My name is Everett Miller, and I was a pastor for 12 years. About eight years into my ministry career, while I was solo pastor of a church of about 250 members, I woke on a Sunday morning and thought I was having a heart attack. Rather than going to the church as I usually would on a Sunday morning, I went to the emergency room while the congregation scrambled to have worship without me.

As it turned out, I wasn’t having a heart attack; I was having a panic attack, and (although I hadn’t realized what had been happening) it wasn’t the first I’d had. It was just the most severe. The pressures of being a solo pastor, the tension that comes with trying to manage ministry and family, the unprocessed grief from a string of difficult deaths in the congregation, and the isolation I was experiencing had built up inside. My body, mind, and spirit finally screamed, “No more!” Years later I realized that I’d gotten to that point (and I struggled to recover from it) in large part because I had no close friendships with anyone who could relate to my experience. I really could have used a Fellowship of Lone Shepherds.

A couple years later (December 2016), I left fulltime ministry to work in the world of higher education fundraising and development operations, where I still work. Unable to fully let go of being a pastor, during my first 2.5 years in my new career, I also served as the pulpit supply pastor for a tiny congregation in Oklahoma City. Even though I’d had my struggles as a pastor, leaving the pastorate was still the hardest thing I have ever done. It broke my heart. Although I am no longer a pastor, I teach adult Sunday school, help with men’s ministries, and participate in a theological book group at the nondenominational church in Stillwater, Oklahoma where my family and I have been members since 2019.

I still think and feel like a pastor. There’s nothing I can do about this; it’s just who God made me to be. Maybe someday I’ll be given the opportunity to serve as a pastor again, but for now I feel called to reach out to solo pastors to offer you the friendship of someone who has been where you are (or perhaps where you would like to avoid) and to connect you to others who are currently where you are.

Note: Fellowship of Lone Shepherds is a professional service of Christian Ministry Alliance and is completely separate and in no way affiliated with my fulltime employer—Oklahoma State University Foundation—or with Oklahoma State University. When I am participating in and facilitating these friendships, I am not, in any way, acting as a representative of OSUF or OSU.