Being A Neurodivergent Pastor

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

What happens when you get a pastor who doesn’t relate emotionally to their congregation? How can that work or be healthy? Shouldn’t the pastor of a church, the minister to a congregation, care deeply and passionately about the people in their care?

What happens when that person is me?

Does a Pastor Need to Care?

I am someone who doesn’t particularly relate to world through my emotions, who struggles with empathy, and who can find it difficult to make deeper connections with people.

How do I pastor a congregation? How do I make meaningful pastoral relationships with people to be able to support them with their problems and cares? It’s the kind of questions that plenty of people have asked me over the years when I have told them what I wanted to do or what I am doing.

What happens when I can’t be the kind of person that people expect their pastor to be?

This blog is sharing part of the way I have come to find an answer to those questions. It is a bit personal in places, but I hope you indulge me. It is my hope that this is an encouragement to those of you who may experience the world like me and who are in ministry or who are thinking about entering into ministry. If nothing else I hope you can take away from this a sense that who you are is loved and beautiful in God’s eyes.

First, Know Thyself

When I was a child, and into my teenage years, I experienced very powerful emotions. I felt things very deeply, often in a way which felt overwhelming. The emotions just had to get out of me and at times it felt like I was just watching myself say things and do things because of what I was feeling without any real control over it. They were all just too much.

This included a strong sense of imaginative empathy, although I struggled with sympathetic empathy. I felt so strongly what people in stories or books were feeling that I found it difficult to watch sad or scary films. I felt what my toys might have been feeling as very real, in some ways as more real than the people around me. I struggled to feel, or to understand, what the person right in front of me was feeling. Expressions, tones of voice, were (and to a certain extent remain) a mystery to me.

Sarcasm was a foreign language. I remember being in primary school when we were preparing for a school play. I was being ‘helpful’ because I had memorised everyone else’s lines as well as mine and so knew if someone got it wrong or what they should be saying next. The teacher said “what would we do without you” and at the time I was so happy and proud to be singled out as being helpful. I have always loved being helpful. Only when I got older did I realise that it was sarcasm.

This meant that by the time I was teenager I struggled to understand the social interactions around me. I didn’t get why my classmates couldn’t just be well behaved and listen in lessons. I was quick to get irritated and angry. And, when I started going out with girls, I was incapable of being casual because every emotion was the biggest most powerful emotion possible I could feel. It would feel like I was an observer in my own body, watching myself react with these big emotions that controlled me rather than the other way around.

It was just too much.

It turns out there are reasons for these things. Reasons which I am working through with the support of the people around me and with my family. But at the time, I simply learned to control my emotions.

Seeking Safety

But at the time, I simply learned to control my emotions.

Or rather, to suppress them, to put them in context, and make sure that I would not have to be in a position where I would be subject to such powerful emotions, whether positive or negative. I would not let them control me. I built up around myself an image, a persona, which protected me. An abstract professor, a geeky eccentric…

Whatever explained me and made me feel safe. I bought into the philosophy of Vulcans from Star Trek, of Elves from Tolkien, the Witches from Terry Pratchett, and many others. I imbibed the stories and images and philosophies that made me feel safe and secure.

I learned that emotions did not have to define me or control me. The more I did so, the less they affected me. The safer I felt. But also the more distant from the people around me. I found maintaining friendship and relationships more difficult as I struggled to find ways to relate to people where they were rather than where I was.

Intellectualising Emotion

I ended up distrusting the reality of my own feelings – if I can control them and remove them then are they real? Do I really feel that way or am I only feeling it because I think I should feel it? More than once I have been standing in the middle of worship then looked at the people around me and wondered why I don’t feel like they do, or, if I do, then do I only feel it because they are and I am feeding on their emotions in what Durkheim (1858–1917) would call Collective Effervescence (Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912).

I simply struggled to naturally empathise with the people around me. I tried to explain it to someone once as walking down the road and everyone around me being like mannequins in a shop front. I couldn’t ‘read the room’ which sometimes resulted in me saying the wrong thing, or someone would react to something I said and I couldn’t work out what they were feeling.

Increasingly, my emotions stopped having an impact on my engagement with the world around me or on my decisions. I still had them. In some cases they were still powerful and directive. But I always knew I did not have to submit to them. I ended up hurting people I cared about because of it, just as I ended up feeling hurt in turn.

I felt both deeply lonely and yet quite safe. I had associated powerful emotions with a threat, with danger, which made being exposed to other people’s emotions feel threatening. The world of people and emotions was one that I was no longer at home in.

Called to Officership

But I knew I was called to ministry, to being a Salvation Army officer. And I wanted to be good at it. So I learned how to read body language. I learned how the brain works with emotions and empathy and feelings and memory and all those kind of things that other people don’t have to think about. It was something like that cliché of a person who decides they need to make friends and so goes and reads a book about how to make friends.

I knew I needed to be better with people so I learned about it because that was safer than just going and being with people. I struggled with small talk, so I memorised things from the news and sports scores to be able to talk about them. I learned a list of questions which would get people talking. I learned how to seem interested without looking bored or too intense.

During one of my summer breaks from university I worked for The Salvation Army at DHQ (divisional headquarters) which included one night a week supporting a men’s drop-in at Faith House in King’s Cross. Where I was very happy to help in the kitchen but had to be shepherded back into the main room to spend time speaking with people because I found starting a conversation and maintaining it with people really tricky. I felt so awkward just sitting down next to people and asking how they were or what they had been up to. But I did it because I had to do it. Which helped me learn.

Could I Be Accepted For Me?

Working out my calling to ministry put me in a position where who I had become, who I was and who I am, was too different, too strange, too alien, for people whose experience of religion was dominated by feelings and personal experiences. I felt that they didn’t understand what I was trying to say, or that, ultimately, I just wasn’t good enough.

I lacked the vocabulary to be able to express the very deep and powerful emotions which were held in check deep inside me. I desperately wanted to follow my calling but kept on feeling that unless I changed who I was I would never be able to actually do so.

I would routinely be told that I had head faith but no heart faith. That I needed to talk about what I felt about God, or that I needed to make it ‘real’ for me. I was asked questions that I was just not equipped to answer because I had so separated myself from my emotions.

Can I Be Me?

Those questions categorically failed to understand who I was and which only further embedded the sense that if I were to be me, to just be me and not have to worry about it, then I would not be acceptable. But I didn’t help my questioners. I didn’t open up and try and explain myself. I didn’t talk about what was going on or how I was. I didn’t let anyone in, because that was threatening.

Instead people should just accept me who I am and when they didn’t that just confirmed my own narrative.

I could have done a lot better at explaining myself, but I don’t think I would have been able to then in the way that I can now. I was too scared of getting rejected. Of not being worthy enough.

Because a person who doesn’t engage with their feelings in a way which is expected is a person who sits outside of what is understandable and what is safe. I didn’t fit the mould.

Finding My Place

When academia became a place where I could express myself and engage in a way which was safe and free, it created a context where people who did not understand me (which to be fair I didn’t make easy as I never let anyone in close enough to understand me) could hang the hat of Chris upon the hook of ivory tower. The things that brought me safety ended up leaving me more vulnerable.

I did end up being ordained and commissioned as a Salvation Army Officer. Thanks to a few people who got me and understood me and supported me through my journey. Only to be given two appointments to ministry which required a deeply emotional affective person who was able to form connections and be warm and open and caring. Tasks which do not come easily for me. But tasks which I have tried my best to live up to.

How Do I Pastor?

So how can someone who does not relate through their emotions act as a pastor to a congregation?

With Honesty

Being honest with myself and with others is essential for healthy relationships, especially when that may not come easily. How to share of myself in way which leaves me feeling safe, but also able to be vulnerable to let people in, is a really difficult bridge to navigate. Who needs to know what about me? Is it a matter of explaining myself or of allowing people to get to know me?

My tendency is to compile a list and hand it out – simply saying this is me. Here is how you can work with me. It’s exactly what I did. But there is a degree to which this still keeps people at a distance because I am in control of what I am sharing.

Letting people get to know me leaves space for discovery which I may not be ready for but which nevertheless is a natural part of growing a relationship. There are boundaries to consider here, about how much of myself I am willing to share. But without the honesty to accept myself, and to share myself, then no relationship can grow at all.

Being Clear About My Capacity and Ability

In my first appointment I hadn’t spent as much time working through where I am or actually addressing the complexities of my experience. So I just went ahead, saying I am who I am and everyone else needs to adapt to me. Maybe not saying that out-loud, but that was what was going on in my head.

The results were fairly predictable when it came to personal and pastoral relationships. In my second appointment I have tried to be more open with people from the beginning, making myself vulnerable enough to share some of my story and how I work. I put up a poster with the best ways of working with me. I’ve tried to explain how what I can and can’t do.

I may not be very good at the small talk before a meeting begins, but if you need to talk about a serious issue then I’m your man! I may not take you out for coffee or form a mutual relationship or friendship, but I will be there for you through all of your problems. I will need time before and after being around lots of people.

I can’t speak meaningfully with you about the local sports team or any sports team really, or who is popular in the music scene, or what celebrity has done what to whom, but if you want to talk about the Bible, Christianity, history, social theory, whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time, then strap yourselves in! You’re in for a wild old time as I splurge everything on those shelves of mental library – you will have to say when you’ve had enough as I might just keep on going.

Working to My Strengths, Finding People to Support My Weaknesses

It takes a kind of painfully radical honesty to really start to know your own strengths and weaknesses, and to be honest about both of them. But in starting to know myself I know what I can do well and what I will need more help and support with.

I have to keep on learning that when someone else might be better than me at something to ask them to help. It’s one of the most beautiful things about the Corps where I am. That everyone who is able, gets involved with things.

Not Being On Your Own

I have friends and colleagues who have been able to offer wise advice and support when I have needed it. My current congregation is very accepting of me. My family is endlessly patient with me and loving of me as I am.

Just like every other pastor in the world. Some things will be easier for me than other ministers. Other things will be harder. I lean into my strengths but allow space and time for the areas that are harder for me, without being ashamed of them. Something which has taken a lot of work.

And, more than anything else, I was called into ministry as the person who I am, not who people want me to be or expect me to be. I can be honest about who I am and about how I work without being embarrassed by it. But I can only be honest in that way because I know I am loved and accepted by God.

Grace and Calling Go Together

This is the marvellous thing about grace. I cannot earn it. I cannot earn a calling to ministry, nor is it something which has been awarded to me because I am ‘good enough’ or because I tick the right boxes. Grace is all about the trust that God’s promises are more powerful than my mistakes. That God’s love is more overwhelming than my failures. That God’s faithfulness is more enduring than my capacity to engage emotionally with my congregation.

I am committed to caring for and serving my community and my congregation. I am passionate about transformation and seeing people come to find a better way of life. I am all in on supporting and encouraging people to know Jesus better. I don’t need to be someone else to do this. I just need to be me – the me that Jesus called and is calling and is continuing to work on with grace upon grace.

I don’t have to be anyone else to do this. I don’t need to express that through my emotions to be valid. 

I am who Christ called and named and blessed, and that is enough.

Sign Up To The MyTheologyCorner Newsletter Here

You can sign up to the weekly newsletter here. You’ll get updates on the work of the Army from around the world, some teaching on Doctrine, a Bible reflection, and some book recommendations. You’ll get a newsletter straight to your inbox every Thursday for free.