The Wounded Healer's Dilemma: Leading When You're Running on Empty

WJ de Kock, ThD
Professor of Practical Theology | Educational Consultant, Partners in Ministry

8—minute read 

It is the Tuesday after Easter, and you have just experienced the pastoral equivalent of grand final week.

You prepared for months. You delivered. The place was full, the music swelled, people made personal commitments to Christ, and for one shining moment on Sunday morning you felt it, the thing you got into ministry for in the first place. Resurrection was not just a doctrine you were defending. It was a room full of people leaning into something real and ancient and alive.

And then Monday happened. And now it is Tuesday.

The lilies are browning at the edges. The "He Is Risen" banner is still up because nobody has got around to taking it down, and that feels, if you are honest, like a fairly accurate metaphor for your interior state. The adrenaline that carried you through Holy Week has quietly packed its bags and left. The extra services, the pastoral visits, the sermon rehearsed at 11 p.m. on Saturday with a throat that was already giving out, all of it spent, all of it gone. What remains is you, a cup of tea, and a particular tiredness that is not quite physical and not quite spiritual but occupies the uneasy space between them like an uninvited guest who has somehow found the spare key.

This is the post-high low. Athletes know it. Musicians know it. Parents of newborns know it. The body and soul pour everything into the peak, and then, when the peak is over, they send you the invoice.

If you know this feeling, you are not alone. You are, in fact, statistically representative.

Around 47 percent of pastors regularly report that the demands of ministry exceed their capacity,  and that is on an ordinary week, before you factor in Holy Week's particular cocktail of spiritual intensity and logistical chaos.[i] One in four considered leaving ministry entirely in 2025, which is actually an improvement, down from a pandemic-era peak of 42 percent in 2022, though the sentence "only one in four are considering quitting" remains one that should stop a room.[ii] More sobering still: the number of church leaders who cite burnout as the reason their predecessor left has doubled in a decade, from ten to twenty-two percent. Burnout is no longer merely a pastoral welfare issue. It is quietly becoming the most common form of succession planning in the Australian church.[iii]

The high was real. So is the low. Both deserve to be named.

And all of this before we account for the world.

The world's grief has not paused for Easter. The names of crises arrive in your congregation the way they always do, not as headlines but as people. The family who cannot reach relatives overseas. The aid worker who came back changed and will not quite say how. The person who weeps during the prayers and will not say why. You absorb all of it. That is part of the call. But nobody told you — or if they did you did not quite believe it, how much it would weigh.

Henri Nouwen understood this weight. Writing in 1972, in a world already weary of violence and confusion, he diagnosed contemporary society's deepest wounds as alienation, separation, isolation, and loneliness, and he said something extraordinary: ministers could not address those wounds in others without honestly inhabiting them in themselves. "For a compassionate person," he wrote, "nothing human is alien."[iv] The minister who pretends immunity to suffering does not become a healer. They become a performer. And performances, however polished, cannot touch wounds.

The wounded healer is not a liability. The wound is the credential.

But, and this is the part of Nouwen that tends to get left out of the inspirational quotes, the wound must be bound before it is offered. There is a world of difference between vulnerability that creates genuine meeting and what we might call spiritual exhibitionism: the leader who uses the pulpit to process their unresolved pain, who weaponises weakness as a different kind of power, who shares their wounds not to create solidarity but to secure admiration for their suffering.[v] The bind-first principle is about sequence. You cannot pour from a vessel that has not itself been filled. You cannot offer healing from a wound you have refused to tend.

This is where Holy Saturday does its quiet theological work.

Between the howl of Good Friday and the astonishment of Easter Sunday sits a day that the liturgical calendar mostly rushes past but that many pastors inhabit for years at a time. Saturday. The disciples locked in a room, not praying with great faith, not trusting the promises, just—silent. Bewildered. Carrying grief they do not yet have language for. The text does not record them doing anything particularly holy. They are simply there, present in the dark, waiting for a morning they cannot yet imagine.[vi]

Holy Saturday has a spirituality, but it is not the kind that makes it onto the motivational posters. It is not triumph. It is not even the active, muscular trust we tend to celebrate. It is something quieter and harder, the spirituality of staying present. Not running. Not performing. Not manufacturing a dawn that isn't ready yet., not manufacturing a resurrection before it is ready. If you are living in a Holy Saturday season of ministry, the invitation is not to perform Easter. It is to stay. To tend the wound. To trust that the same God who was not absent on that silent Saturday is not absent in yours.

Paul writes to the Romans that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope, and it is worth noticing that he does not skip any steps.[vii] You do not leap from exhaustion to hope. You move through it, one unglamorous day at a time. And in 2 Corinthians, the same Paul who was shipwrecked, beaten, and left for dead hears this: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”[viii] Not despite the weakness. In it. Through it. As it.

That is not a verse you cross-stitch and hang in the church foyer. That is a verse you hold at 2 a.m. when you have nothing left.

So here, without rushing toward resolution, are three ways to tend the wound before you offer it.

Find your Sabbath and protect it with sacred ferocity. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath "a palace in time”, not a day off but a weekly sanctuary, a place of genuine restoration rather than recuperative productivity.[ix] You cannot lead people toward flourishing from a life that has none. The Sabbath is not self-indulgence. It is obedience.

Find a peer who will ask the question your congregation cannot: How is intimacy with God? Not "how is the church," not "how are the numbers”, but how well is your soul? Spiritual growth and survival both require community. Do not go it alone because you have convinced yourself that you are the one responsible for everyone else.

If the weight is clinical, if the emptiness has settled into something that sleep does not fix and prayer alone does not lift, please find a good therapist and a Professional Supervisor. This is not a failure of faith. It is faithfulness to the body and mind that God inhabits.

You are allowed to be depleted. You are allowed to be in Holy Saturday. You are allowed to not have the resurrection on demand. What you should avoid doing, what nobody benefits from, least of all you, is to keep leading from empty and call it devotion.

The morning is coming. It always comes. But the disciples in that locked room did not manufacture it, and neither can you.

Stay in the room. Tend the wound. Let God be responsible for the dawn.

[i] Barna Group, "Pastors Quitting Ministry: New Barna Data Shows a Shift," Barna.com, January 26, 2026. Approximately 47 percent of pastors report that ministry demands regularly exceed their capacity.

[ii] Lea Schweitz, "Fewer Pastors Now Feel Like Quitting, Study Finds," Christian Post, January 31, 2026. The figure of 24 percent considering leaving ministry in 2025 represents a significant decline from the pandemic-era peak of 42 percent in 2022.

[iii] Kate Shellnut, "Despite Burnout, Just 1% of Pastors Leave Each Year," Christianity Today, June 2, 2025. The percentage of church leaders citing burnout as the cause of their predecessor's departure doubled from 10 to 22 percent over the prior decade.

[iv] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 72–73. Nouwen identifies alienation, separation, isolation, and loneliness as the defining wounds of contemporary Western society, and argues that ministers must inhabit rather than transcend these wounds to offer genuine healing.

[v] Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, 82–83. Nouwen explicitly distinguishes between the wound made available as a source of healing—carefully bound, honestly held—and what might be called "spiritual exhibitionism," in which the minister's unprocessed pain becomes a burden on those they serve.

[vi] John 20:19. The disciples are described as gathered behind locked doors "for fear" on the evening of the first Easter day—a posture more consistent with Holy Saturday than resurrection triumph.

[vii] Rom. 5:3–5.

[viii] 2 Cor. 12:9.

[ix] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 14–15. Heschel's description of the Sabbath as "a palace in time"—a sanctuary built not of space but of sanctified hours—remains one of the most evocative theological accounts of rest in the modern era.