'Exhausted' pastors suffering decline in overall health, respect, friendship: study

[Zephyr]

This devastating news should be a serious wake-up call. Pastors deserve better than to be dragged into conflicts they were never trained for. Maybe small groups or something should be discussing these things, but there are real limits to what anyone can handle!

'Exhausted' pastors suffering decline in overall health, respect, friendship: study

The overall health of pastors in the U.S. has plunged since 2015 as more say they face declining respect from their community and lack of true friends, according to a recent study.

www.foxnews.com

Data collected by faith-based organization Barna Group as part of its Resilient Pastor research showed a significant decrease in pastors' spiritual, mental and emotional well-being, as well as their overall quality of life, between 2015 and 2022, the group announced last week.

The study conducted 901 online interviews with Protestant senior pastors in 2015 and compared the results with those they compiled based on 585 interviews with pastors from Sept. 6 to Sept. 16, 2022. The interviews asked pastors to rate aspects of their lives on a scale of excellent, good, average, below average, poor or don’t know.

Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.

"The most unrealistic expectations come from us trying to be proficient in someone else's profession, especially in the last two years," he said. "People want us to chime in on politics, on a pandemic and things we're not qualified to do. We're not economists. If we focus on what God's called us to do – pastoring, preaching, serving – we are less likely to face some of the challenges that are making pastors want to quit."

"We have to wake up every day and remember what John the Baptist said: ‘I am not the Christ.’ That takes a lot of pressure off when we're not trying to solve every problem," he added.

 

[Everlasting Life]

Oh man, these poor guys... they are really in the line of fire. May the Lord provide special strength, power and encouragement!

How important it is to pray for our Pastors, encourage and bless with words of appreciation, friendship and tangible acts of kindness/service as lead by God.

To have a Godly Pastor is a tremendous gift and blessing of God, never to be taken for granted.