Easing Their Burdens

It’s not often that the chief executive officer of a nonprofit organization fields the kind of

call that Josh Sherfey received one summer day. An elderly woman had spotted a snake in her yard. She wondered if Mr. Sherfey could come and kill it.

“Hmmmm,” he recalls thinking. “Don’t remember that being in my job description.”

But no self-respecting pastor would think of saying no to a parishioner in distress. Mr. Sherfey, a United Methodist minister in Statesville, N.C., went over and killed the snake.

That kind of deep dependence people have on their pastors — and ministers’ readiness to shoulder the load — is adding to the stress of their jobs and helping to fuel a health-care crisis among the nation’s clergy. Experts say clergy members of all faiths and denominations are literally working themselves sick; their health-care claims are rising so fast that church budgets are straining under the weight.

Statewide Program

Few of the nation’s large private foundations have tackled that problem through their grant making, even though clergy members and their congregations are some of the nation’s most common providers of frontline social services. Houses of worship run soup kitchens, homeless shelters, health clinics, employment programs, and other efforts to help the needy.

But major foundations, perhaps leery of getting snared in thorny theology-tinged disputes over issues like abortion or homosexuality, haven’t put much money into religious grant making generally or programs to aid clergy members specifically.

However, a new effort from the Duke Endowment, in Charlotte, N.C., is giving some religious leaders hope that that might be changing. The endowment this summer unveiled plans for a seven-year, $12-million program aimed at improving the physical and emotional health of virtually all of the state’s 1,600 United Methodist pastors.

Teaming with Duke University’s divinity school and the state’s two Methodist conferences, organizers of the project will offer pastors health-care screenings, fitness coaches, and peer support groups. They hope to reverse the advance of heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, and other illnesses among the ministers. The project will include a long-term study not just of pastors’ physical health, but also of their spiritual and emotional well-being. Organizers of the program hope other denominations will be able to use the study to attack their clergy members’ health problems.

L. Gregory Jones, dean of Duke Divinity School, hailed the effort as a signal that the clergy health crisis is beginning to attract the same type of strategic, aggressive grant making that large foundations are known for directing toward worthy social causes.

“It’s an extraordinarily important topic,” he says. “Churches are one of the few places in our society where you have a genuine intergenerational gathering. When there are strong and healthy religious communities, it has a broader ripple effect on the larger civic community as well.”

‘No Political Aspect’

The health problems among members of the clergy aren’t new. A handful of large private foundations, and many small family ones, have been trying in recent years to deal with the challenges. The Lilly Endowment, in Indianapolis, has made perhaps the biggest financial commitment to religious grant making, according to data provided by the Foundation Center, in New York. Lilly awarded $123-million for religious projects in 2006, making up more than a third of the foundation’s $346.6-million in total grants.

In 1999, Lilly started giving congregations in its home state of Indiana grants to subsidize sabbaticals for stressed-out pastors. A year later, it began a similar national effort. Thousands of ministers from a range of denominations have taken advantage of the program.

Other large private foundations like Duke, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, in Jacksonville, Fla., the Henry Luce Foundation, in New York, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, have also helped over the years. But many others have stayed away, sometimes for fear of sectarian squabbles, sometimes in deference to the wishes of their benefactors.

A Foundation Center study issued in February found that out of more than $16-billion in grants awarded by big foundations, only 2.5 percent, or $408-million, supported religious projects. The biggest chunk of the money — $3.9-billion — went to education, followed by health and human services.

Lilly’s long tradition of supporting religious projects reflects the wishes of J.K. Lilly Sr., who created the endowment in 1937 with sons J.K. Jr. and Eli though gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical company.

“There’s no political aspect of this,” says Gretchen Wolfram, a spokeswoman for the Lilly Endowment. “It’s just a matter of trying to make congregations better.”

Officials at the Duke Endowment see their new effort similarly, even though theirs is aimed at the Methodist ministers for whom the tobacco magnate James B. Duke made provisions when he set up the trust in 1924.

Duke Endowment officials say leaders from North Carolina’s two United Methodist conferences came to them for help after noticing many pastors were struggling with health problems, such as high blood pressure and depression.

Officials of the Western North Carolina Conference have faced such a tough time with rising health-care costs for clergy members that the organization has struggled this year to reach acceptable contract terms with its health insurer. The conference spent $7.5-million in 2005 to meet the health-care costs of about 990 ministers and nearly 300 of their dependents, according to the group’s treasurer, Bill Wyman. That number climbed to $8.7-million in 2006 and is expected to push past $10-million this year.

“District after district tells us we’ve got clergy who are in trouble,” says W. Joseph Mann, director of the Duke Endowment’s rural church program. “We have the capacity. We can make a difference. So why not?”

Increasing Demands

Things weren’t always so troubled for members of the clergy. Research from 50 years ago showed that they lived longer, healthier lives than workers in most other professions. But a 2001 survey of more than 2,000 religious leaders conducted by Duke Divinity School’s Pulpit and Pew research project showed that 76 percent of clergy members were overweight or obese, compared with 61 percent of the general population. Forty percent reported in the survey that they sometimes experienced depression, while about 10 percent said they are currently suffering from depression, which is comparable to the percentage of Americans over all who report the same.

Part of the problem is that a higher proportion of clergy members than ever before are older than 55. A study last year by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, in Washington, showed nearly one-third to nearly half of the ministerial staff members in seven major Protestant denominations are 55 or older. In the Catholic Church, 65 percent of priests were age 55 or older.

But social ferment in the larger culture is also adding to pastors’ stress levels. Debates over abortion, gay rights, the war in Iraq, and other hot-button issues play out in local congregations, and the pastor often winds up at the center of the debate. On top of that, pastors say, even smaller, seemingly mundane decisions — such as changing the type of music played during services — can bring on controversy.

Generations ago, says Mr. Mann, ministers were the most highly educated people in their churches, and congregants usually deferred to them.

Now, church members are often as well educated as their pastor, and look at the church through a more consumer-oriented lens. They demand more programs for their families, such as child care and support groups, and they expect the pastor to operate as efficiently as the chief executives they see at their own jobs.

“It’s pretty tough to be omnicompetent,” Mr. Mann says, “but in many cases they are asked to be just that.”

‘Suffering Servants’

Mr. Sherfey, the pastor who fielded his parishioner’s call about the snake, knows all about the stresses of the job. When he became a minister about seven years ago, the 32-year-old found himself facing the same challenges as the leader of any other nonprofit group: figuring out how to balance a tight budget, starting and sustaining fund-raising drives, and motivating the volunteers so critical to the organization’s success. When he gets stressed out, he does what experts on the clergy health problem wish other ministers would do — he laces up his running shoes and goes jogging.

Far too many of his colleagues, he says, take too literally the common theological argument that pastors are to be “suffering servants,” just like Jesus. They keep loading themselves with work and stress, feeling that their own suffering is proof that they are working extra hard to help others.

The Duke program will have to turn that perception around, he says: “I hope it’s not too little, too late. There’s got to be something done. The health of our churches mirrors the health of our pastors.”

The Rev. Sarah Sanderson-Doughty, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lowville, N.Y., echoed a common theme among pastors when she explained that the job is, ironically, a lonely one. Despite all the time ministers spend with others, it is rare that people can stop seeing them as “the preacher” and allow them to blend in as another friend in the crowd.

“There is this experience of isolation,” she says. “You’re set apart, yet you are called to fulfill so many needs in the community.”

Recruiting Efforts

She counts herself as an example of the good that private foundations can do by putting money into programs that help the clergy. Back in 1999, she was in the first class of a clergy-fellowship program run by the Fund for Theological Education, in Atlanta. The fund, which last year received a $6.3-million grant from the Lilly Endowment, tries to ease the clergy crisis by recruiting younger candidates to help ease the load on an aging work force. The program identifies and encourages promising candidates younger than 35 to pursue Christian ministry and doctoral study.

Ms. Sanderson-Doughty, 30, recalls how enriching it was to speak with nationally known preachers that the program brought in, and how much she learned from other seminary students who were fellows with her. They each received $10,000 through the program, but many found it hard to believe a foundation would give that much money to preachers with no strings attached. She laughingly reveals that some fellows wondered if Lilly would send them to Indiana to work with youth groups in exchange for the money. But, she says, she was told to simply design and carry out any theologically sound summer project that would enrich her preparation for the ministry.

She chose to travel the country, talking to female Presbyterian ministers from coast to coast. The experience, she said, deepened her understanding as a pastor and has helped her handle the challenges of serving a small church in a town so tiny, she jokes, it has “more cows than people.”

Melissa Wiginton, vice president for ministry programs and planning at the Fund for Theological Education, who writes many of the organization’s grant proposals, says just a limited number of major foundations are “open to the conversation” about supporting religious projects.

“There are a bunch of them that we know it’s not going to go anywhere,” she says. “You just have to go out and find the people who get what you do.”

She believes the pool of grant-making resources will grow in the upcoming years, thanks to the booming economy of recent decades.

“Let’s face it, so many people have made so much money in the past 15 to 20 years. They need a place to put it,” she says. “And some of them are church people.”