Convicted by Spider-Man

Is it too early to talk about Spider-Man: Brand New Day? If you think it is… this is your warning that I am going there anyway, because this has been building in me since I walked out of the theater, overloaded with emotion, thinking about pastors in ministry. If you are not a Spider-Man fan, I promise to make this accessible to you.

In the final moments of the previous film, Peter Parker (who is Spider-Man, for those who hide from superhero movies) makes an incredibly painful decision to protect the people he loves: he chooses to allow them to forget him entirely, not just his identity as Spider-Man. So this movie begins with Peter living and working completely alone, unknown to anyone. I can hear him saying the very things I sense in some pastors: “I need to do this on my own.” . . . “Others wouldn’t understand.” . . . “I don’t want people caught up in what I have to deal with behind the scenes.”

Here are a few thoughts I had while watching the film.

The Invisible Cost of Isolation is Burnout
Watching Peter carry the full weight of Spider-Man’s work with no one to share it, I recognized something I have felt in my own ministry and watched in others.

Isolation does not announce itself. It creeps in disguised as diligence, as the responsible choice, as the quiet conviction that no one else could carry what you carry.

Peter tells himself that keeping his friends at a distance protects them. Pastors tell themselves the same story in a hundred small ways: we stop bringing our real struggles to elder meetings, and we answer “I’m fine” until we half-believe it. We let people admire the work without ever letting them see what it costs. The result is rarely a dramatic collapse. It is a slow erosion, a pastor who is technically present but quietly depleted, running on a grim competence that looks like strength from the outside and feels like exhaustion from the inside. That is what burnout actually looks like most of the time: not a crash, but a long, invisible drain nobody can see, because part of the energy that you expend is the incredible effort that it takes for your burnout to remain hidden.

The Fusion of Role with Identity
That isolation is not the only danger, and this next one is not really a wall at all. It is a conflation, the role and the person underneath it slowly becoming the same thing. There is a moment in the film when Peter is becoming more and more like pure Spider-Man and less and less Peter Parker. The mission is consuming the man. Do you know that firsthand? Ministry has a way of rewarding you for disappearing into the role, right? The better you perform, the more affirmation you receive, and the easier it becomes to forget who the person is underneath the role. But a title is not an identity, and a calling is not a self.

When “pastor” becomes the whole of who you are, every criticism feels like an attack on your soul, every slow season feels like personal failure, and every ounce of rest feels like betrayal of the mission.

I have watched good men lose themselves this way, not through scandal, but through a quiet substitution nobody names out loud; they stopped being someone loved by God and started being only someone useful to God’s people. Those are not the same thing. Confusing them will eventually cost you everything the role was meant to teach others in the first place. God’s love for you comes from His infinite grace and love for you as His child, and not for the goods and services you might offer to His Kingdom work.

The Walls We Build
The isolation I described earlier was Peter, and plenty of pastors, trying to protect the people around them. This wall is different. It is the kind you build to protect yourself. I planted a church in the Seattle area in 2005. Several years in, during a particularly challenging season, I confided in one of my best friends in the church that I was struggling to know our next step. A month later, his family stopped attending. My first thought was that I would never be vulnerable with a friend in the church again.

I know how to build a wall that keeps others out – never let them see me struggle.

The movie also serves as a cautionary tale about the extremes Peter was heading toward. The Punisher (Frank Castle) is a man who has accumulated so much pain in his life that he has built a literal fortress to keep people out, booby traps and all, and anyone who makes it through still has to face his bitterness and sarcasm. Have you ever seen someone’s sarcasm as a protective wall built to keep people from getting too close?

Taking Off the Mask
By the end of the film, Peter finally chooses differently. He takes off the mask and lets someone see him without it, not the persona, not the competence, just the person underneath, grief and all. That is the invitation for every pastor who has built a fortress like Frank Castle’s, one trap of professionalism and self-sufficiency at a time. The wall I built after that conversation with my church friend did not keep me safe. It kept me isolated in exactly the way I have been describing.

I do not think the answer is never to get hurt again. That is not possible in ministry, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have found a way around it. The answer is closer to what Peter finally does, in that he stays in the work but stops doing it alone. Let a few people pass the traps; let them in. Tell someone the truth before you are forced to.

If something in this landed too close, take it as an invitation rather than an indictment. The isolation you have built was probably intended to protect yourself or the people around you. The truth is that it is protecting no one, least of all you. Let’s talk.