In April 2026, Scott Barber published an essay on the Evangelical Free Church of America's blog titled "Pastors, You Are the Immune System of Our Movement" — a piece that speaks not only to EFCA pastors but, by extension, to the pastoral theology of the free evangelical tradition as a whole.
Barber's central argument is that the spiritual, emotional, and relational health of a movement's pastors determines the movement's overall health. Just as a body's immune system is the distributed, adaptive defence against disease and decay — present throughout the whole organism, not concentrated in one organ — so pastoral vitality is the distributed health of the church. When pastors are isolated, burned out, or spiritually dry, the whole movement pays. When they are well, connected, and growing, the congregations they serve tend to reflect that.
The essay comes at a moment when pastoral health has moved to the centre of many free evangelical conversations. The EFCA, like other free-church bodies, has invested in pastoral cohorts, spouse support, sabbatical programmes, and peer networks — recognising that the pressure of ministry in a secularising culture, combined with the relative isolation that congregational polity can produce, creates genuine vulnerability for pastors and their families.
For the free evangelical tradition in particular, the question of pastoral health carries structural dimensions. In a tradition where the pastor is not a sacramental mediator but a commissioned member of the congregation's ministry team, the absence of formal episcopal oversight (which in episcopal traditions provides at least a framework for pastoral care of pastors) must be compensated by intentional peer structures and denominational investment. Barber's essay is a call to that intentionality.
Source: EFCA Blog, Scott Barber, April 2026
