Youth Worker Burnout: When The Flames Go Out

Burnout is our emotional and spiritual response to the excessive demands that we put on ourselves. We will look at three vital steps one must do in follow-up of burning out including taking time to stop and be with Jesus, identify what excessive stressors led to the burnout, and working with others in your organization and ministry to prevent those stressors from leading to another burnout.

Stopping Work To Be With Jesus
Burnout is our emotional and spiritual response that what we are doing is wrong and we need to change. For us to ignore this will lead to some severe emotional, mental, social, and physical consequences. We talked about some of those Monday like impaired physical health, reduced job performance, and damaged relationships with colleagues. We need to take time (maybe a day or maybe a nine month Sabbatical) to come to Jesus and rest in Him. Remember that we are looking for rest, taking a day from ministry to finish off the honey-do list is counter-productive and may speak deeply into why you burned out in the first place. If you needed to take a week off, how would you rest and meet the whole time with God?

“For you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe.” – Psalm 61:3

Identify The Excessive Stressors
Excessive stressors come in so many different forms that it would be impossible to label them all here. A simple guideline to follow is to write down everything you did this week and see if it falls within your job description. Have you been tasked or said yes to too many side projects? Are there too many external events that you need to eliminate from your weekly routine? We do not want to remove so much that you are lazy, but enough that you can be health and effective in ministry. This means saying no to a lot of good things to be able to do a couple of great things. How many things in your life are good, but not great?

Create A Strategy To Eliminate Those Stressors
When you have identified several demands on your life that have led to an unhealth work environment, it is time to get others on board and come up with a strategy to hand them off elsewhere. This is not a decision that should be done by yourself, but allow others to see the big picture and help speak into the situation. Let go of some projects and allow others to either pick them up or let them die. Ministry will still thrive if you do not lead three different adult prayer meetings when your job is to be in charge of the youth ministry. Allow the senior pastor to take it on or have the church members meet on their own. What will you let go today?