Many of us were taught that faithful ministry means giving until there's nothing left. John gently challenges that assumption. Drawing on scripture, neuroscience, and his own experience, this episode explores the difference between empathy and compassion, why those two words matter more than we might think, and how some of the stories we've inherited about ministry can quietly pull us toward exhaustion. Rather than asking us to care less, John invites us to care differently. It's a conversation about boundaries, rest, and rediscovering a way of serving that reflects the life of Jesus instead of simply rewarding endless sacrifice.
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
Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
The neuroscience beneath the empathy/compassion distinction traces to the research of Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki on empathy versus compassion training.
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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 back to “Will Your Anchor Hold”. I'm the Reverend John Borthwick, and if this is the first time you've joined this series, “Will Your Anchor Hold”, then you might want to go back and listen to episode one of this series, because last time in that episode I told my story. The one where the person I was kept quietly losing ground to the minister that everyone seemed to need me to be. Now, right at the end, I planted a seed. I said that the name I'd first learned for what happened to me, “compassion fatigue”, turned out not to be actually the best way of understanding it, and I promised that I'd explain. So, let's start there, because the very first lie we tell ourselves in this work is hiding inside those two little words, and here's the lie: that compassion is a fuel tank. That you begin your ministry, your shift, or your week with a full tank of the stuff, and every person you care for draws a little out, until one day you turn the key, and there's simply nothing left. Compassion fatigue. It's a compelling picture. It also turns out it's actually not quite true, because compassion, real compassion, doesn't actually run out. We have our Buddhist siblings to thank for this caution first of all, and brain science has since backed them up. Researchers who've looked closely have found something surprising: compassion isn't the thing that's draining you. Compassion actually seems to be very nearly inexhaustible. It's one of those places where science and the scriptures quietly nod at each other, the wellspring of care runs deeper than we do. So, if it isn't compassion that's fatiguing us, well, what is? Well, here's where one small life-changing distinction comes in, and it's between two words we usually treat as the same thing: empathy and compassion. Empathy is feeling with someone when you sit with a grieving family, and your own chest goes tight. When you hear the details of somebody's worst day, and you carry them home in your body. That's empathy. You are, in a very real way, taking their pain into yourself. And here's what the brain scans show: when you empathize like that, the very same pain circuits light up in your brain, as if the hurt was your own. Empathy, in other words, actually hurts, and it's meant to. It's part of how we stay human to one another. But to do it all, to do it every single day, for years and years and years, well, it'll wear a groove into our lives, and that wearing down has a name - a truer one than compassion fatigue. It's called “empathic strain”. Now, compassion is a different thing altogether. Compassion is feeling for someone. It's the warmth, the care, the movement toward the part of you that doesn't just ache alongside the person, but actually is also wanting to help, and it reaches out to. And the remarkable finding is that compassion lights up an entirely different set of circuits in our brains. Not the ones wired for pain, but those very circuits that are wired for warmth, and connection, and even a kind of joy. Compassion. Doesn't drain you the way empathy does. Compassion can actually hold you up. Let me say that as plainly as I possibly can. Feeling with can wear you out. Feeling for can keep you standing, or maybe it's better said, it can keep you grounded, or even dare I say, anchored. Now, if you know your scriptures, you'll already recognize this. Over and over, the Gospels tell us that Jesus was moved with compassion. The word underneath is a gut word, a stirring deep in the bowels, the ancients would have said, kind of word. But notice what it does every single time.
It moves Jesus toward the person. It becomes action. It is something whereby he is moved with compassion, and Jesus heals someone. Moved with compassion, he feeds the people. He teaches; he touches, moved by compassion. You see, compassion in the scriptures is never a puddle that you drown in. It's a current that carries you toward another person and somehow doesn't empty you out. And when one of God's own does run dry, think of Elijah, collapsed under the broom tree, so utterly spent that he asks God to just let him die. Look at how God responds, not with "Try harder, Elijah”, or not with "You, you of all people, should be more spiritual than this”. No, God lets him sleep. God sends him food and speaks finally not in the earthquake or the fire, but in a still, small, quiet voice. That is the tenderness we so rarely think to extend to ourselves. So, the goal here is not to feel less. Please hear me on that. The goal is not to feel less. The cure for empathic strain is not to armor up and just stop caring completely. There's actually a name for the carer who's gone completely numb, who feels nothing anymore, and it isn't health; it's the far edge of burnout. The goal is what's sometimes called “the edge of compassion”, the sweet spot between caring too much and not caring at all. Enough empathy to stay tender and human, and enough compassion to keep moving toward people without being dragged under. And here's the best news that I know about this work: that sweet spot is not a fixed setting that you were born with. It is not something that you're stuck with; it's actually a practice. But, and here's the trouble: ministry culture is absolutely full of quiet lies that shove us off that sweet spot hard, toward the caring end, too much, and then applaud us for it. Let me name a few and see if any of them sound familiar to you. Lie number one: Give till it hurts. We take something beautiful and true - that love is sacrificial-and we bend it until it hurts becomes the actual goal instead of the cost. We start measuring our faithfulness by our exhaustion. If I'm not running on empty, then I must not be giving enough, working hard enough. Measured sacrifice can be holy. Self-destruction was never the ask. Lie number two. I'll rest when I'm dead. I actually heard someone say this to me one time, and it stuck with me ever since they said it. We wear our lack of Sabbath like a kind of merit badge, but rest was never a prize handed to the faithful. It was a command that was given to them. God rested, even Jesus slept through the storm. If rest was essential for them, what on earth makes us think we've somehow outgrown it? Lie number three: It would be selfish to stop. Now this one's clever because it's dressed up in a kind of humility. But love your neighbour as yourself has that little phrase tacked on the end that we love to skip right past. We say, "love your neighbour”, and we forget the "as yourself” part because caring for yourself isn't the opposite of that command. It's embedded. it's built right into it. And here's the sneakiest one of all, If I don't do it, who will? The Messiah complex, that quiet forgetting that the job of savior is thankfully already taken. Even the Good Samaritan, the gold standard for neighbour love, didn't climb down into the ditch, and simply set up house there. He bound the wounds, carried the man to an inn, paid what was needed, and then he left. He delegated, he trusted others to carry a share. Boundary to compassion is still compassion. Now, underneath every one of these is one deeper lie, and it's the one that I most want to pull up by the roots. It's the belief that this is simply who you are, that you're a caring person, and if you're going to care for people, then you're going to burn out, and that's just the price of admission. There's no way to change it. That's just the way caring goes.
I think it all starts with how we choose to perceive the world around us, that get us hooked by this notion, this lie, this how we see things, the lens through which we decide to view our everyday interactions, our challenges, and at the very core of it, how we perceive other human beings. The experts have a name for this; they call it “mindset”. Carol Dweck has literally written the book on it called "Mindset: Helpfully Mapping our Human Propensity Toward One of Two Settings”. And here's where I think this idea of how we see things and how Dweck frames it is absolute gold. You see, there's a fixed mindset. There's also a growth mindset. I'll leave you to explore her work more fully another time, but it's worth naming here because mindset is the soil all those other lives grow in. For me, I definitely had a mindset. I had a way of thinking and seeing the world around me in ministry, and I'll call it as it was, and certainly fixed was the name of it. It was fixed, although truthfully, there was nothing fixed about it. It was so incredibly broken. I believe that what I was experiencing day in and day out, my dedication to the service of others, was natural, was right, was appropriate. That sacrifice and suffering were simply necessary to be in ministry. That emptying myself right down to the dregs was my calling and was holy even. And remember that first lie: "Give till it hurts”. Well, here's where it was formed, and is endlessly reinforced by the very faith communities that I served. That many of us serve, because in the Christian tradition we follow someone who was crucified, who died in the service of humanity, and the quiet logic runs: Well, if it was good enough for Jesus, then surely we can work straight through our vacations. We can endure endless criticism, and we can pour out our time and our very selves for others. Whatever we suffer certainly pales next to the one who gets lifted up week after week in the context of the Christian story. But, that's not a healthy way to see the world, and it's a downright dangerous way to see the world of helping others. And here's the thing: it's not even entirely true. It's skewed, because the same one who was crucified also again and again disappeared into the mountains, took breaks alone, walked away from places where there was still work to be done. Literally, left everything in the hands of a few confused disciples. So sometimes, sometimes we need to challenge and unpack the stories that we've been handed, maybe even the stories that we're telling ourselves. Otherwise, we will truly be living a lie, thinking that burning the candle at both ends is necessary, but makes for a really ineffective candle. Or here's one I somehow missed in the world of internet memes until I read the Nagoski sisters' book, “Burnout”. This one called "Setting Yourself on Fire to Keep Others Warm”. I suspect we can all see the limits of that one, because the result of this kind of thinking is that we end up empty, and you can't get very far running on empty. Precious little left to give to the people you serve, and nothing at all for the people that you love the most, and least of all, yourself. In the first responder community that I served for a season of ministry, I saw this play out firsthand. What an unhealthy mindset can do to a person over a lifetime-it's like a scorched earth landscape. Relationships, work, health - the whole physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual makeup of a person - left as almost a wasteland. And maybe some of that's landing a little close to home today. If it is, I'd want to wonder with you as gently as I can: has your mindset, the lies you've been telling yourself, or the ones the community around you keeps reinforcing, quietly distorted who you are until you don't recognize yourself at all anymore? If that's you, please stay with me, because here is the good news buried inside that word mindset, a mindset is not a life sentence. That's Dweck's whole point. The movement from fixed to growth, what feels like just who you are, is actually far more often simply who you've learned to be, and what's been learned can be unlearned, reformed, redeemed.
Even learning to move from a lifetime of feeling with toward the steadier ground of feeling for. Finding where your sweet spot is, and how to get back to it. That isn't a personality that you've been sentenced to. It's a set of muscles that you can start to build. And researchers have found that even a few weeks of deliberate compassion practice measurably changes the way the brain answers another person's suffering, shifting it from distress toward warmth. Just a few weeks of practicing. The lie says that you're finished. This is just the way it is, but the truth says that you're trainable, you can learn this, and you can do this. So, there they are. Give till it hurts. I'll rest when I'm dead. It would be selfish to stop. If I don't do it, who will? This is just who I am. Maybe say them out loud just once, so you can hear how very thin they are, and yet how many of us have quietly built whole ministries, whole lives around them. Naming them is the first act of resistance, but it's only the first, because to really do this work, we're going to need some better words, not just for the lies, but for what's actually happening to us out there. Burnout, secondary trauma, moral distress - these are not the same thing. And treating them as if they were is exactly why so many of our well-meant fixes miss. So next time, we're going to build on the vocabulary. We're going to name it properly, and until then, will your anchor hold? Well, 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 us 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 atpeace.