Salus Forum December 3, 2025

Jack

I think there is some of that. However, I loved my life in the manse. I was the janitor of the church from the time I was five until I graduated from high school, and then even some while in college. I sang in the choir every Wednesday night from the time from six until nine every day, every Wednesday. I loved it. But I know that not everyone does. Not everyone has an experience like I did.

And there are, there are pastors who are very charismatic but distant from their family. Pastors are susceptible to all the same vagaries of human flesh that others are. And, you know, one of the local pastors had an affair with a parishioner when I was growing up and it was a scandal, of course. There are those pieces as well. One chapter in the book is about self-care for pastors. The Presbyterian Church has a program called Credo that pastors take in the first five to ten years of their work.  This program goes over their health care, their financial health care, their mental health care, and their spiritual health care. It’s a one-to-two-year program for every pastor. Not every pastor gets to go through it because it has a limited range right now.

But to try to really help prevent the singular notion that a pastor is 24-7 on call for their parishioners without boundaries. And it sounds kind of like doctors, right? Like kids of doctors also have some of these very similar things related to absentee-parent feelings that are overwhelmed by the need to heal people and fix them. So I think there is that in many of the professions. And one chapter of this book is about self-care. And there are a number of programs related to self-care. 

Bill B

I love it, Jack. You were bringing up the issue, the real issue of problems of obesity goes back to the farm bill. And what we found in our study with the Methodist Church is that the real villain is the retirement plans. Many denominations have extraordinary retirement plans for their pastors. They’re some of the best in the country. The problem we found was that a disturbing number of pastors were burned out. They hated continuing to be pastors, but they were in such a strong retirement plan that they could not pull out. Many of them did not have independent retirement plans. They were relying on the substantial church retirement plan. So, a wonderful program for Methodist ministers ended up being a major problem for some ministers, because these ministers were spending 10 years of their life before retirement, being horrible, burned out, angry, and frustrated pastors. I’m sorry to go back to the pastoring thing, but I think that is a major problem. So, when you talk about pastors being terrific in helping in healthcare, you also want pastors who are not pissed off about their life.