Current research shows that the one result of the recent Coronavirus pandemic is that a significant portion of church leaders have experienced significant emotional, mental, and spiritual trauma and burnout, and have seriously considered leaving their churches and their pastoral careers.
This project will recruit 100 pastors in Southern California from a three-month professional coaching intervention program for clergy that provides resources for emotional, spiritual, and mental health, for organizational leadership development, and for a potential impact on the congregations that the clergy members serve. The program's intervention components are designed to enhance through personal discovery the emotional, relational and spiritual well-being of pastors and ultimately reduce stress and job burnout, to improve the overall retention of pastors in the ministry, and to improve their leadership skills and organizational capabilities of the participants.
The project proposed here will seek to understand the relative success of the intervention program, focusing on two related sets of questions:
1. Do program participants experience improvement in their emotional, spiritual, and mental health? If so, what are the outcomes of that improvement? How does this manifest in their personal lives and in their role in their congregation?
2. In what ways does a pastor’s involvement in the coaching intervention program affect their congregations? Do they operate any differently as a result?
The project will be conducted in tandem with a similar project funded by sources other than the John Templeton Foundation. The team of researchers are working on both projects and results between the two projects will be compared with each other. Outputs from the project include an open access database, presentations at professional meetings and articles in academic journals, a book, popular media articles and practical resources for pastors and other faith leaders.
