Most preachers do some of both. Unhealed pain does bend how a leader reads Scripture, often without the leader noticing. Leading from a whole place does not require having no wounds. It requires knowing your wounds well enough that they stop choosing your sermons for you, and accepting real help, real rest and an identity that does not depend on the pulpit.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conference on preaching, where Maliek Blade, who describes himself as almost a lifelong seminary student and is completing a doctorate in counseling, spoke about the wellness of the messenger rather than the message. You can work through it alone in two or three sittings, or with a small group of leaders in one longer meeting. The central practice is a slow, two-column reading of a passage you know well. Nothing here asks you to disclose anything you would rather keep private. Every reflection is yours to write, share in part or keep to yourself.
Start with what you already preach
Before reading further, think of a passage or topic you return to often, or one you avoid. Write it down. You do not need to know yet why it matters to you.
Blade opens with a question he asks twice, so it lands: “Are you preaching the text through the lens of your pain?” He does not call experience useless. He says that “how we preach the text can be framed by our pain.” The danger is quieter than open distortion: “The risk is allowing our feelings to guide the message that we share, especially if we haven’t processed those feelings.”
He offers a picture worth keeping. Feelings, he says, are not meant to run the room: “They shouldn’t be setting the temperature, but they’re more so a thermometer.” A thermometer gives honest information. A preacher who ignores it is careless. A preacher who lets it set every Sunday’s message has stopped reading the text.
This usually happens out of view. Blade notes that “the people that are doing it might not even realize they’re doing it.” That is why the first step is observation, not guilt.
A text that tempts us: Acts 15
Blade’s own example is the split between Paul and Barnabas. Read Acts 15:36-41 slowly before going on.
The KJV describes the moment bluntly: “And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus” (Acts 15:39). Blade observes that someone carrying broken relationships may hear this as permission to cut people off, and then teach it that way. His test question: “is my personal pain informing how I see the text, how I interpret, and how I then preach it.”
Look at what the passage does. Luke is writing narrative. He reports a sharp disagreement and its result. He does not tell readers to imitate it, and he does not say who was right. A sermon that turns this scene into a rule for ending relationships has added something Luke did not say. The wider New Testament complicates the easy reading too. Years later Paul writes, “Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). The text does not tell us how that change came about, and we should not invent a reconciliation scene. It does show that Acts 15 is not the last word on these men.
None of this means separation is always wrong. Some relationships are unsafe, and Scripture does not ask anyone to stay in harm. The point is about method: the passage cannot carry the weight a wounded reading may want to put on it.
Blade gives a second, more sensitive example. He suggests that leaders who hold stricter views on divorce and remarriage often have not faced it in their own families, while those who are more open often have. That is his observation from years in ministry settings, not a measured finding, and it cuts in both directions. Experience can sharpen sight as well as blur it. Someone who has lived through a divorce may notice things in Jesus’ teaching that others skim past, and someone who has not may read with fewer personal stakes. Where a view comes from does not decide whether it is true. The useful question is narrower: does my conclusion hold when I test it against the text itself, or only when I lean on my history?
Blade admits that answering requires work most training skips. To know whether pain is steering, he says, “I would have to do some deep emotional work to understand, well, what’s going on with me before we even get into hermeneutics or homiletics?”
Practice: a two-column reading
Choose the passage you wrote down at the start, or a recent sermon text. Set aside your old notes.
- Read the passage in its full literary unit, at least the chapter. In the first column, write only what the text says: who is speaking, to whom, in what kind of writing, and what happens or is commanded.
- In the second column, write what you have usually taken from it, or what you felt it was saying when you last preached it.
- Mark any line in the second column that does not appear in the first. For each, ask where it came from. Some will come from sound theology elsewhere in Scripture. Some may come from your own story.
- If something comes from your story, you do not have to fix it today. Name it to yourself.
In a group, give people quiet time for this and do not ask anyone to read their second column aloud. Invite them instead to share, if they wish, one thing they noticed about the text itself.
Preaching through it or addressing it
Blade’s second question moves from interpretation to habit: “Are you addressing your pain or are you preaching through it?” He pushes against the common advice to suck it up and preach, and links it partly to an Americanized idea of masculinity in which men suffer in silence. His verdict is firm. Setting aside your emotions and mental health, he says, “tucking that away for the sake of ministry is not God honoring.” He adds, “And it actually dehumanizes you in your role on leading humans.”
Scripture does show God giving strength in weakness. “And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). That verse has sometimes been used to tell leaders to endure anything quietly. Look at what Paul does with it, though. He names his weakness, in writing, to a church. The verse gives no warrant for pretending.
Blade says something similar about image: “maintaining a perfect image is deception, because nobody’s perfect.” He is clear that honesty starts inward, with being real with yourself, before any question of what you share with a congregation. Psalm 51:6 points the same way: “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.”
Blade also mentions the high-profile stories of pastoral suicide in recent years, and wonders whether the push-through mentality played a part. If that subject is close to you, please treat it as more than a study topic. If you are thinking about ending your life, or fear someone you serve with might be, call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and tell a trusted person today.
Rest, help and being carried
Blade names three kinds of help. Each meets a resistance leaders actually feel.
Rest. Blade warns that “good things can become bad things when they become God things when they become idols,” and asks a question that cuts close: “are you open to the idea that God can speak through someone other than you?” Mark 6:31 records Jesus saying to his disciples, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.”
Read on through verse 34 and observe. What does Jesus offer the disciples? What happens to their rest? What does the passage not promise? Notice that the crowds follow them anyway. The text gives a real invitation to rest without pretending rest is easy to protect.
Therapy. Some leaders hesitate here for a sincere reason: they fear that going to a counselor means trusting a person instead of praying. Blade answers by pointing to a choice most Christians already make. We pray about pneumonia or a broken bone, and we also see a doctor, and no one calls that unbelief. He applies the same logic to the mind: “And yes, God can heal them, but God has provided people to help us process through those things as well.” Prayer and professional care do not compete. Jude 3 affirms that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. Blade adds that Christian clinicians are available for those who want one.
Dr. Nicole Massie Martin, speaking at the same conference, pressed the point on leaders directly: “please do not assume that everybody needs healing except for you.” She went further: “Every preacher, every leader, every counselor, every pastor needs a counselor.”
Being ministered to. Blade recognizes that many pastors keep distance from their congregations to avoid old hurts, and he does not tell anyone where their boundaries should sit. He asks only for openness, because “it doesn’t have to be a one-way relationship from pastor to congregation.” Galatians 6:2 reads, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” Read verses 1-5 together. Who is addressed? Does anything in the command exempt the person in the pulpit? What does verse 5 add about each person’s own load, and how do the two fit?
Who are you when the role ends?
Ask a pastor who they are, Blade says, and you usually hear a title. If the role is your primary identity, losing it can become a crisis. His ordering is simple: “first and most primarily, I’m a son or daughter of God, that’s my identity.” The pastoral role flows from that.
He also names a pattern he calls “spiteful success,” drawn from his own book on Black men and identity and from what he has seen around seminaries: a son with an absent or neglectful father who spends life proving his worth through achievement, and in church aims for the top position. Blade presents this as his observation, not a study result, and you need not share his background to ask whether something like it drives you. The work of shepherding stays good. The motive is what needs a look.
His alternative is to “seek wholeness, not perfection.” He defines wholeness as “optimum health and the awareness of what affects me in what way and why,” and adds a realistic limit: “Not that I can control these things all the time, but I’m aware and I can prepare.” Wholeness, on his account, means knowing what affects you and getting ready for it, instead of covering the wound or using ministry to escape it.
Questions for reflection or discussion
Answer these in writing on your own, or talk through whichever your group chooses. Any question may be skipped.
- In your two-column reading, what did the text say that you had not noticed before? What does that suggest about how you approach familiar passages?
- Where in your preparation do feelings give you useful information, and where might they be setting the message?
- Think of a conviction you hold strongly. How has your history helped you see the text more clearly on it, and how might it have narrowed what you see?
- Who taught you, by word or example, that leaders should push through? What did that teaching get right, and what did it cost?
- Which kind of help (rest, therapy, being ministered to by the church) is hardest for you to accept? What is the actual obstacle: time, money, fear of being seen, past hurt, or something else?
- If your title disappeared tomorrow, what would remain true of you before God? How much of your week is built on that answer?
If you are facilitating: leaders often find it harder than anyone to admit struggle in front of peers. Agree at the start that what is said stays in the room, that no one has to share, and that the goal is not diagnosis. If someone discloses something heavy, thank them, ask what support they have, and follow up privately. A study group cannot replace a counselor and should not try.
One step this month
Pick one concrete action small enough to do. Look up a counselor and book a first appointment. Ask a trusted elder or colleague to preach one Sunday so you can rest. Do the two-column reading again a week from now, after time away from the passage. Tell one safe person which of Blade’s questions stayed with you.
Then preach the next sermon knowing what you brought into the study with you. The wound may still be there. It no longer has to write the outline.