LaVerne Campbell was born to serve.
Her mission carried on even after she retired from her 50-year nursing career in 2018. Now, she is applying her skillset at Beth Eden Baptist Church in southeast Fort Worth as its faith community nurse.
In addition to tending to minor cuts and scratches, she and other nurses in the church are often a resource for general education on diseases. Congregants in Campbell’s church have her on speed dial, she said, for support or referrals for other kinds of professional help.
Campbell said that her church’s nursing ministry was reduced from eight members to three after the COVID-19 pandemic. The physical and emotional demand of caring for congregants with chronic health issues such as diabetes, hypertension and autoimmune diseases with her smaller team can sometimes be “overwhelming,” she said.
Campbell is not alone. She was one of many laypeople who attended the Texas Health Community Hope Faith Summit. The April 22 event was designed to offer fellowship to people in both the faith and health fields while discussing topics like mental health, congregational welfare and sustaining health ministries in North Texas.
“I love what I do. I love tending to their needs, and I love being able to see them get better and change their lifestyle,” Campbell said. “But I have to intentionally unplug, and sometimes I don’t always do that for myself, so it was a good reminder of the caregiver needing to unplug and learn to say no and just take really good care of yourself.”
Religious leaders are not immune to experiencing mental illnesses and challenges. In 2015, 46% of clergy surveyed by the evangelical Christian polling firm Barna Group said that they had experienced depression at some point during their ministry. That number increased to 59% by 2020, according to the report.
Mental health and well-being is a “major issue for North Texas communities,” said David Tesmer, chief community and public policy officer for the faith-based system Texas Health Resources.
The nonprofit’s Faith Summit is a way to bring faith and health leaders together to share their experiences and learn about resources available to them from Texas Health Resources and other organizations at Tuesday’s event, he said.
“They take on a lot,” Tesmer said. “They hear a lot about problems that individuals want to come in and talk to them about. Their cup kind of gets empty and they need to fill their cup up. So they’re asking us, ‘How can we take better care of ourselves so we can take care of others?’”
Campbell and others gathered inside the Hurst Conference Center discussed the emotional toll of ministry. Four Tarrant County pastors shared how they try to keep themselves healthy in the pursuit of their role of ministering to their congregants.
“Self-care has to start with the community,” said the Rev. Ralph S. Emerson, pastor of Rising Star Baptist Church located in southeast Fort Worth. He recommended having three tiers of connectivity.
“You need somebody above you, who holds you accountable. … You need to have somebody beneath you that you can pour out into that responsibility for you to attend to them,” Emerson said. “And I think you just need good people connected to you, a real group of people who can kind of just sit and listen to you.”
It can be challenging to find time for yourself as a bi-vocational pastor, said the Rev. Dr. Gilbert Marez of Camino de Paz Christian Church, located near Fort Worth’s Oakhurst neighborhood.
Bi-vocational pastors have the same duties as full-time pastors but hold a second non-church job to supplement their ministry income.
In Marez’s experience, many Latino pastors work bi-vocationally because “churches are small, many of our parishioners are low-to-moderate income,” he said.
“You’re trying to do two or three things at the same time, never mind the fact that you’re doing baptisms, you’re doing quinceañeras, you’re doing weddings, you’re doing counseling,” Marez said. “It gets very difficult to try to set some sort of standard.”
Finding time to take breaks within the day can help, Marez said.
Understanding how your soul functions in the world will help you know how to rest, said the Rev. Johnny Brower, lead pastor of First United Methodist Church of Hurst. Taking personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment, or the Enneagram test can be the building blocks of understanding yourself better, he said.
“When you have self-awareness, you understand how you move in the world, why certain things trigger you, why certain things upset you or make you sad,” Brower said. “Instead of just going ‘Oh gosh, what’s happening there?’ I begin to know. So not only can I give grace to others, I can give grace to myself and not beat myself up.”
Before the Rev. David Grebel became interim pastor of Celebration Community Church in southwest Fort Worth; he spent decades working a mix of higher education and pastoral roles.
When it comes to thinking about how to stay in ministry for the long haul, taking a sabbatical helps, Grebel said.
“I had the chance to stop and think through again who I wanted to be theologically, who I wanted to be as a pastor, who I wanted to be as a person,” Grebel said. “So for me, the biggest self-care thing is learning how to step away so I can step back in.”
As health ministry work continues to evolve, Campbell appreciates the fresh perspectives she got from the pastors, she said. She plans to take everything she learned to help her continue serving her church — something she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
“I have to keep doing it, even though I don’t get paid to do this. It doesn’t matter,” Campbell said. “I love serving, because I know that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Marissa Greene is a Report for America corps member, covering faith for the Fort Worth Report. You can contact her at marissa.greene@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.