Utilizing a Contextualized, Coach-Supported, Emotional Intelligence-Based, Seminar-Style Curriculum to Reduce Stress Leading to Burnout in Pastors of Harlingen, TX

摘要

Pastoral burnout is an epidemic within the ministry world that is quickly reaching alarming proportions. Statistics indicate that as many as 60--80% of those who enter into pastoral ministry will not last ten years. Stressors present in ministry that lead to burnout have been shown to negatively affect pastors themselves, their families, their congregations, and the universal church's witness to the world. This Doctor of Ministry project sought to identify and potentially reduce key stressors leading to burnout among pastors in Harlingen, Texas, through the formulation of a contextualized, coach-supported, emotional intelligence-based, seminar-style curriculum designed to address these stressors.;The project involved the administration of surveys to twenty-five Harlingen-area pastors. These surveys included standardized questions from proven inventories designed to gauge levels of stress present in the ministers' lives and their degrees of severity, as well as questions that gauged each participants' potentiality towards burnout based upon a standardized burnout scale. Standardized survey assessment instruments were also included that sought to gauge the participants' levels of health in six areas of their life, including the vocational, intellectual, physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual realms of their health. Questions from a standardized emotional health inventory determined each participant's emotional intelligence quotient, a number that quantified the degree to which they were emotionally intelligent. The collected data was then aggregated in order to establish the baseline picture of overall holistic health in the ministerial population for which this project was aimed.;This intervention resulted in a tool aimed at potentially helping pastors reduce stressors present within their ministry contexts based upon the results therein.