People with mental health problems...in OUR church

It's likely there'll be people with mental disabilities, or mental health problems in your congregation. You may be dealing with them and their situation with compassion and concern. But what if you don't know how to help them, even in the most basic ways? (My own church has a particular ministry towards people with mental health issues, but there's a very small percentage of the congregation who are actually involved with the group who come to church.)

In an article that appeared in the Leadership Journal online, Through a Glass, Darkly:
Ministry to the mentally ill, Amy Simpson talks about her own experience as a teenager with a mother who was mentally unwell, and how she has learned what things pastors and congregations need to know to help not only those with the mental health problem, but also their families and friends. For instance here's what she has to say about pastors trying to assist:

"Sometimes clergy distance themselves from people with mental illness because they realize the problem can be long term. To become involved with this person may mean a lengthy commitment. Perhaps this person will never be cured. Such a problem is contrary to contemporary Western ideas of being in control of one's life and destiny. People in modern day America expect to find a rational solution to any problem. And yet, in this case, there may be no solution. It is tempting, if an answer is not apparent, to avoid the person for whom one has no answers."

Simpson also looks briefly at the theological issues, and at the problems of overspiritualisation of mental health issues. This is quite a long article, but it's full of good insights, and practical suggestions.

Ministers and extra-marital affairs

One of the issues pastors/ministers/priests seem to face - perhaps even more than other men (and I focus on men purposely here) - is that of the extra-marital affair. The consequences for ministry and family can be devastating, as you'd expect.

I came back to the Lord via the Pentecostal scene. In my naivete I thought these Pentecostal ministers were pure in heart and deed, and admired them for their integrity. And then one fell out of the ministry due to an affair, and then another and then another - and another! All within a few short years. Two of these guys were leaders in very large New Zealand Pentecostal churches.

Chad Estes has written two posts recently on the subject. In one he reviews a book by David Trotter called Lost + Found: Finding Myself by Getting Lost in an Affair, and offers some comments about how it can be difficult to maintain friendship with someone who's fallen in this way, but that it's necessary nevertheless. In the other post, Why Pastors Have Affairs, he offers six reasons why men in these positions of responsibility have perhaps greater 'reasons' to have affairs than other men. 'Reasons' in the sense that they can find reasons for the affairs better than some of us.

Ways for congregations to drive their pastor crazy

On previous occasions we've posted about the bullying of some pastors by their congregations. This time, with only a little tongue-in-cheek, Richard Floyd sets out a fairly comprehensive list of ways in which congregations can make sure they're doing their best to drive their pastor crazy.

Unfortunately the list will be too close to home for some in ministry. Don't read this is you're already feeling low.

Floyd calls his list Ten Highly Effective Strategies for Crushing Your Pastor's Morale.

A couple of examples:

3. Make sure to have an annual customer satisfaction survey where every member of the congregation fills out an anonymous questionnaire about their views of the pastor’s performance during the previous year. Make sure all the negative (or ambiguous) comments are read aloud at several meetings, and publish them without attribution in the church newsletter.

5. Cut the mission budget to balance the budget. Better yet, ask your pastor to choose between a raise in salary or an increase in the mission budget. This would be a good subject for an extended conversation at a congregational meeting. You can never talk too much about clergy compensation at a congregational meeting.

There are some funnier ones, and some that will set your teeth on edge. One or two would make Jesus himself weep.

Re-thinking priesthood

Sometimes there's a great temptation to simply copy a blog post from somewhere else and dump it in your own blog, especially when everything that's in the post is of value.

However, I'll resist the temptation and point you straight to the source - in this case, the Prodigal Kiwi(s) blog, and the post entitled: Re-Thinking Priesthood for the Sake of Mission, the Present and the Future.

The reason this blog post struck such a chord was that it's written very much along the lines of the thinking of the Presbyterian National Mission Office - in particular the National Mission Enabler, John Daniel. Substitute 'Ministry' for "Priesthood' and you could be talking about the Presbyterian denomination.

What's great about this post is that it shows the Holy Spirit isn't just working in one part of the church, but much wider.

Theology of self-care

Roy Oswald's book, Clergy Self-Care, begins by looking at the theology of health/wellness. A colleague provided the following notes in relation to this section of the book:

• God is omnipotent and omnipresent, ministers are not!

• God in Christ has done all that is necessary to redeem the world. Ministers do not need to save the world again.

• Mission and ministry belong to whole Body of Christ; a communal activity. Ministry does not belong solely to the Minister.

• Ministry should be a response to an experience of the grace of God. However motives can become distorted and ministry can flow from guilt or the seeking of personal fulfillment.

• Ministers are created beings, and with all humanity have limitations and weaknesses.

• Human beings are responsible for the stewardship of God’s world and themselves.

• God has given a model of self-care in observing the sacred rhythm of work and rest, the Sabbath. Jesus provides a model of doing ministry and taking care of himself; a balance of work and rest.

• Ministers need to learn that to be a person of compassion; we must not to be strung out with every human need that comes along.

• The biblical view of human beings is that the body, heart, soul and mind are all interconnected, parts of our whole being.

Why do bullies bully?

Bullying is an issue in the church as in the business world. It may be the minister (and his family) who are being bullied, or the minister himself who's doing the bullying. In an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled Create a Bully-Free Workplace, Nathanael Fast writes:

Among targets of bullying, 40% never told their employers and, of those who did, 62% reported that they were ignored. This suggests there's a significant opportunity to increase profits and beat the competition by eliminating the prevalence of workplace bullying in your organization. But how?

The first step is to identify the root of the problem. A set of recent studies conducted with Serena Chen, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, may provide some insight. We found that power is partly to blame. However, in contrast to the old adage that "power corrupts," giving people power did not turn them into bullies. Rather, it was the simultaneous pairing of power with feelings of inadequacy that led people to lash out. In our studies, the power holders who felt personally incompetent became aggressive, not because they were power hungry or had domineering personalities but because they were trying to overcome ego threat. Put simply, bullying is a cheap way to nurse a wounded ego. [my italics]

Leaders Who Last

Rowland Croucher has placed a review of this book by Margaret J. Marcuson on Facebook. What follows is just a part of the review.

Here’s one of the best little (150 pages) books on pastoral leadership with an American mainline church /Alban Institute flavour to emerge in the last decade.

They say every sermon/book should be summarizable in one sentence. Here’s mine for this one: ‘Your pastoral leadership style/conflicts can’t be understood apart from your family-of-origin experiences; so be patient: most changes in a pastor’s approach and a congregation’s responsiveness will take time and sensitivity to that church’s history as well.’

Margaret’s a Baptist, but as a non-fundamentalist Baptist myself, I hasten to add that the people she quotes and the ideas she espouses indicate that she’s a ‘broad church Baptist’ (yes, some of us do actually exist!).

Some of her (and her professional friends’) wisdom:

• When we are less dependent on the approval of others we can be more effective in our ministry (p. 6)

• Carrying other people, until we can’t do it any longer, is the real source of burnout, not overwork (11). We can be the most help by giving people space to find creative solutions to their own struggles (17). Identify who in your family you were trained to rescue so as not to mistake legitimate professional helping with illegitimate family rescuing – which is inevitably tied to unhealthy ways of trying to feel good about oneself (18-19).

• Many clergy are oldest children: they learn early to over-function in relation to others, to take responsibility for them (34-5). Of course not all that we learnt from our families is negative. Ask: ‘What gifts did your parents give you?’ (36). An initial step in looking at our family story is to create a family genogram (37). And remember: the problems with parents is that they had parents (46).

• Clarifying your vocation: Where do I want to go? What energizes me? What future possibilities do I see? What legacy do I want to leave? Do I know what I love to do? Can I do more of it? What was my original thinking in going into ministry? If I had to write down my ministry purpose in one sentence right this minute, what would I say? (73).

• The person who desperately wants to be liked is never the most popular; the leader who desperately wants others to follow is not the most effective (76)

• Teresa of Avila’s daily prayer: ‘Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you; all things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance attains to all things; who God possesses in nothing is wanting; alone God suffices’ (110).

The excellent final chapter on personal spiritual disciplines includes such classical wisdom as: worship in different places and traditions, go outside, find a spiritual mentor, read Scripture devotionally, not just for your sermon preparation.

At the end of each chapter are some very helpful discussion-starters. The ten questions to ask about your church’s history are brilliant (32). I’d suggest this book as an excellent resource for your pastoral colleagues’ support-group.
Alban Institute 2009

Not angels in disguise

Continuing on with our occasional series of pieces from Rowland Croucher, today's article fits in well with the last post I wrote on pastors being bullied by their congregations.

Croucher's article is entitled: Do Yourself A Favour - Encourage Your Pastor!

We're too often keen to nitpick and complain about our pastors, forgetting that they aren't angels in disguise (and thus superhuman). Nor are they supermen/women whom only kryptonite can touch.

Croucher's article is an A-Z of things to think about in terms of your minister, from Accountability (yours as a congregation member, not his or hers as a pastor) to Zeal - zeal to pick up jobs around the church scene and not leave them to the minister to do....in his or her spare time.

And Y for Yourself is succinct and to the point: If every church member encouraged others as much as you do, what sort of church would it be?

On being a new minister

There's an excellent post on the Per Crucem ad Lucem site today, entitled: Pastors aren't Prophets - some unsolicited advice for newly-minted ministers. It's by Rick Floyd.

In it he discusses (amongst other things) the need for ministers to gain the respect of their congregation by being a faithful pastor to the people day in and day out - only then can you speak prophetically to them, and have them listen.

You need to be aware that in spite of all our calls for self-care and avoiding burnout, a minister's job is never going to consist of a forty-hour week, with no evening/night calls or weekend work. It's truly a full-time job...though that doesn't mean you mustn't take any time off. As he writes:

One of the modern heresies (but by no means the only one) of the contemporary mainline church, is that you can have something akin to a normal 40 hour a week professional life and be a faithful pastor. It isn’t true. A pastor’s life, and the life of the pastor’s family is necessarily involved in the community of their congregation in season and out of season. Sometimes, even often, it is wonderful; other times it isn’t. That’s the way it goes. It isn’t the Canyon Ranch spa. I often say being a pastor is the best vocation there is, but perhaps the worst job. If you are not called to it, it is something you really don’t want to do.

And a little later:

One of the things I learned was that you have to love your congregants, even the unlovable, of which there are far too many, and who take up a good deal of your time. If and when you find yourself loving them, you know you are on your way to really being a pastor. Some of them you will just never learn to love, and you have to turn them over to God, who does.

Floyd probably packs more wisdom into this one article than you'll find in many a day. Essential reading.

Being Passionate

In a recent piece called, Phoning it in, Seth Godin talks about whether you're passionate about what you do or not. (He doesn't blame you if you're not, by the way. Not everyone can do what they're passionate about for a living.)

Why this post is interesting to this blog is because he begins by saying:

I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it's just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.
I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.

(Note the use of the royal 'we' here - intriguing.) He then goes on to equate spiritual with passionate - which may not be the best equation - but nevertheless points up something that people in church leadership need to think about. Do I do what I do because God told me to, or because I felt called to this, or because it pays my wages, or because I really am passionate about it - quite apart from the spirituality of the calling.

If, even on the worst days, we can't say we're passionate about what we do, then maybe it's time to go on a retreat and spend some time reflecting on how we got where we are, why we do it, and should we keep on doing it?

And just a thought that is somewhat connected to this: if we asked older, retired ministers who they kept going during their long careers, and why they didn't experience burnout, what do you think would be their answers?

In other words, is burnout a symptom of our current worldview rather than a hazard of being a Christian minister?

[Totally unrelated, but we're told on the news this morning that the increase in fraud isn't driven by the recession, but by greed. It's great the way the news always tells us what we already know!]

Clergy Self-Care?

I do not think clergy need more lectures about self-care.

It seems that at every ordination or installation service I attend there is a charge given about clergy self care. One minister stands up and tells another minister that they know they are about to work themselves to death, so resist the temptation. “Take your day off…set boundaries…don’t try to be all things to all people.” All this is done in front of an audience of lay people who are supposed to be impressed that we clergy would need such a lecture. It has become a cliché, and seems to have trumped prophecy, theology and the love of Jesus.

Lillian Daniel begins a short post on clergy self-care in the above fashion. Is she right about what she's saying: do clergy make more noise about self-care than they do about actually achieving anything in this area? Are clergy worse off than the average working person? Do you think her answers to the question are the right ones? Read the post and let me know.

Ministering in Rural Areas

Muriel Mellow has been running a series of articles on the Canadian Church Rural Network site. The latest (and last) is now available. (Previous ones are in the Archives section.)

The articles have been based on her book, Defining Work: Gender Professional Work and the Case of Rural Clergy. The most recent article in the series is entitled: Professional Demands and Personal Lives, and looks at how rural clergy manage the relationship between professional and private life, and the different challenges for women and men in this regard. What's presented in the article is a much condensed version of what she has to say in the book.

Here's what the publisher's blurb has to say about the book: For rural clergy, the lines between private life and professional life can blur. Their offices are often in their homes, parishioners are also neighbours, and professional duties are intertwined with emotional caregiving and volunteer activity. In a society that defines work as paid, public, and intellectual the ambiguity inherent in the life of the rural clergy poses unique challenges. Muriel Mellow considers how men and women in this occupational group conceptualize "work" in the context of their unique circumstances and shows how their experience raises questions for feminist theories of work. Based on interviews with forty rural Protestant clergy, Mellow argues that male and female clergy challenge gendered definitions of work by focusing on obligation, context, visibility, and time. She also considers how clergys work is shaped by the rural setting, arguing that we must consider how work is "placed" as well as gendered.

The book was published in 2006.

Pastoral Restoration

Pastoral Restoration: The Path to Recovery will guide those church leaders faced with facilitating the healing and recovery of a minister and the church from a moral failure.

This new book comes from The Parsonage Site where you can also see the previous books in the series;
Enriching Life in the Fishbowl - provides assistance to congregations in properly caring for a pastor and his family in order to make their lives rich and their ministries effective;
Living in the Pastor's Home is a unique experience. Join four adult PKs as they look back with new insight that would benefit any congregation.;
Working Together to Impact Your Community will direct you in forming a community impact committee to benefit your congregation and pastor alike