This essay is part of a series reflecting on the loss of transcendence in contemporary cultures and the experience of resonance through the Relevance to Resonance project
For most of the twentieth century, in coal mines throughout the world, miners took caged canaries underground to test air quality. The canary’s sensitivity to toxic gasses warned coal miners below ground of danger. All eyes were on the canary as miners watched for signs of singing or collapse. A swaying or silent canary warned the miners to leave a toxic mine.
If only the church had a simple solution to address toxicity and stress in a congregation?
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter use the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine to talk about burnout. Should we fix the canary? Make the canary stronger or more resilient, then it can sing in any context. A tough old bird should be able to withstand any circumstance. Or should we fix the conditions of the mine? Clean the toxic fumes from the mine to make work safe for the miners and canaries.
After twenty years of ordained ministry including ten years at my current church, I took my first sabbatical in the summer of 2022. I felt like an old bird, not just because my feathers were graying. If you have led or been a member of church you may know the stress of ministry these days—pandemics of health and racial reconciliation, political division, staff transitions, and budget realities. I assumed that time away to rest and recharge, to pray and connect with family and friends would have this old bird singing again.
As I prepared for time away coordinating with staff and congregational leaders to serve in my absence, I realized the work of a congregation doesn’t end when the pastor is on sabbatical. What the church needed was not more work. They needed a new way to do it. They needed connection and flexibility. They needed to hear God’s hopeful vision from their own voices and not just mine. God would continue to give them words to sing while I was away. Instead of leaving a long to-do list, I opted for the tagline, while the pastor is away, the church will play!
Christina Maslach’s work is foundational in understanding burnout as a syndrome with three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. For over fifty years, Maslach and Leiter’s research and writing reveals that burnout is not a problem of people themselves but of the environments and structures where people work and inhabit. Maslach and Leiter point to systematic failures of organizations and workplaces to address burnout. They believe burnout is not a people problem; it is not the people but the organization that needs to change.
There is no shortage of conversation about burnout these days. From recent articles to books to podcasts, from pastors to lay leaders, from parents to kids to grandkids, from doctors to teachers to police officers we all seem to be experiencing burnout.
Often burnout in the church is understood as an individual problem, emphasizing the pastor. Clergy are encouraged to take better care of themselves, practice sabbath, and develop better spiritual disciplines. Though self-care, sabbath rest, and a disciplined spiritual life are vital for any congregational leader, burnout is not an individual problem, and burnout affects the whole system of the church.
In 2019, even the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), describing burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
We can all name specific stresses in our congregations as I listed above. What if there are larger philosophical, sociological, and theological ways to understand the stress of our current congregations?
The stress of seeking the good life
Charles Taylor believes we live in a secular age seeking the good life through an immanent frame, void of divine action and transcendence, with pressure placed on human action. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa builds upon Taylor’s work, stating modern societies experience motion in continual growth, acceleration, and innovation, which he calls dynamic stabilization. Dynamic stabilization requires speed and constant acceleration. In his book, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationships to the World, Rosa believes acceleration is the problem of late modernity. In modernity, the drive to seek the good life speeds up our lives. Within this narrative, the church (like other modern organizations) desires the good life, seeking to be relevant through innovation and growth. For Rosa, living accelerated lives causes alienation, a disconnection between the self and the world. Rosa concludes that the answer is not to slow down the acceleration (beyond our control), but rather, the antidote to the acceleration speed is resonance, a relationship beyond our control.
Andy Root builds upon Taylor’s theory of a secular age and Rosa’s concepts of acceleration and resonance. In modernity, congregations and pastors experience the fast pace of acceleration as they, too, seek the good life. The work to change and innovate is never ending.
This reality can make a church sick. Root writes, “burnout is a depression imposed by the inability to keep pace.”
Time-sickness as burnout
Clergy and church professionals have tools to decrease burnout. Clergy participate in sabbatical programs. They are encouraged to meet with other ministry leaders for support, often forming groups during their theological education.
I assume unmanaged stress of a congregation doesn’t only affect clergy. If there is no systemic understanding of the effects of stress in the system, the pastor may become the identified patient of burnout in a congregation.
In the early 1970s, Herbert Freudenberger, a psychologist in New York City, spent his days with clients at his private practice and then, in the evenings, would spend additional time at a free clinic treating the medical needs of young people. In 1974, Freudenberger published a paper titled “Staff Burn Out,” and later in his 1980 book, he compared “burnouts” like himself to burned-out buildings: “Where there had once been activity, there are now only crumbling reminders of life.”
In California in the summer of 1971, Christina Maslach received her Ph.D. at Stanford and studied depersonalization and detachment in caregivers. In 1973, Maslach wrote a report on service professionals, “if the detachment becomes too extreme, they experience burnout, a phrase which poverty lawyers use to describe the loss of human feeling for their clients.”
Because the focus is often on the burned out individual, self-care is often assumed the best remedy for burnout. It is important for clergy to engage in self-care, which nourishes the body and soul. As congregational leaders, we teach and equip church members to nurture their spiritual lives by engaging in these practices. But self-care will not address the root causes of burnout.
In The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It, Jennifer Moss writes, “Self-care has been the prevention strategy for decades. And yet, burnout is on the rise. Why? Because we’re ignoring the systematic and institutional factors that cause burnout.”
Addressing the problem of burnout: Resonance
Back to our accelerated culture seeking the good life at all costs. Hartmut Rosa concludes, “if acceleration is the problem, then resonance may well be the solution.” The obvious answer might be to slow down in a world where busyness and speed dominate.
Hartmut Rosa borrows the term resonance from physics, describing the relationship of a subject and object in a vibrating system in which both connect. For Rosa, the answer to the central question of what distinguishes a good life from a less good life is relationships.
For Root, understanding resonance in a Christian context is the sense of being in a relationship with something outside yourself, God. Christians can only experience life given by a living God. Thus, for Root, resonance becomes a waiting action as the church opens space for an encounter with God.
Learning to sing together
I returned from my sabbatical, and it was clear, God continued to show up while I was away. The focus on connection and play made space for laughter and new relationships. Leaders stepped up, the staff went above and beyond, but most of all the congregation gained a new perspective on singing. They know now (if they didn’t know before) God gives voice to the whole congregation and not just this old bird.
The solution for burnout is not self-care or sabbath. To address burnout in our congregations we must learn a new song. Burnout is not the problem of the pastor or any one person. Burnout happens when there is stress in a system.
To address burnout, we must learn new ways to sing together. We must learn new ways to work together to decrease exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. I don’t think the stressors are going away any time soon.
Suggested resources:
- View these two animated videos on Church in the Accelerating Age produced for the Relevance to Resonance project.
- Watch the five-part Congregations in a Secular Age video series with Blair Bertrand, featuring Andrew Root’s book.
- “Burnout-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon: International Classification of Diseases,” World Health Organization, May 28, 2019.
- Doolittle, Benjamin R. “The Impact of Behaviors upon Burnout Among Parish-Based Clergy.” Journal of Religion and Health 49, no. 1 (2010): 88–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685249.
- Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationships to the World
- Malesic, Jonathan. The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How To Build Better Lives. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 51, 54.
- Maslach, Christina and Leiter, P. Michael. The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), Intro.
- Maslach, Christina and Leiter, Michael. The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress And What To Do About It. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 18.
- Moss, Jennifer. The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It. (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), 3.
- Root, Andrew. The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time Against the Speed of Modern Life. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 17.
- Andrew Root, Church, and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. (Ministry In a Secular Age Book #4) (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 159.
- William Willimon, Clergy and Laity Burnout (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 21. Quoted by Root, The Congregation in a Secular Age, 17.
