A resilient band of church leaders

LOUISVILLE — How can clergy and other church leaders be more resilient and avoid burnout?

That was the question posed to last week’s 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.”

Image

“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. “It’s important that you have people you exchange niceties with — get together and have a meal. That’s all great.”

“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?

“I love that you named that ‘I don’t want this to kill me,’” Davis said. “The boundarylessness we have in ministry, we have to unlearn that. 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. No matter how much you persevere and willpower your way through it, at some point your body cannot handle that level of heat in the sauna full-time.”

Take time to assess

Davis said she wishes more congregations would regularly review job descriptions. “That can sound dull,” she said, but a practice for the session “is to say, ‘what do you think this person does?’ They might say, ‘they preach a sermon, and that’s it.’”

“People should make a bulleted list of everything they think the pastor does. Then have the pastor bring the actual list of what they do, and then talk about the difference between the lists,” she said. “The next step is to say, ‘how many hours per month does each task take?’”

“I wish more churches had a rhythm for this,” she said. When pastors bring up this idea, church members sometimes think they’re leaving or negotiating for a higher salary, “when really what they’re trying to do is make their work more visible so they can feel valued for all the invisible things they do,” she said. “Usually it’s not until a consultant or someone from the mid council comes in before any of this happens.”

Whatever the session learns during this process can be shared with the congregation during, for example, the church’s annual meeting.

Image

“I know how difficult these conversations [around moving clergy from full-time to part-time] are,” she said. “Through the lens of resilience — of people, practice and purpose — when we have less, how do we not keep doing the same, or more?”

She advised taking a hard look at the church neighborhood to find out “what our neighbors need us to do — current neighbors, not our neighbors 40 years ago. There are a lot of ministries we do that were for a past iteration of our neighborhood or of our church,” she said. “Maybe we can hold respectful funerals and let go of some of those ministries, so now we’re doing less with our less.”

Churches ought to be deciding “who are you inviting into these ministries with you? Maybe the ministry is to keep going.” A leader might say, “you six people who really care about this ministry, you’re in charge. You’re fully authorized to lead this,” Davis said, adding it can be hard for a pastor to say, “I’m going to let some things fall because we need to care about this together. My job isn’t doing it; my job is facilitating us to do it together.”

“Burnout is real, and it’s so easy to give into,” Doong said at the close of the broadcast. “Passion is what we have plenty of. It’s some of those other things we need to focus on developing so we can live into our calling in ways that are life-giving and healthy and don’t exhaust us and burn us out.”

“The culture may be shifting a little,” Catoe said, as congregations make an effort to care for church leaders who are caring for congregants. “I think these are great resources for pastors to have.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.