SERVING the people of God is a complex mixture of pressure and pleasure, success and failure, progress and setbacks. It was ever thus; if you doubt that, try reading the letters of St Paul. Many measures of well-being, including the one used in the Church’s project Living Ministry, tend to measure the levels of mental health and well-being, but don’t capture the way that the negative sides of ministry sit alongside the positive rewards of fulfilling a vocation.
The Francis Burnout Inventory (FBI) is a measure of work-related well-being that was developed some years ago specifically for clergy. It measures two things related to ministry: emotional exhaustion and satisfaction.
The theory behind it is that vulnerability to burnout is increased when ministers are emotionally exhausted, but decreased if they are finding greater satisfaction in their vocation. Ideally, ministers should have low exhaustion and high satisfaction, but this is not always the case. These days, emotional exhaustion is often baked into the role. So, understanding the overall well-being of clergy is about knowing how exhausted they feel, and how much satisfaction and purpose they get from their work.
Over the past two decades, we and other researchers have used the FBI to explore aspects of clergy well-being. We have accrued enough data from a wide range of Christian ministers to know what sorts of levels of emotional exhaustion and satisfaction are typical, what factors are associated with different levels, and some of the consequences of those different levels.
We have identified different groups of clergy: some with low exhaustion and high satisfaction (“Cruising”), some with high exhaustion and low satisfaction (“Creaking”), some with high exhaustion and high satisfaction (“Compensating”), some with low exhaustion and low satisfaction (“Coasting”), and a group in the middle who have average levels of both exhaustion and satisfaction (“Central”). Knowing which of these groups clergy fall into tells us something about their vulnerability to burnout.
We would like to invite all clergy and ministers to take part in a project that is assessing how well this instrument gives ministers insight into their well-being. You can use the link below to find the survey, which will take about ten minutes to complete. We hope that enough people will take part so that we can refine the tool if necessary and make it even more useful in the effort needed to ensure that ministers can continue to fulfil their calling in healthy and satisfying ways.
For access to the survey, use this link or scan the QR code.
The Revd Andrew Village is a professor emeritus, and Canon Leslie J. Francis is a visiting professor, at York St John University.
