Clergy Wellbeing Down Under

A Tale of 2 Surveys with Sam Sterland - NCLS Senior Researcher

• Valerie Ling • Season 1 • Episode 11

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We are joined by Sam Sterland, Senior Researcher with the National Church Life Survey and we look at the latest findings from the NCLS and how it matches/sheds light on what our (much smaller!) survey found in the clergy wellbeing space.  What does church health have to do with clergy wellbeing? Have we made any progress in leadership sustainability, and what are the key insights we glean from both our findings.

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Please be aware that the opinions and viewpoints shared on this podcast are personal to me and my guests, and do not represent the stance of any institution. This podcast aims to present findings for open discussion and dialogue, inviting listeners to engage critically and draw their own conclusions. While the content serves informational purposes, it is not a substitute for professional advice. Thank you for joining me on this journey of exploration and conversation!

Valerie Ling:

Hey, it's Valerie Ling. I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm your host for the clergy well-being Down Under podcast. I'm looking forward to interviewing an expert today to take you through my findings from my research where I asked 200 pastors down under how they were doing. Don't forget to subscribe, like and share. Buckle up and here we go. Greetings everyone. I have Sam Stowen with me. Hello, Sam.

Sam Sterland:

Hello everyone.

Valerie Ling:

From the National Church Life Survey group. Should we call that group? Yeah?

Sam Sterland:

people call us different things. Ncls research is our short name.

Valerie Ling:

Awesome. You and I, we chatted a few years ago. Really. I had, for not a long time, but for some time had, been reading what was coming out of NCLS. At the point when we had it a chat, I was quite curious to see how some of the burnout things that you were finding might link into things like personality, leadership dynamics. But then a pandemic hit. Things got a little complicated. So I'm glad that we can sort of regroup. There's been another survey that's gone out, results have come back in and it'd be fantastic to just chat with you about that.

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, we've done a lot of work over the years on ministry sustainability, burnout, and we like to talk about the positive end as well, the thriving end.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, I think that'd be a good place to start. What do we know about leadership, ministry leadership that are thriving. What's come out of the most recent survey, for example?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, well, we have defined thriving for our purposes as pretty much the opposite of burnout. So we said burnout is one end of a spectrum where you're extremely emotionally depleted. You don't have a lot of energy to give to people. It's effecting your functioning wider in life and probably feeding over into certain behaviors like avoiding people, certain emotions, like getting more easily irritated as well, and that comes out in your workplace and also you don't feel like you're achieving very much. So I've just described those three pillars of the mainstream understanding of burnout, which is emotionally exhaustion, depersonalization and sense of personal achievement. But we're interested in the high end as well. We don't want people to be just surviving in ministry, just avoiding car crashes all the time. We want to know what's the thriving end look like. So yeah, we looked at the literature, we looked at the engagement work. Engagement literature, for example, did some work on workaholism and those things don't quite line up with the idea of thriving. We thought that you know the opposite of those things, so the opposite of workaholism. So we said look for the purposes of our work. We're going to just use the same scales we've used for burnout, but we're going to look at the positive ends of those things, and we developed a scale with some colleagues in the UK who had also been surveying ministers, and we've been using that for 20 years now in Australia and it's been used in a lot of other countries as well.

Sam Sterland:

So the idea that we have set of thriving is someone who's not emotionally depleted, first of all, who has energy to give, and I guess that means someone who is keeping an eye on their reserves and knowing when they need to rest.

Sam Sterland:

You know, because we all can get tired and work hard, that's normal. And someone who therefore doesn't have that avoiding behaviour going on a lot, because they don't need that as a coping mechanism. And then the other side is so that's a low emotional distortion, so, and low and low depersonalisation. And then what about high sense of achievement? And so you know someone who feels like I really am. I know what I'm achieving in my ministry and I feel good about it. You know you don't have to be feeling like you're getting the gold medal every day in all the work that you're doing, but you feel good about what you're doing. You have a basic sense of satisfaction, competence and achievement in what you're doing. And we said if, that's if you're in that place where you know you've got energy to give and you know that you're achieving well then we want to call that thriving in ministry.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, for many people sitting in church, our experience of the survey is quite different from the overall results that you can get or that NCLS presents. For example, I attended your webinar not too long ago about the results from the sustainable leadership and what you were looking at. But, broadly speaking, what are all the different aspects that the survey covers in terms of what information it gives us?

Sam Sterland:

Well, in relation to leaders, which I guess was out where our interest is today we obviously cover the well-being material. So burnout and thriving we've used various stress measures over the years. Anxiety, depression indicators and I suppose the distinction I'd make there is burnout is generally recognised as a workplace phenomenon Although I think you can burn out in other things as well but it's framed as a workplace phenomenon, whereas anxiety, depression, are more a whole of life experiences and they can certainly be linked. If you're staying burning up for long enough and it's not dealt with, it may just move into generalised depression and anxiety and that you can't function at all in any area. So we've looked at all those things. We've looked at the positive side of things a positive well-being indicator, which is a well-known Australian scale that's used. We've looked at engagement in work, so that's more work-focused thing. Again, we've looked at workaholism, as I mentioned before. So they're all the well-being things. But then another big area that we have focused on is resilience, because when you look about burnout or thriving, you're really talking about an outcome. It's good to know how you're going, but you don't have to think about that too long before you should be thinking well, hang on a sec. What causes this stuff? What has led to me being okay, I know where I am, I know I'm doing well or I'm struggling, but really, how did I get to this outcome? And so there's a million things that affect us in our life and if we're in ministry. A million things going on in church, in society, in our family, in our health, our background as well they all affect how we're going, but particularly the internal qualities that we carry as people. We refer to that as resilience factors. So we talk about six resilience factors that we think is helpful to focus on aspects related to self-care etc. When we're focusing on those things, they will help us thrive and avoid burnout. So they're the well-being related things in leadership.

Sam Sterland:

Then we also ask a lot of stuff about training, how well-trained people feel in areas and of course, we know that something like that is related to well-being If you don't feel particularly well-trained and you're needing to function in an area that you don't feel well-trained in. So a good example of that would be administration in church. So many ministers do a significant amount of administration. In fact, most ministers put that in the top three things they spend time on. But if you have not received training in administration.

Sam Sterland:

You probably didn't sign up for it. When you signed up for Bible college, you wanted to go in ministry. You didn't think, oh, I really want to be an administrator in a church, I'm really looking forward to all that paperwork. You went in maybe because you have a pastoral heart for people, or you like to preach or train, or you want to connect with the community as the local minister, etc. And so if you haven't been trained in an area that you find you have to do a lot of work in, that can really affect your well-being and you can also be pretty bad at it because you're not trained in it and so it's taking up even more time than it should. And so we've noticed a number of denominations offering training in administration, which is not a bad thing because they probably didn't get it at Bible college in a lot of cases, and if they can spend less time on it because their competency level is higher, they're going to be happy and they're going to be less stressed and feeling that mismatch, more about the things they wish they were spending time on. So training.

Sam Sterland:

We looked at personality and obviously the literature says that some aspects of our personality can make us more vulnerable to struggling in various ways, so that's an important area. We also look at effective leadership, which is a different topic to sustainable leadership. They're no doubt very closely linked. But what is my leadership style? How do people in my church experience me as a leader? That can be a really helpful but scary question to ask. Where can I get feedback that's safe to receive, that's not traumatising or damaging for me, but where can I get helpful feedback that will help me grow as a leader, and so that's very much a fit. It's about how effective am I, but it's going to feedback on how sustainable I am in my role as well.

Valerie Ling:

Incredible. Yeah, let's start from the top. Let's do the church stuff as well.

Sam Sterland:

So I've just mentioned also we do the church stuff as well. That's what most people are familiar with.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah.

Sam Sterland:

All the healthy churches and qualities of churches that are thriving.

Valerie Ling:

So in the most recent survey, what proportion are thriving, surviving, burning out?

Sam Sterland:

Now we pretty much calibrated our scales now close to what scales that are used by psychologists would give. So, like the Maslach burnout inventory, which is like the gold standard that clinicians use, and we've looked at their norms, or you know their levels of where people are above or below burnout or in the top end, and then we've applied that to people in ministry with our own scales. We haven't seen that the level of burnout has increased greatly yet. So I think 2016, maybe, strictly say, 2% of ministers were in burnout, according to what we could see. Now, of course, that's not going to be exactly right. Some people have already left ministry. They're not filling out a survey, so you know you've got that issue. Of course you're sampling and of course, everybody's different. A scale doesn't replace seeing down in front of a professional or someone who's experienced, a really good mentor or someone like that who can really help you assess where you are, but a scale gives you a basic sense of that. So we found about 2% of people in ministry really were in burnout, whether they knew it or not, based on what they'd answered, and this time around it was about the same. But that next level above, where you're not burning out but you are struggling and you're in danger. That group has grown, but what's interesting is that the top end group those who are thriving in ministry that's grown as well. So the experience of COVID has been really surprising, I think.

Sam Sterland:

I think when it first hit we've got to remember it wasn't the same for everyone. It wasn't the same for everyone in ministry. Even at the time we were talking to people, because we talked to church leaders all the time, we talked to denominational leaders who can tell us what their people are saying. There were people who were world falling apart as COVID started. I can't preach, we haven't got our tech set up, I can't do pastoral care, I mean, these are the top two reasons why a lot of people went into ministry and they can't do either of these things.

Sam Sterland:

There were certainly people who were really questioning what am I supposed to do? What on earth is my purpose right now? How do I adapt? So there were certainly people that I think there were probably some people who were actually great for a bit of a rest, who might have been working too hard and said, okay, I've just got to pause, I've got to set up some other things, but all that adapting, that change was really hard. There were other people who were saying this is really exciting because we're going to stop doing some of the things we had no choice about and we're now in a new space where we can give some thought to, for example, creative mission. We talked to some people who were saying how can we connect with the community when people aren't even allowed to go out, when we're under that much lockdown you're only allowed to go one person to the shops once a day, or something like that and there were some people who were really excited about a mission in a new approach, and some were even saying I don't think I want to go back to what when all this gets lifted? I think I'm like I'm really excited about the new possibilities.

Sam Sterland:

You know, online connecting has just exploded for us, so we've got to remember it was different for different people. Some people were really struggling. Others just enjoyed the change and found some refreshing wind blowing, and then, as time went on, you know there were things that became resolved. At first, there was no understanding of what's going to happen financially. Then financial support was provided by the government for most churches and so that stress, massive stress, went away for a period and as for many, many businesses too, you know, wouldn't still be here if they hadn't had that government support. So that has led to two different groups of people.

Sam Sterland:

If we just want to generalise, I think there are some people who have come through COVID who have said this has been really, really hard. This has been the hardest thing. I'm more tired than ever. I'm still not sure how I feel now about how things are going for church. Not everybody's come back. There's more people that it's hard to connect with, et cetera. There's some people who are still really struggling and finding that hard. There are other people who say look, I'm refreshed by the changes and the new possibilities.

Sam Sterland:

I think one thing ministers found that was that because they had more people in their churches in crisis for a range of reasons. It might be because of health, it might be because of finances, because they lost their job or their job had massively scaled back. It might be because of loneliness, because they weren't as mobile like they were. It might be because of family illness. They might have known people or had a relative who died. I mean, I know of someone who died during COVID who was close to one of our work colleagues. So all kinds of stresses, but many ministers, I think, rose to the occasion of pastoral care in that time and felt more relevant than ever because they were able to connect with people in that time of crisis. So sure, there was a lot to deal with and more people with more needs, but we actually found that the proportion of ministers who say I feel really effective in my role went up.

Sam Sterland:

And that surprised me because I thought, oh, they're all going to be really affected by I can't preach, I can't do pastoral care. But that was early in the pandemic 2020. By the time our survey came around, late 21 and many churches waited till early 22 to do the survey because they hadn't fully resumed, or they kind of resumed in late 21. But too much was going on, so they waited till 22 to do it. At that point I think many of them were saying actually feel really satisfied in my role. I feel really effective, I know what I'm here to do. There's a lot of good stuff here.

Sam Sterland:

So I think we've got two groups. Of course, more people are exhausted as well. We saw that go up as well. So the proportion of people who say, look, I'm feeling pretty worn out, I don't have a lot of energy, I feel drained by my work, I know I'm avoiding some things or some difficult situations because I'm just barely coping myself, maybe just because I'm so tired and emotionally I've given out. A lot More people were in that space. So it's an interesting shift because we have always found that people who that ministers can be high on stress and high on sense of effectiveness at the same time. They don't. They're not opposites. They often go together. You're working hard, you're doing great work, you feel good about what you're doing, but you're stressed and you're tired, and so what we found during COVID is both of those things went up. The sense of effectiveness really did go up a lot, so that means quite a number of people felt more effective. I'm not saying everyone did, but for many not as many, but for many exhaustion went up as well.

Valerie Ling:

I think that's a finding that's replicated in other studies as well that for people who are in the industry, their sense of effectiveness or engagement or meaning and purpose doesn't necessarily go down, but they are exhausted. So, sam, you were saying that 2% probably met the technical diagnosis, if you like a burnout. Maybe we'd have to do more investigation to that, but perhaps that's what it is. And then you were saying that there was a range from the thriving to the burnout spectrum. What does it look like currently?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, okay, so I'll start with what you said there, that, yes, 2% we found were burning out both in 2016 and 2021. That's of senior local church leaders, not assistance, not other people. We collect all that info as well, but the national figures we put out after senior leaders and that's because we can put out a consistent figure for Australia from year by year and even when our sample changes, that figure is actually accurate because we know how many churches there are in Australia.

Sam Sterland:

So that figure has not gone up and I guess the uncertainty around that is to say, if you think you're burning out based on a scale, go and talk to someone, because you probably are, but there might be other things going on as well. It may be that you're suffering from depression and it's not burnout, because you'll probably score really high on burnout. And similarly, if you're struggling according to a scale, go and talk to someone anyway, because you might actually be burning out and just the scale didn't pick it up. So that the scale is a blunt instrument. You get face to face with a professional and experienced person who will then help you decide what you need to do to get out of that struggling place. Yeah, so what we found in 2021 was that the overall proportion of people in the lower bands had actually gone down and that the top bands managing well, thriving had increased.

Sam Sterland:

But that actually made us stop and go. There must be more to the story that we're not getting and that's what we just talked about a couple of minutes ago that I broke into the two parts and I said, yes, more people are saying they feel effective, but also more people are saying they do feel exhausted. And so if you can feel really exhausted but still feel really effective, technically you're not in burnout, right. But what's really happening is you've got this buffer underneath you holding you up like a big balloon. I am totally exhausted, but I feel so good about my ministry, I feel so fulfilled. We're doing so much good stuff and you're not necessarily really reflecting on how long can I do this for. But if anything was to take away that sense of effectiveness, suddenly, let's say, something bad happens at your church, or let's say you get sick and you can't work, or something in your own life falls apart, suddenly all you're left with is your exhaustion level and no sense of achievement. So what we would say is that people lost in that very one dimensional sense, they're feeling better about many people are feeling better about ministry. We have to stop and ask ourselves have we moved into an unsustainable position? So, yeah, so to give you the numbers.

Sam Sterland:

Previously we said 14% was struggling, and now it's 9%. Previously we said 35% were in that surviving zone, that middle zone. Now it's 23%, so that's smaller as well. The Managing Well group has barely changed that group, who are almost up there with thriving. They're above surviving. The thriving group has doubled. So in 2016 it was 17% of senior ministers we categorised as thriving. This time it's 33%, and so that on the surface looks great. But then we looked at the wider thing, not just the one dimensional, but the wider picture, and we said, oh, we can see what's happened.

Valerie Ling:

This is the midpoint break for the podcast. If you want to put a pause and walk away and come back to it, make sure you do check out the description for all the various downloads that we have for you, including my full report, research and reflections. You might also want to remember to like, share and subscribe. So stop now or keep going.

Sam Sterland:

More people have moved into this tired but feeling fulfilled space, and so if you look at it one dimensionally, you say, yep, overall they're feeling great, but actually, in a more detailed look, they probably moved into an unsustainable place. So we all need to ask ourselves is this a good equilibrium that I can maintain? It's a little bit like going to war, and I think the pandemic was a little bit like going to war. It's a really unusual event, and when people have had to go to war and go off and fight or those who don't go off and fight but stay at home but they have to survive as well Everything is different for a while. But can it stay that way for very long, or is something going to break? And so, yeah, when people came back from war, they had to come back to actually that's not normal what I just did. I have to find my new equilibrium. Maybe it will be back where I used to be, or maybe there'll be a new equilibrium because this has changed me in some way. But I think this whole experience is like that too.

Sam Sterland:

You've had this high intensity period where more people in your congregation have been in crisis and struggling and scared than probably any other time in your ministry and the whole country has gone crazy for a while. Now we're moving back into a new thing. Do you need to stay at this high intensity pace? Can you stay there Even if you found it deeply fulfilling? Or are some cracks starting to show, some where starting to show? Because you might have been neglecting your need to rest, because you were there for everybody else. You might have been neglecting your relationships, even your walk with God. You might have been neglecting that to somebody. Many ministers say when I'm busy, my time with God is the first thing to go, believe it or not. More than half a minister say that. So what will it mean now for you to come back to an equilibrium so that you're still ministering in 20 years time, you're still glorifying God in 20 years time because of the way you're ministering and you're not just going to burn out now because of this high intensity time we've had?

Valerie Ling:

So there are a couple of things that in the survey that I had and I think you're right, these are the people. So by the time I did my survey, it's now 2023. It's not in the thousands, it's 200, mainly senior leaders, and the top three reasons there was probably more were saying that it was the reason why they would leave has got to do with loneliness as well as impact on family. I think that was like in the 70 percents, whereas sort of the work stress was in the 40 percents zone. Is there anything from what you've seen that makes sense of how the interaction of some of the relational things impact maybe church life, what's happening? Even in the leadership details that you have, anything that explains that loneliness and sense of impact on family?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, look, I think one of the challenges of being in ministry I've been in ministry for a period of time, but I know many, many others who are and have been in for much longer than me One of the hard things about being in ministry is friendships, because you are part of it. You're embedded in a community of people you love and hopefully love you, but that's but. Having your closest friendships in your congregation can be a real challenge and so many ministers, I think, express a level of loneliness because they know there's a level of distance there with their local people and so they've got to also have connections outside Some people you know in your church you're an authority figure. You're a spiritual authority figure. You might be up on a pedestal, even if you didn't want to be on a pedestal. People who put you up there and sometimes people would be playing weird towards you when you're an authority figure because they're dealing with all their authority issues and they're projecting them onto you. So there's all that to deal with.

Sam Sterland:

I know many ministers that you know they've just found one or two really close friends in the congregation who treat them like a normal person and who know they're not Superman or superwoman, that they're just a person who signed up and went into ministry and they, you know they don't want to wear this mantle or this aura of perfection. But mostly I think it's best to go for those relationships outside where the whole church context is just not complicating things. It's a little bit like, you know, if you're a counsellor, you can't become friends with your clients because you can no longer be a good counsellor to them. It's this boundary thing that has to happen in many places. So, yeah, you can have close friends in church, but it's it's. There's challenges to that. So we've asked ministers do you have close friends in church? Do you have someone that no, in your life? I mean, can you trust that you can trust? And there's, there's a group of ministers that say no, I don't have a single one, at least 10%, who say I don't have a single person that fits that description. Now, maybe some of these people are single and so they don't even have that spouse. But even even with the spouse, if you're married, you might be protecting your spouse to some degree from some of the stuff you're dealing with. So even there this is why you know, getting a mentor or a spiritual director or a coach or someone, a professional supervisor, that they can just hear everything and you don't have to worry about how they cope. You know that's their issue, because friendships are friendships are there for your support and many ministers struggle to find that. Many ministers said I've got one, I've got one person, presumably often their spouse. So yeah, it is an issue.

Sam Sterland:

Loneliness is a definite issue. It's not just because of the pandemic. Maybe it's exacerbated a little bit because your close friends who you know live 50Ks away or something. Maybe you couldn't see them as much over that time and they all got busy too. But it's really. It's a perennial issue. Loneliness what was the other ones you mentioned? The other at the top?

Valerie Ling:

three Like the family.

Sam Sterland:

Yes, yeah. So that's a perennial issue as well, obviously. But with the pandemic, if you've been more involved in pastoral care, you've been more sacrificial with your time in supporting people in crisis, then the stress on family has no doubt increased as well.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, I reckon this has just come to my mind as well that from a systems and resourcing perspective the whole family gets sucked into it as well. So it's not just the minister who's dealing pastorally with the issue, but the kids are also interacting with the kids, spouses are interacting with spouses. So it possibly can also deplete the family resources to minister to one another as a family, to love and give and engender hope and encouragement for one another, if the whole family system has been absorbed into some of the pastoral implications. Because I do think, because we've seen it in the practice. So we typically are a training practice as well, so we supervise students and then we supervise registrars etc.

Valerie Ling:

When our clinical psychologist registrars and our senior clinical psychologists, we continue to feel the pressure of the acuity and the level of emotional distress in our community such that we've actually kind of had to put a protection around our students so that they wouldn't burn out, because it is. It can be quite a helpless, traumatic experience to hear such horrible things that are happening to younger kids. So we've actually had we have a bit of a traffic like system. You know we triage the clinical load so that our students are protected from too much of that and then our registrars take, you know, a level of it. But our seniors we have to really watch because they're actually taking the majority of the complexity and we have to check in very regularly with them Because, very much like ministry folk, when you're a psychologist you also deeply care for people outside of your professional life. So there's a lot of caring and I think ministry households just don't have those natural protections and boundaries.

Sam Sterland:

That's right. Quite a much more organic sort of environment, yeah.

Valerie Ling:

So, sam, I'm curious then, just with respect to these two things that we've talked about, the loneliness impact on family resources Is there anything that we can tell from the thriving group? That's different, maybe.

Sam Sterland:

I think that we see evidence that the thriving group make time for good connection and there's no substitute for quantity time.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah.

Sam Sterland:

So the thriving one of our resilience factors is balance and boundaries. And balance is about having something other than your ministry that you also enjoy and obviously your family relationships are a big part of that and boundaries is about being clear when you're able to walk away, when you're able to say no, that you're not 100% of the time on call, that you can't be interrupted all the time, that kind of stuff. If you make the decision that you want to be that kind of minister, that's your decision and you may be able to do that fine, depending on your makeup. But there is a cost involved and you may not even really process that cost. It could be quite unconscious that you always feel on duty. You always feel that you're there for others. Now, if you're a parent, you already feel that for your kids, that you're trying to be there for them. If you've expanded that to well, actually anybody anybody in church, can call me anytime can do that there's a cost involved for you and that you may not actually fully relax ever. So, even when it's just you and God, when you're just spending time with God, are you able to really fully be there in that relationship, or is it just attention and always a readiness to race off and do something. So can you be still? Because even God said be still, seize.

Sam Sterland:

Striving is another way to translate that. First Be still and know that I'm God. There's a peace in that. That's our number one foundation, that we say the resilience factor, your spiritual foundations, are the thing that are going to make the biggest difference. So that balance and boundaries, close relationships. And we know that thriving people, they invest in their relationship with God. They spend time with God in ways that work for them. We know that they invest in their relationships with their family and their friends. They just hope that it happens by accident. They actually invest intentionally. We know that they're clear with their boundaries and have a balance in life. So they're three of our factors. Yes, so we do know that thriving people invest in that.

Valerie Ling:

How do you know what the balance and boundaries are? How were those questions asked? What were they about?

Sam Sterland:

Yes. So we asked some general questions about some of these. Stuff is not complicated, yes. I mean, if you want to know whether someone's burned out, you can ask them a whole scale or you could just ask them do you think you're burned out? Because most people know it's not actually that complicated, unless they're in denial or they're wanting to hide it from you. Most people know if they're coping or not and similarly, a lot of our questions are very transparent. So I managed to keep good boundaries between work and the rest of life. That's one of our survey questions. I have other interests apart from my ministry.

Sam Sterland:

Just asking people self-report, yes or no, agree or disagree, and how strongly do you agree or disagree, even that with you. Well, I kind of agree. I better put slightly agree, because I know I'm not very good at that. So even that kind of thing, we combine a bunch of questions on boundaries to get a score for each person and then we see a bell curve of everybody in Australia, all the ministers in Australia and where they are. So there's going to be those that down the low end and our analysis. I won't use a lot of statistical terms, but we do correlation analysis, we do regression analysis. But basically what that analysis does is say what do all the struggling people have in common and what do the people who are thriving have in common?

Sam Sterland:

And that's where you get these factors from. So of course, you go in with your theories, you go well, I bet balance and boundaries makes a difference. And then you come up with some questions. You tested and sure enough it does, because most of us kind of know that. I bet having supportive people in my life makes a difference, and it does. But that's the point of research is that you confirm things that you had hunches about, but you also explode myths, because some of these things are not right, although they're not as as big as you thought they were, and it also helps you find things you hadn't thought about.

Sam Sterland:

So you know, for example, we found that having a strong sense of call to ministry makes a huge difference to whether you're going to burn out. So those of those of us who have a really strong sense of I know that I'm meant to be doing this, I feel called to do this. That just gives a sense of confidence in yourself, even if other people are saying, oh, but you haven't had enough training or you don't have the right personality or whatever, or what about this, this and this in your life? That sense of call is a really strong foundation for us. Now we still need those other things. But we have found that even that is really important to have. If, when, that, when things happen in your life, that call into question am I meant to be doing this? That's a really that's a really vulnerable moment. So, for example, in the pandemic, we were saying to people now is not the time to leave ministry, now is not the time to say, oh, ministry didn't work out for you because nothing's normal right now.

Sam Sterland:

You know, churches aren't even allowed to meet, or when they did resume, half the people aren't coming. Don't don't look at yourself now and say, oh jeez, I'm a terrible minister. You know, like this is really, this is hard. I don't think this is for me, because it's not a normal time for anybody. So, yeah, we need to be realistic about what's going on and we need to know the times, as the Bible says. You know, understand the times and be gentle with ourselves and careful with ourselves when we examine how we're going.

Valerie Ling:

We actually find in the clinic that it's really at the point where it's burnt out and depressive symptoms have started and panic attacks and things like that. That's the point where maybe the ministry person recognizes there's something wrong, but in the lead up to that very often they're not actually fully aware. It's almost like a frog in a pan, sort of adapting the thing that you said about the call. This is an interesting one, right, because everybody has. Well, there are different theological positions on that, but practically what we find is at that pointy end the call can be like the sense of conviction can also be this double-edged sword, a real sense of guilt and failure. So you know, I'm really talking now. You know there's an impact, sense of self-worth, there are depressive symptoms, they're burnt out, exhausted and then feel like a failure as well. That's one of the things that you know we've found. We have to return our clients back to the original love for Jesus first, because all of the expectations of duty and what he then wants of you, you know, has been completely shifted actually.

Sam Sterland:

That's fair enough, that a call is a buffer zone when you're coping. It's one of the things that will help you in your confidence. But if things have fallen apart for whatever reason, it's not supposed to be a chain around you that holds you to something. If you were listening to God in that moment, I'm sure God would be saying I didn't call you to this, I didn't call you to. You know, shrivel up and die. I didn't call you to burn out. I don't do that to my children. Look at my people who follow me in the Bible. That's not what I did to them. Look at the even the heroes of faith. You know they suffered, but they held on to me and I didn't call you to. You know, crash and burn like this. It's not glorifying to God if you're in that position. So come away with me and get yourself sorted out with me, and then we'll work out where we go from here.

Valerie Ling:

So did you find anything to do with church, health, conflict, leadership that gave any interesting information about those who were struggling, those who were thriving?

Sam Sterland:

Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yes, even way back in 20 years ago when we brought out this book, burnout in Church Leaders, which you can still get. The book came out in 2000. That was a very comprehensive look by Peter and Rod who wrote that book and did that work, and it looked at what you're asking about. What's the role of the church? The way they framed it at the time was there's such a thing as toxic churches so it's. But it's that idea that Burnout isn't all about you, right. Burnout isn't just because of your lack of resilience or your personality or you know your role issues.

Sam Sterland:

That book showed that about 50% of Burnout related stuff was coming from the individual. So that is very important to think about because that is stuff you have some control over, right. But another half of the causes of Burnout were coming from outside, coming from the wider context, particularly the local church. So if you're in a church that's toxic in some way or that's going through a conflict which is a toxic time for many people, that is going to take its toll. You can. It can also be denominational, so denominations can go through periods where it will drop in high stress for people who are affiliated. And then think of the wider context as well as just what's happening in Australian culture. So we found, for example you know Australian culture is changing all the time. Many would say that Christian values are less and less central. One of the findings in that book was that people who are struggling with the fact that society is, you know, society is falling apart.

Sam Sterland:

It's not, society is not as healthy as it used to be, those people were more likely to be experiencing burnout, and so in my first thesis that I wrote in my psychology on is on ministers and burnout I based it on secularisation and that's the idea that as society secularises, ministers are in an increasingly difficult position.

Sam Sterland:

We used to be ministers, used to be authority figures in their community, less and less so and more and more compromised in. How do I stand in my community as a person who wants to speak with authority but is being increasingly questioned and the values that I stand for that seemingly personify in some people's minds as the leader of my church, some of those values are being denigrated or ignored at least, and so that the wider society influences actually bring to bear on individuals and, Valerie, I want to commend you with the work that you did. I really resonated with some of the things that you did in that area. When you talked about you know we need to look at the wider picture, the wider context. We totally agree with that and our work has highlighted that as well.

Valerie Ling:

Oh, that's wonderful to hear. Thank you for your encouragement. So again, I'm just curious. I don't know whether you have the answer to this, but did you find any connections, for example, with some of the spiritual health components of church life? You know, because I found those questions when we were doing it at our church, I was fascinated actually with our results, making my own internal connections to some things. Did you find some broader traffic?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, we did, we did so and you can look them up in that book. Actually, it's really quite comprehensive. So, yes, in churches where people are walking more closely with God themselves so, for example, they're more involved in personal devotions Feel like they're growing in their faith In those churches, ministers are struggling less with burnout and you would think that partly because there's an alignment between them and their people. But clearly, you know, when the place is more healthy spiritually, then it's a less stressful workplace for the minister. Yes, yeah, so we did find that.

Valerie Ling:

Any other interesting tidbits you can remember?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, I'd like to add a bit more to that, because we can over spiritualize things as well. So of course churches are spiritual places and you know ministers see that as a big part of what they're doing is. I'm here to help people in their walk with God and their growth as disciples, and we want to connect with our wider community as a spiritual place to help other people think about their connection with God. But there's also just healthy organizational stuff that a church can have or can ignore, and you know, if you compare that to a workplace, if there's, if you're in a workplace where you know unhelpful stuff is just let go and isn't dealt with, or if there's just really bad habits or culture that just go unchecked, of course that becomes kind of a more depressing place to work. Over time People often won't hang around as much.

Sam Sterland:

Now a church is not a workplace, except it is for the minister. So it's an unusual place, but it is still what you call an organization and so the things that we know about healthy organizations still apply to churches. But we shouldn't just put on the template of this is how a workplace should be there for this, how church should be that silly. I mean, a church should be so much better, because it's a community of people who are doing life together and they're doing it voluntarily. They're not showing up because they're paid to be there. They want to be part of this community. But if you think of it as an organization, that's quite an unusual place to work.

Sam Sterland:

Many ministers have not really many churchgoers have not really reflected on the fact that their minister works for an organization where they are the only employee in many cases one staff member and everybody else in the organization is a volunteer, and so they are there because they want to be. They can come and go as they want. They can increase their commitment, decrease their commitment, but the minister is in quite a different position than that. This helps us understand why boundaries are such an issue if you're a minister, because we don't think about boundaries when in our community group or with our family. It's just life. But the minister is ministering to everybody is part of everybody's life. So, yeah, we have found that churches that think about their organizational health or exhibit greater organizational health.

Sam Sterland:

I've done some recent work on this, actually on organizational culture in church, and we and I have found in these studies that churches with cultures of more empowering of their people. Churches that are more innovative that's a cultural thing. Churches that are more focused on a vision and a direction. So those three cultural qualities in particular. They are significantly different to other churches in a whole bunch of ways. In one way, they do better at attracting new people to church. They do better at attracting people from the community. They also make a big difference in people feeling like they're growing in their faith, interestingly. And so just healthy organizational culture, and there's obviously many other aspects of culture too, but that's what I focused on in those studies.

Valerie Ling:

Is this part of the NCLS studies, sam, or this is something else you do?

Sam Sterland:

Yeah, it's going to come to light eventually. So these are studies that I've done with NCLS data and we're now looking at how will that come out in the future. We'll do some papers on it. It'll first of all come out in some journal article papers, so we go for the peer reviewed stuff. Then we'll do some more easy reading stuff Fact sheets, maybe a book in the future.

Sam Sterland:

But I think anybody who's been listening to NCLS for the last five or 10 years has heard us using the word culture more, and we're talking more about church culture, organizational culture, because in an organization like us, when you survey everybody in church, or nearly everybody in church, that's really what you're getting an opportunity to measure. Is the culture, the true culture of the place, not what one or two people think is the culture which is most organizational culture studies are based on, but actually the majority of people. So, yeah, when we give churches reports on a sense of belonging, how close do we feel as a community, their sense of how welcoming is this church, how inclusive is it for new people, how good is it reaching out. We're really talking about culture in those things and so we're using that terminology more. So we decided to do some studies really focused on that.

Valerie Ling:

You're also looking at psychological safety there. I think that's another ingredient Don't talk about.

Valerie Ling:

I absolutely resonate with you. For a long time I felt really burdened because we are clinical psychologists, so we are really in the realm of understanding individual dynamics. And I find too that because many of the in my opinion, many of the interventions that we've brought into the church space has come from a clinical lens which largely deals with intra-personal dimensions. So things like we just talked about, you know, balance and loneliness and how we view ourselves and our standards for ourselves, and then interpersonal dynamics, so you know how we're relating with one another, sort of from a familial lens, right. So you know how do we trust, how we forgive in all of those sorts of things. But I think there's a big part missing, which is the church is increasingly also an organization. So you know, organizational behavior becomes really, really important. How do we cultivate psychological safety to innovate, make mistakes, say oops, I was wrong, and how to also then look at things like how do we reduce the risks in an organization with regards to how we design workload, work roles and things like that?

Valerie Ling:

Because in my hypothesis is, if we overly focus also on the clinical and the familial dynamics, we also open the door for those dynamics to cause havoc in organizational behavior. As an example, I have a psychology practice. We behave as an organization, right, we have some conduct boundaries with regards to I'm not your parent yeah, how do you speak to me, your expectations of me. We don't interact as if I'm the parent in your other child, but we're actually professionals interacting with a certain set of standards that we would expect an organization to have so that we can serve others, be focused in what we do, not be distracted and really not be burnt out by all of that stuff. So I really resonate with that.

Valerie Ling:

I really look forward to seeing what comes out of that.

Sam Sterland:

I think to have conversations like that in church is really valuable, that there's things here that are acceptable and there's things here that are not okay, and that people need to be pulled up on that. So an example would be what people do on social media that impacts on their church. I'm picking this example because it's really slippery, really difficult. I was talking to someone recently who was posting on. Someone in their church was posting online criticism of the minister. They're free to do what they want in the social media space, but to pretend it has no impact, right, and the person posting is in leadership themselves at the same church.

Sam Sterland:

Now it gets really complicated and I said you guys need a code of conduct, right? You need to be able to at least have the conversation and someone needs to say this hurt someone. Okay, it's fine that you have a criticism, but what you do with it has the power to hurt people. It has the power to cause harm, and that's just organizational thinking that the churches can take on. It's things that organizations have learned long ago. We've always been organizations. I think we're just waking up to it more and realizing that that can mean a whole lot of things.

Sam Sterland:

And it's lovely when everything's going well. Church feels like a really happy family. That is lovely. But I guess we can sort of fall asleep in matters like that and not be prepared for when things go a bit pear shaped and how we're going to deal with it when that happens. And this is where I really encourage local church leaders to talk to your denominational people, because they've already had to help other churches deal with this stuff. So don't go and reinvent the wheel.

Sam Sterland:

As soon as anything negative happens, as soon as bad stuff is coming out, dysfunctional stuff, go and talk to someone who's probably had the same conversation with 10 other churches and say what have you learned? What do we need to put in place? Because that is all about safety. Obviously, we've seen a lot of stuff in the last few years about safe church, particularly in relation to protecting children and other vulnerable people. That's really the tip of the iceberg, isn't it? Because what you're talking about, valerie, is also just basic psychosocial safety for anybody in the way we relate, and that's the obvious. Next thing, we've got to deal with the most extreme stuff first and make sure even the most basic things are in place to protect the most vulnerable people from the worst kinds of behaviour. But we need to also move forward, once we're achieving that, into all the other ways that things can be damaging and leave a really bad mark, because it all reflects badly on the church and on God's mission. That God is trying to draw people into a community of love, and that was Jesus' words. They will know you're my people by your love, and so we want to be communities that exemplify that.

Sam Sterland:

I'll come back to something I said at the beginning. It's a great question to ask what is it like to experience me as a leader? What are people experiencing? And it's going to be a tough question, be a hard question, a little bit scary to ask, but we're really talking about the same thing here. Do people experience me as someone who's connected with God and life-giving to them, or do they experience me as a little bit dangerous or a little bit risky, because I'm not always good to relate to? Now, if you ask yourself that question, don't beat yourself up when you realise you could be doing better than you are.

Sam Sterland:

But ultimately nobody needs you to be perfect as the minister, because that's not what we preach. We preach grace. So people want to encounter someone who's just genuinely connecting with God, knows they are a broken person, knows they are a sinner, but also knows they're made in the image of God, knows they are forgiven, that their life has been redeemed and they're just doing life with God now. That's all people want to encounter in their leaders. They don't need this perfect person. If people expect you to be a perfect person, you should correct them. Don't let them put you on a pedestal. But it is a great practice to. If you were constantly thinking what's it like to be on the receiving end of me? What's it like, then you will be very careful about what you post on social media and you will be very careful about what you say in public. In that, because it's just an empathetic way to think about it from other people's point of view, as to what are they being impacted by when I'm the person impacting them?

Valerie Ling:

Now we need to wrap up, but it would be remiss of me not to ask this last question, sam. Any insights from leadership, from the data that you have on personality or leadership from the NCLS? Anything came out of that that can help us? To see what's thriving and what's struggling.

Sam Sterland:

Look, there's some well-known work on this. We haven't done it just recently, but we've replicated in the past what other studies have found. So let me mention a couple. People aren't familiar. If you are a person who his emotions go up and down a lot, if you're emotionally labelled as one of the words that people use, or they used to say it was neuroticism, but that's unfair, that could be a bit of a negative word. But if you're someone who you know it's got negative connotations unless you're into certain forms of comedy. But if your emotions go up and down and you just know that about yourself, then you have to look after yourself, because people whose emotions go up and down a lot are more vulnerable to burnout. We know that, okay.

Sam Sterland:

Second thing introverts and extroverts People who are more introverted are more vulnerable to burnout. Now, neither of those things make you disqualified for ministry, because God made you the way you are for a reason. You gave us all different personalities and so you just need to be aware of their areas. For me, okay, if you're an extrovert, you're going to have other areas of weakness, but this isn't going to be such an issue for you, okay, we aren't going to criticise extroverts right now. But if you know that people tie you out, you have to put a lid on it. You're just going to be good with your boundaries, because when you are with people you are quality. Okay, because you do go deep with people, you invest with people. That's the big bonus of being an introvert you understand people, you take the time and you bother. But you can't do that with a large number of people. So, yes, if you're introverted, just go. Oh, that's why I can't keep up with the extroverts all the time, because I go deep with people and I feel it deeply If you're more a feeler than a thinker, say in the Myers-Briggs world or something like that. That's similar to how my emotions got went down.

Sam Sterland:

But I also want to separate some things off that maybe aren't personality. I think some of us sometimes excuse things and say, oh, you know, I've just got a bit of a temper, that's just my personality, right. So don't put everything down to personality and say that's just the way I am, or I tend to get impatient more easily. There are things about you that God might God might be, want to work on, that are not actually your personality, but you might have taken things on even from a very early age. You might have been told all your life you know you're this kind of person or that you're not. You know you might have been told you're not a very artistic person, not creative. Whatever these things are, we've got to think about what we really feel. We know we are from what we've learned in our work with God and in life, and also some things that maybe aren't part of it, part of our personality, and we can leave them behind and we can see transformation.

Valerie Ling:

Sam, thank you so much for your time and thank you for for you, the NCLS, for your service to the church and to the Lord over the decades, because you know it is very much because you have put out this information that people like myself can then take that and say, okay, let's make sure we can do some upstream work. Also, let's know exactly where we need to go when working with our ministry teams in the practice. Thank you so much, sam.

Sam Sterland:

Thank you for your work too. I just loved your. I would have talked more about your study, but I really resonated with a bunch of things and it's made me think, it's made us think, I think, in the team, and it's. It's great, isn't it, to connect over this kind of thing and all stimulate each other to what do we need to understand better and how can we just, you know, bless the church with what we're learning here?

Valerie Ling:

Yes, yes, thanks, sam. Thank you so much.

Sam Sterland:

All right, god bless. Bye.

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