The 300 Pound Pastor
When Mark
Bejsovec, a youth pastor, saw the scale creep over 300 pounds, he gulped. During his high school football playing days,
he carried just 186 pounds on his six-foot-two frame. In his early thirties, however, Mark started
gaining weight steadily. At first, he rationalized it and even began using it
like a tool. It made him seem funnier. He could push out his stomach until he
looked like he was pregnant, and the kids in his ministry would laugh: “You
look like you got twins!”
When
he hit 300 pounds, though, Mark began to sense God speaking to him about his
physical condition.
“I
looked into Scripture, specifically at the men in the Bible who assumed
leadership roles, and wondered how they must have looked. I couldn’t find anyone
in leadership who was overweight.”
This
wasn’t about vanity, but rather about being a better steward of his body and
his calling: “If I was addressing only spiritual issues but not the physical
ones, I considered I would be less useful to the Lord in my ministry. If I was
going to remain in ministry, I needed to honor God with all my heart, all my
soul, all my mind, and also all my body.”
By
definition, we can’t be a leader in secret.
Somebody is following us. And the
bodies we are leading with aren’t hidden.
A
friend of mine, who works as a senior director for a major Christian
development organization, recently shared with me the battle he faces with
eating and exercise. On a recent
business trip, he ate twenty-four restaurant meals in a row. He’s concerned
about his health habits, and like many, he lives with a constant sense of
failure that he could be doing more about his weight. What he doesn’t see are
spiritual leaders taking this struggle as seriously as he does. “We’ve been taught in the evangelical
tradition about adultery and lying and stealing and coveting,” he says, “and
about lust and alcoholism and smoking and drug abuse. But many evangelical
pastors who preach against these things are visibly overweight or obese. I
don’t say this to judge them—I struggle with the same thing. But sometimes I
wonder. Sure, they may have conquered the online porn, but it seems like
they’re ‘medicating’ with food; I get that, because I do the same thing.”
For
his part, Mark decided to quit his former eating habits cold turkey. When his
weight started coming off, Mark experienced a rush of positive energy. “I
started feeling more affirmed, my self-esteem went up, and my relationship with
God grew. It’s not that my previous life didn’t honor God, but now it felt like
I was living like God designed me to live.”
When I
asked Mark what changed most about his life since he lost seventy pounds, he
responded, “Let’s be honest: there were times I was discredited because of the
way I looked. When I talked to kids about self-control in other areas, they
could look at me and understandably ask why I wasn’t addressing my issues with food. But now, when I
share my story, there’s an added inspirational element. If I can do it, anyone
can do it, and my weight loss has become an effective tool in my ministry.”
As a
writer whose most prominent books relate to marriage, I take it as a personal
challenge to maintain the integrity of my own marriage. I can’t write and teach on marriage if my own
is falling apart. As a pastor, however, when
I talk to the church about self-control; when I preach on the necessity of
personal discipline, good stewardship in all areas of life, and, above all,
when I teach out of 1 Corinthians 6:20: “You are not your own;
you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” I am going to
completely undercut my message if I’m preaching out of a body that denies this.
It
would be convenient if being a leader didn’t require also being an example, but
that’s not the case. Paul writes,
“Follow me as I follow Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:1)
Leaders,
let’s ask ourselves, “Is my body serving or thwarting my message?” If you’re a pastor, you may well have accepted
financial sacrifice for the privilege of being in the ministry; if you’re a
leader of any type, you have readily accepted the sacrifice of your time,
tranquility, and even reputation, as leadership assaults all of these. But will you also accept bodily sacrifice—watching what you eat, and putting in the effort
to get appropriate exercise? Will you recognize that the body out of which you
lead can either support or undercut the message that you carry?
I
am not suggesting that we pick
leaders by how thin they are, or that we make a direct connection between a
person’s BMI and his holiness. That would be ridiculous, ignorant, and
unfair—some bodies aren’t designed to be thin, other bodies seem to naturally
stay thin regardless of how they are cared for or fed, but leaders, we know our own journey, we know whether
this area of stewardship is feeding or hindering our maturity and ministry.
Don’t all of us feel better, stronger, more energetic, when we’re being
faithful in this area? And don’t we all
know that there are negative consequences when we get careless?
So,
in a spirit of encouragement and grace, let’s admit that this is something we
need to start talking about. Just as we seemed eager to denounce the opulent
affluence and money-raising scandals of the 1980s televangelists, let’s not be
blind to our own contemporary challenges at the dawn of the 21st century.
For more
on this topic, check out Gary’s book Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul.
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