Core Questions

What are the signature characteristics of pastoral well-being, and what role does it play in a well-lived pastoral life?

One of our main objectives is to gain greater insights into what distinguishes a flourishing, meaningful, vital pastoral life from one that is declining, empty, languishing, or otherwise not well-lived. Our research will explore both pastors' hedonic well-being – their happiness, life satisfaction, and emotional well-being – and their eudaimonic well-being – the meaning, purpose, and vitality they experience in their lives. (We describe these in more detail below.) We have structured our research to yield insights about the nature, causes and outcomes of well-being. We believe our research will also help the field develop better ways to assess pastoral well-being and we have proposed research that will make important contributions toward developing an index that can be used to monitor the well-being of pastors on a larger, perhaps national, scale. Such an index could prove to be very instrumental in advancing both research and practice around pastoral well-being.

What constitutes pastoral well-being over a life span?

Our goal here is to begin the study of pastoral well-being over long periods of time and to understand the way well-being changes and evolves over a life span. One of our focal interests is resilience, which is the positive capacity of people to respond adaptively to stress, resist the negative impact of difficult life events, and recover from crisis. A second focal interest is growth, which is the process of reaching toward one's full potential and becoming more efficacious in one's capacity to foster positive outcomes in one's own life and in the lives of others. Much of the existing well-being research is cross-sectional and, therefore, focuses on snapshots of human life. Research that explores how well-being ebbs-and-flows over time, what conditions account for those fluctuations, and the potential impact of those fluctuations on pastors, their families, and their congregations is urgently needed. Of central importance here is to understand the dynamics of resilience among pastors and their families. While we will explore issues related to pastoral burnout, our perspective goes beyond studying pastors under duress. We have proposed studies designed to investigate how pastors successfully navigate the highs and lows of pastoral life, especially over long periods of time. Our research will address how well-being grows or diminishes over time, what life conditions are related to positive and negative changes in well-being, and what conditions build and maintain high levels of pastoral resilience and growth. We will study the key harbingers of pastors in decline, explore how pastors recover successfully from periods of difficulty, and investigate the conditions that cause pastors to remain mired in decline. In addition, we will study the lives of pastors who experience positive growth trajectories and find ways to sustain and increase their capacity to foster positive outcomes versus those pastors who experience plateaus or declines in their life trajectories.

What are the signature characteristics of pastoral well-being, and what role does it play in a well-lived pastoral life?

One of our main objectives is to gain greater insights into what distinguishes a flourishing, meaningful, vital pastoral life from one that is declining, empty, languishing, or otherwise not well-lived. Our research will explore both pastors' hedonic well-being – their happiness, life satisfaction, and emotional well-being – and their eudaimonic well-being – the meaning, purpose, and vitality they experience in their lives. (We describe these in more detail below.) We have structured our research to yield insights about the nature, causes and outcomes of well-being. We believe our research will also help the field develop better ways to assess pastoral well-being and we have proposed research that will make important contributions toward developing an index that can be used to monitor the well-being of pastors on a larger, perhaps national, scale. Such an index could prove to be very instrumental in advancing both research and practice around pastoral well-being.

What are the conditions that stimulate, nourish, and support high levels of pastoral well-being and what conditions are detrimental to it?

Our objective here is to gather data about the key individual (e.g., personality, life practices), social (e.g., family dynamics, friendships, connections to the pastoral community), and environmental (e.g., local church characteristics, conditions of the local community, denominational systems & structures) conditions that are associated with higher or lower levels of pastoral well-being. We are interested in exploring the differences between those pastors that experience chronically high levels of well-being from those who experience chronically low levels. For example, we will explore the personal factors – such as life practices, education & experience, and individual differences – that explain important differences in levels of well-being. In their book Resurrecting Excellence, Jones and Armstrong2 propose a number of practices – what they call "treasures of ministry" – derived from Scripture and church tradition that they believe will foster excellence in ministry. Our plan is to gather empirical data that will provide further insights into how practices such as these foster the well-lived pastoral life. We will also study how conditions such as social relationships and networks, family dynamics, the nature of the pastor's appointment, congregational characteristics, and denominational structures influence pastors' well-being. Our proposed program of research is designed to provide empirical data that will shed light on what conditions are most conducive to well-being among clergy and their families.