Ill-behaving members lead to clergy burnout

Ill-behaving members lead to clergy burnout
___By Hillary Wicai
___Religion News Service
___ST. LOUIS (RNS)--Bad behavior from church members is the leading cause of clergy burnout, according to a team of researchers hired by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
___Alan and Cheryl Klaas of Mission Growth Ministries were hired by the Lutheran Church to investigate the root causes of the clergy shortage it and many other mainline denominations currently face.
___"It was intended to be a traditional recruitment and retention study," Klaas said. For example, he thought he'd be recommending changes on issues like seminary communication with potential students.
___"We wondered if students got good services, if seminaries were recruiting the right people," he explained. But in the end, the Klaases concluded the problems are 20 percent institutional and 80 percent behavioral.
___"The fundamental finding is that people beating on each other is the main issue," Klaas said.
___The Klaases wrote a book about their findings. In "Quiet Conversations," a pastor and his wife struggle through ministry burnout. While the book is fiction, it is a collection of incidents that actually happened--incidents the Klaases believe illuminate why so many pastors burn out.
___The book talks of pastors' wives being chastised by members of the congregation for working outside the home. It includes stories of pastors and their families being alienated from their congregations because the pastors' wives asked to redecorate the parsonages.
___Hurt feelings lead to gossip, criticism, bad behavior from both congregations and pastors, and ultimately to burnout, Klaas said.
___"We heard about one situation where a pastor and his congregation were at such odds that he took a vacation and when he came home he discovered bullet holes in his house. So he sent his child more than 1,000 miles away to stay with relatives. But church members tracked the child down and harassed her over the phone," he said.
___Such behavior problems contribute to clergy burnout, he explained. "It affects pastor burnout because pastors get whipsawed trying to satisfy everyone while satisfying no one."
___The problem also affects clergy families, he said.
___Klaas estimates pastors' children made up about 40 percent of seminarians in the 1950s and '60s. It's a much different picture now at the two Missouri Synod seminaries. Last year, pastors' children were 5 percent of seminarians at one and 17 percent at the other.
___Klaas knows the problem crosses denominational lines. At a recent conference with officials from 25 denominations, 24 of the 25 representatives agreed the description of the problem applied to their denominations as well.
___"The denominations are very much aware of it, but it's being approached differently in each one," said Adair Lummis, faculty associate for research at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary. The Hartford Institute surveyed more than 4,300 clergy in 1994 and found 32 percent of women and 28 percent of men had thought seriously about leaving church ministry in the last year.