THE REAL TORTURE OF BEING A PASTOR   Rev. Dr. Ken Fong is pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church, Los Angeles, and is the author of Secure in God’s Embrace (Intervarsity Press, 2003).

An essential part of my morning habit is to retrieve my newspaper from wherever it was heaved, and retreat to my spot in the house where I can scan the headlines to see what’s transpired while I was asleep. Perhaps as a sign of my age or life stage, I turn to the editorial pages now before I peruse the sports section.

Given the debate being waged on talk radio these days on America’s use of torture during the just-finished Bush administration, I wasn’t the least bit surprised one recent morning to spy several headlines about this issue. What lured me into reading it, though, was a piece by a former CIA interrogator who had been ordered to torture captured enemy soldiers during the Viet Nam War. The CIA believed that it had captured a high-ranking NVA officer, but despite subjecting him to all kinds of gruesome cruelty, the soldier kept denying that he was the officer in question.

Finally, after the CIA had moved the prisoner to a small, completely white cell with no windows, the writer got involved. They had kept the suspected officer isolated there for three years, never turning off the bright overhead lights, always keeping the room temperature frosty. He only began to tell the truth when the interrogator became the one person to shatter his enforced solitude. The officer had been well-trained to endure excruciating pain and suffering. What broke him was a combination of extreme loneliness and the eventual inability to keep track of the passage of time.

While being the pastor of a local church is nothing like being tortured as a prisoner of war, it nevertheless often brings with it it’s own unique kind of torture. Speaking at a recent national gathering of Christian pastors, Pastor Rob Bell of Michigan’s Mars Hill Bible Church described our job as “death by a thousand paper cuts.” Every pastor in that audience immediately thought of the damage done by innumerable and incessant little criticisms, of the impossible-to-meet expectations and demands on the pastor and his/her family.

Years and years of feeling taken for granted or not being respected also take their toll on every pastor’s spirit. Yet like God’s elite soldiers, we pastors are trained to somehow endure whatever punishment our deacons and church members can offer us. The only confession they’ll hear from us is, “Thanks for sharing your concern with me. God bless you for your honesty.”

While some pastors finally succumb, many of us soldier on, seemingly impervious to repeated violations and degradations. However, our ultimate downfall is quite often the same thing that broke the NVA officer. It is not so much the ‘paper cuts’ but the ongoing isolation from meaningful contact with other pastors that, in the end, crushes our will and defeats our spirit.

Years ago I came to the realization that I—and no one else—was cutting myself off from regular, meaningful contact with other local pastors. Consumed by the boundary-less expanse of pastoring, my days, weeks, and months blurred into one continuous ball of concerns, meetings and messages.

To remedy this, I called together an eclectic bunch of pastors to meet over lunch on the 4th Tuesday of each month. A few were already friends of mine; others were from nearby churches. Some of the originals are still here, others have dropped out, and each year we add a few more. The only prayer we utter is over our fast-food or leftovers.

The rest of the two hours is reserved for sharing concerns, examining personnel issues, discussing trends, or seeking advice from peers. Being together has been meaningful if only because there is no need to explain what you do or to convince each other of the unique joys and sorrows of our shared calling. We have walked each other through the dark night of a church split. We have tried to parse the underlying issues surrounding ministering to homosexuals and their families. We have enjoyed plotting each other’s upcoming sabbaticals. Currently, we are weighing bringing our churches together to assist homeless families year-round.

Although I host our gathering, no one is ‘in charge.’ It’s really a circle of equals, regardless of the size of our budgets or the state of our churches. It’s become one of those unique groups where pastors aren’t trying to impress each other with factoids that rarely get at what matters to God. The time together goes by quickly. At two o’clock we part company and scatter back to the broken people and fractured communities that Jesus has called us to love and shepherd. We return to worlds that haven’t been altered by our time with each other. But somehow it makes a huge difference to know that someone really understands and that we are not alone.