A few years ago, I did a book on burnout among clergy. I was looking for those factors that often made pastors, having once begun in ministry, turn away. I discovered after conversations with many people (this will not come, I suppose, as a surprise) that many clergy just can't take the pressure of being that special, that holy person on which so much is put by the people.

I remember a pastor somewhere in the Midwest saying to me, "My people expect me to work sixty hours a week, to preach brilliant sermons on a weekly basis, to be good in working with the youth, to visit the old people, and still never to lose my temper at a church meeting."

Isn't it a wonder that merely mortal people find that they just cannot take these unrealistic demands of their parishioners? What merely human being can fulfill such demands toward perfection?

Years ago Charles Merrill Smith wrote a popular book called How to Be a Bishop Without Being Religious. The book was a satire on the life of clergy. In one section he discussed the pastor's wife. (There were few pastor-husbands in those days.) And he has a whole chapter on how to select an appropriate wife. He said that you need to select an attractive wife who will be a source of pride to the congregation. But by all means, your wife must not be so attractive that she is in any way desirable or beautiful.

Pastors are required to have a couple of children, but you must not have too many children, because people just don't like to think of their pastor involved in that sort of thing. People like to believe that if a pastor has children, says Smith, they've somehow arrived through immaculate conception.

Last year a former student of mine at the Divinity School wrote of his struggles in his first parish. Despite his efforts to minister to these people, to serve them, to give them the kind of leadership they needed, they complained that he was not attentive enough, that he was not helpful enough to them.

"But I've been going through weekly chemotherapy for my cancer," he said to them.

"That's no excuse," they said. "You're the pastor."