For the next several Wednesdays I will be focusing on the work environment and your self-care in the Church setting.  I am drawing material from several sources, but primarily I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This by Julie Jansen.  If you would like to use her book to take the tests and exercises she recommends, I recommend the paperback edition so you can use the interactions easily.

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Last Wednesday I highlighted Julie Jansen’s stress upon one’s values as part of a general assessment of career planning and reduction of job stress. I did not have time or space to look at her other two criteria, attitude and change resilience. The topic of “attitude” caught my eye in particular because the very word has taken on a pejorative meaning, as in “my kid shows too much attitude.” I stopped treating minors five years ago, which may as well be a century, so maybe there is new terminology. But “attitude” has always been a little suspect. Somewhere the word “attitude” became married to the word “defiant” to the point that a healthy assertiveness is now suspect as well.  A priest friend of mine—very much his own man--who went on to become a president of two colleges told me that on the day of his ordination, when he went to say good-bye to his superior of several years, the senior told him, “The problem with you is you push too much.” When I was young the age-appropriate expression of attitude among teens was a haircut known as a DA or “duck’s behind.” The parental reaction was typically “you look like a hood.” If you’ve ever seen the Fonz…
 
Actually, attitude is a neutral word, defined by Jansen as “your state of mind or feelings with regard to a person, idea, or thing. There is a wealth of research to correlate attitude and behavior. (p. 34ff) Unless someone is suffering from mood disorder, such as depression, attitude changes according to circumstance. As a kid my attitude on June 25 or thereabouts was always festive, as the Catholic school system closed and I had two months for sports, board games on the porch, and even reading. (I somehow obtained an adult-level library card for the Buffalo Library System around the fourth grade—I have no idea who pulled the strings. Maybe I showed them my report card. Maybe the bar wasn’t so high.)
 
The difficulty with attitude is masking it when it would create stresses. Doing one thing but feeling something quite different creates many negative physical and psychological conditions. The psychological term is incongruence. Here is where the workplace issues live. There is a saying about getting paid for doing what you really like to do. Polling consistently indicates that not very many people feel this is true about them. I suspect that a good number of people continue employment with a “determined” attitude, committed by their value system to feeding their families and making positive contributions to society. Likewise I also think that a number of those in church ministry—including clergy and religious—bring an attitude of duty and commitment to the Bible, the Creed, the universal Church, their vows, the church of their childhood and history, the past and present good works of the placement, etc. There is a quiet heroism here that should never be overlooked, though I fear that church workers do not receive the emotional support they need because, in the minds of their employers, they are just doing their duty and following God. Ironic, isn’t it?
 
But duty without passion is not sustainable for good health. The longer one endures a job or more likely a career where the moral imperative for the career is in tension with genuine affect and feelings about it, there is a fatiguing process that sets into motion a number of troublesome behavior. At the benign end of the spectrum an individual without an attitude of at least some satisfactory expectation from the work place will gradually become a clock watcher; he or she will pass up continuing education, a sad thing when many professional seminars offer new, inventive, and challenging insights into the old boring routine. As dissatisfaction continues, physical care begins to deteriorate. Exercise is abandoned. Issues of weight become more problematic (obesity among church workers is an issue rarely addressed; I did come across a 2006 article from the Washington Post on the subject.)  Food, at least temporarily, brings a fulfillment that the work place is not providing. There was a point in my church work and again in my mental health career where my very appearance was contradicting my message of religious wholeness. Other remedies to soothe the pain of dissonance include legal and illegal use of certain drugs—tranquilizers, pain killers, marijuana, etc. as well as pornography, excess spending, etc. Alcohol consumption increases. Professional health providers can pick up physical deterioration from incongruence in many parts of the body. My dentist can spot stress by the wear on my teeth.
 
The end product here is that eventually the suppressed feelings will break through. Church ministers in many instances let this process occur under a counselor’s care. It is a lengthy process, connected as it is to one’s self-image over many years, an image that is hard to forsake.  If untreated, a burned out minister becomes either an empty shell going through the paces, or worse, an angry soul whose work among the people is actually a debit to the Church’s mission. I would note, though, that anger is an appropriate reaction to the degree that there is lots in the Church at every level. I have been following this week’s debates at the annual U.S. bishops’ conference. With all sorts of raging moral issues among us, including the national debate on immigration, not to mention the pope’s messages to bishops during his visit here, the agenda so far has included (1) a statement on pornography—I’ll go out on a limb and guess they’re against it, and (2) the possibility of a lighter Mass Missal because altar servers find the present one too heavy.
 
Particularly with middle age and seniority there is a tendency for all of us Catholics to feel that the “institutional Church” has been spinning its wheels in bureaucratic flurry to mask its own dissonance over its inability to effect meaningful religious conversion. It is important for all of us involved in the Church in any way to come to grips with this and other realities of ministry and come clean to ourselves about how we actually feel, not what “duty binds us to feel.” This assessment of attitude provides the data necessary to determine how, where, and even if to serve the Church in a fashion that no longer demoralizes but rather emphasizes the charisms of nature and faith we received in Baptism. A group of Galilean fishermen made major career changes because the idea of being “fishers of men” seemed like a much better idea.
 

For the next several Wednesdays I will be focusing on the work environment and your self-care in the Church setting.  I am drawing material from several sources, but primarily I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This by Julie Jansen.  If you would like to use her book to take the tests and exercises she recommends, I have linked it for you. I recommend the paperback edition so you can use the interactions easily.
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One of the unfortunate things about aging is that we acquire more skill about vocational assessment and workplace selection at a time in our lives when these skills are less critical. For example, I understand today that in a job interview I should be assessing the employer and the work place more critically than vice versa, and that I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had known that then. This was true when I worked as a priest in a religious order, and in a second career making my bones in the mental health field. Particularly in my “second life,” the pressure to “make the team” and pull down a paycheck made me overlook a number of critical factors, notably the character, style, and competence of bosses. Later, when I developed some skill in the employee assistance specialty, I found that this fear of losing place was very common in my patients; the prevalent thinking was that “any job is better than no job,” despite the fact that job stress was my number one self-reported complaint.

I need to make a critical distinction here. The words “job” and “career” are not interchangeable. I was a decent fit in the mental health profession, but I found myself in crazy positions, no pun intended. Again, let me zone in on my mental health tenure in years: 2-5-1-1-11. It does not take rocket science to figure out which were the “misfit” years, one as an administrator/evaluator for a children’s Medicaid clinic, and another as psychotherapist with a team of psychiatrists in a managed care service center. Curiously, these two lousy years were the ones with the best salary and benefits packages in my life. That two year span was useful at least to the degree that it taught me where the land mines were buried in my profession. By contrast, the “5-year tenure” was a shoestring family therapy center where the paychecks were not always predictable but there was lots of quality face time with patients and a hand-on staff of supervisors whose priorities included skills development and professional enhancement.

Vocational counseling dates back to 1909 with the publishing of Frank Parsons’ Choosing a Vocation. Amazon allows free access to the introduction of the book by Ralph Albertson (Parsons died before publishing), and aside from the sexist language, it is interesting that all the general principles—written during the presidency of William Howard Taft—have significant application today. Notable are the emphases on the very process of career planning and the need for advice from knowledgeable and successful outsiders.

Julie Jansen, in chapter two of her above cited text, recommends that all professionals address three critical questions about themselves in initiating the discernment/assessment process of present day career satisfaction.  She provides self-assessment material in her book, a good reason to buy it in paperback. From her own experience she has identified three significant benchmarks for professionals: values, attitudes, and change resilience. She defines values as “a principle, standard, or quality considered inherently worthwhile or desirable.” (29) Values, in her way of thinking, are what motivates the worker and provides fulfillment. For those of us in Christian ministry, the obvious value of our work would most naturally seem to be a love of Christ, devotion to the Church, or some personalization of this.

But given the number of church personnel I have treated over the years, I have come to the conclusion that many ministers are in stress because there is dissonance between “the obvious values” of church work and the actual values held by the minister. This does not imply that my patients were phony; it was more a question of not recognizing their deepest-felt needs and purposes; here is a good example of where religion and psychology work in tandem. Jansen, in her inventory here, cites among many values such things as autonomy, challenge, competition, creativity, doing good, helping others, leadership, self-expression, safety, stability. (31) Having gotten her reader to identify the top ten values in one’s life, she goes on to assess whether these values are expressed in one’s current work place.

Jansen’s value list includes spirituality, integrity, doing good, belonging to a group; these are values we typically associate with church and parish ministry. But this is what I hear in the field or the office from church workers: there is no time for a staff retreat; there is no money or time provided by parishes for ministers to make individual retreats; staff meetings are non-existent, or dominated by narcissists and histrionics, or state of the union addresses by the pastor; there is too much parish bureaucracy to engage in Pope Francis-like sojourns among the sheep, like the always appreciated home visitation. It is little wonder that we have burnt-out folks who labor 50-hour weeks in circumstances of disconnect from what they truly believe in.

Of course, the reverse is also true: a parish may be decently administered but a minister’s values may be at variance from the values cluster of the local or even the universal Church. Years ago a major catechism publisher told me about a parish in a large U.S. city that discovered its highly successful director of religious education was an avowed atheist. When confronted about this, the DRE admitted that he took the job for the challenge of running programs. Today I reviewed Jansen’s inventory of values and discovered that indeed she has identified achievement/accomplishment as a significant workplace value in the general public. Some of her identified values would inevitably lead to frustration for a church professional or volunteer: excitement, fame, financial security, fun, leisure, physical activity, recognition, risk-taking, status, and wealth are usually not the opening phrases in a Catholic job posting.

Time and space do not permit me to continue on to attitudes and change resilience; I will pick those up next week. But in conclusion I would stress the importance of your values system, that which naturally drives your enthusiasms. What we profess our attitudes to be from a distilled sense of duty, and what they actually are if we are truthful with ourselves, can often be in some measure of dissonance. I have used the word “passion” over time with the blog to describe the values that drive us. In choosing or sustaining a career, in planning our education and/or formation, and even when interviewing for placement in the ministry, the term “passion” should sit first and foremost.

For the next several Wednesdays I will be focusing on the work environment and your self-care in the Church setting.  I am drawing material from several sources, but primarily I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This by Julie Jansen.  If you would like to use her book to take the tests and exercises she recommends, I have linked it for you. I recommend the paperback edition so you can use the interactions easily.
 
I took some time yesterday to look at the tenure of all the paying jobs I held in my lifetime, both in the Church and the mental health field. In years,  the tenure sequence looks something like this: 4-11-4-2-5-1-1-11. Without a context, of course, the numbers indicate only that I am slightly below average in the number of job changes over my career; various studies indicate that the average U.S. worker changes jobs about 11 times, and in the last census respondents indicated that they had been at their present employment for four years. One interesting tidbit about my own numbers: the two “11’s” represent a tenure as a pastor and my tenure as a private practice therapist where I owned the business. Generally those were years of greatest job satisfaction; off the top of my head, I would say that I guess I work best where I am my own boss. However, in grad school my professor of research and testing had us self-administer the MMPI psychological test. I had elevated scores in several categories, including the Schizophrenia type. Schizophrenia is a disorder of personality and thought; my prof explained to me that on the continuum scale my score indicated “thinking out of the box,” idealism and imagination. It was a highly valuable piece of information for me; clearly I was not suited by temperament to be an accountant.

I think the first mistake we all make when looking at our careers is the assumption that the science of the psychology of the workplace somehow does not apply to those of us who are or have been working for the Church or “for religion.” I attended a workshop yesterday by Richard P. Johnson, Ph.D., with all my old priest buddies from my diocese, who discussed the spiritual and psychological dimensions of aging clergy. In his discussion on our individual personalities, Johnson observed that groups have unique personalities as well. There was considerable laughter and universal agreement over the observation that “parishes have unique personalities.” So do parish staffs: pastors, administrators, volunteers. I have been involved with some church entities long overdue for a collective MMPI. While such factors are true in every work setting, we cannot deny that some church settings are detrimental to our physical and psychological health, nor can we deny that each of us owns the power to manage our choices in terms of finding the placements and the workplace challenges that optimize our mood and spirituality.

Julie Jansen (cited above, xi.) observes that Salary.com‘s 2009 “Employee Satisfaction and Retention Survey” revealed that 65% of those surveyed were actively and passively looking for a new job or contemplating starting a new business. This statistic resonates with my own anecdotal experiences working around my diocese. In every parish I have visited this fall, my local contact—usually the faith formation director or equivalent—was a new hire. One of them told me of having worked in three parishes over the past three years. At the very least, one wonders how a parish staff is able to develop an esprit de corps in a revolving door culture.

Jansen (11, ff.) identifies six factors that every worker (and, for our purposes, church volunteers, too) can use to evaluate one’s occupational status at any juncture in life: (1) Where’s the meaning? In my vocational counseling work in the early welfare reform projects, I would try to help my patients identify to me what they were truly passionate about in life. I have great respect for duty, but duty is best motivated by its end goals. (2) Been there, done that, but still need to earn. This population operates competently and may be motivated to move ahead, but perceives that the regular paycheck and the benefits are the safer play as opposed to changing occupational hats for more challenge and job satisfaction. (3) The bruised and gun-shy.  Particularly since the Great Recession, there is a large number of the work force who were fired, downsized out, discriminated against, and who are now anxious and distrustful of the workplace. I should add here the many employees whose jobs, well, are gone. The future is a crushing press of uncertainty. (4) Bored and plateaued.  I was very happy to see Jansen include this category, because I don’t see the Church doing much to encourage upward mobility. Take a 43 year-old faith formation director who has been working essentially from the same template for maybe two decades. What can we say to that individual who wants to grow in professional vision, to remain in faith formation, maybe earn a master’s, and increase creative and administrative challenges? Isn’t that our optimum obligation to our church workers, to prompt them to deeper professional development? (5) Yearning to be on your own. Anyone working in the church will need to reconcile this need against the structures of parish life for the foreseeable future. At the very least, it is a matter for discussion in a job interview; avoid micromanager pastors. (6) One toe in the retirement pool. Jansen makes an excellent point that baby boomers often retire to get away from various work stresses before they have had the chance to plan for a retirement that lasts many years.

Perhaps you have read to this point and believe that your work place in the church is optimum. I am happy for you, but remember this: your pastor may be replaced tomorrow by a priest from another culture where men do not take women seriously or who never got the fax from Pope Francis about humbly listening to his people. Or, you may come back next August and half of your colleagues are gone elsewhere. Or consider this: the future of the Church depends upon the depth of theological and pedagogical skill each one of us brings to ministry. If you are not growing, you are atrophying, to your own detriment and that of the Church. Don’t kid yourself. Duty without vision and passion kills everything in its grasp.