In ministry contexts, there is a common philosophy that ministers and pastors are called to sacrifice all of themselves for the good of those under their care and to reach those that have been unreached. While the heart posture of giving one’s self to others and the heart posture for seeing the kingdom of God grow is honoring to the Lord. Jesus speaks this word to his disciples: “you love each other as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this—that a man should lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). Jesus shares the words right before he goes to the cross, and it can be easy to take these words of Jesus literally – that followers of Jesus are called to sacrifice all of themselves for love, regardless of their own well being, especially for ministers who are held to a higher standard. However, this misses the entire purpose of the cross and Jesus’ embodied life on earth. I was one of the many Christian leaders who believed that I needed to sacrifice my own well being to meet the spiritual and emotional needs of those I was leading. Through an exploration of my own experience nearing ministry burnout, God revealed the importance of a biblically grounded theology of embodiment for my own well-being as well as the health of those I lead.
Nearing Burnout
I have always had a tendency to sacrifice my own needs, wants or desires for the needs and wants of others. In part this has come from a legalistic theology that places all of my worth in what I can achieve, the mindset that if I do all the right things and be everything everyone needs me to be then I will be worthy of love from others and from the Lord. This paired with a lifetime of thinking of my body as a tool led me to become an unhealthy leader that is disconnected from my own body.
If one is operating under the theology that the sole purpose of someone who is a Christian leader, minister, or pastor is to disciple others and grow the kingdom of God, then having a leader that is not well connected to their body seems to be irrelevant. It is true that as a minister of the gospel, there is a responsibility to disciple others. But, to reduce a minister to their work is to miss their humanity and to miss their own neediness as human beings. When a leader is not attentive to their own humanity because they are so worried about the needs of others, we stray from the way that the Lord calls his people to live: work and rest in a balance.
For me, this became most evident in my senior year of college as I was leading a student ministry while wrestling with my own mental health struggles and trauma and trying to balance finishing school well on top of everything else. As someone who struggles to be attentive to the messages of my body, I was quick to set aside my own needs for all of the other things vying for my time and attention. I felt that it was so important for me to be readily available to all of the students that I was discipling that I would often pick up the phone or sit in their dorms around midnight after an already full day of work, class, student meetings, and writing papers. I would schedule every free hour with a discipleship meeting with a student. There were many days where I wasn’t even sitting down to start homework until 9 o’ clock at night because I’d had so many student meetings.
If you had asked me how I was doing, I would have said “I’m great! Life is full, but good!” As far as I could tell, everything I was doing was bringing me joy and was meaningful to those around me! I felt like I was really making a difference in the lives of others and growing God’s kingdom. As far as I could see, everything I was doing was to the glory of God.
I learned years later in a conversation with a friend that, although I was saying I was not feeling tired and genuinely meant it, all of those around me could see weariness in my body and on my face that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel or experience. I myself did not realize the damage that I had been doing to myself until my body quite literally gave up on me. In the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas break, I could barely eat anything. Whether from stress or poor eating habits over the course of the semester, my body had had enough.
Sadly, even then, I struggled to listen to the needs of my body. I was stressed about exams, performing in a dance concert, and finalizing my thesis, so I felt like I barely had time to do any of the regular ministry rhythms I’d had the whole semester, much less be attentive to the needs of my body. I tried to force my body to keep running on fumes, but it was slowing down whether I wanted to or not. Thankfully, Christmas break came and I was able to get the rest and recovery I needed. However, looking back on that semester makes me realize that I was woefully unequipped to balance the needs of others and my own.
Reordering Our Theology of Our Bodies
For my body to fall into such disrepair, something had become disordered in my theology. There are two helpful frameworks that help reorder our theology around our bodies and lead to flourish for both Christian leaders and those they lead: 1) we are our bodies, and 2) God loves and cherishes human beings as embodied creatures.
As a young leader in college, I had a tendency to treat my body as an object, a thing to manipulate and control, rather than a part of me. This thought process allowed me to ignore my body’s cries for sleep, food, and rest in order to continue to use it for what my mind thought was more important. I was not treating my body as me, but as a barrier to my goals. My mind had a will that my body simply could not keep up with and the dissonance I experienced was damaging not only to my body, but also to my mental and emotional health, my relationships, and my ability to minister well. Hillary McBride, a psychologist and author of The Wisdom of Your Body, describes the experience of disembodiment as feeling “disempowered and constricted as well as lacking in competence, safety, and presence.”1 It is no wonder that as I was disembodiedly trying to help everyone else, I was feeling a little untethered and low in self-confidence.
Clearly, this way of thinking was not helping me. I was attempting to think of my experience in the world as a brain on a stick, but as I neglected the needs of my body, my brain slowed down. What felt like the very essence of me (even though it actually cannot be separated from my body) became less – less aware, less full of life, less able to function.
God calls us instead to have a fully integrated self. We cannot leave our bodies behind and still function mentally or emotionally at maximum capacity. All aspects of our being are affected when one is neglected.
Relationships with others cannot happen without a body fully integrated with the self, so soul and body must be understood as one integrated being to be able to understand and experience the fullness of human capacity for covenantal relationship with each other and with God. It is said that “to be Christian and to understand human uniqueness does not require positing something immaterial and immortal within the person. What makes humans unique is much more about how God chooses to interact with humans who are a part of his physical creation.”2
Scripture teaches that God considered his creation of humanity in physical form to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and the Psalmist reminds us that each person is “woven together in the mother’s womb” and “fearfully and wonderfully made,” intentionally crafted by God to be embodied (Ps. 139:13,14). Human beings are made of the dust of the ground in the Garden before the fall (Gen. 2:7), and resurrected life is embodied life (Jn. 21:12-14; 1 Cor. 15:42; Rev. 21:1-2, 22:1-2). Embodiment is not a result of the fall, something to be escaped, or the work of sinfulness, but these are ideas many Christians come to believe, as we discussed briefly above. I myself had become convinced that my own limitations were something to overcome and push beyond for the glory of God as an act of self-control and faithfulness, rather than understanding limitations to be a gift from God, a way of intentional created being, and an invitation to depend on the Lord who is without limits.
In neglecting my own body, I was actually rejecting God’s love for all of me, as his creation. My disordered theology around my body was also a disordered theology around my whole self. As my actions reflected that I did not believe my body was worthy of the time or attention it needed to recover, on a deeper level, I also believed that I myself was unworthy of the rest my body so desperately needed. Matthew 11:28-30 reminds us of God’s invitation for us to experience not only soul rest, but also embodied rest.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
– Matt. 11:28-30
I heard this verse regularly during the season of my life where I was near burnout, but each time I heard it, I essentially turned my back to this word from the Lord. I believed Jesus invited his people to rest and to walk under his easy and light guidance, but I seemed to think that invitation wasn’t for me and that I didn’t deserve the light guidance of the Lord. I was heaping burdens on my own shoulders – my own burdens and the burdens of others. I was rejecting God, his promises, and his invitation for abundant life in neglecting my own physical needs.
God created me with a body intentionally. He knitted me together as a body, mind, and spirit combined in one form with the attention, love, and pursuit of beauty of an artist. The shame and anger that I direct towards my body could not be further from God’s view of my body. To fully understand God’s adoration for human beings as embodied creatures, we must explore the incarnation of Jesus. In the act of Jesus taking on human form fully and completely, “the Divine is right here among us and showed us through his body that our bodies are not bad, that the Divine exists in flesh, and that the body is part of God’s way of being in the world.”3 How can my body just be bad or shameful in its limits if the very God of all creation accepted and lived by the limits of the human body? If Jesus lived life perfectly within the limits of a human body, then for me to honor my limits is for me to honor God and to honor his creational intent for me.
In following the limits that God has set on humanity through our bodies, we are choosing to put our trust in God’s power, strength, and work over our own. All of my efforts to meet everyone’s needs, to be what everyone else needed, and to do everything by my own strength without help is a reflection of pride in me and an unwillingness to surrender to the leadership and rulership of God. In many ways, I was trying to be my own God.
This is one of the biggest ways that my own lack of self-care and honor to my body is damaging to those I lead. What I am modeling and the culture I am building with this attitude of shame towards my body’s limits and pride that I must do it all by my own strengths gets passed on to those that I lead. This disordered view of myself and of God can become the culture of the ministry. We often see the effects of individuals coming together and being influenced by one another in a way that creates and shifts aspects of the community culture without being able to pinpoint exactly how it happens.
Ultimately, when we let the stories of Scripture, the love of God, and the heart of the gospel inform our ways of thinking and being in the world, we can experience true thriving – the abundant life that Jesus promises in John 10:10.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
– John 10:10
If I had allowed myself to believe in the depth of the being that my existence in this specific body that the Lord has given me with the specific limits set upon it, I would have experienced much more peace, joy, and life in the Lord that would have overflowed into my ministry. While I may not have been able to do everything I wanted to as efficiently or independently as I wanted, I would have experienced the restorative blessing of living within the limits God created for me, the joy of sharing the work and the burdens with other, and the beauty of meeting God in the slowing down of inefficiency. In the end, I missed out on abundant life as the Lord intended for me to experience in my body because I was trying to shame my body into doing what my mind wanted to do from a place of fear, shame, and independence.
Living Fully in Our Bodies
It feels so important to combat the ideas that our minds must overcome and overpower our bodies, that we must neglect our needs to prove our worthiness, or that our own wellbeing is less important to God than the harvest of his kingdom. Part of combating these ideas requires doing the emotional and spiritual work of uprooting lies we believed about our bodies and our being, choosing instead to live into the limits God has blessed us with in our bodies’ need for rest, sleep, food and healthy relationship.
I have always felt a deep calling to lead others into the incomprehensible, beautiful, and redemptive love of the Lord. But as I continue to reflect on my own struggle to receive this love from the Lord, I am reminded that I must reach a place of living fully embodied if I want others to learn of his goodness and love through my dedication to serving him. This reflection on the integrated, wholly embodied self that exists within a community of other embodied selves challenges all of us to change the way we talk about our bodies, live in our bodies, and work in our bodies. We are invited to fully experience the abundant life that God has for us. When we receive God’s gift of limited, blessed, holy bodies, we experience this promise of abundance. A part of that abundance (but not the whole!) is that we can serve God at our fullest capacity and help others see and experience the beauty of living a wholly embodied life with God.
- Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021), 39. ↩︎
- Jack O. Balswick, et al., The Reciprocating Self : Human Development in Theological Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 24. ↩︎
- McBride, Wisdom of Your Body, 218. ↩︎
Living Embodied Lives 
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