In this issue:

Clergy Health
—A Mixed Portrait

Congregational Integrity

The Right Question

By having the courage to change themselves, [leaders] model the behavior they are asking of others.

Robert Quinn

Studies of clergy beginning in the 1700s consistently found that clergy lived longer than other professionals. But by the middle of the twentieth century something was changing. Clergy could no longer claim that distinction. Indeed, concern about the state of clergy health is mounting steadily—due in part to heightened health consciousness in our culture broadly, but more specifically to the rapidly increasing median age of clergy and skyrocketing health insurance costs in many denominations.

Is there a crisis in clergy health? Several U.S. denominations have intensified their efforts to collect data on the wellbeing of clergy. In August 2008, the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits of The United Methodist Church (General Board) established the Center for Health as a denominational focus on health. This initiative is the umbrella for activities established to track and monitor health data across the UMC.

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Congregational Integrity
By Lovett H. Weems, Jr.

We rightfully expect personal integrity in our leaders. Should we not also ask whether our congregation has integrity? The behavior of organizations is as important as that of individual leaders. What a church is as an institution may very well have more impact on people than what it says to them. This may be all the more critical as we seek to reach younger and more diverse disciples who notice inconsistency quickly.

Integrity requires congruence. The goal is not so much congregational perfection as consistency. Within a congregation, the ideal is to have three views of the congregation aligned:

• what you say about your church
  
• what people perceive your church to be
  
• what an objective analysis of your church would reveal
  

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The Right Question

Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

When someone makes statements that do not seem to match your perceptions, some questions from which to draw are:

On what information do you base your comments?
What experience convinced you of this?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution: Carol Follett