Condition: Critical
Exploring the causes of poor clergy health
Physical health of clergy? The phrase is oxymoronic.
Today, the health and well being of clergy is awful. This was not always the case. The Pulpit and Pew research project at Duke Divinity School points to studies conducted with Protestant clergy in the 1950’s. At that time, Protestant clergy had the lowest rates of disease for every major diagnosis and lived longer and healthier lives than people in any other profession. By 1983, another study found that Protestant clergy had the highest overall work-related stress of various religious professionals and the next to the lowest amount of personal resources to cope with the strain. A third study conducted in 1999 found that clergy have one of the highest death rates due to heart disease of any occupation1.
The statistics get grimmer and stranger. A 2003 Pulpit & Pew survey of 2, 500 pastors found that 76 percent rated their health as excellent or very good. About this same percentage said that neither their physical health nor emotional health had caused them to miss work. But, 10 percent reported feelings of depression all or most of the time and more than 40 percent reported feeling worn out or depressed most of the time.
At the same time, 76 percent of the clergy surveyed were either overweight (46 percent) or obese (30 percent), a significantly higher percentage than the population as whole (61 percent). Weight was a bigger problem for men than for women in the Pulpit & Pew survey, with 79 percent of being either overweight or obese, compared to 52 percent of women.
This portrait of clergy health is not news to denominational officials. The United Methodist Church is busily working to determine how their pastors will be able to have health care coverage. Some have proposed having one health care policy for the entire General Conference rather than having each annual conference provide coverage. A judicatory official of one annual conference told me he had an extremely difficult time finding a carrier who would even talk about insuring his pastors because the risk is too high for Protestant clergy.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has made health care a priority for the denomination--not just the health and well being of clergy, but also the justice implications of health care coverage, and the crisis of national obesity. The American Baptist Church has also made clergy health a priority. The Presbyterian Church (USA) Board of Pensions is conducting a thorough search of all the available wellness programs for clergy, new ways to promote mental and emotional health, and is working closely with seminaries and judicatories to encourage overall health for candidates to ministry. The Episcopal diocese of California has created the Clergy Wellness Commission to address the issues of burn out and clergy ill health2.
So what happened? How did clergy go from a place of health and well being to this new place near the edge of an abyss? The emotional and physical ill health of today’s clergy is not the disease; they are symptoms of a much bigger issue.
The church has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. Society has changed. We have gone from being a rural to an urban or sub-urban society. We have always been a mobile society, but today, instead of leaving one town to settle in another, we live in towns as if they are hotels, perhaps never establishing roots with social commitments. A pastor who was interviewed in a focus group at Austin Seminary, for example, described his church as more of a train station than a fixed community. He said his congregation’s membership has a 33 percent turn-over rate every three years.
The decision to affiliate with a religious community is deeply influenced by a culture of choice. John Mulder noted at the Symposium on the Future of Mainstream Protestant Churches that, “...a culture of choice contributes to the church shopping that bedevils pastors and congregations, and undermines a deep sense of belonging to a particular theological tradition. Pastors ask: ‘How can we win the allegiance of people in a competitive marketplace of ideas, beliefs, and values?’ ‘How can we speak with integrity the claims of the gospel when ‘beliefs’ are reduced to the level of ‘personal opinion’ and ‘faith’ is equated with ‘ideology’?”3
Within this culture of choice comes a lack of shared values and commitment to purpose. This leaves many pastors to do all the work all the time all alone.
Another cause of clergy health is conflict, a persistent problem in today’s congregations. David Roozen and Carl Dudley in a 2001 study entitled, Faith Communities Today: A Report on Religion in the United States Today reported, “Congregations suffer more when they experience conflict than (advanced) age or (poor) location. Lingering conflict is strongly associated with declining vitality and declining membership.” In focus groups conducted at Austin Seminary, pastors say they are called in to mediate conflicts large and small in congregations. These pastors said that they did not want just more training in conflict management skills, but a breather from conflict, a place where they could vent, and people who understood what it is they talk about. 4
Next is loneliness and isolation. Ministers are different. We are not business people, although we need some business skills. We need to know how to read a spread sheet, negotiate, persuade, and delegate.Pastors are not lawyers, although we need to be firmly rooted in our theological convictions; we must understand the polity of our own denominations. Following polity is one of the methods by which we can weather the conflict in our congregations.
Ministry is a calling. Ministry is a craft. Ministry involves loving the church, its members (who often act in unlovable ways), all the while wrestling with one’s own doubts and inner conflicts.
Healthy ministry requires healthy pastors.
For more on clergy health, read “Which Way to Clergy Health?”
1 Becky McMillan, “The View from Pulpit and Pew: Provocative Findings on Pastoral Leadership in the 21 st Century,” SACMB Presentation, February 21, 2003 (Duke: Pulpit and Pew), (August 12, 2003).
2Most mainline denominations now have easy access links to health and wellness sites on their websites. Many have their own health and wellness programs and articles or even books for downloading.
3 John Mulder, “The Shape of Mainstream Protestantism, “A Symposium on the Future of Mainstream Protestantism”, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Tuesday, January 29, 2002.
4 Carl S. Dudley and David A. Roozen, “Faith Communities Today: A Report on Religion in the United States Today” ( Hartford: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Hartford Seminary, March 2001), p. 61.
