The Church Revitalization Podcast – Episode 338– Low EQ in Pastors
Every pastor wants to lead well. Most invest heavily in theology, preaching, and strategy. But one of the most overlooked factors in pastoral effectiveness is emotional intelligence, and low EQ in pastors quietly undermines teams, erodes trust, and stalls church health in ways that no amount of programming or planning can fix. If you want to lead people well, you have to understand yourself first.
Why Emotional Intelligence Matters in Pastoral Leadership
Emotional intelligence is not about being soft or overly sensitive. It is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions, while also reading and responding wisely to the emotions of others. For pastors, this is not optional. Leading a church means navigating grief, conflict, disappointment, and joy, often in the same week. Without a developed EQ, a pastor will find those moments working against him rather than through him.
EQ Can Be Developed Over Time
Here is something worth noting: EQ is not entirely fixed. Research and experience both confirm that emotional intelligence can grow over time with intentional effort. That is genuinely good news for leaders who feel like they were not naturally wired for relational nuance. The goal is not to become someone you are not. The goal is to grow into the kind of leader your congregation actually needs.
Dr. Aubrey Malphurs addressed this directly in his final book, Developing Emotionally Mature Leaders, written with the church context firmly in mind. It is a worthy resource for any pastor serious about leading from a place of health rather than reaction.
Sign One: You Confuse Anger With Authority
The first sign of low EQ in pastors is a pattern of using emotional intensity as a substitute for genuine leadership. This looks like sharp tones with staff, disproportionate reactions to minor problems, or a persistent undercurrent of frustration that keeps your team walking on eggshells.
Anger Is Not the Same as Real Influence
Anger is not authority. A pastor can absolutely get short-term compliance through emotional pressure, but that is not the same as real influence. When team members start withholding information, avoiding honest conversations, or disengaging quietly, they are not respecting a strong leader. They are protecting themselves from an unpredictable one.
Think about the parallel to parenting. A parent who yells to get results may technically achieve the immediate behavior they wanted, but at a significant relational cost over time. The same dynamic plays out in church leadership. People may comply for a season, but a culture built on fear never becomes a culture of trust. The congregation and the staff both deserve better than emotional volatility dressed up as decisive leadership.
The Path Forward
If this resonates, the work is not to eliminate passion or directness. It is to learn the difference between conviction and reaction, and to build the self-awareness to know which one is actually driving the moment.
Sign Two: You Struggle to Separate Your Identity From Outcomes
Low EQ in pastors often surfaces when results become tied to self-worth. When attendance drops, criticism lands, or a vision fails to gain traction, a pastor with low emotional intelligence tends to internalize those outcomes as personal indictments. The result is defensiveness, overexplaining, or an inability to receive honest feedback without shutting down.
Why This Makes Growth Almost Impossible
If every critique feels like an attack, the people around you will eventually stop offering input at all. That might feel safer, but it leaves you leading in an echo chamber where no one tells you what you actually need to hear.
Healthy leaders develop what might be called a stable center, a grounded sense of identity that does not rise and fall with every success or setback. For pastors, this rootedness should be theological as much as it is psychological. Knowing who you are in Christ is not a cliche. It is the foundation that makes honest self-examination possible without it becoming self-destruction.
Practical Steps Toward a Stable Identity
Practically, this means cultivating relationships where honest feedback is expected and welcomed. It means building rhythms of reflection, not just activity. And it means being willing to ask the uncomfortable question: Am I leading from security, or am I leading from fear of what failure says about me?
Sign Three: You Treat Emotions as Obstacles Rather Than Information
Some leaders, particularly those wired toward task-completion and strategy, view emotions as noise that slows things down. This perspective produces a particular kind of low EQ in pastors that is easy to miss because it can look like efficiency or even strength.
Emotions Carry Real Data
When a staff member’s tone shifts, when a volunteer quietly disappears, when tension surfaces in a meeting, those signals carry real information about what is happening beneath the surface of your team and congregation. A leader who dismisses or ignores those signals does not make them disappear. He simply loses access to critical feedback that could shape better decisions.
This does not mean every emotional moment requires an extended processing conversation. Strong leaders learn to read the room without being controlled by it. The skill is attunement, noticing what is happening emotionally in the people around you and factoring that into how you lead, communicate, and make decisions.
Building the Habit of Attunement
For highly task-oriented pastors, this is genuinely learnable. Start by building the simple habit of asking people how they are doing and actually waiting for the answer. Slow down enough in staff conversations to notice nonverbal cues. Treat the relational temperature of your team as a metric worth tracking, not just the numbers on a report.
Growing Your EQ Is Part of Growing Your Church
Church health and pastoral health are not separate conversations. The emotional culture of a congregation almost always reflects the emotional health of its leaders. When pastors grow in self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and relational wisdom, that growth ripples outward. Teams become more open, communication improves, and trust deepens in ways that no strategy alone can manufacture.
Emotional Intelligence and Courageous Leadership Work Together
It is also worth saying clearly: addressing low EQ is not about becoming someone who leads by sentiment or avoids hard decisions. The most effective pastoral leaders are both emotionally intelligent and courageously direct. Those things work together, not against each other.
If you want to go deeper on this, Developing Emotionally Mature Leaders by Dr. Aubrey Malphurs is a strong starting point. And if you are looking for practical tools to strengthen your leadership and your church’s overall health, explore the resources available at healthychurchestoolkit.com and malphursgroup.com. The Healthy Churches Toolkit in particular offers a leadership operating system built for exactly this kind of growth, and you can try it free for seven days.
You cannot lead people further than you are willing to go yourself. Growing in emotional intelligence is not a detour from ministry. It is part of it.
Also check out:
5 Competencies of High Impact Leaders
The Dark Side of Leadership: 5 Emotional Disorders
What Difference Does Emotional Intelligence Make?
Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Scott Ball is the Vice President and a Lead Guide with The Malphurs Group. He lives in East Tennessee with his wife and two children. (Email Scott).
