Clergy Wellbeing Down Under
Welcome to the official first podcast of the Centre for Effective Serving, a research and consulting organisation focused on vocational wellbeing, burnout prevention, and training. In Season 1 we are focussing on Clergy Wellbeing Down Under. In Season 2 we looked at how ministry kids locally and on the mission field are doing.
In today's fast-paced and demanding world, support for those who serve by leadership is more crucial than ever. However, the pressures and challenges that come with leadership roles can often lead to burnout and exhaustion, both mentally and physically. At the Centre for Effective Serving, we understand the significance of addressing these issues head-on to create a healthier and more productive leadership landscape.
In each episode we delve into the latest research and resources developed by our team of experts, who are dedicated to enhancing leadership wellbeing and fostering a supportive environment for leaders to thrive. Our podcast provides valuable insights, evidence-based strategies, and practical tips to help leaders and their families maintain their well-being, improve their resilience, and prevent burnout.
Join us as we bring on renowned experts in the fields of psychology, mental health, leadership, and well-being to share their knowledge and experiences. Through candid interviews and engaging discussions, we explore various topics, including stress management techniques, emotional intelligence, work-life integration, team building, and much more.
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Clergy Wellbeing Down Under
Health and Well-being of Pastors: Research Findings of Timothy Captain from Flourish San Diego
As our season draws to a close, I began to contemplate leadership in a wider context, beyond just Australia and parish settings, I was drawn to explore international issues of leadership in gospel work.
Our guest, Timothy Captain from Flourish San Diego, brings his unique insight derived from his PhD thesis, the Holistic Pastoral Well-being Assessment. Timothy provides a comprehensive understanding of pastoral well-being, examining it from spiritual, psychological, physical, social, and economic perspectives.
Podcast Disclaimer:
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!
Dear listener, welcome to another episode of the Clergy Wellbeing Down Under podcast. It's Valerie Ling. I'm a clinical psychologist and I am your host for today. The podcast is being produced under the banner of the Centre for Effective Serving, which is a leadership and workplace well-being consulting arm that I lead. I also lead a Centre for Effective Living, which is a psychology practice located in Sydney. Many of our psychologists are Christians and on any given week are supporting our ministry and mission families of here in Australia and around the world. We are currently recruiting for two full-time equivalent positions, that is, for psychologists to join the Centre for Effective Living to work with us in our mission to see a world without burnout. If you know someone who is a registered psychologist, a student who is soon to be a registered psychologist, someone who is planning to move to Australia and would love to be registered as a psychologist, would you send them our way? The best thing to do is to send them the link wwweffectivelivercomau slash join-our-team. I'll put the link in the podcast description as well. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Valerie Ling:Greetings everybody. I'm so pleased to introduce you to a new guest. I myself have just met him online. His name is Timothy Captain and he is part of the Flourish San Diego, a leadership development organisation for churches, and I love this. That will love San Diego for life. I just love that so much. Tim has also completed a PhD very recently. The title of that thesis was the development of the Holistic Pastoral Well-being Assessment.
Timothy Captain:That's correct.
Valerie Ling:So welcome Tim to the podcast.
Timothy Captain:Thank you very much. It's so wonderful to be with you.
Valerie Ling:Tell us a little bit about Flourish.
Timothy Captain:Yeah. So I actually joined Flourish as a pastor. I've about 15 years pastoral ministry experience and one of the things I was craving and desiring was a group of people that were thinking about holistic life to the discipleship, thinking about ways that were helping people not just inside the church but also outside the church in our cities to flourish and to see their part in God's kingdom just take part. And so I just kind of found, honestly, this group of people in San Diego that was just starting up, and so really the mission and the drive of Flourish is to support pastors that have this view of the city, and as we do that together, we've started kind of looking at adding different elements of support, and that's really where we got into the work of researching and developing assessments for well-being but also supporting pastors in their well-being.
Valerie Ling:Incredible. And what was the motivation of your thesis? Why do a PhD devoted to this issue?
Timothy Captain:Right. So my PhD is in leadership and, as I looked at my own journey and kind of my years in ministry but I also have two brothers in ministry I grew up in a ministry family and surrounded with folks through seminary and otherwise, you just see burnout, you see all sorts of destruction happen because of, I would say, malpractice from pastors in many various ways, and so really that caused me to say there's got to be ways for us to look at this and there's a lot of great work from psychologists such as yourself. But I think there's a lot of room for different voices to come in, and so I approached it more from being somebody who has worked for many, many years in pastoral ministry, trying to take that experience and look more into why some of these various aspects contribute to well-being or not.
Valerie Ling:Malpractice too. That's interesting. Yes, I'd love to hear more about what you think about that.
Timothy Captain:Well, I think that if we had other professions so physicians, for example that so poorly took their own advice and or worked directly against their own medical advice, we would call that malpractice, because there's a sense in which they are doing the exact opposite. They are perhaps causing harm in a field in which they've sworn or taken an oath to. That's the number one rule not do harm. And so as we look globally, but as we look into very specific local contexts, we see where pastors have done harm and, unfortunately, are developing a reputation of being a profession that has done harm. Unfortunately, parishioners, they're doing harm to themselves, and so those who are advocating for caring and loving and hope and salvation, all these things that is a message that is non-harmful, and they are being trained in seminaries to do this are, for whatever reason, not experiencing that, oftentimes in their own lives.
Valerie Ling:Oh, wow, I think you just gave me goosebumps there. You know, I presented at a church looking at the mental health situation for young adults in a post-pandemic world and I got off and I asked one of the young people listening in. I said what do you think? Have I kind of got it, you know, am I heading in the right direction?
Valerie Ling:And they said to me one more thing In our time we have seen so many public pastors fall and churches, you know, really scattered and it's like we don't know anymore if we can even trust when we walk into church. There's no safety for us Even when we walk into church. Or, you know, when we're listening to sermons, it's so tiring because we don't know whether to take it into our hearts or not. I'm like, whoa, okay, that's pretty major. So, you know, I think it is much like a health professional. We don't just have a responsibility to the individual, we actually have a responsibility to the public to ensure that we're safe.
Valerie Ling:Wow, so I read your dissertation Not all of it, but most of it and you were basically looking to create an instrument that looked at all the dimensions of well-being, and I really love this. So, you know, you looked at spiritual, psychological, physical, social and economic dimensions of well-being, and I think we'll put the link to that to the PDF of your dissertation it is online Because I thought that even the instrument and the questions that you were using were so telling of what happens in the ministry space. What were, if you can remember what were some of your key findings?
Timothy Captain:Yeah. So I was attempting to validate this instrument, to kind of add a potential tool to the toolbox for so many professionals trying to help pastors, and so one of the findings that I was attempting to do was to validate that as an instrument, and so I have kind of a mixed bag on whether it's statistically validated there, and so folks who are really numbers, people like me can go in and dig into that and make up their own minds about how valid or not this instrument is. But I think the more interesting feedback, if I may, would be that there is a broad spectrum of where pastors are at in their well-being and that broad spectrum in those five different categories are not how to put it, totally related to one another. So, for example, a person may be reporting that they are spiritually doing really really well, meanwhile really struggling socially, and so some of the hopefully helpfulness of this kind of way of thinking about well-being is to understand that there is a uniqueness to each situation and each pastor in their experience of well-being and there's many different ways to encourage pastors. But there's also a lot of ways that pastors can be tripped up, and so pastors were sharing all sorts of different kind of personal experiences and follow-up interviews.
Timothy Captain:A couple of the kind of meta-analysis findings is that age was highly correlated with overall well-being.
Timothy Captain:So if you put all those five categories together a pastor's age was a very tell tell sign of kind of what their score might be.
Timothy Captain:And the finding was that age, as pastors got older, their well-being actually improved or increased and so kind of suggest to us that perhaps young pastors specifically are in times of life in which perhaps they haven't developed the tools or the skills, the relationships, things like that, to cope with the anxiety and the stresses of ministry.
Timothy Captain:And that might be something that we could, as seminaries or as supports go, let's pay attention to specific pastors in early years of life. The other thing was that there was specific denominational backgrounds that had impact, for whatever reason, on well-being scores, and so the specific group of independent Christian churches or restoration movement churches in my study that had almost a 10% deduction in somebody's expected well-being just by being theologically affiliated there. So there's more work to be done but we know that certain groups or theological backgrounds may not have support or may not be providing enough support to pastors there, or it may be contributing to pastors who feel isolated because they don't have a denominational system behind them, or they've been trained or taught to have kind of a Superman theology, that they are it and they're going to save the world, but that puts them on a lonely island. That, then, is a dangerous place to be. So those are a few of the findings, real quick there.
Valerie Ling:Well, I think you find that that resonates with not just my tiny survey, which I did, but also what's out there in Australia. So young people who are younger in ministry and probably even in mission, I'd say, from recollecting what I've read probably have lower levels of self-concept, lower levels of self-awareness. They just haven't seen enough of life really to understand and to navigate the hard knocks. Plus, they usually come with family and kids as well. That's right.
Valerie Ling:I mean, I think I noticed this in your paper and this could be the other reason is that the people who are older, who are still in ministry, they haven't resigned, attritioned, gotten sick, so they're also representing probably a group of people that have been able to endure, for whatever reasons. So we certainly finding that here, and a very small. Just like you, you know, we have to be so careful what statistics we put out. There was a very small effect correlation that I got that one particular denomination which were the factors at slightly lower levels of loneliness, for example, than some of the other denominations. Now they also have women in their clergy, whereas in Sydney, particularly in Sydney, that's not the case for all denominations, but there was some suggestion that the way that denomination resourced the ministers and the way the governance was structured may facilitate more connectivity. So I think that that's probably something that might want to be looked at in the future.
Timothy Captain:Yeah, and some of the things I think are good about again considering pastors, and one of the things I urge as a kind of a limitation but also a future place that we can, as supporters of pastoral well being consider, is to consider pastors in their kind of matrix of relationships, in their denominations, and see them not just as an individual to be studied but to really kind of think about them in that.
Timothy Captain:And so some of the follow up conversations that I had with pastors kind of cause me to realize like, oh yes, this is somebody who, as we see them, as a multi dimensional individual, they also have multiple dimensions of relationships, of supports, of a lack thereof, and stories that come behind that. So, for example, one pastor shared that their economic well being was a key point in their family stress. At that time they had little children. They're trying to navigate all of that. They're far away from family support to cover childcare and at the same time, carrying debt from when they were a youth minister and weren't paid very well, and so they're really struggling with all of this economic impact in their family, in their ministry, because of this specific time of life, not because of spiritual downfall, not because of other pieces like that, but because of the time of life that they're going to be in, and so that's the time of life that they're in.
Valerie Ling:Yeah, I wrote. I read the sentence, I've written it down here. I think what you said was in your mixed method and I thought, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. So what I think you were saying is the ability to have the agency to then talk about their results. You were saying, you know that was really the meaningful thing. It wasn't just here's a scale and here's where you come up with the results, but it was the ability to dialogue, to reflect, to make sense of the their particular context and the hope then of what can we do with this.
Valerie Ling:I mean, you've written here I think you said personal experience of well-being should be handled with a sensitive, with sensitivity, to appreciate nuance, complexity, pain that the individual has. I Think it's so right, like we have ministry families, you know, different states in Australia, for example, have different financial arrangements and Sometimes even a family of six can be living in a three bedroom house. You know, and and as the children are growing up and becoming bigger, everybody's context is quite different, and so I love how you you're really going for, you know, checking in individually with ministers and their well-being and pastors and their families and Understanding their individual context as well and making sense of the of the data.
Timothy Captain:Yeah, yeah, it's so important.
Valerie Ling:Now you might have had a chance to look to see what my survey found. I was curious. Did anything kind of pop up for you, tim, when you were looking at it?
Timothy Captain:Yeah, and so I think for me, the helpfulness here is a Reiteration of the point in just some very clear ways. So great work to you and again, so glad that you're Others are working in this space. I think that for me, the thing that pops up most importantly to me is to think about how demographics and some of those pieces play in with folks's experience, because I do think that there's a Individual level care and expertise that support systems need to provide. But this is also one of the things that I think, as we can look at a macro level, become so important to think about. How do we influence, for example, seminaries, or how do we think about developing and moving past just Telling the story and finding ways to, for example, measure like what I was trying to do Pastoral well-being to going well? What are the things that actually help people Rebound out of seasons of burnout? How do we help develop more understanding about this in seminaries or in training programs and denominational support systems?
Timothy Captain:And really, I think some of the demographics that, from your work, we're very telling about ways that perhaps we have failed has leaders and the support systems in specific groups, that these are groups that we have overlooked, whether it's supporting women, their roles, or whether it's certain, for example, staff sizes and people that maybe in I don't know whether in your australian context is the same in us, but oftentimes we platform leaders from mega churches or from large Organizations and say this is how you should do ministry.
Timothy Captain:Meanwhile, most Ministers are solo ministers or those who are really struggling. That's not encouraging to them because they go back and go, oh, but I can't pull this off, and so it adds on to that weight or that burden, and so those were the few of the things that I saw in there that I was really encouraged to see a patience in the termination and looking at those individuals that may be. We sometimes just forget that Everyone's experiences aren't on the same playing field. They haven't been given the same opportunities or care or support, and so we need to Repent of that, I think. I think we need to come back and say when are our systems of support, of training, missing these individuals?
Valerie Ling:Yeah, I like what you're saying there. I think you know that an individualized concern. Sometimes I think we can try to be reductionistic to simplify the picture, but you know, a Female staff person in a large church with multiple caring roles at home and at church, who hasn't been theologically equipped, not being mentored, is a really individualized situation that is vulnerable, very vulnerable. Yeah, and you know so. We have had situations. It is, you know, not a common thing where a minister of a Maybe a smaller church or a more under resourced, or even just from a poorer suburb, you know, goes to a large Conference and comes back with panic attacks because how are they going to do that in their church of 40? Where half of them are in a 70 and above? You know, how are we going to do them? And all of those expectations of self, the perfectionism, you know, the, the fear of failure, just can really collapse on us. So I think there are, there is a need for us to be interested in the individuals as well as the church history. You know what, what makes that church Joyful, thriving and vulnerable, because that that marriage, if you like, is also very unique.
Valerie Ling:This is the midpoint break for the podcast, if you want to put a pause and walk away and come back. 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. That's right, yeah, yeah, and what did you think about? The sum of the correlations between burnout and the destructive leadership practices are? Be curious what you thought, because Flourish being leadership, this is your, this is your space. I mean, what are your thoughts there? I?
Timothy Captain:think that One of the things that we have had multiple kind of round table conversations with is the role, at least in the United States, that violence, that Continued acts of hatred against particular racial groups, and how these things affect people in ministry and their experience of ministry. And so I think, first of all, being able to bring these conversations to the surface is so important, and so I think clergy in general and are having to respond, oftentimes before they have been formed in these Areas, and so I think that I really appreciated the Kind of parallel that you draw between pastors or clergy and Then principles, because I think that's very, very true in that I can imagine principles needing to have a response, needing to have Policy or needing to have well, we're gonna wake up tomorrow and it's another school day and I felt that as a very, very good Kind of connection point for a lot of folks to realize that you know, pastors do this every single day and week is they get up and they go, another Sunday's coming or an act of violence happens and I have to be there to participate, and so I've found that to be true in our flourished groups of pastors in the research. But I'll just tell a brief story personally, where this happens in many different ways of for me as a young pastor, calling on those who are sick or in hospitals. I knew that was going to happen. One day I got called in and to a hospital and and got ushered straight through the emergency room into a very, very gory scene. A young woman had had a terrible accident and Basically I was not prepared to walk in and see blood and all sorts of different things going on, meanwhile being asked to support the husband as he watches his wife die in front of him.
Timothy Captain:And I went home that night and had basically I would say, some kind of post-traumatic stress kind of reaction where I was not able to sleep and I was going who do I talk to? And realizing in my support system, in my support network, I don't know who to talk to about what just happened. I can't talk to anybody in my congregation because they're mourning and grieving and not able in some ways to support me in that. Fortunately, because I'm in a family of pastors, I was able to call out my own dad in the middle of the night and say dad, I don't really know what to do with this. I can't sleep. This is a horrible, horrible situation.
Timothy Captain:I just keep seeing the scenes replay in my mind, and so I think exposure to these things is something that we don't need to over glorify it, we don't need to make it something that is going well. You're not a real pastor unless you've seen or done these things. But for many pastors, they would be able to tell a whole litany of stories like this that come to mind for them that they've been exposed to these things, and oftentimes, unfortunately, like for me early on in the ministry at that time I didn't have a psychologist, friends or people on call that I was ready to call up and have that support. And so I think, absolutely this research that you're doing, that is, saying these are the levels of exposure to these things on the front end, explain some of the emotional numbness, some of the responses of isolation, of isolating because I feel like I can't talk to anybody. Then I think it also leads to questions about how much do we see patterns of response where that malpractice or that actually harming others comes in, and so that's a missing link for me.
Timothy Captain:I would love to see continued research, for example, of those pastors who are overly exposed to this, with heightened awareness to these things? Do they go home and have higher levels of violence in the home, higher levels of burnout? That contributes to all sorts of different pieces in their congregations, and so I wasn't. As I read your work there, I wasn't sure whether that was linked at all, but I'm so curious about that.
Valerie Ling:Yes, I think that was the. I did my Masters of Leadership in a secular environment and I think my supervisors went on quite the journey with me. They were mind blown, I think, about some of these things and the potential for future research. And one of those things is how unaware we are to the exposure that not just clergy but anybody really in pastoral ministry gets exposed to, and we've certainly seen it in the schools team. So, quite aside from doing our ministry work, we actually are regular psychologists and we're seeing all the professions in this post pandemic, in the teachers, doctors, all of the people, people, professions coming in and the types of things that teachers are exposed to now is vastly different from what they were exposed to a decade or 20 years ago. So I think I read in your dissertation I could be wrong, but I thought that you might have said that people in ministry who had early exposure to some traumatic material possibly may have also had lower levels of well-being.
Valerie Ling:Well, this is definitely being replicated in the teaching profession. I think they're finding that there are high and even in health professionals so high levels of attrition at three to five years post graduation and that is because they're exposed to a lot of trauma. So, for example, teachers first going out and having kids throw a chair at them or even hit them, or really tall adolescent boys standing over a little young teacher and just threatening them. And is that helplessness of not just about how do I manage that situation, but I don't even know where to go for help? Can I leave the classroom and go and get someone? Well, that seems negligent. Who do I go and tell that this happened to? Well, they think that I'm weak. And this is very similar, I think, to what we're seeing in ministry. Context is this level of chaos in our community and the level of threat in ministry, with no room to escape and no real sense of where do I go with this just keeps going.
Valerie Ling:And that's making quite a vulnerable group, I think, people fresh out from colleges into ministry.
Timothy Captain:Yeah.
Valerie Ling:So I love that you said that you come from a family of pastors. I thought to myself that actually can be a good thing. It can be a negative thing. I wonder if also some of the patterns that we see in ministry have come from a kind of a hero worship of overdoing or not having any weaknesses and just keep going Like it seems to be a bit of that too from the stories I hear. Does that happen in the States as well?
Timothy Captain:Yeah, so one of the funny things that I was able to see in my survey piece of my dissertation was the perfect scores. We'll put it that way, and we're very telling and interesting to me, meaning that hardly anybody scored themselves perfectly across physical or social or other dimensions, but I had a lot of people pastors who were perfectly doing just perfectly. When it came to spiritual well-being. They were the perfect model saints, and so I didn't quite dig too much into that, other than to say that other work and things does suggest that pastors are prone to, like many of us, overstating how they are doing in the realm that they feel like they're performing in, and so I think that, in the performative sense, this is a place where we need to have conversations, for what are the metrics, what are the things that our pastors feel like they're being watched in? And so I think this is again a telling sense of if you go to a conference or if you're to go to a place and even just to do the simple thing of how do you introduce yourself as a pastor to somebody, do you say hi, my name is Tim, I pastor.
Timothy Captain:In this fill-in-the-blank theological kind of background, here's how big my church is, and so these different kind of ideas of the self that we put forward oftentimes reflects what is kind of, in an economic speak, rewarded, or what are the places that we kind of see as successful, and so for different backgrounds in different places that's the case.
Timothy Captain:So again, I come from a background, the group that had the minus 10% on their scores, that is my theological affiliation and so I can't speak for all independent Christian churches or restoration movement churches, but certainly my experience and my brothers and my parents' experience has been that if you lead a big, successful place or you go and minister in a particularly hard city or something like that, then you are saying success is about numbers or success is about I can endure or take it when it comes to kind of abuse or hardship or lack of financial resources. These things are kind of elevated in our background and I've seen these are things that have negatively impacted me and I'm still trying to work through before the Lord about how I view success and therefore the self that I put forward as again being a superhero. In some ways it comes back to also my family background and growing in that too.
Valerie Ling:Yeah, and so what are some of the protective things in the denomination that has? Do you think hypothesize? Like I know you, we can't tell, but what does seem to help to improve?
Timothy Captain:well-being. So one of the things that some of my participants kind of shared in their journey is specifically having mentors, and so I think that denominations largely have some protections in them that don't just let 20-something girls go and go straight to the top. Even the most talented oftentimes have people that they have to report to, as in non-denominational settings, oftentimes people's talent gets in front of their experience and to their own detriment, and so I think that that is a protective force where somebody that is incredibly talented, incredibly successful in developing even power for themselves at a local level has somebody that they have to respond to and report to, and I think that's a very important thing. But non-denominational or independent churches often don't have that, and then I think vice versa, there's understanding of kind of individual churches on a much broader level, and so that can protect younger pastors as well. So, for example, I believe I write about thinking carefully about pastor-eater churches. Now, again, I love Jesus' bride, the church, and so I don't want to talk negatively about her at all. However, there are congregations and structures and leadership structures that have made a name for themselves as being a place that is unfriendly or uncaring about the pastor's well-being. They see them as somebody to just be used or used up for their talents or skills, with no desire to care for them as actual Christ followers and people. And so sometimes that is an easier kind of rotation of switching in pastors and using them up for a season and just getting the next one, getting the next one if there is no denominational support, to say wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, that's not how you treat somebody that is an clergy person and we're going to help your board or we're going to help your local leadership to better understand what is going on, and so sometimes I think that's an important protective piece too. So, again, these are some of the things that I see systemically.
Timothy Captain:I think one of the things that also happens systemically too is both in the age of the church as well as again thinking about the dimension of economic well-being for pastors. So some pastors again know, going into the ministry, that the financials may have an impact, but when maybe, for example, you accept a pastorate and you're married and you have no kids, that is a totally different financial situation than later on when you have children or the demographics change around you. And so some of these things need to not just be training pastors to be better with their finances. It's to think systemically about going. We are sending pastors on mission fields or into areas that are economically depressed perhaps. Now what is our financial plan to support that pastor to do that work? And so denominations oftentimes are able to supplement local church income, oftentimes for pastors that are in those situations, versus oftentimes, if they're totally independent, what you're perhaps earning from there or your spouse's income. Those become things that are only on that pastor, which can obviously provide a lot of difficulty for them.
Valerie Ling:So I think I like to think about as I think about doing a PhD. I love that you've just shed a light on how important demographics can be, because I'm actually thinking about a similar dynamic that happens in psychologists. Those of us who live in quite well resourced suburbs and we practice in one such suburb can sometimes look judgmentally on our colleagues who are practicing in suburbs. We call them housing commissions. They're subsidized housing, high rates of alcohol abuse, high rates of just social issues, and they have a very different set of stresses and they have a very different set of pressures on them and many of them choose to live not far from the practice, so they're actually also embedded in that system. The kids will be going to schools, for example, that are a little bit more underprivileged, et cetera.
Valerie Ling:So I think you've given me a lot to think about that we can gloss over demographics as being here's the basic average figure and not actually have an individualized concern for the person who is being placed within that demographic. So maybe what I'm hearing is that it's also quite important for us to almost have a intimate profile, to know, when we're placing people, how much support they probably even need. Are they going to need like a more protracted support, like in 12 months, even because of where the church is situated and what they've been through and the individualized need of the minister and if they're single or their family. I think that's very interesting. Have you seen anything like that coming out? Is that what? Is there something happening in your neck at the woods?
Timothy Captain:No, I think so. I'm encouraged that some church planting organizations here in the US are starting to develop this kind of support Nominations, are beginning to think about this, so we're definitely on the front edge. We have not figured things out here, so we're waiting for you to tell us how you all are doing it, and I think one of the things that's encouraging to me is, as we tell these stories and talk about them again, it's so helpful to start creating language and a desire to do this, because I think we've and the church historically being able to celebrate that we have figured out how to support one another's needs. One of the hallmarks of a church in many ways is that kind of potluck where we're bringing things to the table from all different aspects. I think that this is what this movement of pastoral well-being needs is a more robust bringing to the table of different professions and experiences to say, hey, these are the ways that we can support pastors, and so we need economists, we need psychologists, we need medical professionals, we need pastors to pastors, we need a team of people that are coming in considering this.
Timothy Captain:So, for example, in the United States, one of the big problems that we don't talk about.
Timothy Captain:It's kind of taboo to talk about is clergy, physical health, that clergy.
Timothy Captain:One of the ways that we sometimes kind of deal with this stress and emotion is we eat it, and so no one is going to talk in the church about the sin of overindulgence, of eating oftentimes, and so pastors in stressful jobs and situations are not allowed to go and drink or do other things like that to kind of take away their pain, but they are allowed to go eat whole things of ice cream.
Timothy Captain:That was one of my go-tos, a late at night sitting and wanting to eat ice cream on the couch, and no one was going to talk to me about that, nor say, hey, your medical health is at jeopardy and a risk that you are doing this as a way to do that, unless we start opening up to voices that say, actually you are an embodied person and your body matters. And so it took me having to have more conversations with medical professionals that loved Jesus and loved me To see, no, this is integrated with an unhealthy way that I'm dealing with burnout and stress, but I'm now able to have these conversations. So I'm very encouraged to know that on the individual levels, I think in small places, there's work being done that's opened these doors up for conversations. I'm hopeful that it's going to make big systemic changes into the future, because this work, I think, is just beginning.
Valerie Ling:Well, tim, I think that's such a wonderful note to finish today. I really resonated with a lot of what you said and it's given me a sense of courage that actually connecting with other people such as yourself like literally found your thesis, sent you a LinkedIn message, said, hey, I want to put the pieces of puzzles together, we might discover more things. I think it's a great word of encouragement that we can include more conversation from different people to really address what is a significant issue. I think you're right.
Valerie Ling:The burden of health in clergy was one of the things that kickstarted me a decade ago to think about it, because I was looking at some results from the UK and going not only is it attrition from ministry if physically compromised, how can we allow this to happen? This can't be right. We need to do something about this. And if we don't have our people in ministry enduring and physically and emotionally and spiritually well, we also lose people who can share the word of Jesus to a world that needs to know Him. So it's been so fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.
Timothy Captain:The pleasure is all mine.
Valerie Ling:Thank you very much.
