Insights from Day 10 at CN705
- Be CAREFUL in taking care of our body as the temple of God.
- Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment that occurs in individuals who work with people. (Too much caring; too little resource.)
- There is no such thing as failure in God's kingdom, only forced growth.
- Burn-out could take 5 to 6 years to work out.
- Burn-out people say, "Yes, there is a God, but He just doesn't care about me." That sense of loss is what is devastating about burn-out.
- When you lack support, your chance of burn-out increases dramatically.
- Support has to come from top-down. You cannot look to your congregation for support.
- Causes of burn-out includes situational and ongoing minor conflicts, inadequate support and rewards, low-grade depression, irrational expectations and lack of assertiveness. Over-work is not the key.
- Stress-out is the exhaustion of your adrenaline system; burn-out is the exhaustion of your emotional system with loss of empathy, caring, hope and detachment. Both are forms of depression.
- Type B personality is more prone to burn-out.
- We suffer burn-out from emotional triangles. Training in systems theory can help reduce burn-out.
- We suffer burn-out from not having a safe place to express intense job-related feelings (aggravated by confidentiality issues).
- We suffer burn-out from a confused sense of purpose accompanied by administrative overload.
- Humour is powerful in putting things back into perspective.
- 1 in 3 pastors 10 years in ministry shows signs of burn-out.
- Leaving your ministry will not help your burn-out.
- Sympathy is actually not helpful to ourselves as well as to the people we help. We need to learn empathy.
- We need to develop healthy theology of compassion, self-care, success and failure.
- Success has little spiritual and therapeutic value. It does not make our life better. Success is just a bonus God give to those who are faithful.
- God is not in the success business but the refine business. God cares about the maturity of our life more than the size of our church.
- Because of the information technology revolution, pastors now are constantly being compared to the celebrity pastors. This has created tremendous stress on pastors.
Labels: Reflection
