around us, I saw the divorces and the boundary crossings, the criminal investigations, the heart attacks, and yes, even the suicides. The aftermath of people carrying what I was carrying, and then the body, the body that had been keeping its accounts this whole time-finally presented the bill. I started at last to pay attention to what it had been telling me all along, and it had been sounding pretty much every alarm. I just wasn't listening, or at least I just hadn't known how to hear it and listen for it. One day, I was donating blood, and the nurse taking my pulse and blood pressure told me that the numbers were high enough that she was thinking about sending me to the hospital. We laughed it off a little and blamed it on the coffee, the two double doubles that I'd already had that morning. I had unexplained pain, mostly in my gut. I'd get it all checked and I'd get the all clear from a doctor, and then one day I got shingles, in my early 40s. Shingles. And I thought to myself, "That's what some seniors in my congregation get, not me”. And of the whole parade of health professionals, my chiropractor was the only one who thought to ask this question, “John, are you under a lot of stress”? Who me? Stress? Now I'm a voracious learner. I have a squirrel-like curiosity, and I've had it my whole life long. So, I started to delve into the world of stress and trauma, dip a toe in, and began to do some things that would make a significant change in my life. I took a silent retreat, and began to make it an annual thing, just to decompress, just to stop talking, to stop listening, just to stop. And eventually, I did the hardest thing of all. I sat down with a colleague and I told them. I told them honestly, some much more graphically, of the story that I've just told you, and once they recovered from the shock of my sliming them, and after they had said the words, "But you're Borthwick, nothing gets to you, nothing sticks to you”, they then paused, and they connected me with a clinician, and slowly, I got to work, to work on myself for once. I reduced my drinking and finally named it for what it was - a maladaptive coping strategy. I built much healthier and stronger boundaries. I took better care of me, and I stepped back from filling my life with more and more traumatic input. I leaned back into my sense of purpose, and I found meaning in the work again. Ministry, again. I got educated and better informed, and I chose with real intention the environments and the situations and even the friends that were good for me. I took control of what I could, and I let go of what I couldn't, and I began finally to press pause. And here's the actual grace in that. It was that recovery, that long unglamorous work, that eventually gave me the capacity to say yes to something the old me would have never survived. Later in my career, in ministry, for a season, I stepped into the first responder community in my city, since I had been invited in.
Drawn, I suspect, by all those years of connection, all those chats with strangers on the streets. People whose whole identity, whose literal uniform declares, "I am the one who copes”, and it was there, serving alongside them and taking advantage of every scrap of training that I could get my hands on, that I finally came to understand what had happened to me years earlier in the church, and in ministry. And was able to come alongside people who were struggling in the very same, and sometimes differently than the ways I was way back then. And one of the most significant pieces of that learning was from Tend Academy's Train the Trainer program on secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue, what's now being called “empathic strain”. It handed me the words for something I'd already lived through without even really understanding it, and it led me to become an associate with them over the last several years, starting at the beginning of the pandemic, actually. Somewhere in all of that, something shifted. My role stopped defining me. I used to say it never defined me, but it kinda did, at least on how I approached the role. I realized, and I knew this then, but couldn't fully embrace it in a grounded way, that I'm more, much more, than a minister. And I could finally say, and actually meant it, that I am John Borthwick, a beloved child of my Creator, and I am enough. And here's what all of it taught me: the thing it took me far too long to learn, that being impacted by this work, this ministry, this calling, is not a failure. It's not a sign that your faith is thin, or that your call was a mistake, or that you're not cut out for this. It's the entirely predictable cost of caring deeply over a long time for people who are suffering. And if you feel it, you're not weak. You're paying attention. That understanding is what also brings me here. These days, I get to gather all of it up through the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College, and honestly, it kind of feels like all of this is the culmination of the many areas and spaces and places that I've had the gift to minister in. The collision, the recovery, every hard one bit of learning-it all seems to have been quietly pointing here. The chance to sit with you and to say on this podcast, “let me spare you some of the trouble it took me to figure this out. Pull up a chair, and let's talk”. And like you, perhaps, or like the person you'd want to become, I'm now choosing and have been for some time, to walk the not always easy, often complicated path of wellness, resilience, and self-compassion, and I'd be honored to walk a stretch of it with you through this series that I'm doing with you. So, one last thing before we go today, because it's going to run underneath this whole series. You might hear me say compassion fatigue, and I might keep saying that occasionally, because that's the language I first learned it in, and it's still the phrase that most people recognize. But somewhere along the way, those who researched this stuff concluded that it wasn't the best way of understanding it, and that's a bigger conversation that I'll properly get into next time. But I want to plant the seed now - the more honest name for what happened to me and has happened to others and continues to happen to people each and every day is “empathic strain”, and that single change of word opens up a far more hopeful way through. And so that's where we begin. The hardest storm I ever weathered wasn't the one anyone could see. It was the one raging quietly, behind the collar, the person I was slowly losing ground to the minister that everyone seemed to need me to be. And if any of this has landed a little too close to home today, stay with me, because the reason so many of us don't see that collision coming, isn't ignorance. It's the stories we tell ourselves; the quiet, faithful sounding lies that keep us pouring out long after the well has run dry. Give till it hurts. I'll rest when I'm dead, it would be selfish of me to stop and press pause.
Next time, we're going to name those lies out loud. Until then, will your anchor hold? Let's make sure that it will.
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us on the Ministry Forum podcast. We hope today's episode encouraged you and reminded you that you are not alone in ministry. If this episode resonated, tell someone. Please don't keep it a secret. And if you can, subscribe, rate, or leave a review wherever you listen. It helps us reach more ministry leaders just like you, and honestly, it reminds us that we're not alone either. Find more resources and ways to connect at ministryforum.ca, and follow us on social media at Ministry Forum. Until next time, may God's strength and courage be yours. May you be fearless, not reckless. May you be well in body, mind, and spirit, and may you be at peace.