The Well-Being and Resilience of Canadian Christian Clergy

Abstract

Clergy play significant leadership, educational, and caregiving roles in society. However, burnout is a concern for the clergy profession, those they serve, and their families. Effects include decreased ministry effectiveness, lower sense of personal accomplishment in their role, and negative impacts on quality of family life and relationships. Given these risks, knowledge of the nature of Christian clergy’s current resilience and well-being in Canada may provide valuable intelligence to mitigate these challenges. In summary, the purpose of this research was to describe and analyze the status of clergy resilience and well-being in Canada, together with offering focused insights. Resilience and well-being surveys used by the co-authors with educators and nurses were adapted for use in this study. This instrument was developed to gain insight into baseline patterns of resilience and well-being and included questions across seven sections: (1) demographic information. (2) health status, (3) professional quality of life, (4) Cantril Well-Being Scale, (5) Ego-Resiliency Scale, (6) Grit Scale, and (7) open-ended questions. The findings provided valuable insights into clergy well-being and resilience that can benefit individual clerics, educational institutions, denominations, and congregations. The participants’ current resilience and well-being included high levels of resiliency, moderate grit, and satisfaction with health and wellness. Other significant findings included the impact of congregational flourishing and age. This study found that clergy well-being and resilience was doing well despite the increased adversity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications of this study are that clerics may need unique supports based on their age and also whether they serve in a congregation they perceive as flourishing.

Role-Related Stress and Adversity Impacting Christian Clergy Resilience: A Pan-Canadian Study

“…This article reports on the findings related to types of adversity clergy reported, arising from the qualitative data collection. Other study findings are reported elsewhere, including the results from the quantitative well-being and resilience scale (Clarke et al, 2022a), findings related to the resources that clergy identified as supporting their resilience (Clarke et al, 2022b), and the Clergy Resilience Model (forthcoming).…”