NEW YORK, United States (AP) — Greg Laurie is among America’s most successful clergymen – senior pastor at a California megachurch, prolific author, host of a global radio programme. Yet after a youthful colleague’s suicide, his view of his vocation is unsparing.

“Pastors are people, just like everyone else,” Laurie said by e-mail. “We are broken people who live in a broken world. Sometimes, we need help too.”

Laurie’s 15,000-member Harvest Christian Fellowship, based in Riverside, California, was jolted in September by the death of Jarrid Wilson, a 30-year-old associate pastor. Wilson and his wife, parents of two sons, had founded an outreach group to help people coping with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“People may think that as pastors or spiritual leaders we are somehow above the pain and struggles of everyday people,” Laurie wrote after Wilson’s death. “We are the ones who are supposed to have all the answers. But we do not.”

There is similar introspection among clergy of many faiths across the United States as the age-old challenges of their ministries are deepened by a host of newly evolving stresses. Rabbis worry about protecting their congregations from anti-Semitic violence. Islamic chaplains counsel college students unnerved by anti-Muslim sentiments. A shortage of Catholic priests creates burdens for those who remain, even as their church’s sex-abuse crisis lowers morale. Worries for Protestant pastors range from crime and drug addiction in their communities to financial insecurity for their own families to social media invective that targets them personally.

Adam Hertzman, who works for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, witnessed first-hand the emotional toll on his city’s rabbis after the October 2018 massacre that killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue.

“Somehow in the US we expect our clergy to be superhuman when it comes to these things, and frankly that’s an unrealistic expectation,” he said. “They’re human beings who are going to feel the same kind of fear and numbness and depression that other people do.”

It’s difficult to quantify the extent of clergy stress, nationwide or denominationally. But a 2018 Gallup poll bears out a widely shared impression that clergy no longer enjoy the same public esteem as in the past. Only 37 per cent of Americans rate members of the clergy highly for their honesty and ethics, the lowest rating in the 40 years Gallup has been asking that question.

“Not very long ago, they were seen as one of the pillars of the community,” said Carl Weisner, senior director of Duke Divinity School’s Clergy Health Initiative. “There has been some loss of status… and that does add to stress.”

Yet Weisner says the challenges of ministry are often offset by the rewards.

“There’s a gift of meaning in the work that not a whole lot of other professions have,” he said.

Stress — and rewards — come in many forms for Rodney McNeal, 54, an Army veteran and hospital social worker who has pastored Second Bethlehem Baptist Church in Alexandria, Louisiana, for nearly eight years.

Officially, the African American church has 300 members but only about 130 attend a typical service, he said.

“They don’t understand that I get tired like they get tired,” he said. “They want you to be at their constant beck and call.”

He has attended five seminaries but never completed them. The courses, he said, didn’t cover the things he sees on the job.

“The preaching part is the easy part,” he said. “Had I known the ugly side of ministry – the hospital visits, burying the dead, being in the room when someone is dying and trying to comfort their family… Had I known all that, I don’t think I would have accepted being a pastor.”

When he began, McNeal rarely took time off, straining his marriage.

Although he has tried to create a work-life balance, he visits sick congregants on his lunch break and, if he gets off his job at 4:30 pm tries to make two or three home and hospital visits before he picks up his children at school.

McNeal said pastors in small congregations get close to their parishioners; when a tragedy strikes, “You are feeling the same pains.”

“You have to get them through the process, but nobody is there to help you,” he said.

Over the years McNeal has opened up to two older pastors who counsel him. He also talks to his brother, who is a minister in North Carolina.

“I know what depression is,” he said. “You have to sit in your car when you drive up in the driveway of the church and get your game face on to go in there. I have contemplated walking away so many times.”

What keeps him going?

“I love seeing people just turn their lives around,” he said. “I will be out in the community and somebody will say ‘Hey man, you changed my life. You helped me’.”

Episcopal Bishop Chilton Knudsen, from the vantage of a nearly 40-year career, cites several factors affecting the clergy’s morale, including sex-abuse scandals that have rocked several Protestant denominations as well as the Roman Catholic church

“Back in the day, you were automatically assumed to be trustworthy,” said Knudsen, 73. “As the scandals became public, the public trust of clergy has dropped a little notch with each revelation. Even if you never had a scandal, there’s still a taint by association.”

“At the same time, the clergy has more complicated situations come across their doorstep,” she said. “There’s a wearing-down effect, a sense of frustration and malaise – they’re thinking, ‘I’ve spent all these hours with people trying to do good things, and I’m just getting nowhere’.”

Another challenge, she said, is the willingness of some churchgoers to engage in “clergy bashing”.

“Sometimes your congregation is polarised – a group who wants you gone and believes another priest will be so much better, and a group who are supportive,” she said. “People are acting out, circulating rumours about you in e-mail chains – it’s traumatic.”

The Episcopal church offers subsidised psychological counslling to its clergy, but Knudsen says the service is underused.

In Baltimore, the Rev Alvin Gwynn, 74, has been getting help from computer-savvy millennials as he serves for a 30th year as pastor of Friendship Baptist Church. His mostly African American congregation of 1,100 is flourishing, he says, and yet he’s weighed down sometimes by the multiple crises of his city – high crime and drug abuse, underfunded schools, a lack of decent affordable housing.

“The hardest thing is trying to keep people’s hope alive,” he said. “We’re no longer a friendly city – our families have been torn apart, and people don’t have the interaction with the church that they once had.”

The National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches in the US, published research in 2016 detailing pervasive financial stress among its pastors.