PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Those of us involved in Christian institutions and churches often work to protect other people whose bodies are oppressed, abused, trapped in violent situations or discriminated against. But we don't often stop to think about how well our own bodies sustain the work we are called to do.In a recent conversation with a friend contemplating a career move, we carefully examined all the angles: What work is she called to do? What work is she most gifted to do? What is her passion?
But later, it occurred to me that we had missed a crucial question: What work can she physically sustain? What work and how much work can her body take?
Like so many Christian leaders I have met over the years, this wonderful friend is serving God to the fullest -- in an institution, a church and the academy at the same time. She is using all of her talents. She is young enough that she may not yet have considered this question of physical sustainability, but in time, she will need to.
As Christian leaders and as creatures in God's creation, we have a theological obligation to ask the question, "Will this work make me sick?"
Faith &Leadership
Gretchen E. Ziegenhals: Will this work make me sick?
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Our discernment processes don’t often consider the physical sustainability of our work, but Christian leaders have a theological obligation to explore this question, writes a managing director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.Those of us involved in Christian institutions and churches often work to protect other people whose bodies are oppressed, abused, trapped in violent situations or discriminated against. But we don’t often stop to think about how well our own bodies sustain the work we are called to do.
In a recent conversation with a friend contemplating a career move, we carefully examined all the angles: What work is she called to do? What work is she most gifted to do? What is her passion?
But later, it occurred to me that we had missed a crucial question: What work can she physically sustain? What work and how much work can her body take?
Like so many Christian leaders I have met over the years, this wonderful friend is serving God to the fullest -- in an institution, a church and the academy at the same time. She is using all of her talents. She is young enough that she may not yet have considered this question of physical sustainability, but in time, she will need to.
As Christian leaders and as creatures in God’s creation, we have a theological obligation to ask the question, “Will this work make me sick?”
The Clergy Health Initiative(link is external), a 10-year program to assess and improve the health and well-being of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina, has documented findings about the high rates of work-related illness among clergy. Researchers have found that pastors’ health and vocations are affected as they try to balance work, home, family and friends. The sense of call that we feel as Christian leaders often prevents us from recognizing when enough is enough -- even as we develop high blood pressure, diabetes, depression and heart disease.
The Clergy Health Initiative works to underscore “the theological reasons for caring for oneself” and to offer strategies to help pastors develop holistic health practices. Ideally, Christian leaders will learn to implement more of these strategies on the front end of our work, as we decide what and how much we can do, rather than be faced with how to cope in the aftermath of a physical collapse.
I have witnessed such collapses over years of working with Christian leaders who are physically affected by the strains of their work. Some have developed illnesses from working too much; others, from the stress of the work itself. My work with more than 50 seminary and divinity school deans has taught me that these workhorses are particularly vulnerable. I’ve met several deans who have had heart attacks from managing an overwhelming array of details, conflicts, people and programs without sufficient money, time or support.
Christian leaders work hard, in part, because we know we are doing God’s work. St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours.” Even so, if we are to take her charge seriously, we must take care of our bodies so that we will be equipped to continue Christ’s ministry through those bodies.
Taking care includes good nutrition, periods of exercise and rest, and time off from screens. For me, taking care in the midst of my evolving roles as professional, spouse, mother, caregiver of an elderly father, church member, friend and community member means in part paying attention. My body, my spouse and my friends teach me where my boundaries lie, if I will remember to pay attention to their wise voices.
As the linchpin of my balance, I have over the last nine years saved most Fridays for Sabbath. In the stillness of my Sabbath Fridays, I exercise, putter in my house, meet a friend for lunch, play with our dogs, paint or read. I try to rest both mind and body. I can tell the difference in my body when I don’t take my Fridays.
What is good stewardship of your body? And how can you work to protect those who do not have a choice about the stewardship of their bodies?
I know Christian leaders who rise early to exercise and pray, who ride their bikes or walk to work, take frequent three-day weekends rather than wait for a two-week vacation in the summer, walk or practice yoga on their lunch hours, stand at their desks, and set their phones to mindfulness chimes every three hours. These preventive measures all help.
But how can we think differently about the work itself and what we can physically manage? It is not simply about having that little plastic gizmo on our desks -- the “NO” button -- that says “No!” in three different ways when we push it. Or repeating to ourselves, “I’m not on that committee” when we try to control too much.
It is about those things and creating jobs that are “small enough to do and big enough to matter,” as Dave Odom, the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, writes.
If you supervise others, are you attentive and respectful about creating jobs that can actually be done? Are you willing to help others think through the question, “Will this work make me sick?” If the answer is yes, can you be creative about reassigning, recombining or rethinking tasks?
These are, at root, not questions of calling or of gifts; these are fundamental theological issues. We are embodied servants of God. God thought that bodies were important enough that God became embodied in Jesus. Jesus’ ministries were about healing, touching, feeding, reconciling and resurrecting bodies.
Christian leaders may need all of these healthy mindsets, as well as the theological reminder that we are creatures, not the Creator. As creatures, we are blessed to have limits within which we function best. Yes, we are God’s hands and feet on earth, but more is not necessarily better for us, our physical functioning or our constituents. Celebrating our creatureliness means celebrating and caring for the bodies we are in and recognizing when our work is harming those bodies.
What is your balance? Your tipping point? What are the signals your own body sends when you can’t physically sustain the work you are doing? What are your choices? Do your colleagues or congregation members support you in those choices?
If your institution is short-staffed and under-budget, what one small change could you make to care for your body or the bodies of your staff? Could you do a bit less, or something different, in order to celebrate and honor your creatureliness?
Read more from Gretchen Ziegenhals »
Reflective Leadership Grants offer Christian leaders "balcony time" to reflect on accomplishments, broaden perspectives and discern next steps.
Leaders must simultaneously manage immediate needs and look ahead to what is coming next. In today's rapidly changing context, leaders often spend so much time reacting that they don't have the time or space to "get on the balcony," stepping away from daily obligations and focusing on the long view.
The Reflective Leadership Grant program offers lay and ordained Christian leaders up to $15,000 to step away from their current work to reflect on accomplishments, broaden perspectives and discern next steps.
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Faith & Leadership
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: MARTY ST. GEORGE
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A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Episode 8: Marty St. George on nurturing organizational culture at JetBlue
Ask any JetBlue Airways crew member the company’s five values, and he or she can rattle them off: safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun. Naming those values isn’t just a rote exercise, says Marty St. George, the executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue; it reflects deeply held convictions that guide decision making at every level of the company. In this conversation, St. George and “Can These Bones” co-host Laura Everett explore the lessons an airline executive can teach Christian leaders about creating a healthy organizational culture through team building, leadership training and talent cultivation.
This episode is part of a series. Learn more about “Can These Bones” or learn how to subscribe.
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Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Marty St. George
CBS Boston: “A Few Good Minutes With Marty St. George, EVP Commercial & Planning at JetBlue Airways(link is external)”
Washington Post: “While some fares skyrocket, JetBlue offering $99 flights for those trying to escape Irma(link is external)”
USA Today: “JetBlue takes hit from hurricanes, but promotes blue-sky performance for 2018(link is external)”
Massachusetts Council of Churches: Core values statement(link is external) (influenced by Marty St. George)
Transcript
Laura Everett: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church.
I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is episode 8 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”
You spoke with Marty St. George from JetBlue. Tell us what an airline executive can teach us in the church.
Laura Everett: I think Marty can teach us a lot, actually. Marty is an old friend of mine, and he’s my go-to conversation partner when I have a question about nurturing organizational culture -- in part, because JetBlue has such a strong brand identity.
JetBlue is a relatively new airline company. It’s a low-cost carrier with 101 destinations, and it’s got a reputation for providing good customer service and some pretty sweet perks, like free Wi-Fi and free blue potato chips.
And so even though our objectives are quite different in the church and a for-profit corporation, I’ve learned a ton over the years of hearing how an airline exec like Marty thinks about things like team building, talent cultivation and having lots of people, at lots of different levels, in lots of different places, committed to the same set of values.
So my friend Marty St. George is an executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue. He joined JetBlue in 2006, and he’s worked at other airlines. He thinks a lot about innovation in the airline industry, in the same way that I aspire to think about innovation in the church.
I’ve found him generous in sharing his experiences, and I see Marty strive to live out his faith and values in a way that shows grace in an industry where people can often be tired and cranky and unnecessarily rude.
I recognize that talking to someone who’s in charge of making a profitable business is unusual for church folks. But I’ve found it really helpful for me to talk with Christians in other fields, even if their institutional objective is quite different.
Bill Lamar: Let’s hear your conversation.
Laura Everett: Marty, welcome to “Can These Bones,” a Faith & Leadership podcast.
Marty St. George: Thank you so much, Laura. I appreciate it.
Laura Everett: Really glad to be with you today. So, first question: Did you fly to work?
Marty St. George: I did not fly to work today. I do on occasion fly to work, but this was not one of those days. It was the train. Sorry to not fulfill the stereotype.
Laura Everett: You started out in trains, right?
Marty St. George: I did. Very, very early on. And once I found airlines, that was it for me.
Laura Everett: What was it about airlines?
Marty St. George: I have a -- completely misunderstood by myself, until recently -- fixation on the concept of connections. And if there’s one thing that airlines do, it’s connect people. It’s connect people with their jobs, with each other, with places in the world they’ve never seen, with their families -- you name it.
And when I would go in an airport and see all these people scurrying around, trying to get from point A to point B -- I really like it.
One of the things about JetBlue is that it’s a very flat organization. We have 21,000 crew members, and we are all called “crew members.” Historically in the airline business, that [term] means people who fly airplanes. That’s not at JetBlue. At JetBlue, everyone’s a crew member. The CEO is a crew member; I’m a crew member; the man or woman who handles baggage at JFK is a crew member.
And part of the culture is that during the peak holiday periods, [the executives] will go to the airport and help. It’s either telling customers where to go, throwing bags -- I mean, you name it, whatever we can do. And I realized, being in that environment, the airport, and seeing what we do as a business -- and I’m not saying just JetBlue, what we all do -- it actually, you know, I didn’t have the self-awareness to know why I was so drawn to it, but now I get it.
Laura Everett: At one point, the slogan for JetBlue was “Bringing humanity back to air travel.” Where did that decision come from -- that it wasn’t just an objective to get people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, but there was something about the travel itself that JetBlue wanted to invest in?
Marty St. George: Well, air travel is what I call a derived demand. People don’t buy airplane tickets because they want to be on an airplane. Well, I do, because I like to fly, but most people buy them because they need to get somewhere.
It’s the old line, when you go to Home Depot to buy a drill, you’re not buying a drill; you’re buying a hole. People don’t buy the plane ticket because they want to buy a plane ticket. And airlines, over the period since deregulation, I think, have more and more commoditized the experience.
So -- and by the way, I appreciate everything you said about JetBlue. I will take no credit for that, because it was really the founders of the company back in the late ’90s who had this idea. Most of them came from other airlines. Not all, but most of them had seen the commoditization of the business and the fact that we really had lost this concept that it is fundamentally a service business. We are in the service business.
So they came to JetBlue and said, “You know what? We’re going to build this new airline, and it’s going to be an airline built around service and built around people.”
So when the founders sat around the table trying to decide what their plan was for JetBlue, they actually, very early on, before they had a route network, before they had a fleet of planes, before they even had an idea of those things, they sat down to talk about the mission and the values.
So the original mission of JetBlue was “Bringing humanity back to air travel.” And it came from that core insight that it is fundamentally a service business -- and it’s a business where very few airlines are focused on service.
At the same time, we also started with values. What are the guiding lights that we’re going to have to make sure we can fulfill the mission? So the company has five values. They have not changed since day one of the company.
And for those of you who are listening, if any of you know JetBlue crew members, first of all, tell them I say hello. Second of all, ask them the five values. I guarantee you, every single one of them will tell you the five values: safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun.
Which basically is how -- my description of that is, “This is how we do things.” That’s how we get things done, by following those five values. So from your first day at JetBlue, you know the mission and you know the values.
We actually changed the mission several years ago. After 10 or 12 years of success in bringing humanity back to air travel to a certain extent, I think we felt like we should take a bit of a victory lap.
We’ve shortened the mission, and we call it “Inspire humanity” -- and very deliberately with a double meaning. First of all, inspiring humanity amongst each other and amongst our customers. But secondarily, I think also to be an example of humanity in the greater business world. So I think from that perspective, it was sort of a natural morphing of JetBlue.
But back to the original point: it would be very difficult to get hired at JetBlue if you do not know the mission and values in your interview. When you walk in the door, you immediately understand why the mission and values are so important. And frankly, you hear these words.
I don’t think there’s -- I wouldn’t say every day -- but there’s certainly not a week that goes by that we do not reference the values in the senior-level meeting. Because so many of our decisions need to be made through that filter. Now it’s like breathing; values truly are deeply held. You don’t need to remind yourself of them every single day, because that’s how you live your life.
But secondarily, there are certain times when maybe you’re straying a little bit in a decision, you’re having trouble trying to discern the right path, and someone will say, “How does that fit the caring value?” And one sort of stops and says, “Oh wow, that’s a good point. You know, we’re moving too fast here; let’s slow down.”
So it really is part of your life. That’s why I would challenge anyone to ask their friends [who work at JetBlue] what the values are. They know them.
Laura Everett: Part of what’s so fascinating to me about JetBlue is you all have been explicit about values. A lot of institutions say that, but they don’t always enact it. So what do you do to make those values real?
Marty St. George: Well, first of all, the values really are part of your onboarding process. And you experience the values in your first day, your first week, your first month, throughout your experience here.
And I think it’s important to say, our first value is safety. Rules are really important. You know, there are places where we do not want our crew members to innovate, because it’s very important that you do things exactly the same way every single time to make sure that you’re running a safe, secure operation.
But the last place I worked, the rules culture had gone so extreme that they had this thing there called “regs”; regs is short for regulations. In the building, in the headquarters building, you could look at regs. And regs were a set of three-ring binders probably 4 to 5 feet long of a bookshelf. There was a rule about everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
At JetBlue, we don’t really have that. We have a thing called a Crewmember Blue Book. And the Crewmember Blue Book is sort of the blanket rules and regs as far as how we do things. But it’s very, very short.
And our crew members are encouraged to -- we use this phrase internally all the time -- “do the right thing.” What is the right thing? If you can do the right thing and do it consistent with the mission and values, it is very tough to get in trouble with JetBlue. And there are legions and legions of examples of things that we do.
I could spend this entire podcast telling you stories. And I won’t, for two reasons: first of all, I’d use up all the time, and second of all, I’ll start crying, because some of the stuff we’ve done has just been incredible.
But I think that is the culture. I mean, that phrase “culture” -- what does “culture” mean? Culture is how we do things. How do we do things around here? That is the culture of the company.
Laura Everett: So let’s go back for just a second. You said that when people become a new crew member at JetBlue, that immersion into the values of JetBlue -- those values of safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun -- starts on day one. Or, it sounds like, start in the interview process before you’re hired.
What is the onboarding process for a new JetBlue crew member, whether a baggage handler or a pilot or someone who is working in the cabin?
Marty St. George: Well, it’s a little bit different at JetBlue than other places I’ve worked. Everyone’s first day sort of has the same experience. We fly our crew members to our training center in Orlando, Florida. And we have a smaller training center in Salt Lake City for some other crew members.
But the largest one is in Orlando. And you spend two to three days in something we just call orientation. And orientation sounds very, very, very innocent. The initial perception of orientation is this is, “I sign my insurance forms; how does vacation work; let me get a logon for the intranet; where is the bathroom” -- things like that.
That’s not really what orientation is about. Orientation is two days of culture school. And it’s a very, very formal program. We do it more or less the same every time, and everyone goes to orientation together.
So, for example, I went to orientation in 2006. I was a vice president and so probably one of the top 30 people in the company at that point in time. And I was in orientation with baggage handlers. I vividly remember having a conversation with two baggage handlers from Boston, one of whom had never been on an airplane before we flew him down to Orlando.
So it is truly the first time when it is really crystal-clear to everyone within the company that you’re all the same. There are only two [types of] people in this room. You either serve a customer or you serve the people who serve the customers. That’s it. That’s everybody’s job.
We use this phrase internally -- “Our goal is to create citizens and not consumers” -- among our crew member base. We don’t want people who are just here for the paycheck. We want people who want to contribute.
Every single person who moves from crew member to crew leader has to take a course called “Principles of Leadership” [POL]. And what it basically does is it teaches you how to manage.
You know, it’s funny, because someone who had worked for me at a previous company, who was just an outstanding contributor, I remember giving her probably her -- not her first review -- like, her second review at my previous company. She was just stellar, one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.
And at the end of the review, she started crying. And I said, “What did I miss in here? This was a great review. Read this review. I said all these great things you’ve done here.”
And she’s like, “Yeah, but you know what? We sat here and talked, and all you told me about was all the things I was doing wrong.”
I said, “Well, you know the stuff you’re doing right. Isn’t it great to know what you can do better?”
And she’s like, “You know, it’s kind of nice to hear it.”
And I said, “You know what? I’m 40 years old. I’m not going to change.”
And it’s funny, the first day of POL, I walked out of POL and I was driving home that night and I got on the phone and I called her up and I apologized.
And I said, “You know what? I was so wrong. I’m really, really sorry, because you were right. I was wrong. I had no idea what I was doing. And boy, am I working in the most incredible place now.”
Laura Everett: How can you tell when the values are working well?
Marty St. George: We had a service failure that was relatively well-known across the company, and it was very painful for us. And a lot of lessons were learned in the company when this happened.
But what really got me excited was when we would talk about the specific service failure with a front-line crew member -- someone you may know, someone you may not know -- and the first thing they’d say out of their mouth was, “Well, where’s the safety value in that?” And like, “I understand the caring value.”
When our crew members are saying that -- when that’s the language they’re using to us -- that’s when we know we’ve been really successful at making sure this is part of the culture. And that really -- I mean, listen, service failures are painful. But when it’s not just crew leaders, but front-line crew members are trying to interpret them in light of the values, that’s when we know we’ve done a great job.
Laura Everett: When you can hear crew members articulating those values back to you.
Marty St. George: Yeah, it’s not us telling them; it’s them telling us.
Laura Everett: So let’s dig at one of those values for just a sec. Because I think you’ve got some good stories to tell here that might be illuminating. Let’s talk about that “fun” value, because this is part of JetBlue’s image and reputation -- that there’s something joyful and pleasant about the experience -- and crew members have been a part of that.
What’s a good story you’ve got about when crew members felt empowered to have a little extra fun because of the values of JetBlue?
Marty St. George: Sure. Well, I mean, I’ve got a ton of stories. I’ll tell you the one that comes right off the top of my head. We had a Boston-based crew that was flying on a flight from Boston to Vegas. And as you can imagine, the Vegas flights tend to be a little raucous at times, at certain times of the year. In a good way, but still raucous.
But the crew members were interacting with the customers -- and again, it’s tough to be an in-flight crew member at JetBlue if you don’t love people, you don’t like to interact with people -- so that’s quite normal, course of business. And one of our flight crew members, this guy Chris, who I’ve gotten to know pretty well, started talking to a couple of customers and found out that they were eloping to Vegas. And I still remember the pictures. The guy was in a Patriot -- in a Tom Brady shirt -- in a Patriots shirt.
Laura Everett: Of course.
Marty St. George: The woman was just dressed normally; they were flying out to elope. And I think their original goal in telling that was to maybe get a couple of free drinks, which is a great idea, and I’m sure he did that; I don’t know for a fact.
But what this turned into was Chris held an in-flight wedding.
Laura Everett: Come on.
Marty St. George: So -- he did. Our crew members are quite resourceful with the resources we give them on the airplane. So I believe he used a blue garbage bag to create a little bouquet of flowers for the bride. He, I think, used a couple of napkins to create a little bow tie for himself.
He brought them up to the front of the airplane, and he and the other two in-flight crew members and the couple had a little wedding ceremony at the front of the plane.
Now, I’m sure when Chris did this, he had no expectation whatsoever that this would become any sort of an event. But as usually happens in the 21st century, there were customers on the airplane who were using social media and put stuff on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and it ended up becoming a little news story.
[For Chris,] you know, it’s a long flight, and this’ll sort of break up the tedium of a long flight. Let’s just have some fun. There’s no rulebook that said to Chris, “You can do this; you can’t do this. Don’t waste garbage bags, because each garbage bag costs 2 cents.”
He basically was going to do what it took to make sure those customers had a great experience, and also that the other customers in the airplane could have a little fun.
So it’s that sort of thing. I mean, the actual experience that those customers had is exciting, but what excites me more is that our front-line crew members feel that empowered to do something like that. Those are my favorite stories -- I love when they feel they can do those things.
Laura Everett: And this, really, this sense of empowerment among crew members is also related to another part of your portfolio, which is the marketing piece, right?
Marty St. George: Yes.
Laura Everett: So we’ve talked a little about how values are a part of the JetBlue culture among crew members. How are the values part of the experience with customers?
Because it seems like, when you’ve got the person in 17B who’s watching Chris preside over a wedding -- frankly, encroaching on my territory -- and that person in 17B takes a photo, uses the free “Fly-Fi” on JetBlue, tweets it out, you get a ton of good publicity that reaffirms the values proposition that you started with.
How is the values piece built into how you think about marketing for JetBlue?
Marty St. George: Well, I just want to start by saying I made a vow to myself when I walked in the door to do this conversation with you that I was not going to shill all the great things about JetBlue. So I very much appreciate that you talked about the fact that we have free broadband Wi-Fi on our airplanes, so ...
Laura Everett: [Laughter] Look, I use it!
Marty St. George: You did, I know. I appreciate that.
I’ll just go through a very current example. This summer, where in the midst of Hurricane Irma hitting Florida, we made the decision that -- obviously, what we do is we move people, and there were a lot of people who wanted to get out of Florida -- and we made the decision that we were going to offer all of our seats out of Florida for $99, in the light of some of our -- actually, I think all of our competitors, who were letting the prices go to $600, $700, $800.
And by the way, I’m not casting any aspersions. If you let -- if you leave the computer model alone, that’s what it will do. Because the last seat on the airplane costs more than the first seat on the airplane. I totally understand how it happened.
Long story short, we made a conscious decision to override the system so that we could sell as many seats at a low price as possible. Would it be nice to get that extra X million dollars? Is it going to help me make my revenue goal? Absolutely.
But at the same time, we are inspiring humanity. It’s not the right time to take advantage. So that culture goes across the company. Interestingly enough, we did not even make an announcement about it. We just did it. One of the two senators from Florida made an announcement, and then that also became this gigantic viral news story.
I look at that experience, and I think to myself two things. First of all, it’s good that we can live the values and have that impact, our day-to-day decisions, just like Chris did.
And second, I think it’s great for the rest of our crew members to see that we do that, because I think it actually helps support them when they make decisions like the decision that Chris made on that airplane. Because they recognize that all 21,000 of us are trying to live the values. It’s not just something we’re expecting our front-line crew members to do when they’re in front of customers.
Laura Everett: So you have a sense that when, like, the corporate leadership of JetBlue makes a decision to cap airfares in the wake of a hurricane, that that reaffirms the values for front-line crew members.
Marty St. George: Absolutely. And I think it’s a -- these are things that you don’t have to say explicitly. They get it. They understand the mission. They know the focus the company has on service and on serving customers. And certainly, if you look at our intranet -- we have a lot of private Facebook groups for our own crew members -- they have all just been incredibly proud about the stuff that we’ve done.
And there are countless examples like that, where we have stepped up with pretty significant investments of company resources to try to live those values.
I’ll just give you one more quick one, when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened in Orlando. First of all, Orlando being the home of our training center and one of our six focus cities, we have a very large JetBlue crew member base [there]. Thankfully, we did not have any crew members in the club that night -- excuse me, at the time of the shooting. We did have some crew members who had left before, so it came very close to home for us.
But also there was a very heavy contingent of Hispanic customers, mostly Puerto Rican customers, in the club that night who were victims of the shooting, and we’re the largest carrier in and out of Puerto Rico, including from Orlando to Puerto Rico.
So we immediately went into action. We offered families free travel back and forth between Puerto Rico and Orlando to come either support their loved ones or, in unfortunate cases, come make arrangements for the loved ones who had passed away.
It was a decision that was made within -- it was a Sunday morning that that came out, and I think we made that decision in about 15 minutes. It wasn’t even a question.
Laura Everett: There’s something pretty remarkable for me about how JetBlue is not just professing the values but living them in every component part of its business -- not just in how you care for customers but also how you care for crew members.
Marty St. George: The company was founded by two men: David and Dave. And David and Dave are, in the origin story of JetBlue, those are the two names you hear over and over again. And one of the lines that they used repeatedly -- and they’ve both since left the company -- one of the lines they used repeatedly was how vital it is that we keep JetBlue feeling small as we get big.
Because scale is absolutely something we worry about. And I think if you were to ask most of the crew leaders at JetBlue what your biggest concern is, it’s not competition. It’s not the price of fuel; that goes up and down, and we manage that. It’s how do we make sure we preserve the culture.
So many decisions are made in that light. And I think the ability to use corporate resources to try to improve that relationship with our customers, to fulfill the mission of inspiring humanity, and to also reaffirm that with our front-line crew members -- I think that’s priceless.
And if you look at the reaction -- I’ll just go to the $99 fare out of Florida -- look at the reaction that we got from just regular, normal, ordinary customers when they heard that story. Those are the people who are going to come back and fill flights. Once the hurricane has passed and we’re back to normal, you know, these are the people who remember.
Laura Everett: I know that one of the questions that first-call pastors often ask is, What do you change, and how do you know what not to change?
So there are some things that JetBlue has added, like the free Wi-Fi or the unlimited blue potato chips, that build a ton of goodwill, I imagine, and don’t add a ton of cost.
With the values that you’ve got, how do you know what are the spaces where you’ve got some flexibility, and what are the sacred cows that you dare not touch? Like, if you took away those blue potato chips, would that mess with the entire company?
Marty St. George: I use this line all the time: the only people who truly welcome change are wet babies. Change is tough. And my team knows that when they come to me with something very controversial, my first reaction is, “Oh geez, I don’t want to do that. Holy cow.”
But at the end of the day, this is part of -- we have a stewardship not just to our customers and our crew members but also to our owners. And we have to balance all three of those.
Now, I would say that it’s very important that we focus on how to communicate these changes to our crew members, because they’re surprised. We went through one other change in the last, I guess it was probably three or four years ago, that was also extremely controversial. I shouldn’t say controversial; it was a difficult change within the company, which was that we added what other airlines would call a first-class product.
Now JetBlue -- we did our own research with our crew members, trying to understand the crew member pulse. And when we did the research, we walked out of it and said, “Boy, there’s actually a secret sixth value that we didn’t know.”
We’ve had five values forever. What’s the sixth value? The secret sixth value was egalitarianism. Which is everybody gets treated the same. And we took that as a badge of honor. Because we wanted to make sure that we did not have the same experience as other airlines.
I use the example all the time of that old movie -- well, not too old movie -- but that movie with George Clooney, “Up in the Air.” George Clooney had -- he was flying with one of the big three legacy airlines. He was having a fantastic experience. You know, George Clooney gets met at the curb when he flies. They put him in the lounge. They say, “Hey” -- whatever the character’s name is -- “would you like to go to the U.S. Open this weekend? We have tickets.”
Because he gave them hundreds of thousand dollars, and if you’re a top customer at a legacy airline, you have a pretty good life. They treat you very well. But if you’re the one-time-a-year customer, you don’t get treated incredibly well.
So our goal at JetBlue is that every single customer gets treated really, really well. So when we went out there to our crew members and said, “Hey, we’re looking at trying to design this first-class-type product because we think we can make a lot of money, and it’ll be a really, really good service,” they recoiled.
Because their reaction was, “Whoa, we don’t do that! You’re telling me that we’re going to treat some customers different than other customers?”
You go back 10 years, we actually screened for that in the interview process, that people could treat everybody the same. Like, that was a really core value that we didn’t even really understand.
So economically, we needed to do it, and it’s been wildly successful. But we had to come up with our own sort of soul searching, like, “Does this fit the mission or not?”
And we actually brought the process all the way back to the founding of the company. The way JetBlue was created at the beginning was the founders looked at the marketplace in the United States for air travel, and they said, “Boy, this is a market with really high fares and really bad service. And if we can design a better mousetrap that gives people low fares and great service, the world will beat a path to our door.”
And as we explained the concept of Mint -- we call the product Mint, by the way; we don’t call it first class. But as we explained the concept of this premium product, what we said to our customers was -- excuse me, what we said to our crew members was, “You remember when we had this conversation about we want to provide really, really great service at really low fares because our competitors are giving something else?
“Well, let’s look at the premium market from New York to the West Coast or Boston to the West Coast. It’s $2,500 to buy a business class seat from New York to the West Coast, and it’s really crummy service. We think we can do that for half the price, and we know that our front-line crew members will deliver a significantly better experience than the legacy airlines who fly this route.”
And when we had the conversation in that lens, crew members said, “Oh, I get it. Yes. I understand that -- this is actually part of our mission. It’s just more people to whom we can bring great service at low fares.”
But I think if we hadn’t first had the insight that there was this deeply held value -- we sort of took it for granted, and I don’t think we really understood it was there. But second of all, that knowledge helped us explain it to crew members in a way that “this is how it does fit the mission.”
Laura Everett: Well, I love that story, too, Marty, because in adding the new premium product in Mint, you went back into your history to reclaim some of your own tradition at the company to invite new crew members on board. What are those five core values of JetBlue again?
Marty St. George: Safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun.
Laura Everett: One final question, Marty. We’re in this moment where lots of people want lots of access and availability, all of the time. I’m sure you get a ton of emails every day, and text messages, that are both personal and professional. Talk to me about your phone. How do you manage a productive, healthy, maybe even holy relationship with it?
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: Is it a struggle for you?
Marty St. George: I do not have a healthy relationship with my phone, unfortunately. In fact, I turned my phone off for this conversation. I think when I open it up -- I just turned it on -- I believe it will tell me -- and give me 10 seconds to tell you -- yes, I have 6,839 unread emails in my inbox right now.
Laura Everett: No, Marty.
Marty St. George: That’s both personal and my work email; I do not have that many work emails unread. But it’s a real challenge.
I certainly -- we are a 24/7 business, and I certainly have had multiple examples of having the work world interrupt the real world. And I think if you asked my family, they would tell you I’m horrible at it.
If you go back to the Catholic tradition, one thing that the Catholic faith is very good at teaching you is that you’re fundamentally imperfect and your job is to get as close to perfect as you can. But this is just another example where I’m gonna walk in and say, “Well, I know I’m bad at this. I just need to get better.”
So I have zero good advice for you or the listeners on how to fix that.
Laura Everett: Well, you know, sometimes just being in solidarity in the struggle is part of where we find some companionship. So Marty St. George, thank you so much for joining me on “Can These Bones.”
Marty St. George: It was my pleasure. Thank you.
Laura Everett: Bye.
Marty St. George: Bye.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Marty St. George, executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue.
Laura, there was much to learn. First of all, generally speaking, say more about what you think we can learn from folks in business and other fields. Because often, the church has conversations [only] among ourselves. How might this leaven our loaves?
Laura Everett: Well, I think first, one of the reasons to have conversations with people who work in business and in other fields is because often, those are people who go to church. We treat them like they’re some sort of foreign entity that has nothing to do with a life of faith, but these are also our parishioners. They’re our neighbors. They’re our colleagues. And they have wisdom that they’ve learned in their professional lives and vocation.
I think it’s really helpful to speak with folks who learn how to lead other institutions in ways that help us strengthen our own. So for me, being in conversation with Marty is being in conversation with someone who sits in the pews on Sundays, but also someone who has taken their professional life in service of innovating in a pretty tight field. So I’ve been able to learn a lot from him.
Bill Lamar: You know, Laura, one of the most challenging issues for me as a pastor and someone working in denominational spaces as well is, How do we do leadership training well? Like, every local church that I know in every level of our church and every level of other denominations -- there’s this mandatory leadership training that probably becomes often as bland as dining on wood chips after a while.
So how do you do leadership training well? Marty said that everyone at JetBlue who moves from crew member to crew leader must be trained in what he called POL, principles of leadership, and I found that fascinating. I’m struggling with that myself.
What insight did you glean, and how are you working with that with the [Massachusetts] Council [of Churches]?
Laura Everett: Sometimes the meal is wood chips. Sometimes it’s just sawdust. It can be really rough out there, and I think there are resources in the community.
I mean, first off, Leadership Education(link is external) [at Duke Divinity] is a resource, clearly. But talking with parishioners who do leadership formation in their own day-to-day life is another resource at our disposal that I don’t think we take full advantage of.
So part of what’s so interesting about what Marty was talking about in learning how to manage is that everybody [at JetBlue] who moves into management has to go through this training process. But God knows, if you move from being an associate pastor who is supervising and leading volunteers to being a senior pastor, or move from being an associate director to being the executive director -- I didn’t get any formal training in how to manage colleagues.
What are best practices? How do you manage people differently based on what their strengths and models of feedback are? You know, for me, going to Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) at Leadership Education was a lifesaver in some really rough waters, but I still feel like I could get a lot more formation on how to manage colleagues well.
What are you learning about how to do that, Bill?
Bill Lamar: Well, what I’m going to do right now, because of what you have shared, is to get all the people at Metropolitan who do any type of leadership training together and have a conversation. I think that’s exactly -- I think with their wisdom and our shared values, if we move that into discussions both theological and political and other commitments that we have as a church, I think that we can come up with something.
I think that it could be that we have this wisdom deficit because we are afraid -- maybe “afraid” is not the right word -- but we are not engaging the gift sets of folk in the pews.
And here is something that you mentioned that is very interesting that connects with Marty, about how you give feedback. Now, I’m called to do that often. And I know that I can grow. But Marty talked about a very gifted woman -- he gave her feedback, and he only talked about her growth edges, and she was crying, he said. And she said, “Please” -- in the words of the song -- “tell me something good.” Just a little, just please, please, tell me something good.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: So that was very helpful. And I think having the kinds of conversations when you have to do feedback -- I think first of all, we should share as leaders, anyone who’s a leader or pastor or an institutional leader, share with groups how you best receive feedback.
Laura Everett: Yeah. So I’ll shamelessly say that because of my friendship with Marty, at [Massachusetts] Council of Churches we’ve tried to use our own values. We’ve named five of our own values and some working norms, and one of those working norms for us is “Ask for and offer feedback.”
And we’re not always as good at following up on that. But I think there’s real wisdom, if we have the humility to say that we are not finished, that serving the church requires our first fruits and our best work, then we’ve got to be proactive in asking for feedback and not just building organizational patterns of receiving it when we’ve done something wrong. So that we build in a practice of gratitude and excellence and invitation for feedback. I’m still not there yet at the Council [of Churches], but we’re getting closer in building that into our organizational life.
Bill Lamar: Laura, here is something that will not surprise you. I recently had a meeting with what we call our Stewardship and Finance Commission, the wonderful money people who take the resources the folks are willing to give to Metropolitan and figure out their best use in accord with our vision and mission and strategic plan -- and investment. How do you know when to invest, and how to invest?
So Marty talked about the $99 flights and the blue potato chips and the Wi-Fi, and he talked about how expensive that is. I mean, the millions of dollars that they invest in blue potato chips and Wi-Fi.
And I’m really, as a pastor, trying to figure out -- when resources are constrained, often, you still must make investments. How do you do that? How do you think about that?
Laura Everett: The conversation that Marty and I had about not raising the airfares in a time of crisis -- we actually recorded it before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.
And one of the things that JetBlue actually continued to do following the hurricanes in the summer and early fall of 2017 was keeping prices low. So my observation of that was in a time of crisis, they actually went back to their values proposition -- safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun -- and assessed how those values were going to lead in a time of crisis.
And made the decision not to raise fares, even though that would have been a really good time to make a bunch of money, if making money were your only value.
I think, for me, the question around investing in times of, let’s say, organizational anxiety -- so one of the values of [Massachusetts] Council of Churches that we’ve articulated is delight.
In my experience, when Christian organizations get anxious and tight, we forget that, like, this is supposed to be good news. It’s really hard to be joyful when you’re worried about rent and payroll and if you’ve got enough people to do the things you’ve said you’d do.
And so one of those filters, for me, is asking, Does this bring me delight? Does this bring God delight? Will it bring delight to the people that we work with?
So I think, for me, having that strong values filter to run everything through and then giving ourselves permission to not do other things so that we can invest. So that our no is our no and our yes is our yes. And so that yes can be clear and strong and directed to places that need additional investment.
Bill Lamar: Something that Marty said that resonated with me: he said he’s not most anxious about rising fuel costs or competition but he wants to ensure that the organizational culture remains intact. And it is fascinating to me that the most valuable thing for him is the culture of the organization, and that that must be preserved. And it was such a breath of fresh air.
I was wondering, how do you get to that place where people in our institutions say, “What is most valuable is preserving these values that we articulate are resonant with the gospel and what we’ve been called to do”?
Laura Everett: Right. A theme we’ve touched on in previous episodes -- there’s a real question about scale in this, too. When you’re a one-person operation -- and I know many of our listeners are solo pastors or folks serving as the only staff person to a nonprofit -- when you’re just one person, it’s not actually that hard to hold on to the values. You’re the one in charge of that.
But as you scale, as scope and scale expands, how you do organizational culture and shared values across a wider group of people, a wider network of volunteers, a wider community, I think, is a real challenge.
And so Marty was talking about, How do you do those values across 21,000 employees spread around geographically doing really different kinds of work? I feel like I’m asking that question about, like, three people or my board of seven or my network of 3,000 churches in Massachusetts.
So two things, Bill, I would think of. One is, I went on a visit to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta a couple of years ago and was warmly welcomed as a guest. Sat down. Pastor gives the welcome, and then he says, “At Ebenezer Baptist Church, we believe …” and the entire congregation finished the sentence. Everybody in unison said the vision statement of that congregation.
It was a remarkable moment, because you realized that that vision that they had cast was shared across the people who were there. And I looked around. They were not reading out of their bulletins. Folks had that memorized. They were talking seriously about what the vision was of that community.
And I know -- I heard Marty say it, but I know it’s also been true for me -- I know that the values and the vision are getting some traction in my own organization when people start saying it back. Not that I’m saying it, but that other folks are saying it, too.
So I remember I was in a meeting, and our treasurer said, “The [Massachusetts] Council of Churches exists to make the vibrant church visible.”
And I thought, “Oh, yes! I’ve been saying this, and somebody else is saying it.” Those moments when other people in your web of relationship are reflecting back the values, for me, is that touchstone of when I know things are sort of penetrating and expanding.
Bill Lamar: It was a fascinating conversation, and I learned quite a bit. And I think there’s much to glean for our listeners who are doing the good work in the communities of faith around the country.
Laura Everett: Thanks for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. There’s more about Marty St. George, including other interviews with him, at www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
Who are we talking to next time?
Bill Lamar: I am really, really excited about my conversation with Yolanda Pierce, the dean of Howard University Divinity School here in Washington, D.C.
Laura Everett: That sounds really good, Bill. I’m looking forward to it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external), and you can find Bill @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external). You can also find both of us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CLERGY HEALTH
Faith & Leadership
Those who flourish in ministry are intentional about their well-being
Challenges are part of any ministry, yet some clergy thrive despite the inevitable setbacks. Research shows that their keys to success can be boiled down to a few simple strategies available to anyone.
Challenges are part of any ministry, yet some clergy thrive despite the inevitable setbacks. New research shows that their keys to success can be boiled down to a few simple strategies available to anyone.
Some clergy seem to rise above the fray.
They face the same sorts of challenges that are present in any church: critical congregants, hectic schedules, pressure to devote more time to others and thus minimal time to caring for themselves. They don’t always get it right; in fact, they’ll say they are far from having it all figured out. Yet they’re flourishing in ministry.
What sets them apart?
In a recent study, researchers at the Clergy Health Initiative at Duke Divinity School(link is external) interviewed 52 church-appointed pastors about their daily lives and how they approach challenges, and invited them to complete a series of surveys and maintain a daily activity log for one week.
The participants were selected based on their responses to an earlier study of the predictors of positive and negative mental health in clergy, through which they had answered questions about components of positive mental health. Among the participants were clergy who had been identified as flourishing, with positive mental health scores at the highest levels, and those identified as languishing, with scores in the bottom third of the continuum.
When the researchers compared the new data from these two sets of pastors, they noticed important differences in how the two groups take care of themselves and orient their work. One factor stood out above the rest, however: flourishers attend to their well-being(link is external). In fact, the researchers found that 94 percent of clergy with flourishing mental health are intentional about spending time on personal care such as exercise, prayer, family relationships and hobbies.
The good news: the strategies they employ to achieve this balance are available to everyone, clergy and laity alike. These strategies can form a playbook of sorts for how to attain positive mental health.
“Some people, including some clergy, still feel that the very nature of clergy work sets pastors apart -- that above all else, pastors are called to serve, so the human need to attend to oneself shouldn’t apply,” said Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, the research director for the Clergy Health Initiative. “But this just doesn’t hold up. The flourishing pastors’ beliefs and actions show that applying intentionality and nurturing relationships with friends and family actually make all the difference.”
Flourishing clergy focus on working in alignment with God.
Strategy 1: Remember who it is that you serve.
Rather than looking for praise from the pews, aim to derive your sense of success from knowing you’re doing your all to enact the work God has called you to. Also, keep in mind that you are participating in a process -- you are working with God, and God alone sees the full picture.
Strategy 2: Discern, discern, discern.
Create time for spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study to understand the work God is calling you to do.
Flourishing clergy are proactive and flexible in taking care of their physical and mental health.
Strategy 3: Prioritize healthy behaviors.
There is tremendous pressure to eat what is offered to you at church gatherings. Remind yourself that your congregants don’t want to make you unhealthy. Take smaller portions, and don’t feel awkward about it. Go to the doctor regularly; get annual checkups. Get outside. Ride bikes, play golf, or go for a walk every day and set a goal for the number of steps you want to log. Make healthy activities a priority, but also be flexible about how you incorporate those health behaviors into your daily routine. Pastors’ lives are too unpredictable to keep to the same habits all the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to dismiss your health goals.
Strategy 4: Invest in spiritual care.
Start each day by reading the Bible. If you’re traveling and can’t read along the way, listen to a devotion on an MP3 player or mobile device. Set aside time for prayer and one-on-one communion with God. Keep a regular Sabbath.
Strategy 5: Make time for personal interests.
In addition to pursuing the activities you care about, look for opportunities to incorporate them into your ministry.
Flourishing clergy are intentional about setting boundaries around their work and personal lives.
Strategy 6: Pick the time that works for you.
Schedule activities in functional blocks. Pick one night of the week when you will attend nighttime church meetings, and urge others to use this as a basis for scheduling. Set “office hours” for when you will be available at the church each week.
Strategy 7: Use space creatively.
One pastor described taking regular “office hours” in a local McDonald’s. This allows him to have space outside the church to connect with church members, as well as the broader community. To create distance from their work on an afternoon off, some pastors recommend going out of town -- even if it’s only as far as the next town.
Strategy 8: Communicate clearly and regularly.
If you keep a Sabbath, include that information in the signature of your emails. If you have to say no to a request on your day off, offer an alternate time to help. Ask your congregants, staff and other key people about their top priorities for you, and share your own. Then discuss where your expectations diverge. Being honest about your gifts and limitations as a leader is important.
Strategy 9: Manage your technology.
Some pastors set a stop time every evening, after which they do not pick up incoming calls. These clergy say they check their voicemail and will respond if there’s an emergency, but by waiting for a message, they can determine whether a request needs to be addressed during off hours. Work with another pastor or spiritual leader who can be “on call” when you are off or away. Include that person’s contact information in your automatic email reply and your outgoing voicemail message.
Flourishing clergy nourish friendships and mutual relationships.
Strategy 10: Find support from other clergy.
Identify another pastor who can serve as a mentor. Form or join a peer or covenant group. Find at least one person in whom you can confide and from whom you can draw support in the face of ministerial and personal challenges.
Strategy 11: Seek out emotional support from family and friends.
Meet a friend for lunch, especially if you feel yourself getting down or low on energy. Create an annual ritual, such as a retreat with friends, to maintain important connections. Make yourself accountable to a close friend or spouse who knows the day-to-day stresses you’re facing; help each other maintain boundaries and healthy practices.
Those who set priorities and adjust their plans to attend to those priorities on a near-daily basis aren’t undone when difficult circumstances arise; they find their way through. They embrace challenges. They avoid symptoms of depression, anxiety and burnout. They flourish.
“If you’re wondering whether these basic strategies make a difference, they do,” Proeschold-Bell said. “Even though they sound like good common sense, they are hard to enact -- but worth it. They are what differentiated flourishing pastors.”
Questions to consider:
Faith & Leadership
Don't be embarrassed to admit you need helpThe belief that he should "pray his way through" depression prevented a pastor from seeking counseling. But after going to a therapist, the pastor of Miller Memorial Baptist Church in Philadelphia wants to persuade others to seek a therapist's help.
Update:The Rev. Wayne Weathers is now pastor of Vision of Hope Baptist Church(link is external) in Philadelphia.
The Rev. Wayne Weathers began struggling with depression in 2002, after a congregant in the church where he was the pastor shot and killed a family member who also was a member of the congregation.
But the stigma against seeing a therapist prevented Weathers from getting the help he needed for five years -- and even then, he kept it a secret.
I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is episode 8 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”
Laura Everett: I think Marty can teach us a lot, actually. Marty is an old friend of mine, and he’s my go-to conversation partner when I have a question about nurturing organizational culture -- in part, because JetBlue has such a strong brand identity.
JetBlue is a relatively new airline company. It’s a low-cost carrier with 101 destinations, and it’s got a reputation for providing good customer service and some pretty sweet perks, like free Wi-Fi and free blue potato chips.
And so even though our objectives are quite different in the church and a for-profit corporation, I’ve learned a ton over the years of hearing how an airline exec like Marty thinks about things like team building, talent cultivation and having lots of people, at lots of different levels, in lots of different places, committed to the same set of values.
So my friend Marty St. George is an executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue. He joined JetBlue in 2006, and he’s worked at other airlines. He thinks a lot about innovation in the airline industry, in the same way that I aspire to think about innovation in the church.
I’ve found him generous in sharing his experiences, and I see Marty strive to live out his faith and values in a way that shows grace in an industry where people can often be tired and cranky and unnecessarily rude.
I recognize that talking to someone who’s in charge of making a profitable business is unusual for church folks. But I’ve found it really helpful for me to talk with Christians in other fields, even if their institutional objective is quite different.
Bill Lamar: Let’s hear your conversation.
Laura Everett: Marty, welcome to “Can These Bones,” a Faith & Leadership podcast.
Marty St. George: Thank you so much, Laura. I appreciate it.
Laura Everett: Really glad to be with you today. So, first question: Did you fly to work?
Marty St. George: I did not fly to work today. I do on occasion fly to work, but this was not one of those days. It was the train. Sorry to not fulfill the stereotype.
Laura Everett: You started out in trains, right?
Marty St. George: I did. Very, very early on. And once I found airlines, that was it for me.
Laura Everett: What was it about airlines?
Marty St. George: I have a -- completely misunderstood by myself, until recently -- fixation on the concept of connections. And if there’s one thing that airlines do, it’s connect people. It’s connect people with their jobs, with each other, with places in the world they’ve never seen, with their families -- you name it.
And when I would go in an airport and see all these people scurrying around, trying to get from point A to point B -- I really like it.
One of the things about JetBlue is that it’s a very flat organization. We have 21,000 crew members, and we are all called “crew members.” Historically in the airline business, that [term] means people who fly airplanes. That’s not at JetBlue. At JetBlue, everyone’s a crew member. The CEO is a crew member; I’m a crew member; the man or woman who handles baggage at JFK is a crew member.
And part of the culture is that during the peak holiday periods, [the executives] will go to the airport and help. It’s either telling customers where to go, throwing bags -- I mean, you name it, whatever we can do. And I realized, being in that environment, the airport, and seeing what we do as a business -- and I’m not saying just JetBlue, what we all do -- it actually, you know, I didn’t have the self-awareness to know why I was so drawn to it, but now I get it.
Laura Everett: At one point, the slogan for JetBlue was “Bringing humanity back to air travel.” Where did that decision come from -- that it wasn’t just an objective to get people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, but there was something about the travel itself that JetBlue wanted to invest in?
Marty St. George: Well, air travel is what I call a derived demand. People don’t buy airplane tickets because they want to be on an airplane. Well, I do, because I like to fly, but most people buy them because they need to get somewhere.
It’s the old line, when you go to Home Depot to buy a drill, you’re not buying a drill; you’re buying a hole. People don’t buy the plane ticket because they want to buy a plane ticket. And airlines, over the period since deregulation, I think, have more and more commoditized the experience.
So -- and by the way, I appreciate everything you said about JetBlue. I will take no credit for that, because it was really the founders of the company back in the late ’90s who had this idea. Most of them came from other airlines. Not all, but most of them had seen the commoditization of the business and the fact that we really had lost this concept that it is fundamentally a service business. We are in the service business.
So they came to JetBlue and said, “You know what? We’re going to build this new airline, and it’s going to be an airline built around service and built around people.”
So when the founders sat around the table trying to decide what their plan was for JetBlue, they actually, very early on, before they had a route network, before they had a fleet of planes, before they even had an idea of those things, they sat down to talk about the mission and the values.
So the original mission of JetBlue was “Bringing humanity back to air travel.” And it came from that core insight that it is fundamentally a service business -- and it’s a business where very few airlines are focused on service.
At the same time, we also started with values. What are the guiding lights that we’re going to have to make sure we can fulfill the mission? So the company has five values. They have not changed since day one of the company.
And for those of you who are listening, if any of you know JetBlue crew members, first of all, tell them I say hello. Second of all, ask them the five values. I guarantee you, every single one of them will tell you the five values: safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun.
Which basically is how -- my description of that is, “This is how we do things.” That’s how we get things done, by following those five values. So from your first day at JetBlue, you know the mission and you know the values.
We actually changed the mission several years ago. After 10 or 12 years of success in bringing humanity back to air travel to a certain extent, I think we felt like we should take a bit of a victory lap.
We’ve shortened the mission, and we call it “Inspire humanity” -- and very deliberately with a double meaning. First of all, inspiring humanity amongst each other and amongst our customers. But secondarily, I think also to be an example of humanity in the greater business world. So I think from that perspective, it was sort of a natural morphing of JetBlue.
But back to the original point: it would be very difficult to get hired at JetBlue if you do not know the mission and values in your interview. When you walk in the door, you immediately understand why the mission and values are so important. And frankly, you hear these words.
I don’t think there’s -- I wouldn’t say every day -- but there’s certainly not a week that goes by that we do not reference the values in the senior-level meeting. Because so many of our decisions need to be made through that filter. Now it’s like breathing; values truly are deeply held. You don’t need to remind yourself of them every single day, because that’s how you live your life.
But secondarily, there are certain times when maybe you’re straying a little bit in a decision, you’re having trouble trying to discern the right path, and someone will say, “How does that fit the caring value?” And one sort of stops and says, “Oh wow, that’s a good point. You know, we’re moving too fast here; let’s slow down.”
So it really is part of your life. That’s why I would challenge anyone to ask their friends [who work at JetBlue] what the values are. They know them.
Laura Everett: Part of what’s so fascinating to me about JetBlue is you all have been explicit about values. A lot of institutions say that, but they don’t always enact it. So what do you do to make those values real?
Marty St. George: Well, first of all, the values really are part of your onboarding process. And you experience the values in your first day, your first week, your first month, throughout your experience here.
And I think it’s important to say, our first value is safety. Rules are really important. You know, there are places where we do not want our crew members to innovate, because it’s very important that you do things exactly the same way every single time to make sure that you’re running a safe, secure operation.
But the last place I worked, the rules culture had gone so extreme that they had this thing there called “regs”; regs is short for regulations. In the building, in the headquarters building, you could look at regs. And regs were a set of three-ring binders probably 4 to 5 feet long of a bookshelf. There was a rule about everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
At JetBlue, we don’t really have that. We have a thing called a Crewmember Blue Book. And the Crewmember Blue Book is sort of the blanket rules and regs as far as how we do things. But it’s very, very short.
And our crew members are encouraged to -- we use this phrase internally all the time -- “do the right thing.” What is the right thing? If you can do the right thing and do it consistent with the mission and values, it is very tough to get in trouble with JetBlue. And there are legions and legions of examples of things that we do.
I could spend this entire podcast telling you stories. And I won’t, for two reasons: first of all, I’d use up all the time, and second of all, I’ll start crying, because some of the stuff we’ve done has just been incredible.
But I think that is the culture. I mean, that phrase “culture” -- what does “culture” mean? Culture is how we do things. How do we do things around here? That is the culture of the company.
Laura Everett: So let’s go back for just a second. You said that when people become a new crew member at JetBlue, that immersion into the values of JetBlue -- those values of safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun -- starts on day one. Or, it sounds like, start in the interview process before you’re hired.
What is the onboarding process for a new JetBlue crew member, whether a baggage handler or a pilot or someone who is working in the cabin?
Marty St. George: Well, it’s a little bit different at JetBlue than other places I’ve worked. Everyone’s first day sort of has the same experience. We fly our crew members to our training center in Orlando, Florida. And we have a smaller training center in Salt Lake City for some other crew members.
But the largest one is in Orlando. And you spend two to three days in something we just call orientation. And orientation sounds very, very, very innocent. The initial perception of orientation is this is, “I sign my insurance forms; how does vacation work; let me get a logon for the intranet; where is the bathroom” -- things like that.
That’s not really what orientation is about. Orientation is two days of culture school. And it’s a very, very formal program. We do it more or less the same every time, and everyone goes to orientation together.
So, for example, I went to orientation in 2006. I was a vice president and so probably one of the top 30 people in the company at that point in time. And I was in orientation with baggage handlers. I vividly remember having a conversation with two baggage handlers from Boston, one of whom had never been on an airplane before we flew him down to Orlando.
So it is truly the first time when it is really crystal-clear to everyone within the company that you’re all the same. There are only two [types of] people in this room. You either serve a customer or you serve the people who serve the customers. That’s it. That’s everybody’s job.
We use this phrase internally -- “Our goal is to create citizens and not consumers” -- among our crew member base. We don’t want people who are just here for the paycheck. We want people who want to contribute.
Every single person who moves from crew member to crew leader has to take a course called “Principles of Leadership” [POL]. And what it basically does is it teaches you how to manage.
You know, it’s funny, because someone who had worked for me at a previous company, who was just an outstanding contributor, I remember giving her probably her -- not her first review -- like, her second review at my previous company. She was just stellar, one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.
And at the end of the review, she started crying. And I said, “What did I miss in here? This was a great review. Read this review. I said all these great things you’ve done here.”
And she’s like, “Yeah, but you know what? We sat here and talked, and all you told me about was all the things I was doing wrong.”
I said, “Well, you know the stuff you’re doing right. Isn’t it great to know what you can do better?”
And she’s like, “You know, it’s kind of nice to hear it.”
And I said, “You know what? I’m 40 years old. I’m not going to change.”
And it’s funny, the first day of POL, I walked out of POL and I was driving home that night and I got on the phone and I called her up and I apologized.
And I said, “You know what? I was so wrong. I’m really, really sorry, because you were right. I was wrong. I had no idea what I was doing. And boy, am I working in the most incredible place now.”
Laura Everett: How can you tell when the values are working well?
Marty St. George: We had a service failure that was relatively well-known across the company, and it was very painful for us. And a lot of lessons were learned in the company when this happened.
But what really got me excited was when we would talk about the specific service failure with a front-line crew member -- someone you may know, someone you may not know -- and the first thing they’d say out of their mouth was, “Well, where’s the safety value in that?” And like, “I understand the caring value.”
When our crew members are saying that -- when that’s the language they’re using to us -- that’s when we know we’ve been really successful at making sure this is part of the culture. And that really -- I mean, listen, service failures are painful. But when it’s not just crew leaders, but front-line crew members are trying to interpret them in light of the values, that’s when we know we’ve done a great job.
Laura Everett: When you can hear crew members articulating those values back to you.
Marty St. George: Yeah, it’s not us telling them; it’s them telling us.
Laura Everett: So let’s dig at one of those values for just a sec. Because I think you’ve got some good stories to tell here that might be illuminating. Let’s talk about that “fun” value, because this is part of JetBlue’s image and reputation -- that there’s something joyful and pleasant about the experience -- and crew members have been a part of that.
What’s a good story you’ve got about when crew members felt empowered to have a little extra fun because of the values of JetBlue?
Marty St. George: Sure. Well, I mean, I’ve got a ton of stories. I’ll tell you the one that comes right off the top of my head. We had a Boston-based crew that was flying on a flight from Boston to Vegas. And as you can imagine, the Vegas flights tend to be a little raucous at times, at certain times of the year. In a good way, but still raucous.
But the crew members were interacting with the customers -- and again, it’s tough to be an in-flight crew member at JetBlue if you don’t love people, you don’t like to interact with people -- so that’s quite normal, course of business. And one of our flight crew members, this guy Chris, who I’ve gotten to know pretty well, started talking to a couple of customers and found out that they were eloping to Vegas. And I still remember the pictures. The guy was in a Patriot -- in a Tom Brady shirt -- in a Patriots shirt.
Laura Everett: Of course.
Marty St. George: The woman was just dressed normally; they were flying out to elope. And I think their original goal in telling that was to maybe get a couple of free drinks, which is a great idea, and I’m sure he did that; I don’t know for a fact.
But what this turned into was Chris held an in-flight wedding.
Laura Everett: Come on.
Marty St. George: So -- he did. Our crew members are quite resourceful with the resources we give them on the airplane. So I believe he used a blue garbage bag to create a little bouquet of flowers for the bride. He, I think, used a couple of napkins to create a little bow tie for himself.
He brought them up to the front of the airplane, and he and the other two in-flight crew members and the couple had a little wedding ceremony at the front of the plane.
Now, I’m sure when Chris did this, he had no expectation whatsoever that this would become any sort of an event. But as usually happens in the 21st century, there were customers on the airplane who were using social media and put stuff on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and it ended up becoming a little news story.
[For Chris,] you know, it’s a long flight, and this’ll sort of break up the tedium of a long flight. Let’s just have some fun. There’s no rulebook that said to Chris, “You can do this; you can’t do this. Don’t waste garbage bags, because each garbage bag costs 2 cents.”
He basically was going to do what it took to make sure those customers had a great experience, and also that the other customers in the airplane could have a little fun.
So it’s that sort of thing. I mean, the actual experience that those customers had is exciting, but what excites me more is that our front-line crew members feel that empowered to do something like that. Those are my favorite stories -- I love when they feel they can do those things.
Laura Everett: And this, really, this sense of empowerment among crew members is also related to another part of your portfolio, which is the marketing piece, right?
Marty St. George: Yes.
Laura Everett: So we’ve talked a little about how values are a part of the JetBlue culture among crew members. How are the values part of the experience with customers?
Because it seems like, when you’ve got the person in 17B who’s watching Chris preside over a wedding -- frankly, encroaching on my territory -- and that person in 17B takes a photo, uses the free “Fly-Fi” on JetBlue, tweets it out, you get a ton of good publicity that reaffirms the values proposition that you started with.
How is the values piece built into how you think about marketing for JetBlue?
Marty St. George: Well, I just want to start by saying I made a vow to myself when I walked in the door to do this conversation with you that I was not going to shill all the great things about JetBlue. So I very much appreciate that you talked about the fact that we have free broadband Wi-Fi on our airplanes, so ...
Laura Everett: [Laughter] Look, I use it!
Marty St. George: You did, I know. I appreciate that.
I’ll just go through a very current example. This summer, where in the midst of Hurricane Irma hitting Florida, we made the decision that -- obviously, what we do is we move people, and there were a lot of people who wanted to get out of Florida -- and we made the decision that we were going to offer all of our seats out of Florida for $99, in the light of some of our -- actually, I think all of our competitors, who were letting the prices go to $600, $700, $800.
And by the way, I’m not casting any aspersions. If you let -- if you leave the computer model alone, that’s what it will do. Because the last seat on the airplane costs more than the first seat on the airplane. I totally understand how it happened.
Long story short, we made a conscious decision to override the system so that we could sell as many seats at a low price as possible. Would it be nice to get that extra X million dollars? Is it going to help me make my revenue goal? Absolutely.
But at the same time, we are inspiring humanity. It’s not the right time to take advantage. So that culture goes across the company. Interestingly enough, we did not even make an announcement about it. We just did it. One of the two senators from Florida made an announcement, and then that also became this gigantic viral news story.
I look at that experience, and I think to myself two things. First of all, it’s good that we can live the values and have that impact, our day-to-day decisions, just like Chris did.
And second, I think it’s great for the rest of our crew members to see that we do that, because I think it actually helps support them when they make decisions like the decision that Chris made on that airplane. Because they recognize that all 21,000 of us are trying to live the values. It’s not just something we’re expecting our front-line crew members to do when they’re in front of customers.
Laura Everett: So you have a sense that when, like, the corporate leadership of JetBlue makes a decision to cap airfares in the wake of a hurricane, that that reaffirms the values for front-line crew members.
Marty St. George: Absolutely. And I think it’s a -- these are things that you don’t have to say explicitly. They get it. They understand the mission. They know the focus the company has on service and on serving customers. And certainly, if you look at our intranet -- we have a lot of private Facebook groups for our own crew members -- they have all just been incredibly proud about the stuff that we’ve done.
And there are countless examples like that, where we have stepped up with pretty significant investments of company resources to try to live those values.
I’ll just give you one more quick one, when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened in Orlando. First of all, Orlando being the home of our training center and one of our six focus cities, we have a very large JetBlue crew member base [there]. Thankfully, we did not have any crew members in the club that night -- excuse me, at the time of the shooting. We did have some crew members who had left before, so it came very close to home for us.
But also there was a very heavy contingent of Hispanic customers, mostly Puerto Rican customers, in the club that night who were victims of the shooting, and we’re the largest carrier in and out of Puerto Rico, including from Orlando to Puerto Rico.
So we immediately went into action. We offered families free travel back and forth between Puerto Rico and Orlando to come either support their loved ones or, in unfortunate cases, come make arrangements for the loved ones who had passed away.
It was a decision that was made within -- it was a Sunday morning that that came out, and I think we made that decision in about 15 minutes. It wasn’t even a question.
Laura Everett: There’s something pretty remarkable for me about how JetBlue is not just professing the values but living them in every component part of its business -- not just in how you care for customers but also how you care for crew members.
Marty St. George: The company was founded by two men: David and Dave. And David and Dave are, in the origin story of JetBlue, those are the two names you hear over and over again. And one of the lines that they used repeatedly -- and they’ve both since left the company -- one of the lines they used repeatedly was how vital it is that we keep JetBlue feeling small as we get big.
Because scale is absolutely something we worry about. And I think if you were to ask most of the crew leaders at JetBlue what your biggest concern is, it’s not competition. It’s not the price of fuel; that goes up and down, and we manage that. It’s how do we make sure we preserve the culture.
So many decisions are made in that light. And I think the ability to use corporate resources to try to improve that relationship with our customers, to fulfill the mission of inspiring humanity, and to also reaffirm that with our front-line crew members -- I think that’s priceless.
And if you look at the reaction -- I’ll just go to the $99 fare out of Florida -- look at the reaction that we got from just regular, normal, ordinary customers when they heard that story. Those are the people who are going to come back and fill flights. Once the hurricane has passed and we’re back to normal, you know, these are the people who remember.
Laura Everett: I know that one of the questions that first-call pastors often ask is, What do you change, and how do you know what not to change?
So there are some things that JetBlue has added, like the free Wi-Fi or the unlimited blue potato chips, that build a ton of goodwill, I imagine, and don’t add a ton of cost.
With the values that you’ve got, how do you know what are the spaces where you’ve got some flexibility, and what are the sacred cows that you dare not touch? Like, if you took away those blue potato chips, would that mess with the entire company?
Marty St. George: I use this line all the time: the only people who truly welcome change are wet babies. Change is tough. And my team knows that when they come to me with something very controversial, my first reaction is, “Oh geez, I don’t want to do that. Holy cow.”
But at the end of the day, this is part of -- we have a stewardship not just to our customers and our crew members but also to our owners. And we have to balance all three of those.
Now, I would say that it’s very important that we focus on how to communicate these changes to our crew members, because they’re surprised. We went through one other change in the last, I guess it was probably three or four years ago, that was also extremely controversial. I shouldn’t say controversial; it was a difficult change within the company, which was that we added what other airlines would call a first-class product.
Now JetBlue -- we did our own research with our crew members, trying to understand the crew member pulse. And when we did the research, we walked out of it and said, “Boy, there’s actually a secret sixth value that we didn’t know.”
We’ve had five values forever. What’s the sixth value? The secret sixth value was egalitarianism. Which is everybody gets treated the same. And we took that as a badge of honor. Because we wanted to make sure that we did not have the same experience as other airlines.
I use the example all the time of that old movie -- well, not too old movie -- but that movie with George Clooney, “Up in the Air.” George Clooney had -- he was flying with one of the big three legacy airlines. He was having a fantastic experience. You know, George Clooney gets met at the curb when he flies. They put him in the lounge. They say, “Hey” -- whatever the character’s name is -- “would you like to go to the U.S. Open this weekend? We have tickets.”
Because he gave them hundreds of thousand dollars, and if you’re a top customer at a legacy airline, you have a pretty good life. They treat you very well. But if you’re the one-time-a-year customer, you don’t get treated incredibly well.
So our goal at JetBlue is that every single customer gets treated really, really well. So when we went out there to our crew members and said, “Hey, we’re looking at trying to design this first-class-type product because we think we can make a lot of money, and it’ll be a really, really good service,” they recoiled.
Because their reaction was, “Whoa, we don’t do that! You’re telling me that we’re going to treat some customers different than other customers?”
You go back 10 years, we actually screened for that in the interview process, that people could treat everybody the same. Like, that was a really core value that we didn’t even really understand.
So economically, we needed to do it, and it’s been wildly successful. But we had to come up with our own sort of soul searching, like, “Does this fit the mission or not?”
And we actually brought the process all the way back to the founding of the company. The way JetBlue was created at the beginning was the founders looked at the marketplace in the United States for air travel, and they said, “Boy, this is a market with really high fares and really bad service. And if we can design a better mousetrap that gives people low fares and great service, the world will beat a path to our door.”
And as we explained the concept of Mint -- we call the product Mint, by the way; we don’t call it first class. But as we explained the concept of this premium product, what we said to our customers was -- excuse me, what we said to our crew members was, “You remember when we had this conversation about we want to provide really, really great service at really low fares because our competitors are giving something else?
“Well, let’s look at the premium market from New York to the West Coast or Boston to the West Coast. It’s $2,500 to buy a business class seat from New York to the West Coast, and it’s really crummy service. We think we can do that for half the price, and we know that our front-line crew members will deliver a significantly better experience than the legacy airlines who fly this route.”
And when we had the conversation in that lens, crew members said, “Oh, I get it. Yes. I understand that -- this is actually part of our mission. It’s just more people to whom we can bring great service at low fares.”
But I think if we hadn’t first had the insight that there was this deeply held value -- we sort of took it for granted, and I don’t think we really understood it was there. But second of all, that knowledge helped us explain it to crew members in a way that “this is how it does fit the mission.”
Laura Everett: Well, I love that story, too, Marty, because in adding the new premium product in Mint, you went back into your history to reclaim some of your own tradition at the company to invite new crew members on board. What are those five core values of JetBlue again?
Marty St. George: Safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun.
Laura Everett: One final question, Marty. We’re in this moment where lots of people want lots of access and availability, all of the time. I’m sure you get a ton of emails every day, and text messages, that are both personal and professional. Talk to me about your phone. How do you manage a productive, healthy, maybe even holy relationship with it?
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: Is it a struggle for you?
Marty St. George: I do not have a healthy relationship with my phone, unfortunately. In fact, I turned my phone off for this conversation. I think when I open it up -- I just turned it on -- I believe it will tell me -- and give me 10 seconds to tell you -- yes, I have 6,839 unread emails in my inbox right now.
Laura Everett: No, Marty.
Marty St. George: That’s both personal and my work email; I do not have that many work emails unread. But it’s a real challenge.
I certainly -- we are a 24/7 business, and I certainly have had multiple examples of having the work world interrupt the real world. And I think if you asked my family, they would tell you I’m horrible at it.
If you go back to the Catholic tradition, one thing that the Catholic faith is very good at teaching you is that you’re fundamentally imperfect and your job is to get as close to perfect as you can. But this is just another example where I’m gonna walk in and say, “Well, I know I’m bad at this. I just need to get better.”
So I have zero good advice for you or the listeners on how to fix that.
Laura Everett: Well, you know, sometimes just being in solidarity in the struggle is part of where we find some companionship. So Marty St. George, thank you so much for joining me on “Can These Bones.”
Marty St. George: It was my pleasure. Thank you.
Laura Everett: Bye.
Marty St. George: Bye.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Marty St. George, executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue.
Laura, there was much to learn. First of all, generally speaking, say more about what you think we can learn from folks in business and other fields. Because often, the church has conversations [only] among ourselves. How might this leaven our loaves?
Laura Everett: Well, I think first, one of the reasons to have conversations with people who work in business and in other fields is because often, those are people who go to church. We treat them like they’re some sort of foreign entity that has nothing to do with a life of faith, but these are also our parishioners. They’re our neighbors. They’re our colleagues. And they have wisdom that they’ve learned in their professional lives and vocation.
I think it’s really helpful to speak with folks who learn how to lead other institutions in ways that help us strengthen our own. So for me, being in conversation with Marty is being in conversation with someone who sits in the pews on Sundays, but also someone who has taken their professional life in service of innovating in a pretty tight field. So I’ve been able to learn a lot from him.
Bill Lamar: You know, Laura, one of the most challenging issues for me as a pastor and someone working in denominational spaces as well is, How do we do leadership training well? Like, every local church that I know in every level of our church and every level of other denominations -- there’s this mandatory leadership training that probably becomes often as bland as dining on wood chips after a while.
So how do you do leadership training well? Marty said that everyone at JetBlue who moves from crew member to crew leader must be trained in what he called POL, principles of leadership, and I found that fascinating. I’m struggling with that myself.
What insight did you glean, and how are you working with that with the [Massachusetts] Council [of Churches]?
Laura Everett: Sometimes the meal is wood chips. Sometimes it’s just sawdust. It can be really rough out there, and I think there are resources in the community.
I mean, first off, Leadership Education(link is external) [at Duke Divinity] is a resource, clearly. But talking with parishioners who do leadership formation in their own day-to-day life is another resource at our disposal that I don’t think we take full advantage of.
So part of what’s so interesting about what Marty was talking about in learning how to manage is that everybody [at JetBlue] who moves into management has to go through this training process. But God knows, if you move from being an associate pastor who is supervising and leading volunteers to being a senior pastor, or move from being an associate director to being the executive director -- I didn’t get any formal training in how to manage colleagues.
What are best practices? How do you manage people differently based on what their strengths and models of feedback are? You know, for me, going to Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) at Leadership Education was a lifesaver in some really rough waters, but I still feel like I could get a lot more formation on how to manage colleagues well.
What are you learning about how to do that, Bill?
Bill Lamar: Well, what I’m going to do right now, because of what you have shared, is to get all the people at Metropolitan who do any type of leadership training together and have a conversation. I think that’s exactly -- I think with their wisdom and our shared values, if we move that into discussions both theological and political and other commitments that we have as a church, I think that we can come up with something.
I think that it could be that we have this wisdom deficit because we are afraid -- maybe “afraid” is not the right word -- but we are not engaging the gift sets of folk in the pews.
And here is something that you mentioned that is very interesting that connects with Marty, about how you give feedback. Now, I’m called to do that often. And I know that I can grow. But Marty talked about a very gifted woman -- he gave her feedback, and he only talked about her growth edges, and she was crying, he said. And she said, “Please” -- in the words of the song -- “tell me something good.” Just a little, just please, please, tell me something good.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: So that was very helpful. And I think having the kinds of conversations when you have to do feedback -- I think first of all, we should share as leaders, anyone who’s a leader or pastor or an institutional leader, share with groups how you best receive feedback.
Laura Everett: Yeah. So I’ll shamelessly say that because of my friendship with Marty, at [Massachusetts] Council of Churches we’ve tried to use our own values. We’ve named five of our own values and some working norms, and one of those working norms for us is “Ask for and offer feedback.”
And we’re not always as good at following up on that. But I think there’s real wisdom, if we have the humility to say that we are not finished, that serving the church requires our first fruits and our best work, then we’ve got to be proactive in asking for feedback and not just building organizational patterns of receiving it when we’ve done something wrong. So that we build in a practice of gratitude and excellence and invitation for feedback. I’m still not there yet at the Council [of Churches], but we’re getting closer in building that into our organizational life.
Bill Lamar: Laura, here is something that will not surprise you. I recently had a meeting with what we call our Stewardship and Finance Commission, the wonderful money people who take the resources the folks are willing to give to Metropolitan and figure out their best use in accord with our vision and mission and strategic plan -- and investment. How do you know when to invest, and how to invest?
So Marty talked about the $99 flights and the blue potato chips and the Wi-Fi, and he talked about how expensive that is. I mean, the millions of dollars that they invest in blue potato chips and Wi-Fi.
And I’m really, as a pastor, trying to figure out -- when resources are constrained, often, you still must make investments. How do you do that? How do you think about that?
Laura Everett: The conversation that Marty and I had about not raising the airfares in a time of crisis -- we actually recorded it before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.
And one of the things that JetBlue actually continued to do following the hurricanes in the summer and early fall of 2017 was keeping prices low. So my observation of that was in a time of crisis, they actually went back to their values proposition -- safety, caring, integrity, passion and fun -- and assessed how those values were going to lead in a time of crisis.
And made the decision not to raise fares, even though that would have been a really good time to make a bunch of money, if making money were your only value.
I think, for me, the question around investing in times of, let’s say, organizational anxiety -- so one of the values of [Massachusetts] Council of Churches that we’ve articulated is delight.
In my experience, when Christian organizations get anxious and tight, we forget that, like, this is supposed to be good news. It’s really hard to be joyful when you’re worried about rent and payroll and if you’ve got enough people to do the things you’ve said you’d do.
And so one of those filters, for me, is asking, Does this bring me delight? Does this bring God delight? Will it bring delight to the people that we work with?
So I think, for me, having that strong values filter to run everything through and then giving ourselves permission to not do other things so that we can invest. So that our no is our no and our yes is our yes. And so that yes can be clear and strong and directed to places that need additional investment.
Bill Lamar: Something that Marty said that resonated with me: he said he’s not most anxious about rising fuel costs or competition but he wants to ensure that the organizational culture remains intact. And it is fascinating to me that the most valuable thing for him is the culture of the organization, and that that must be preserved. And it was such a breath of fresh air.
I was wondering, how do you get to that place where people in our institutions say, “What is most valuable is preserving these values that we articulate are resonant with the gospel and what we’ve been called to do”?
Laura Everett: Right. A theme we’ve touched on in previous episodes -- there’s a real question about scale in this, too. When you’re a one-person operation -- and I know many of our listeners are solo pastors or folks serving as the only staff person to a nonprofit -- when you’re just one person, it’s not actually that hard to hold on to the values. You’re the one in charge of that.
But as you scale, as scope and scale expands, how you do organizational culture and shared values across a wider group of people, a wider network of volunteers, a wider community, I think, is a real challenge.
And so Marty was talking about, How do you do those values across 21,000 employees spread around geographically doing really different kinds of work? I feel like I’m asking that question about, like, three people or my board of seven or my network of 3,000 churches in Massachusetts.
So two things, Bill, I would think of. One is, I went on a visit to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta a couple of years ago and was warmly welcomed as a guest. Sat down. Pastor gives the welcome, and then he says, “At Ebenezer Baptist Church, we believe …” and the entire congregation finished the sentence. Everybody in unison said the vision statement of that congregation.
It was a remarkable moment, because you realized that that vision that they had cast was shared across the people who were there. And I looked around. They were not reading out of their bulletins. Folks had that memorized. They were talking seriously about what the vision was of that community.
And I know -- I heard Marty say it, but I know it’s also been true for me -- I know that the values and the vision are getting some traction in my own organization when people start saying it back. Not that I’m saying it, but that other folks are saying it, too.
So I remember I was in a meeting, and our treasurer said, “The [Massachusetts] Council of Churches exists to make the vibrant church visible.”
And I thought, “Oh, yes! I’ve been saying this, and somebody else is saying it.” Those moments when other people in your web of relationship are reflecting back the values, for me, is that touchstone of when I know things are sort of penetrating and expanding.
Bill Lamar: It was a fascinating conversation, and I learned quite a bit. And I think there’s much to glean for our listeners who are doing the good work in the communities of faith around the country.
Laura Everett: Thanks for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. There’s more about Marty St. George, including other interviews with him, at www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
Who are we talking to next time?
Bill Lamar: I am really, really excited about my conversation with Yolanda Pierce, the dean of Howard University Divinity School here in Washington, D.C.
Laura Everett: That sounds really good, Bill. I’m looking forward to it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external), and you can find Bill @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external). You can also find both of us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CLERGY HEALTH
Faith & Leadership
Those who flourish in ministry are intentional about their well-being
Challenges are part of any ministry, yet some clergy thrive despite the inevitable setbacks. Research shows that their keys to success can be boiled down to a few simple strategies available to anyone.
Those who flourish in ministry are intentional about their well-being
Some clergy seem to rise above the fray.
They face the same sorts of challenges that are present in any church: critical congregants, hectic schedules, pressure to devote more time to others and thus minimal time to caring for themselves. They don’t always get it right; in fact, they’ll say they are far from having it all figured out. Yet they’re flourishing in ministry.
What sets them apart?
In a recent study, researchers at the Clergy Health Initiative at Duke Divinity School(link is external) interviewed 52 church-appointed pastors about their daily lives and how they approach challenges, and invited them to complete a series of surveys and maintain a daily activity log for one week.
The participants were selected based on their responses to an earlier study of the predictors of positive and negative mental health in clergy, through which they had answered questions about components of positive mental health. Among the participants were clergy who had been identified as flourishing, with positive mental health scores at the highest levels, and those identified as languishing, with scores in the bottom third of the continuum.
When the researchers compared the new data from these two sets of pastors, they noticed important differences in how the two groups take care of themselves and orient their work. One factor stood out above the rest, however: flourishers attend to their well-being(link is external). In fact, the researchers found that 94 percent of clergy with flourishing mental health are intentional about spending time on personal care such as exercise, prayer, family relationships and hobbies.
The good news: the strategies they employ to achieve this balance are available to everyone, clergy and laity alike. These strategies can form a playbook of sorts for how to attain positive mental health.
“Some people, including some clergy, still feel that the very nature of clergy work sets pastors apart -- that above all else, pastors are called to serve, so the human need to attend to oneself shouldn’t apply,” said Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, the research director for the Clergy Health Initiative. “But this just doesn’t hold up. The flourishing pastors’ beliefs and actions show that applying intentionality and nurturing relationships with friends and family actually make all the difference.”
Flourishing clergy focus on working in alignment with God.
Strategy 1: Remember who it is that you serve.
Rather than looking for praise from the pews, aim to derive your sense of success from knowing you’re doing your all to enact the work God has called you to. Also, keep in mind that you are participating in a process -- you are working with God, and God alone sees the full picture.
Strategy 2: Discern, discern, discern.
Create time for spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study to understand the work God is calling you to do.
Flourishing clergy are proactive and flexible in taking care of their physical and mental health.
Strategy 3: Prioritize healthy behaviors.
There is tremendous pressure to eat what is offered to you at church gatherings. Remind yourself that your congregants don’t want to make you unhealthy. Take smaller portions, and don’t feel awkward about it. Go to the doctor regularly; get annual checkups. Get outside. Ride bikes, play golf, or go for a walk every day and set a goal for the number of steps you want to log. Make healthy activities a priority, but also be flexible about how you incorporate those health behaviors into your daily routine. Pastors’ lives are too unpredictable to keep to the same habits all the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to dismiss your health goals.
Strategy 4: Invest in spiritual care.
Start each day by reading the Bible. If you’re traveling and can’t read along the way, listen to a devotion on an MP3 player or mobile device. Set aside time for prayer and one-on-one communion with God. Keep a regular Sabbath.
Strategy 5: Make time for personal interests.
In addition to pursuing the activities you care about, look for opportunities to incorporate them into your ministry.
Flourishing clergy are intentional about setting boundaries around their work and personal lives.
Strategy 6: Pick the time that works for you.
Schedule activities in functional blocks. Pick one night of the week when you will attend nighttime church meetings, and urge others to use this as a basis for scheduling. Set “office hours” for when you will be available at the church each week.
Strategy 7: Use space creatively.
One pastor described taking regular “office hours” in a local McDonald’s. This allows him to have space outside the church to connect with church members, as well as the broader community. To create distance from their work on an afternoon off, some pastors recommend going out of town -- even if it’s only as far as the next town.
Strategy 8: Communicate clearly and regularly.
If you keep a Sabbath, include that information in the signature of your emails. If you have to say no to a request on your day off, offer an alternate time to help. Ask your congregants, staff and other key people about their top priorities for you, and share your own. Then discuss where your expectations diverge. Being honest about your gifts and limitations as a leader is important.
Strategy 9: Manage your technology.
Some pastors set a stop time every evening, after which they do not pick up incoming calls. These clergy say they check their voicemail and will respond if there’s an emergency, but by waiting for a message, they can determine whether a request needs to be addressed during off hours. Work with another pastor or spiritual leader who can be “on call” when you are off or away. Include that person’s contact information in your automatic email reply and your outgoing voicemail message.
Flourishing clergy nourish friendships and mutual relationships.
Strategy 10: Find support from other clergy.
Identify another pastor who can serve as a mentor. Form or join a peer or covenant group. Find at least one person in whom you can confide and from whom you can draw support in the face of ministerial and personal challenges.
Strategy 11: Seek out emotional support from family and friends.
Meet a friend for lunch, especially if you feel yourself getting down or low on energy. Create an annual ritual, such as a retreat with friends, to maintain important connections. Make yourself accountable to a close friend or spouse who knows the day-to-day stresses you’re facing; help each other maintain boundaries and healthy practices.
Those who set priorities and adjust their plans to attend to those priorities on a near-daily basis aren’t undone when difficult circumstances arise; they find their way through. They embrace challenges. They avoid symptoms of depression, anxiety and burnout. They flourish.
“If you’re wondering whether these basic strategies make a difference, they do,” Proeschold-Bell said. “Even though they sound like good common sense, they are hard to enact -- but worth it. They are what differentiated flourishing pastors.”
Questions to consider:
- What activities and values are meaningful to you? How do you make time for them? Are there ways to incorporate them naturally into your other responsibilities?
- None of the flourishing clergy who participated in the study named all of these strategies as critical parts of their ministry, but they all said they employ a number of them. You likely already do, too. Which new ones will you try?
- Positive emotions have been shown to promote broad-minded coping and openness to new ideas -- important traits for effective leadership. How might you foster positive emotions in yourself and others?
Faith & Leadership
Don't be embarrassed to admit you need helpThe belief that he should "pray his way through" depression prevented a pastor from seeking counseling. But after going to a therapist, the pastor of Miller Memorial Baptist Church in Philadelphia wants to persuade others to seek a therapist's help.
Wayne Weathers: Don't be embarrassed to admit you need help
Bigstock/the3DStock
The belief that he should “pray his way through” depression prevented a pastor from seeking counseling. But after going to a therapist, the pastor of Miller Memorial Baptist Church in Philadelphia wants to persuade others to seek a therapist’s help.Update:The Rev. Wayne Weathers is now pastor of Vision of Hope Baptist Church(link is external) in Philadelphia.
The Rev. Wayne Weathers began struggling with depression in 2002, after a congregant in the church where he was the pastor shot and killed a family member who also was a member of the congregation.
But the stigma against seeing a therapist prevented Weathers from getting the help he needed for five years -- and even then, he kept it a secret.
After eventually sharing his experience with his family and his congregation, Weathers decided he wanted to tell his story to a larger audience so that other pastors might be encouraged to get the help they need.
“It has allowed me to be a better husband, a better father and a better pastor,” Weathers said. “An individual should not feel any shame because he or she needs a therapist.”
Weathers is the pastor of Miller Memorial Baptist Church(link is external) in Philadelphia. He has an undergraduate degree from Virginia State University and a master of divinity degree from Duke Divinity School. He earned a doctor of ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary, where he focused on urban ministry.
Weathers spoke with Faith & Leadership about his own experience with depression and his desire to help other pastors struggling with mental health issues. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Why is it important to you to share your story?
What I want people to understand is if you have to see a therapist, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean that you’re crazy. It doesn’t mean that you’re sick. It just means that you need help.
In the faith community, especially the Christian faith community, we must embrace those who are in need of a therapist. My testimony is, it’s a blessing.
It has allowed me to be a better husband, a better father and a better pastor. I have not experienced this much peace in a long time. An individual should not feel any shame because he or she needs a therapist and has sought one in order to get whatever additional help they need.
Q: What changed your mind about therapy?
In my faith community growing up, we were always taught to pray your way through. Anything that came upon you in your life, you constantly submit it to prayer.
Going to a therapist was taboo -- like a bad word -- something that you didn’t do.
Q: Tell me about your experience.
The depression started for me when I was pastoring a congregation in Durham, N.C. One of the church members got in an argument with a family member, and the person pulled out a gun and shot the individual, who died about 18 days later. Both of them were members of my church.
My congregant passed away from gun violence. I cared about the individual who pulled the trigger as well. Then you have to navigate the pain of the congregation, and you have to minister to the family.
At that point I had no outlet, no one to talk to, nobody who could understand the deep-seated pain and depression that I was going through.
I had been taught that you just pray your way through to get yourself through. But I’ll be very candid with you -- I needed something more than just spiritual care. I needed mental care.
Q: Why didn’t you get help at that time?
It took me five years to get counseling, for a number of reasons: the evangelical model had taught me to pray my way through the depression and that God would take care of the rest; I was in denial that I needed a therapist; I was afraid of the stigma, that getting a therapist meant I was crazy; I was embarrassed because I thought this meant that I lacked faith in God and that I was not living up to the image of being a strong leader for the congregation that I was called to serve.
As a pastor, we sometimes have a fictitious image that we’re supposed to be Superman. We’re not supposed to show any pain. We’re not supposed to cry. We’re not supposed to hurt.
There’s a danger of falling into that image, because we don’t take care of our physical care, our mental care and our spiritual care.
I thought that a person of faith should not be going that [therapy] route, because if you have faith in Christ, then that’s all you need. I later found out that model doesn’t work.
Q: Did you realize that when you moved to Philadelphia?
I was still battling with the depression. That was a hidden secret from the congregation.
I was at a church business meeting and a member asked me one simple question, and I blew a gasket -- I got upset with the person and yelled over something very trivial.
After that incident happened, I started to examine myself -- to say, “How did you get to this point? Your member just asked you a simple question -- the meeting was not contentious; there weren’t any major problems going on -- what happened that caused you just to explode?”
That was the turning point. The depression came on three and four times more than it ever did before, and it was at that point that I knew I needed to get help to navigate through this depression.
Q: What’s your congregation in Philadelphia like?
The congregation is about 250 members active, 400 on the roll. The best way to describe the community where I pastor is this: there was a sitcom on TV called “Good Times.” When the show first came on, you saw the Cabrini Green projects. Well, think of the beginning of “Good Times,” the Cabrini Green projects, and think of a church in front of that tall, high-rise public housing. That’s the type of community in which I pastor.
It has the second-highest HIV infection rate in Philadelphia, second-highest heroin addiction rate in Philadelphia. It’s an economically challenged community, and it’s also a community that deals with high unemployment and violence.
Recently, while we were having our morning worship service, there was a shootout between two individuals right next to our church. By the grace of God, no one was injured and no bullets came through our church windows.
Q: When you decided to get help, what action did you take?
My wife works at the University of Pennsylvania. Actually, she works in the area of psychology. So her boss, who had a background in psychology, advised me.
I came across a counselor, and I got the best of both worlds. Not only was he a psychotherapist, but he also was an African-American pastor. So the blessing of my therapist was that I got the therapy that was needed for the mental health issues, but I also got a pastor in the process.
Q: What was the difference between therapy and pastoral care for you?
First, the psychotherapist was able to identify things that I was doing that traced all the way back to my childhood.
So the difference with the psychotherapist compared to a pastor is that this person not only was able to identify the behavior but also was trained to get to the root of the behavior.
The other thing that the therapist was able to do was to put something in place so that I would be able to identify when my emotions start to emerge, like when I’m getting angry.
I use little buzzwords, pick up a piece of paper, start writing notes to myself, some mental notes to calm myself down. For me it is biblical Scriptures or writing encouraging notes to myself.
Those are some of the things that the therapist was able to do that a pastoral counselor couldn’t do.
Q: Did you ever take antidepressants or other medications, or did you consider it?
I have not taken antidepressants or other medications for my depression. At this point, I have not considered it, because the therapy has really helped me with my depression.
Q: At first you kept the treatment a secret, right?
I didn’t tell my mother until after a year that I was in therapy. I even tried to keep it from my kids.
I have three kids, two girls and a boy, and one day I went to the therapist’s office and needed to take them with me. I didn’t tell them it was a therapist; I said, “Daddy has to go to the doctor.”
So after they’d spent an hour in the waiting room, I came out and my son looked at me and said, “This ain’t no doctor’s office. This is a therapist. What do you need a therapist for?”
Q: How did your son know this?
He looked at some brochures that were on the table. That was very naive on my part. I’m thinking, “They can’t figure out this is a therapist’s office,” because it looked like a doctor’s office.
But kids being inquisitive, they put the pieces together.
Q: Were they OK with it?
Yes. I didn’t go into detail, but I had to explain to them why I was going.
And they see the difference now. They don’t see me come home as stressed out as I used to, unpacking some of my emotions on them, like getting angry because somebody dropped a piece of paper on the floor and didn’t pick it up, or they didn’t clean their rooms.
Q: When did you share this with your congregation?
I was admitted to the hospital last year. That was my third trip in seven years -- I had some health issues, irregular heartbeat.
After I came out of the hospital, I finally shared with the congregation some of the things that I was keeping in, and the biggest secret that I was keeping was that I was seeing a therapist.
I was in a joint board meeting, and I was sharing with them that I was partnering with a therapist in the community. We are ministering to people in the community who are affected by gun violence or trauma.
I said, “The therapist that I partner with, I’m proud to say, is my therapist.”
After the meeting was over, one of my leaders pulled me to the side and said, “I’m real proud of the fact that you were bold enough to admit that you have a therapist, because it shows that you’re not ashamed to admit it.”
My mouth dropped, and I was like, “Wow, I didn’t know the impact.”
Q: How did you tell your congregation?
At a church business meeting. In a Baptist church, on a quarterly basis the officers and the pastor meet with the congregation.
Q: And what was the immediate response from the members?
It was welcomed, and that was a shock. It was welcomed. They really appreciated the fact of me sharing that information, and they were very supportive.
Q: Were you afraid of what the response might be?
My concern was, would this undermine my credibility as a strong leader within the congregation? In actuality, it did not.
Q: Do you feel that you faced any different or more difficult issues as an African-American pastor?
This is a hard question to answer. The history of the African-American pastor is that he or she is a leader, and a prophetic voice in the community. As a result, there are models that have been constructed for African-American pastors that place us in a position where people feel that we have to be everything for everybody without error or imperfections.
However, if this question would be raised to my brothers and sisters who are pastors but are not African-American, their response may be similar.
I think the problem that many pastors -- including myself -- encounter is inheriting a description of what a pastor should be that has not been defined by God. As a result, we spend a lot of time trying to live up to the image that society has placed on us that was never in God’s pastoral job description.
Q: If you could give advice to pastors struggling with mental health issues, what would you say?
I would say that there is not anything wrong with identifying that a person is dealing with mental health issues. This does not diminish your role as a pastor or reduce your faith in being a child of God. This just means that you are human and need help.
There are some forms of evangelical models that teach people just to pray through your illness and that God will do the rest. When a person is dealing with mental health issues, they must understand that God has equipped many people to help deal with any mental health issues that are creating challenges in an individual’s life.
Don’t be embarrassed to admit that you need help.
Read more from Wayne Weathers »
“It has allowed me to be a better husband, a better father and a better pastor,” Weathers said. “An individual should not feel any shame because he or she needs a therapist.”
Weathers is the pastor of Miller Memorial Baptist Church(link is external) in Philadelphia. He has an undergraduate degree from Virginia State University and a master of divinity degree from Duke Divinity School. He earned a doctor of ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary, where he focused on urban ministry.
Weathers spoke with Faith & Leadership about his own experience with depression and his desire to help other pastors struggling with mental health issues. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Why is it important to you to share your story?
What I want people to understand is if you have to see a therapist, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean that you’re crazy. It doesn’t mean that you’re sick. It just means that you need help.
In the faith community, especially the Christian faith community, we must embrace those who are in need of a therapist. My testimony is, it’s a blessing.
It has allowed me to be a better husband, a better father and a better pastor. I have not experienced this much peace in a long time. An individual should not feel any shame because he or she needs a therapist and has sought one in order to get whatever additional help they need.
Q: What changed your mind about therapy?
In my faith community growing up, we were always taught to pray your way through. Anything that came upon you in your life, you constantly submit it to prayer.
Going to a therapist was taboo -- like a bad word -- something that you didn’t do.
Q: Tell me about your experience.
The depression started for me when I was pastoring a congregation in Durham, N.C. One of the church members got in an argument with a family member, and the person pulled out a gun and shot the individual, who died about 18 days later. Both of them were members of my church.
Where to find help
- American Association of Pastoral Counselors(link is external)
- Davidson Centre for the Professions(link is external)
- National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)(link is external)
- PastorCare Network(link is external)
- Psychology Today(link is external)
My congregant passed away from gun violence. I cared about the individual who pulled the trigger as well. Then you have to navigate the pain of the congregation, and you have to minister to the family.
At that point I had no outlet, no one to talk to, nobody who could understand the deep-seated pain and depression that I was going through.
I had been taught that you just pray your way through to get yourself through. But I’ll be very candid with you -- I needed something more than just spiritual care. I needed mental care.
Q: Why didn’t you get help at that time?
It took me five years to get counseling, for a number of reasons: the evangelical model had taught me to pray my way through the depression and that God would take care of the rest; I was in denial that I needed a therapist; I was afraid of the stigma, that getting a therapist meant I was crazy; I was embarrassed because I thought this meant that I lacked faith in God and that I was not living up to the image of being a strong leader for the congregation that I was called to serve.
As a pastor, we sometimes have a fictitious image that we’re supposed to be Superman. We’re not supposed to show any pain. We’re not supposed to cry. We’re not supposed to hurt.
There’s a danger of falling into that image, because we don’t take care of our physical care, our mental care and our spiritual care.
I thought that a person of faith should not be going that [therapy] route, because if you have faith in Christ, then that’s all you need. I later found out that model doesn’t work.
Q: Did you realize that when you moved to Philadelphia?
I was still battling with the depression. That was a hidden secret from the congregation.
I was at a church business meeting and a member asked me one simple question, and I blew a gasket -- I got upset with the person and yelled over something very trivial.
After that incident happened, I started to examine myself -- to say, “How did you get to this point? Your member just asked you a simple question -- the meeting was not contentious; there weren’t any major problems going on -- what happened that caused you just to explode?”
That was the turning point. The depression came on three and four times more than it ever did before, and it was at that point that I knew I needed to get help to navigate through this depression.
Q: What’s your congregation in Philadelphia like?
The congregation is about 250 members active, 400 on the roll. The best way to describe the community where I pastor is this: there was a sitcom on TV called “Good Times.” When the show first came on, you saw the Cabrini Green projects. Well, think of the beginning of “Good Times,” the Cabrini Green projects, and think of a church in front of that tall, high-rise public housing. That’s the type of community in which I pastor.
It has the second-highest HIV infection rate in Philadelphia, second-highest heroin addiction rate in Philadelphia. It’s an economically challenged community, and it’s also a community that deals with high unemployment and violence.
Recently, while we were having our morning worship service, there was a shootout between two individuals right next to our church. By the grace of God, no one was injured and no bullets came through our church windows.
Q: When you decided to get help, what action did you take?
My wife works at the University of Pennsylvania. Actually, she works in the area of psychology. So her boss, who had a background in psychology, advised me.
I came across a counselor, and I got the best of both worlds. Not only was he a psychotherapist, but he also was an African-American pastor. So the blessing of my therapist was that I got the therapy that was needed for the mental health issues, but I also got a pastor in the process.
Q: What was the difference between therapy and pastoral care for you?
First, the psychotherapist was able to identify things that I was doing that traced all the way back to my childhood.
So the difference with the psychotherapist compared to a pastor is that this person not only was able to identify the behavior but also was trained to get to the root of the behavior.
The other thing that the therapist was able to do was to put something in place so that I would be able to identify when my emotions start to emerge, like when I’m getting angry.
I use little buzzwords, pick up a piece of paper, start writing notes to myself, some mental notes to calm myself down. For me it is biblical Scriptures or writing encouraging notes to myself.
Those are some of the things that the therapist was able to do that a pastoral counselor couldn’t do.
Q: Did you ever take antidepressants or other medications, or did you consider it?
I have not taken antidepressants or other medications for my depression. At this point, I have not considered it, because the therapy has really helped me with my depression.
Q: At first you kept the treatment a secret, right?
I didn’t tell my mother until after a year that I was in therapy. I even tried to keep it from my kids.
I have three kids, two girls and a boy, and one day I went to the therapist’s office and needed to take them with me. I didn’t tell them it was a therapist; I said, “Daddy has to go to the doctor.”
So after they’d spent an hour in the waiting room, I came out and my son looked at me and said, “This ain’t no doctor’s office. This is a therapist. What do you need a therapist for?”
Q: How did your son know this?
He looked at some brochures that were on the table. That was very naive on my part. I’m thinking, “They can’t figure out this is a therapist’s office,” because it looked like a doctor’s office.
But kids being inquisitive, they put the pieces together.
Q: Were they OK with it?
Yes. I didn’t go into detail, but I had to explain to them why I was going.
And they see the difference now. They don’t see me come home as stressed out as I used to, unpacking some of my emotions on them, like getting angry because somebody dropped a piece of paper on the floor and didn’t pick it up, or they didn’t clean their rooms.
Q: When did you share this with your congregation?
I was admitted to the hospital last year. That was my third trip in seven years -- I had some health issues, irregular heartbeat.
After I came out of the hospital, I finally shared with the congregation some of the things that I was keeping in, and the biggest secret that I was keeping was that I was seeing a therapist.
I was in a joint board meeting, and I was sharing with them that I was partnering with a therapist in the community. We are ministering to people in the community who are affected by gun violence or trauma.
I said, “The therapist that I partner with, I’m proud to say, is my therapist.”
After the meeting was over, one of my leaders pulled me to the side and said, “I’m real proud of the fact that you were bold enough to admit that you have a therapist, because it shows that you’re not ashamed to admit it.”
My mouth dropped, and I was like, “Wow, I didn’t know the impact.”
Q: How did you tell your congregation?
At a church business meeting. In a Baptist church, on a quarterly basis the officers and the pastor meet with the congregation.
Q: And what was the immediate response from the members?
It was welcomed, and that was a shock. It was welcomed. They really appreciated the fact of me sharing that information, and they were very supportive.
Q: Were you afraid of what the response might be?
My concern was, would this undermine my credibility as a strong leader within the congregation? In actuality, it did not.
Q: Do you feel that you faced any different or more difficult issues as an African-American pastor?
This is a hard question to answer. The history of the African-American pastor is that he or she is a leader, and a prophetic voice in the community. As a result, there are models that have been constructed for African-American pastors that place us in a position where people feel that we have to be everything for everybody without error or imperfections.
However, if this question would be raised to my brothers and sisters who are pastors but are not African-American, their response may be similar.
I think the problem that many pastors -- including myself -- encounter is inheriting a description of what a pastor should be that has not been defined by God. As a result, we spend a lot of time trying to live up to the image that society has placed on us that was never in God’s pastoral job description.
Q: If you could give advice to pastors struggling with mental health issues, what would you say?
I would say that there is not anything wrong with identifying that a person is dealing with mental health issues. This does not diminish your role as a pastor or reduce your faith in being a child of God. This just means that you are human and need help.
There are some forms of evangelical models that teach people just to pray through your illness and that God will do the rest. When a person is dealing with mental health issues, they must understand that God has equipped many people to help deal with any mental health issues that are creating challenges in an individual’s life.
Don’t be embarrassed to admit that you need help.
Read more from Wayne Weathers »
Faith & Leadership
How can clergy achieve positive mental health?
A study of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina has found that certain conditions correspond to both a lower likelihood of depression and anxiety and to higher levels of positive mental health. By promoting these, churches can help their clergy thrive.
How can clergy achieve positive mental health?
The Rev. Chip Webb, far right, drinks coffee at McDonald's most mornings to connect with people outside his congregation. He says the practice helps him remember that he is a member of a broader community. Photo by Lauren Olinger
A new study of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina has found that certain conditions correspond to both a lower likelihood of depression and anxiety and to higher levels of positive mental health. By promoting these, churches can help their clergy thrive.McDonald’s might not be the first place people think of as a hub for ministry. But that’s where you’ll find the Rev. Chip Webb most mornings, sipping a steaming coffee as the Pfafftown, North Carolina, community streams in.
“At 8 a.m., at 9 a.m., at 10 a.m., there are a whole lot of older adult United Methodists taking care of their needs for fellowship in those very inexpensive fast food joints,” Webb said.
And he counts himself among them. Many of the people he chats with each morning are not members of his Brookstown United Methodist congregation, and he relies on those conversations for outside perspective.
“It’s a wonderful practice for me, simply to confirm for myself that I’m a member of this broader community, and my life doesn’t just center around being at the church or with church folk,” Webb said.
It wasn’t always that way.
“In my first appointment, I would have thought, ‘If people see me at McDonald’s or Hardee’s every day, they’ll think I’m just a slacker,’” he said. “But the reality is it feeds my soul, and I’m able to feed other people, emotionally and spiritually.”
Do you regularly take time to care for your mental health?
As the Clergy Health Initiative(link is external)at Duke Divinity School is finding, that sense of connectedness can be a marker of something very powerful for clergy: positive mental health.
Positive mental health is more than the absence of negative emotions. People with positive mental health experience high levels of positive emotions, which can be anything from chuckling at a cartoon to feeling awe at the sunset. They feel good about themselves as individuals, experiencing meaning in their lives, positive relationships and personal growth. They also feel satisfied with themselves in community with others -- a sense of belonging and contribution.
In their professional roles, clergy frequently negotiate highly stressful situations, and that can take a personal toll. Researchers with the Clergy Health Initiative found that United Methodist clergy in North Carolina experience high rates of depression and anxiety(link is external). Clergy in other mainline Protestant denominations face similar pressures and likely experience similar outcomes.
At the same time, the unique vocation and responsibilities of clergy may have a bearing on their positive mental health. Many clergy strive to live engaged and meaningful lives, and like other caregivers, they feel a strong calling to their work. They also often feel called to help others find meaning and joy during times of suffering and negative circumstances.
In a new study of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina recently published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion(link is external), the Clergy Health Initiative set out to determine which factors might protect clergy against problems such as emotional exhaustion, depression and anxiety, and which factors might improve their positive mental health.
They discovered that the factors associated with a lower likelihood of negative outcomes such as depression and anxiety are not necessarily the same as those associated with positive mental health. By identifying factors and pursuing strategies that relate to both, churches can decrease mental health problems among clergy and boost pastors’ positive mental health at the same time.
“People with positive mental health have been shown to work more effectively with people of different backgrounds, races and genders,” said Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, the Clergy Health Initiative’s research director. “They’re also more open to social interaction and to new ideas, and better equipped to solve problems creatively. Who wouldn’t want that sort of leader at the helm of their congregation?”
Moreover, those with positive mental health are less likely to experience a new case of anxiety or depression, be hospitalized or develop a chronic disease in the next year.
So while offering support and treatment for depression and anxiety is important, Proeschold-Bell said, churches should also put resources toward proactively promoting clergy’s positive mental health, which can further serve as a preventive against physical or mental health problems.
The Clergy Health Initiative study found several factors related to positive mental health in clergy -- leading a “positive congregation,” for example, in which congregants get along with each other, contribute positively to the surrounding community, and are open to new experiences and new people; and perceiving that congregants support the pastor as an individual, not just as a pastor.
Do you perceive that your congregants or community support you as an individual?
But more importantly, the study found three factors that were associated with both a lower likelihood of negative and a greater likelihood of positive mental health. It’s in these areas -- experiencing less financial stress, getting adequate social and emotional support, and not feeling socially isolated -- where interventions may have the greatest impact, not just for United Methodist clergy but for clergy in other denominations as well.Financial stress among clergy is not uncommon. The minimum salary for a full-time pastor in the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church is roughly $42,000; the median full-time income in this study was $48,000. While housing expenses are often covered as part of a compensation package, clergy responsible for the expenses of raising a family and paying off debt from seminary and undergraduate education may well experience financial strain.
In addition, the frequent relocations required of itinerant United Methodist clergy may limit the incomes of clergy spouses, who may not receive promotions because of short tenures, thereby increasing the family’s financial stress. Lengthening church appointments could help, the study said, as could providing financial counseling and planning tools for clergy.
Clergy themselves, speaking with Clergy Health Initiative researchers, named a variety of strategies they use to increase social support and decrease social isolation -- joining a covenant peer group, for example, or finding a mentor.
“Ministry is lonely, particularly in some of these smaller churches,” said the Rev. Jenny Wilson, associate pastor of Apex United Methodist Church in Apex, North Carolina. “You don’t have a large staff. You’re not part of a big team.”
A covenant group can go a long way toward providing clergy with much-needed support and accountability, she said. “I always was in one. It has been huge for me.”
Webb said his ministry has benefited from a mentoring relationship with a more seasoned pastor.
“My very first appointment [as a student pastor], I had four churches,” he said. “At the main church, there was a person who was maybe eight years older than me, and he was my lifeline. He sought me out to engage me; he was hospitable and invitational and nonjudgmental. He’d been doing it long enough where he could simply say to me, ‘You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to put up with this.’ And whether I listened to him or not, that was extremely helpful for me.”
The Rev. David Woodhouse of Smyrna United Methodist Church near Robbins, North Carolina, increased the level of social support he receives from his congregation by engaging them in the shared work of ministry. He let his congregation know that as pastor, he intended to be present and available to people. But he also challenged them to join his efforts: “If the only people who get a visit are the people I visit, then we as a church aren’t going to fulfill our calling.”
“That concept of ‘doing church as a team’ is really important from the start,” Woodhouse said. “The truth is, a leader makes a big difference, but the impact of that leader is multiplied tremendously if others come alongside of that person, and it becomes a team effort.”
It can also have a big effect on the pastor’s health.
Editor’s note: A copy of the study is available on the websites of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion(link is external) and the Clergy Health Initiative(link is external).
Questions to consider:
- Do you regularly take time to care for your mental health? Do you pursue strategies that might improve your positive mental health, rather than only focusing on reducing depression or anxiety? What strategies have worked for you in the past?
- Do you perceive that your congregants or community support you as an individual? What markers do you look for to know whether that is true?
- Do you lead what researchers call a "positive congregation"? How much of your leadership is spent helping congregants get along with one another, contributing to the community, or feeling open to new experiences and people?
Read more from Kate Rugani »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Donald Hands and Wayne Fehr combine clinical psychology and spiritual direction to create a practical model of spirituality that integrates theology, psychology, and an understanding of individual frailties in a new way. Spiritual Wholeness draws on counseling experience with more than 400 clergy and pinpoints the human problems, traps, and temptations awaiting those who choose the clergy role.
Clergy will learn to develop and maintain a psychologically healthy spirituality in relationships with others. Judicatory executives and therapists working with clergy will gain insight into addiction problems and how to help clergy move toward greater emotional and spiritual health.
Learn more and order the book »
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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