02 Mar 2025: Caring for our Shepherds: Understanding and Coping with Burnout as a Pastor – Book Review
Caring for our Shepherds:
Understanding and Coping with Burnout as a Pastor
Thomas V. Frederick, Yvonne Thai, and Scott E. Dunbar
Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024. 144 pages, $22.00/$37.00
Reviewed by Garrett Ho, PhD
Gateway Seminary
Concern for the health of ministry leaders is shared among Doctor of Ministry educators for good reason. These ministry leaders face challenges that range from long hours and unreasonable expectations to financial stressors. Additionally, challenges unique to pastoral ministry may include spiritual warfare, boundary ambiguity, and a sense of isolation. Ministry leaders continuing their formal education may add the rigor of doctoral studies to the long list of challenges. To meet this need, Thomas V. Frederick, Yvonne Thai, and Scott E. Dunbar provide a helpful volume that addresses a prevalent condition among ministry leaders – burnout. In their book, Caring for our Shepherds: Understanding and Coping with Burnout as a Pastor, the authors make significant contributions as they apply their diverse fields of study (i.e., counseling psychology, sociology, and business) to bear on this topic, resulting in an integrated, biblical approach.
The first significant contribution of Frederick, Thai, and Dunbar is reconceptualizing burnout. They begin with an overview of burnout, which includes a brief history of burnout studies since the 1970s. These phases include the exploratory phase (defining and describing burnout), the empirical phase (quantitative and qualitative testing), and the expanding phase (application of technology and broadening to include additional occupations). Here they interact with Maslach’s definition of burnout, which understands the condition in terms of three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and efficacy. Some may be familiar with these dimensions from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which measures emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and professional accomplishment. The authors go on to explain the nature of burnout as a “prolonged response” to “chronic stressors,” terms from Maslach’s definition, in order to present the current state of burnout studies. Ministry leaders may experience lethargy, indifference, and the perception of an inability to make a difference. However, some ministry leaders persevere in their work without the long-term effects associated with burnout despite high levels in those three dimensions. In response, Frederick, Thai, and Dunbar suggest viewing burnout among those in ministry professions as “the ratio or balance between meaningfulness in ministry and emotional exhaustion in ministry” (8). This calculation captures some of the uniqueness of ministry work and calling and contextualizes burnout for ministry leaders.
The authors’ second significant contribution is their contextualization of burnout to the field of ministry leadership as introduced above. In doing so, they leverage previous work (Frederick and Dunbar, A Christian Approach to Work and Family Burnout, 2019) and apply it to the unique social context of ministry leadership. Pastors, they recognize, differ from other vocations in their experience of burnout. Current studies, they assert, “may not adequately reflect the experience of pastors” (17). What they are referring to is the unusual satisfaction that ministry leaders experience in their work alongside the presence of the typical indicators of burnout. Understanding burnout among pastors must incorporate these feelings of satisfaction or “meaningfulness.” On the other side of the equation, they consider emotional exhaustion through the lens of “emotional labor,” a concept borrowed from social psychology. This refers to the way ministry leaders modify and present their feelings in order to make these feelings appropriate for their situation. Since preaching, counseling, and visitation require emotions corresponding to the task, regulating and communicating appropriate emotions is inherent to pastoral leadership. The authors discuss the benefits and weaknesses of “surface acting” and “deep acting” strategies for emotional adjustment. Weaknesses may include emotional strain or even an obscuring of one’s sense of authentic self. The authors also discuss the unique relationship between work and family that ministry leaders must negotiate. They note the vantage point that a leader’s congregation has to the individual and his or her family. Between the three perspectives on work and family (i.e., conflict, opportunity, and balance), the authors promote a work and family balance approach (WFB). They adopt the definition proposed by Frederick and Dunbar (2019) that work and family balance is “one’s perception of the compatibility and enhancing nature of both work and non-work activities in accordance with one’s values and preferences” (23). In this way, they connect WFB with burnout by way of the concepts of “salience and satisfaction.”
Another significant contribution of Frederick, Thai and Dunbar is the practical help and direction that they offer. While the volume offers a capable summary of burnout studies and identifies unique characteristics of ministry leadership, the authors reserve the second half of their text for psychological and spiritual resources to cope with pastoral burnout. The authors look to Differentiation of Self (DoS) as a resource for managing burnout. Related to this, they propose a Differentiation in Christ (DifC) model to address burnout, beginning with an exploration of the difference between primary and secondary calling. Then the authors engage multiple streams of Christian spiritual disciplines for reinvigoration. They promote a “Christian” practice of mindfulness, in contrast with a secular view of mindfulness. They emphasize Christian Devotion Meditation (CDM) or Christian contemplative practices. Finally, they conclude with tools for self-assessment, personal reflection, and a four-step process to develop a personal plan. While acute burnout symptoms may require personalized counseling and treatment, low-grade burnout and preventative efforts will find timely help in these chapters.
The consequences of burnout are significant: depleted energy, lowered resistance to illness, and reduced effectiveness at work (Maxon, 1999). But burnout among ministry leaders may be addressed and this volume enables the reader to understand burnout and initiate constructive steps to recovery. Doctor of Ministry educators looking for additional resources for themselves or their candidates would benefit from the addition of this text to their bibliographies as an accessible, up-to-date, and practical text directed toward a growing concern in the area of ministry leader health. I recommend this work for its introduction to burnout studies in general and its novel approach to pastoral burnout in particular.