Day Four - Silence and Wellbeing

Me at my ordination as a priest in 2000 

After nearly twenty one years in parish ministry, I have been doing a little reflecting on all that has been. As I play a part in the training and formation of another Curate, I've also been reflecting on some of the things that have sustained me over that time.

Boundaries. My own TI was very clear that I needed to take my allotted rest day and if I didn't he would come down on me like a tonne of bricks - not quite his turn of phrase but basically what I heard! Over the years, whilst I am not convinced that I have always taken all of my allotted leave, I have been fastidious about my rest day. The opportunity to take Sabbath, to stop, to do something renewing for me and of me has been key. It was made clear that as a then single person, that I should not be doing my laundry and cleaning on my day off as keeping myself and the house was part of normal life and ministry. This, therefore, allowed my rest day to be just that.

Silence. As I look back over years of ministry I can now see the importance that periods of silence have played over that time.  I may not have named silence as silence if you understand what I mean, but I have learned to ensure that there were (even small) windows of space and time within each day to be made new - sitting, reading, listening to music, reflecting, walking the dog etc. Silence isn't a lack of speech, rather, silence is an attitude of attentive listening.  All, time away will allow that attentive listening as God speaks.

~~~

This is all apposite as clergy wellbeing and mental health more generally, topics once never discussed openly until crisis hits, are now part of the foundations of a thriving resilient ministry. There are some very good resources out there including Justine Allain Chapman's book 'Resilient Pastors' and much of Brene Brown's books especially 'Dare to Lead'. My colleague Lesley Crawley has spent her Extended Study Leave exploring this in more detail and there are some good resources on her blog including a survey about clergy wellbeing.

This is increasingly the case for a church, like the culture in which it is set, which looks for extroverted character traits as at worst desirable, and at best essential to be considered 'successful' in ministry. For those of us who self-identify as introverted, these models and expectations of what good leadership looks like can be both daunting and simultaneously exhausting.

Susan Cain's remarkable book 'Quiet' tracks the rise of the extroverted superman as the ideal leadership trait and then invites her readers to reconsider the qualities that introverts bring to the party.

One of the things that she reminds her readers of is how exhausting life for introverts can be, particularly up front, 'performing and presenting' roles like those of the minister. Introverts are not hermits or shy - rather they gain their energy differently from extroverted personalities that are so often presented as the ideal. Introverts are often also highly sensitive. Introverts often invest in a few friendships and find 'working the crowd' exhausting; they are drawn to the inner world of thoughts and feelings; they just feel better with less stimulation; they work more slowly and deliberately focussing often on one task at once and they are relatively immune to the lure of wealth and fame.

In short, what I have discovered, in part as an introvert, is that I need to take periods of downtime each day (they need not be long) - certainly after up-front ministry such as a service, an assembly, a funeral, teaching a nurture course or a PCC meeting to simply recharge and renew my energy. These ministries are often seen as the extroverted ideals of ministry - the places where relationships with others outside of the church community are forged - but for introverts, they are the most costly.

As an introvert, the ministry I love almost above anything else are one on one meetings with people, a home communion visit, time praying or crafting a liturgy or a sermon. These ministries are often seen by those who see extroversion as the ministerial ideal as nowhere near as important as the 'out on the street and in the community' type.

For flourishing ministry, we need to look again at what we are looking from our ministers. We need to ask important questions about the extroverted ideals of leadership that as a culture we idealise - which are normalised in childhood around clustered tables in the classroom where group work is valued above individual study, through to open-plan offices and hot-desking.

The church has bought into our culture's long term love affair with extroversion.  This is especially visible in our current obsession with management-speak and the language of leadership. If you doubt me, look at the language used in nearly every post advertised in the church press.  We are also running a model of parish ministry where we are needing to do more with less - again look at the increase in adverts for House for Duty or half time posts. These are only clerical examples. 

Couple all of that with very a real need to take long hard look at what is it we want ministry to be in England in the early years of the 21st Century - because it can feel on the ground like a perfect storm of a rediscovery of evangelism (a really good thing) but with a sense of urgency at best and a sense of panic at worst where we are being asked to keep the show on the road with less and simultaneously do more and creatively with less.

Someone once told me of someone meeting an African bishop or Archbishop who commented on our current state of affairs as a church that we had forgotten that at our heart, the church proclaims a story of death and resurrection. We seem to sometimes feel like we are spending much time looking at death in the face and responding and reacting from that place. 

We need to remember the resurrection. The church is still God's and we need to allow God to raise us to new life.  We need to allow a 'quiet' ministry to flourish again. We need to affirm a counter-cultural ministry of prayer, entrusting the church and people to God. We need to affirm the quiet and unseen aspects of ministry.

We need to remember the resurrection. The church is still God's and we need to allow God to raise us to new life. We need to allow an 'up-front' ministry to flourish again. We need affirm creativity, risk-taking, church-planting, opportunities to have meaningful conversations. We need to affirm all of this.

But...

It is not possible to do all of this without a cost. I am ordained, but this applies to lay ministry too. Trying to exercise a ministry across the inherited church and in evangelistic or missional initiatives led by ministers who are expected to be extroverted (whether they are or not) leads to a culture of overwork, and an expectation of it.

We need to return to a counter-cultural model of ministry that affirms both extroverts and introverts and learns the best of both. We need to return to being a church on our knees and to allow the prayer of the whole church to be the beginning and middle and end of our looking, listening, planning and activity.

Our culture breeds an expectation of long hours of work with few breaks. The church needs to acknowledge that ministry requires ministers to turn on a sixpence - going from a school assembly to the bedside of a dying person and then on to lead a service, to returning to prepare and then lead and study group is costly.

All of this can only be countered by boundaries (rest days, holidays, retreats, action-learning sets, ministry consultant schemes, CPD, cohorts, focussed ministry support groups etc.) and silence (whether actual silence or time to listen to music, to do nothing, to stop, to day-dream and above else to pray.)