Pastoring Amid Family Turmoil
July 28, 2026
July 28, 2026
Abstract: Michael Lawrence shares about his experience of pastoring while dealing with an acute mental health illness in his immediate family. Lawrence sensed his weakness and limitations during the crisis, yet this was the very place where God met him with his sustaining grace. He offers suggestions to other pastors walking through family turmoil, encouraging them to acknowledge their weakness and, as they’re able, to embrace God’s gift of fellow elders who can care for them and the church.
Editor’s Note: This article is taken from Church Matters, the 9Marks journal for pastors, in the issue titled “The Pastor and Suffering.”
As a young pastor, I thought I understood Paul’s admonition that an elder “must manage his own household competently and have his children under control with all dignity” (1 Tim. 3:4–5). (If anyone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of God’s church?)” Paul was clearly arguing from the lesser to the greater. If you couldn’t do the smaller thing (manage your household), then there’s no way you could do the larger thing (take care of the church).
Yet decades later, it seems the much harder thing to manage well is your own family, and never more so than when turmoil and suffering strike. Whether it’s a childhood cancer diagnosis, like a pastor friend of mine has dealt with, or the demands of aging parents with dementia, like almost everyone my age is dealing with, or run-of-the-mill teenage boundary-pushing and chronic mental illness, like my family has experienced, when suffering and turmoil and conflict and heartache hit the pastor’s family, the problems waiting for you at the church office can feel like a welcome break, or even an escape hatch, from the problems at home.
When your family is suffering acutely, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually, you must give attention to it. The church can hire other pastors, but your family can’t find another husband and father. At the same time, the church is paying your salary, and not only do you need that salary to care for your family, but the church needs your care as well. So how do we care for the church when our family needs special attention?
For several years, my own family suffered through an acute mental health crisis. One of my children was in and out of the hospital with a diagnosis that, while not always fatal, carried a very real risk of death. The crisis absorbed an extraordinary amount of time and energy from me and my wife, and for many years there was very little that was predictable from day to day. At the same time, I was just a few years into pastoring my church. There was a lot of work to be done, a fair amount of opposition to that work, and not a lot of earned capital with the congregation. It seemed impossible.
And yet, Paul didn’t say that managing your household when it’s easy demonstrates that you’re qualified to manage the church. He didn’t have a family, but he knew what it was like to suffer and to carry on in ministry when things were difficult. Like him, we don’t pastor the church or lead our families out of our strength but out of our weakness. As the Lord said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). So as we pastor while our families are hurting, how can we experience God’s power?
If our weakness doesn’t drive us to prayer, then we’re still operating out of our own strength. Every morning of our family’s crisis, my wife and I would get up early and go for a walk, rain or shine. We had a three-mile loop. For the first mile and a half, we would talk and catch up and plan for the day. But as we turned toward home, we turned to prayer. And we wouldn’t stop praying until we reached our front door. We prayed about the crisis, of course, but we also prayed for the church, and for the family members who weren’t in crisis. We prayed like our family’s life depended on it, which it literally did. We also prayed like our church’s life depended on it, which it did, even if that wasn’t as apparent to everyone else.
You don’t have to follow our morning routine, but if God’s grace is going to show up for your family and your church in the midst of your suffering, it will show itself first in your prayers. It was in response to Paul’s prayers that the Lord assured him of the sufficiency of his grace.
Paul constantly asked others to pray for him.1 His letters to the Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Thessalonians, and Philemon all make mention of it. And no wonder, for he felt the “daily pressure of his concern for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). We too quickly realized that we needed others praying for us, for our family and our church. So my wife and I put together a team of people who knew our family, and especially our child who was suffering, and enlisted their prayers. I sent out regular updates by email to people who spanned the globe so that they would know how to pray for us. I also enlisted people to pray locally. My fellow elders were constantly interceding for us, and some of my staff began to fast and pray once a week.
But it wasn’t just my family that needed prayer. My church did, too. To this day, I think the most significant way that I cared for my church during this crisis was by introducing several new practices of prayer. For instance, I added a pastoral prayer to the Sunday service in which I brought before the Lord the needs of the congregation. I also introduced my staff and elders to the habit of praying by name through the membership directory, both privately and in our staff and elders’ meetings. And we started a Sunday evening prayer meeting that focused on the church and its ministries. Even though I was often distracted by the crisis at home, the church was becoming a praying church, not least the elders.
Pastor, don’t forget that God answers prayer—for your family and for your church. So, get people praying, and ask them to pray for you specifically.
In addition to prayer, I needed my fellow elders to care for my family and the church in other ways, which meant bringing them into the crisis as much as possible. I was blessed to have godly and trustworthy elders from the start of my pastorate. Not every pastor is given such a gift, so wisdom and discretion are required. But remember that your fellow elders cannot care for your family if they don’t know what’s going on. This was the start of what came to be known as an “executive session” for our elders. We normally had guests and observers in our meetings, but I needed a safe context to talk about what was going on and to allow them to ask probing questions. We also needed some privacy to allow them to pray for specific needs for me and my family. And so, at the end of each elders’ meeting, we excused the guests and I both invited and allowed my fellow elders to pastor me.
I also needed the elders, most of whom were quite new to the role, to step up and pastor the church. Since my time was limited and my attention was divided, I gave almost all my personal ministry time to them. This is a normal priority for many lead pastors, but it was essential in my case. I took time in each elders’ meeting to train these men in pastoral care and disciple making; I devoted a lunch or two each week to meet with them individually. I focused on raising up a few potential new elders who could quickly put their shoulders to the plow. My convictions about the biblical case for a plurality of elders became practical knowledge as their growing capacity and maturity complemented my felt weakness and limitations.
There came a point when my family’s crisis had to be addressed publicly. By God’s grace, I had not missed a Sunday, and I always had a sermon prepared during the three or four years when the crisis was acute. But the stress and strain on our family was beginning to show. People noticed that some members of my family were not always there on Sunday. Questions were being asked. Sometimes, members would corner one of my kids and ask leading questions. I’ll never forget one dear saint asking me furtively, “I just need to know, is it drugs?” Usually, though, the questions were directed to the elders, and gratefully they wanted to protect my family’s privacy and dignity. But people can tell when there’s something wrong, and a lack of information often breeds misinformation.
The balance between transparency and privacy is always difficult for a pastor’s family, but the challenge is magnified amid suffering and turmoil. Suffering makes us feel vulnerable—because we are—and it often strips the sufferer of dignity and a sense of agency. Most of us don’t want our infirmities widely known, even if the issue isn’t a direct result of sin in our lives. On the other hand, as a pastor, you are not simply a private individual in the church. You, and sometimes your whole family, are on display publicly. The congregation has a reasonable expectation to know if your ability to pastor them is being adversely affected. More importantly, how can they love and support you and your family if they are left in the dark?
This is another situation in which a plurality of elders can be helpful. In my case, I wrote both a letter and a list of FAQs to the congregation. I read the letter at a public meeting, explaining as much as I could and thanking the church for their love and care. Then the chairman of the elders read the FAQs, putting it in his own voice on behalf of the elders. These FAQs gave practical advice, drew boundaries, protected my children, and directed future questions and offers of help to the elders rather than to me (or my kids). The church was served, and so was my family.
When I read of Paul’s “boasting” in 2 Corinthians 11, even though he calls it “talking foolishly,” I can walk away thinking that the call to pastoral ministry is the call to heroic sacrifice. But then you keep reading, and you find out that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” (12:7) is the thing that made him feel his weakness in ways that his other suffering did not. It’s this, and all the other examples of his weakness, that he boasts in, because it’s in his weakness that Christ’s “power” is made known (12:9).
This was perhaps the most important lesson I had to learn. My call at church was not to soldier on as if nothing was wrong. It was to pastor the church in my weakness so that Christ’s grace would be magnified. And by God’s grace, that’s what happened, at least to some extent. As I preached each Sunday, regardless of how the week had gone, I learned to depend on the Lord in ways I never had before. My study was often interrupted and, by necessity, my sermon manuscripts got shorter. But people who had heard my preaching for years noticed a change. There was more compassion, more tenderness, more vulnerability, more grace. I often told them that all I was simply doing was preaching to myself and letting them listen in. My weakness and need were palpable to me, and in his grace, God met me there. And through me, he met his people, too.
My call at home was no different, though honestly, I found it much harder. During much suffering and chaos, I wanted to fix things and make them better. I wanted to be strong and to have all the answers. But so often, I didn’t know what to do. I felt helpless and weak. While it was easy to admit that in the pulpit or in an elders’ meeting, it was much harder to admit it to my wife and kids. At home I was usually busy, on task, getting things done to keep the household going. But what my family needed was the same thing my church needed: a husband and a father who was a pastor, aware of his weakness and dependent on God’s grace to lead. “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).