How can clergy and other church leaders be more resilient and avoid burnout?
That was the question posed to a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Dr. Kate Rae Davis, the founder and executive director of the Center for Transforming Engagement at the Seattle School for Theology and Psychology, said she starts with the understanding that “people are already resilient.”
“Pastors are resilient, or they wouldn’t be [in church pulpits] every Sunday. Our lay leaders are resilient, or they wouldn’t be showing up to do the work they care about, even above and beyond their normal work,” Davis said. “We already have resilience. How can we tap into it?”
Listen to the 44-minute conversation here. Resilience resources can be found here.
Research by the Center for Transforming Engagement helped distill contributors to resilience among church leaders into three areas: people, practices and purpose.
People form a leader’s community of support. Practices, Davis said, refers to “everything you do to keep yourself well and healthy in every meaning of the word.” Purpose “is about meaning-making and calling. It’s about the bigger picture of why I do what I do. What’s the lesson I learn from setbacks and hardships that makes me more equipped” to face them? she asked.
For many of the pastors she works with, “purpose is the one we live in. … It’s inherently connected to the work of pastoring,” Davis said. “Meaning-making is what we’re training to do for the church and for others” with services that include pastoral care. “It’s all the same work. We tend to get into ministry because of some sense of call, some sense of ‘there’s something bigger than just my life that I want to dedicate my life to.’”
Practices are habits “most of us know we’re supposed to be doing. It’s a matter of getting ourselves to actually do it,” she said. “We know we should be spending more time in prayer and meditation and less time stressing over our in-box. It’s how we stack those habits, and more importantly, how we put together a community of accountability.”
The piece that’s often overlooked in ministry is people, Davis said.
“The people we care about ministry leaders having is the person who can say, ‘hey, you just went through something really stressful in your church. How are you handling that?’ Or, ‘you just had this big event. How are you taking care of yourself?’ That’s a different level of friendship than what we often have access to, which is much more often where we’re the ones offering care, if you’re in a traditional ordained ministry role.”
“Even for our lay leaders, it’s a level of intimacy to invite that kind of feedback from others,” she said. “That’s the piece we see people most hungry for.”
Catoe asked: How do we navigate church cultures that have formed around suffering servant models for their leaders?
“The boundarylessness we have in ministry, we have to unlearn that,” Davis said. “We have to learn other stories of what it means that Jesus died for me, died for us, and what his ministry looks like in my life.”
The dilemma we are facing in this “possibly reforming era of being the church right now is congregations won’t yet know how to treat a pastor who isn’t bleeding out for the ministry, and pastors won’t quite know how to be boundaried with their ministry,” Davis said. “How do we relearn leadership skills more aligned to what God wants for us?”
Davis said the Center for Transforming Engagement added a fourth “p” word, “place,” to the list of three.
“We can do a lot to condition ourselves to heat. I love a good sauna for 20 minutes, but I don’t want to live in that kind of heat,” she said. “It’s the same with some of these leadership positions. We can do them for short periods, but if the heat gets too much, we can’t live there.”
New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Tina Finley, Accountant, General Ledger Office, Administrative Services Group
Rob Fohr, VP, Strategic Alignment & Mid-Council Relations, Strategic Alignment, The Presbyterian Foundation
Let us pray:
Gracious God, by your Spirit you inspire our efforts to feed the hungry, preach the good news and share your love. Your people, all your children, are hungry for food, for friends, for peace and for the good news. As you have fed us, bless our efforts to feed each other, for we serve in your name. Amen.
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