Pastor, in a single week you may lead a funeral on Tuesday, hear on Thursday that a family you’ve shepherded for ten years is leaving, and preach on Sunday as though neither happened. Your congregation sees the sermon. They rarely see the losses behind it.

Thom Rainer observes that the pain of members leaving is largely unspoken, both among pastors and between pastors and their congregations. The isolation is measurable. In Barna’s 2022 survey of more than 500 pastors, 65% reported feeling lonely or isolated sometimes or frequently, up from 42% in 2015.

The grief you may not have named

Grief researchers have names for losses like these. Kenneth Doka, who is both a licensed mental health counselor and an ordained Lutheran minister, coined disenfranchised grief for losses that society doesn’t sanction, acknowledge, or publicly mourn. Family therapist Pauline Boss named ambiguous loss, where someone is physically absent but still psychologically present, or the reverse. Both describe pastoral life with uncomfortable precision:

• The silent exit. A family stops coming, and months later you learn they’ve been attending across town. There was no goodbye and no explanation, and you still see them at the grocery store.
• The friendship that ends with membership. Someone you considered a true friend leaves the church, and the friendship quietly leaves with them. You’re left wondering whether it was ever about you, or only your role.
• The party you’re not invited to. Members hold the barbecue or plan the group vacation without you, because your presence changes the room. It’s rarely malicious, which makes it harder to name and harder to admit it hurts.
• The secrets you carry. You hold confessions, abuse disclosures, and marriages on the brink that you can never share. You grieve for people with no one to grieve alongside you.
• Your own family’s losses. Your teenager is fighting for independence under the scrutiny of a congregation. Your marriage is strained, and the people you’d normally confide in sit in your pews. Your parents are aging, perhaps far away, perhaps slipping into a fog where they are physically present but no longer fully themselves. Meanwhile, you’re still the one everyone else leans on.

Doka says the same sentence comes up again and again with people carrying grief like this: “I don’t have a right to grieve.”

You do.

Is unprocessed grief shaping your leadership?

Ask yourself honestly:

• Do you replay conversations with people who left?
• Do attendance numbers feel like a verdict on you?
• Have you felt numb at a funeral, or quietly resentful toward the people who stayed?
• Is busyness your main way of coping?

If several of these land, that isn’t failure. It’s loss that has never been named.

Five practices for grieving well

1. Call it grief. Doka’s research holds that disenfranchisement complicates the process of mourning. Say it out loud to someone you trust: “I’m grieving the Hendersons leaving.”
2. Stop waiting for closure. Boss teaches that ambiguous loss resists every instinct to resolve, fix, or cure it. The goal is to carry the loss with flexibility, not to finish it.
3. Grieve in doses. Psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut found that healthy coping moves back and forth between facing the loss and rebuilding life. They also found that taking breaks from both is an integral part of adaptive coping. Rest is not avoidance.
4. Create a ritual. Boss notes that leaders often need to offer creative rituals that help people grieve accumulated ambiguous losses. You can do this for yourself. Write down the names and the losses, pray a lament psalm over them, and release them to God.
5. Don’t grieve alone. Barna found that more than half of pastors have no professional support, whether a mentor, coach, or counselor. Find one, and look outside your congregation, especially for grief in your own home.

Pete Scazzero put it plainly: “Jesus was called the ‘Man of Sorrows.’ Yet, we don’t do grieving.” The Man of Sorrows grieved, and you are allowed to as well.

You don’t have to carry it alone

This is why weekly coaching sits at the heart of FiveTwo’s Strategic Growth Process. Every pastor in the two-year process is paired with a Catalyst: an experienced ministry leader who has carried the same weight you carry and knows the grief that comes with it.

Your weekly, 30-minute coaching sessions are yours. Some weeks you’ll use them to sharpen your leadership. Other weeks you’ll use them to process a silent exit, a hard staff conversation, a struggle at home, or simply to recover the rhythms of rest your soul needs. Your Catalyst is not a consultant evaluating you. They’re an ally walking beside you.

If you’re ready to stop leading alone, let’s talk: Schedule a conversation with Randy.