Calling in sick: who pays the price when we don’t step back?
Writing last week about taking time off to recover from illness got me thinking about who pays the price when we do not step back.
When clergy work through illness, it can be easy to imagine the cost is being borne privately. Yet costs rarely remain private. Meals still need preparing, children still need transporting, appointments still need organising, and emotional support still needs providing.
Many clergy today are part of the “sandwich generation”, attempting to balance ministry while supporting both older and younger generations of family members at the same time.
Much of this labour is unseen and often undervalued. It frequently falls disproportionately on spouses, partners and other family members, and often on women. What appears to be an individual’s decision to “push through” can become a household’s sacrifice.
Research suggests this is more than intuition. In Michael Clinton’s longitudinal study of Church of England clergy and their partners, self-sacrificial behaviour was associated with higher perceived role performance, but also with greater emotional exhaustion and increased self-sacrifice by partners (Clinton, 2023). In other words, when clergy consistently bear the costs of ministry through their own self-sacrifice, those costs do not remain theirs alone. Households often absorb them too.
This is one of the reasons St Luke’s exists. Our work is not simply about helping clergy respond when wellbeing has deteriorated. It is about creating the conditions in which healthy and sustainable ministry can flourish. That includes encouraging honest conversations about limits, recovery and support before exhaustion, illness or crisis become the norm.
This is one of the reasons the Clergy Covenant is so important. The Covenant invites an honest and mature conversation about mutual care, responsibility and accountability between clergy, congregations and the wider Church. In practice, this is where the rubber meets the road. It is relatively easy to affirm clergy wellbeing in principle. It is much harder when a minister is genuinely unwell, a service needs covering, expectations need adjusting, and conversations have to be had about limits as well as commitment.
If a priest taking time off sick feels like letting people down, what does that tell us about the expectations we have collectively created? And if clergy routinely work through illness, who else may quietly be carrying the consequences?
These are some of the questions we will be exploring at this month’s conference, where Michael Clinton will be one of our keynote speakers. His research reminds us that self-sacrifice can indeed generate positive outcomes, but that it may also carry hidden costs for clergy themselves and for those who share their lives.
The challenge for the Church is not whether sacrifice has a place in ministry. It certainly does. The challenge is discerning when sacrifice becomes unsustainable, and creating the kind of relationships and conversations that allow clergy and congregations to speak honestly about that together.
Clinton, M.E. (2023). Pushing yourself to the edge: The relationship of worker self-sacrifice behaviour with perceived role performance, emotional exhaustion, and partner self-sacrifice. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.