Category Archives: Clergy Health

5 Reasons U Care about Healthy Clergy & 5 Things U Can Do About It.

Posted on May 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

You care about clergy because:

  1. You believe that God calls clergy to ministry.
    1. A divine source sparked their choice of ministry.
  2. You understand the demanding nature of the ministry.
    1. Both the physical and emotional demands of ministry take their cumulative toll.
  3. You care about your colleagues in ministry.
    1. They are very specific neighbors that need signs of compassion from time to time.
  4. You know that Healthy Clergy Make Healthy Congregations.
    1. When clergy are healthy physically, emotionally, and spiritually, they are more likely to shape healthy congregations.
  5. You see how healthy congregations contribute to a better world.
    1. Consider what it would be like if all the compassion and support regularly supplied by the congregations across the land suddenly disappeared.

Ways You can contribute to the healthy of clergy.

  1. Call a clergy colleague, invite him or her to lunch, ask them to tell you about his or her ministry and then listen.
  2. Plan to attend the Presbytery Pastoral Care Network’s annual conference in Louisville, July 31-Aug 1 (Before the Big Tent). www.pastoralcarenetwork.org. (Open to clergy or lay of any denomination who care about the health of clergy. Check out website for more information.
  3. Sign up for the PPCN newsletter (free on request) and continue to get regular practical suggestions on clergy health. Issued about five times a year with suggestions for clergy, churches, and judicatories.
  4. Read my blog, www.smccutchan.com, for more ideas about how the church and clergy can contribute to keeping clergy healthy. Send me questions and comments and I will try to respond.
  5. Identify three clergy of different churches and pray for them and their ministry for 30 days in a row. (If you miss a day, add two days at the end.)
    1. It’s a discipline from which both you and the clergy will benefit.
  6. (Bonus) Laughter is good for the soul. Complete this sentence three times and find a colleague to share it with. “Clergy must be crazy if they . . . “
    1. Go ahead, have a little fun, enjoy some laughter, and know that God gave us a sense of humor to be an antidote to the stresses of life.

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Posted in Clergy, Clergy Health

Laughter as Healing for Clergy (2)

Posted on April 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Our soul is healthiest when it includes a good dose of humor. As was mentioned in the last blog, if the Abraham and Sara story is a pattern for our faith journey, then the birth of Isaac, laughter, was critical for the fulfillment of God’s promise to them. We need to know how to laugh as we pursue our own faith journey, especially when it involves the stresses that are part of ministry.

Think about humor. Most humor involves some of the following characteristics.

                        Satire,

                        Exaggeration

                        Reversal of expectations. 

These features can be part of our coping in even the direst of situations. Recall how the TV program, Mash, used macabre humor to maintain sanity in a tragic world. Think about  how often great comics come out of an experience of oppression or tragedy. Popular examples are the humor of such people like  Dick Gregory, and Bill Cosby or some of the many examples of Jewish humor.

One of the failures for many Christians is that in their attempt to be pious, they have  lost  the Jewish ability to play with Scripture. Play with the possibility, for example, of one of Jesus brothers coming to a psychiatrists.

“What seems to be the problem, my son?”

“Well, doc, you see, my brother is God and it just makes me feel so inadequate.”

“You have other gifts, my son. You could be a leader of the church in Jerusalem.”

Yes, I know that is not great comedy, but just the ridiculousness of it can loosen us up. If you keep playing with that silliness for awhile, you may find yourself digging deeper into the meaning of Scripture.

The same is true of the practice of ministry. Laughing at some of the ridiculous situations in ministry helps us maintain perspective. My guess is that if a whole congregation would occasionally have a banquet in which they “roasted” the congregation as a whole, they might find some refreshing freedom to allow laughter, Isaac, to be a source of hope for their future.

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Monday we will continue the serial story, “Truth & Consequences: a Pastor Confronts Sexuality,” and then we will continue this exploration with some suggestions of how clergy can engage in some laughter that relieves their times of stress.

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Posted in Clergy, Clergy Health, Comedy

Laughter as Healing for Clergy

Posted on April 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

There is nothing quite so refreshing as having a good experience of laughter. You can really be tired, or experience anger, or sadness, and something happens that causes you to respond with laughter, and suddenly, even if for just a few moments, you feel refreshed. The cause of the laughter might be a good joke, but it can also be just seeing something silly or for a moment realizing how ridiculous some situation is. There is actually some evidence that laughter, even when it is simply going through the motions of laughter, has healing properties. There is an interesting article on the benefits of laughter by the Reverend Laura Gentry http://laughinglaura.com . She has been introducing what is called laughter yoga. She guides people through a series of exercises of physically laughing that helps refresh them.

The humor in the Scripture is of a more subtle variety. Yet as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to laugh. Psalm 126 expresses laughter as the expression of grace when beyond expectations God has restored and healed. You will also recall that  Abraham and Sarah’s child was laughter (Isaac). If you reflect on that story where the family of faith began, you can recognize that laughter is the birth of promise in the face of the impossible. Even when people hear the story of a 100 year old man and a 90 year old woman having a child, many people want to laugh out loud. It’s impossible. Yet that is where our story of faith begins.

In the tragic story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, when out of obedience Abraham was willing to sacrifice laughter, God intervened to preserve laughter as critical to our faith journey. From our own experience, we know that the danger of fanaticism is that one’s belief system becomes so narrow that there is no freedom to question and grow. Laughter is what can give you perspective.

Our soul is healthiest when we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Of course there are healthy and unhealthy forms of laughter. Laughter can be a very destructive weapon used to ridicule another. Yet when one experiences, and especially when one can share laughter, it builds one up and can be the vehicle by which community is restored. There are few things more enjoyable than to be part of a group that is convulsed in laughter as they listen to a good comedy act.

In previous blogs, we have been exploring the value of releasing your anger. Now I want to explore for a couple of future blogs, how a pastor can learn to make use of laughter for personal relief and the maintenance of sanity in the ministry.

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Posted in Clergy Health, Comedy, Emotional Health

Lament & Humor as Balance in Life (2)

Posted on April 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

As we continue to look at the area of lament, (We’ll get to humor soon) I would call your attention to the superscriptions attached to some of the psalms. For example, look at Psalm 34. The superscription reads, “Of David, when he feigned madness before Ahimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.” The one who compiled the psalm is suggesting that if you keep that incident in David’s life in mind (1 Sam. 21:13) as you pray the psalm, it will deepen your understanding of the prayer. If you pray the psalm, however, you will see how early Christians set a new context for this psalm as they sought to understand their experience of the crucifixion of Jesus. (Note Ps 34:20)

We continue to see this flexibility of praying the psalms in different contexts when we look at Psalm 22. Psalm 22 wasn’t originally written with Jesus on cross in mind but when you think about that experience, it provides new depth to our praying that psalm for Christians.

You can deepen your own experience of the psalms by picturing other contexts within Jesus life where particular psalms might have been prayed. Think of Jesus in Garden of Gethsemane. What are some of the feelings you can imagine Jesus experiencing. With that image in mind, look at Psalm 77. It may help by   placing Jesus name in place of pronouns.

I share all of that to remind you of the flexibility you are invited to in praying the psalms. Now, move from biblical contexts to your own contexts. Consider, for example,  a time when you have felt frustrated in your ministry. With that context in mind, pray Psalm 55. Place your name in place of the pronouns, and fill in the blanks with your experiences of frustration as you offer this prayer.

All of this is to suggest that you are both given permission and guided in how to lift up your feelings to God in prayer. While there are many psalms that are not psalms of lament, the emphasis on lament in the psalms recognize this important aspect in your spiritual journey.

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Posted in Clergy, Clergy Health, Emotional Health, Spiritual Health

Lament & Humor as Balance in Life

Posted on April 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

In continuing to look at ways to keep our life in balance, I want to look again at the Psalms of Lament and in a later blog, the role of humor.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh”  (Eccles. 3:4)

 Having a vital spiritual life is a matter of balance. The emotional continuum moves from  Despair to ecstasy

                        Pain to pleasure

                        Lament to praise

            The whole continuum is valuable in the fullness of life.

                        No one can live a healthy life in constant ecstasy, or pleasure, or praise. The psalms, which are our school of prayer, guides us along that continuum. Calvin said that the psalms provide an anatomy of the human soul – There is no feeling in human psyche that is not expressed somewhere in the psalms. And most importantly for our spiritual maturity, all are acceptable to God.

Look at Psalm 13 as a classic example of a lament psalm. Note how psalmist feels comfortable having expectations of God. While we make no pretense to understand the mind of God, still our faith leads us to expect certain things from God as part of our relationship. The psalmist feels free to remind God of those expectations and when s/he believes that God has not lived up to God’s part of the relationship. We see the same thing in Jesus’ use of Psalm 22 as his prayer from the cross.

Having expressed his or her complaint in bold terms, note also in Psalm 13 how the prayer moves from lament to praise. It is when we are honest in expressing our complaints, even our angers, that we cleanse our soul and can then honestly move to an experience of praise and awe.

           To fully experience this, take psalm 13 and substitute your name for the  pronouns and pray the psalm aloud and with feeling. At first you may even feel embarrassed about being so honest, but as you allow yourself that freedom, notice the sense of release in the experience.

As I mentioned,  Psalm 22, made famous because the Gospels report it as Jesus’ prayer from the cross, also moves across the continuum from despair to praise. If you apply the same practice of placing your name in place of the pronouns, you will likely trigger some of your own moments when you have felt abandoned, even if just briefly.

            Also, note how the  moves from loneliness to community. The more we repress and swallow our own negative feelings, the more we isolate ourselves from others, and even from God. When we find one who is able to listen and accept our darkest feelings, we find ourselves accepted as well. We are restored to community. The spiritual life recognizes that despair and pain often isolates and that healing results in the restoration of community.

As Genesis notes from the beginning, “It is not good for the human to be alone.”

 

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Posted in Clergy Health, Emotional Health, Spiritual Health