How can church leaders overcome burnout? In this episode, Callie Swanlund discusses her book, From Weary to Wholehearted, exploring burnout and its unique challenges. She introduces the SPARK practice—Soma, Preparation, Awe, Retreat, and Kinship—as a holistic approach to overcoming ministry burnout. Callie emphasizes the importance of recognizing burnout signs, creating supportive environments for clergy and other leaders, and taking incremental steps toward restoration and wellbeing.
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How can church leaders overcome burnout? In this episode, Callie Swanlund discusses her book, From Weary to Wholehearted, exploring burnout and its unique challenges. She introduces the SPARK practice—Soma, Preparation, Awe, Retreat, and Kinship—as a holistic approach to overcoming ministry burnout. Callie emphasizes the importance of recognizing burnout signs, creating supportive environments for clergy and other leaders, and taking incremental steps toward restoration and wellbeing.
Jessica Anschutz: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I am Jessica Anschutz the Associate Director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, and I am your host for this Leading Ideas Talk. Joining me is Callie Swanlund, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and author of From Weary to Wholehearted: A Restorative Resource for Overcoming Clergy Burnout. Our focus today is overcoming clergy burnout. Welcome, Callie, I look forward to our conversation today.
Callie Swanlund: Me too, thank you for this invitation.
Jessica Anschutz: We are glad to have you. Callie, I want to give our listeners a little bit of background on the book. How did you come to write From Weary to Wholehearted?
Callie Swanlund: Some of it obviously has to come from an autobiographical place of finding ups and downs in my own ministry and finding myself over the years moving from different full time parish leadership positions to beginning to grow my own ministry, where I companion people, often church leaders lay and ordained, in what I call finding your spark, helping people find their greater purpose and meaning. It’s been a topic I’ve wanted to write about for a while. And last year as I was looking at finally writing a book—cause I was waiting for the Holy spirit to be really clear with me, and she was really clear with me that it was time to write my book—I sat down and wrote a different proposal on a different project for a different publisher. And while I was working on that, my … my current publisher of From Weary to Wholehearted reached out and said, would you like to write a resource for us for weary faith leaders? And they’d clearly done their homework on me. Cause I was like, yes, that’s something I care deeply about. And it was just one of those things that you couldn’t ignore. And I was like, yeah, this book is already, it’s already written. It’s already on my heart and I would be glad to write it.
Jessica Anschutz: Congratulations.
Callie Swanlund: Thank you.
Jessica Anschutz: And thank you for writing such a helpful resource. Now, I know your focus is clergy, but you also reference in the opening lay ministry professionals and also people who have experienced burnout and other professions. How do you hope the book will bring restoration to anyone who is experiencing burnout?
Callie Swanlund: Clergy burnout is such a hot topic right now in the media and other places that my publisher wanted to make sure that we highlighted clergy burnout, but I was clear from the beginning that this was for ministry burnout and beyond. And you know all the little ladies at my church who have read it who are not in active ministry of any sort have said, “Oh, there’s wisdom in there for me too.” And I said, “Oh, good. I hope so.” What at the very, very base level. I want people to read this and just say, “I recognize part of myself and I’m hearing that others are experiencing something I’ve experienced.” We are in such a state of isolation and … and loneliness, that sometimes we forget that plenty of others are on parallel journeys, if not the same journey as us. And so, even if someone has zero capacity to implement even the most accessible of tools that I introduce in the book, if they get through the introduction and say, “Oh, I feel less alone.” People write to me after they finished the introduction and they say, “I’m in tears. I know I’m in the right place.” Then that’s a step that feels—of course I’d like them to dig deeper too—but the first step is … is having a name for what you’re experiencing and knowing that other people understand it.
Jessica Anschutz: Let’s talk about that a little bit, right? How would people know if they are experiencing burnout?
Callie Swanlund: So, there are a few reactions when someone hears the topic of my book, and a lot of people sort of like … like, cover their eyes like, “You’re not talking to me, are you?” Like, “How’d you know that I’m burnt out?” Or some people just pass it by really quickly and they’re like, “I’m not burnt out.” And I’m like, “Lovely. I hope that’s true, first of all. I hope that is absolutely true. And second of all, I still think there’s something to reading a resource that helps us prevent burnout.” So even if you’re not in it now, how do you continue on this good path?
I think sometimes the people who are in burnout already know. They might be—if you’re listening right now—you might be the one who is resisting getting up and going to your job in the mornings, not finding joy or purpose or meaning where you once did. A lot of my client base grew in 2020 when a couple of things happened, and one of those was that pandemic ministry, or pandemic nursing, or pandemic teaching, or any of those vocations didn’t … didn’t feel the same as before. And people were like, “Wait. Is this what I signed up for? Is this even making a difference?”
And then we had we had a big racial reckoning in the United States with the murder of George Floyd. And I honestly think that had as much of an impact as the pandemic itself on people saying, “Am I doing something that actually makes a difference?” And so, I think a lot of people are asking themselves those questions still five years later, “Are we are we doing something that uses our gifts and makes a difference in the world?” So, some of those questions can be an indicator of burnout. Feeling like we have more drains than fills. I learned this from my friend, Jenn Giles Kemper, who does Sacred Ordinary Days. And it’s an exercise where you can go through your calendar and write a D or a F next to everything that is scheduled in your week, a drain or a fill. If you identify your week as having more drains than fills, you’re either probably already in burnout or definitely, definitely on your way. Our week in balance should have things that give us life, more things that give us life, than suck our soul.
Burnout—also, I use it some sometimes interchangeably with the word “overwhelm.” Burnout is specific to our job, and overwhelm can be the same set of feelings, but in various areas of life. And when we’re in a state of overwhelm, we’re immobilized. We are not able to come up with a good or healthy solution. So, another way, if you’re listening and you recognize that in yourself—that you’re just sort of like “I know something needs to change and I have no idea what it is.” That’s probably an indicator that you’re in a state of overwhelm and/or burnout. And honestly one of the antidotes is to not make a decision in that moment. That’s really hard because people want to push through and people around you might say, “Okay, so what do you need? What do you need?” And you might just say, “I don’t know.” And what you actually need is to step aside, whether that’s for a day, a week, or a month, I don’t know because I don’t know this, the acuteness of one’s burnout. But it actually does require you to step aside before making the next decision. And I’ve watched so many people, especially in ministry, have their judicatory leader, like bishop or other leader say “Let’s get you … let’s get you on leave. Let’s get you some time off. Let’s get you one, two, three months away.”
Jessica Anschutz: So, let’s stay with clergy for a minute. How and why is clergy burnout different from that of other professionals?
Callie Swanlund: I think there are a lot of things that, that do overlap, especially for people who are in what I call like, “outward facing professions,” service professions like medical, therapists, teachers, etc. Clergy by nature have an around-the-clock, on-call job, which is not the case for all professionals. We also have those who are parish-based clergy, have the … one of their primary communities is their workplace. So, for a lot of people of faith, their faith community is a source, a pillar of strength for them, and a source for their social interactions and things like that. Clergy sort of have, they have their foot in that world as leader in that world, but they don’t get to reap the benefits fully because there are boundaries and there are power dynamics to take into consideration. And so, while their congregants often want to take care of them, there’s this illusion that they don’t want to see their clergy leader as “weak.” And so, we’re holding ourselves to a certain standard and trying to make sense of the world in real time for ourselves and for a whole bunch of other people, too.
So, when a news flash comes across about a school shooting or warring countries or whatever it might be, we’re almost not able to sit with our own feelings about that before we think about “How do I make sense of this for others, because others are going to be looking toward—to me for some comforts, for some meaning making.” It’s exhausting. It’s a lot. It’s … having your family, if you are someone with a spouse or kids—or even if you’re not—I feel like your social life is somehow scrutinized and on display. And so having this place where you can bring your family as part of your vocation and career, but also feels a bit like a fishbowl sometimes to have all of that on display. It’s just such a unique vocation.
Jessica Anschutz: It is. And there are wonderful aspects of it and then (as you’ve highlighted), challenges as well. In the book, you introduce a five element SPARK practice for folks to address burnout or weariness. I don’t want you to give away all the secrets of the book, but I would like for you to introduce those five practices for our audience and perhaps give them a brief description or example of each in hopes that it will interest them in studying them more in depth and buying the book.
Nature: Our First Way of Knowing God, a seven-session video-based adult Christian study, recognizes our innate and embedded knowing of God in and through God’s creation nature. This popular resource includes videos, discussion questions and a suggested weekly spiritual practice in nature that can be done either individually or as a group. Learn more and watch an introductory video at churchleadership.com/nature.
Callie Swanlund: As I said earlier, finding your spark, that, that term is already deeply important to me and my ministry. I talk about your spark as that little divine light within you. And some of us have a flourishing tended spark and some of us have a … just like, something that’s been built on wet wood and is really burning out. And so, looking at psychologists, the work of the Nagoski sisters who wrote the book Burnout, Brené Brown in whose work I’m trained, and scientists and other wisdom bearers like our indigenous siblings. I sort of put together what are the five components that would make a holistic approach to moving from weary to wholehearted, as my book says.
So, the S in spark is Soma, which means body. In the Greek New Testament, it appears 144 times, I believe. And some of those times refer to celestial bodies which—like the sun and moon and stars—which also connects our body to God’s greater creation. And so, in … in my somatic practices, I remind people that our body is already with us. It’s the thing we sometimes think about last, but it’s with us right away. So, if we find ourselves just really spiraling, we can do a breath practice or practice putting our feet on the ground for some grounding. So, I give lots of things that are already with us all the time that require no extra space or tools or anything.
P is preparation. I call this the least sexy spark of these because I think some people are like, “Ugh, I don’t want to prepare,” especially like an Enneagram seven they’re like, “I got this. I can jump right in, right?” But preparation, I tend to think of our Jewish siblings who don’t just arrive on Saturday and say, “Oh, it’s a day off. It’s my Sabbath day.” There are entire TikTok accounts devoted to people preparing their meals during the week to be able to rest fully on Saturday. Whereas soma is the bodily part of this practice, preparation is the mental part of this practice. It includes intention setting and … and claiming mindfulness to be present in the moment.
A is the anchor at the center and it stands for awe. Making space for awe. There’s a recent book Dacher Keltner wrote a book on awe and it’s from scientists’ and psychologists’ perspective, which tell us what people of faith have known for a very long time. And that is that feeling small in the face of something bigger, feeling connected to something beyond us and sometimes even beyond our understanding, is very, very good for our health and wellbeing. It lowers our heart rate. It helps us want to be connected to others. And it even releases the love hormone oxytocin. And so, awe practices … the great thing about awe is that just like negative emotions start to … to take over if we’re ranting, and someone else joins in the ranting, and then we up the ranting, and we’re all just sort of having a negativity session. The same thing can happen with positive emotions. So, awe begets awe. The more we recognize and name awe, the more likely we are to experience it and to slow down enough to see the little ladybug crawling across the ground.
The fourth spoke is claiming retreat. R is for retreat. And I chose that instead of rest because I think retreat goes to an even deeper level than rest. Retreat means time set apart, as a noun or as a verb, it means to pull away. We often think that a retreat needs to be something far away or expensive or time consuming. And while I would love for everyone to take a four-day retreat somewhere, I think we need to start in small increments. I think that retreat can happen in 15 minutes. It can even happen in five minutes. I just was on a trip, a work trip, to lead a retreat and I rented a Jeep. I’ve always thought maybe I would be a Jeep girl and so I tested this theory. I talked them into renting me a Jeep Wrangler and took off the … the roof panels and drove down the road with my down the road with my [windows down]—the wind blowing in my hair. And I thought, “You know what? I think I just turned a car rental into a retreat.” I had an hour on the way to my destination to have time set apart that was holy and sacred. So, retreat is deeply important.
And the last one is kinship, K. Kinship is that connection we have with others. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes a bit about this in Braiding Sweetgrass. She’s an indigenous writer and botanist. Another indigenous writer and theologian Kaitlin Curtice writes about it in Living Resistance, and she calls kinship the invisible string that connects my heart to your heart. And it’s not just about human to human. Our kinship is also about all of God’s creation, about the earth as well
And so, if you go through S-P-A-R-K, soma is body, preparation is mind, awe is spirit, retreat is time set apart, and kinship is time in connection with others. My thinking is that I use these principles when I’m planning my own personal retreat. I use them to sort of assess the balance of my week. Am I engaging in these things? And when one is missing, it’s an invitation for me to say “hmm … why is that missing?” And is that something I can bring in and incorporate into my week.
Jessica Anschutz: So, building on that a little bit, if folks who are listening hear this and they think, “Oh my goodness, I’m not doing one or more of these.” How might you advise them to get started?
Callie Swanlund: Really honestly the things that are already available to us—when I lead retreats, I often talk about, like, pocket practices. So, I’m going give you a couple of examples right now that you could listen to this and do right away. So, when I’m working with my clients, I often teach them somatic practices. So, things that often regulate us, bring down our heart rate, and our blood pressure, and can connect us to the divine within us.
You can soothe yourself with a small gesture. So, like I might put my hand on my heart while I’m listening to someone. And that other person doesn’t maybe even notice because it’s not like I’m putting my hands up in the air, but it might be an indicator to me, you are safe here.
And so, I think starting with little things, but I’ll give you one … one practice that I use with regard to retreat. And if you can’t, if you can’t bring yourself to read the book, you don’t have enough time or you feel overwhelmed even by that idea, or implementing practices feels like too much right now, I’m going to give you what I call the retreat on-ramp. I think everyone needs retreat. I have plenty of people who haven’t been on retreat in years or ever. And so, I talk about the retreat on-ramp. It is—I want you to take out your calendar and look at the next week and find one hour, one hour to claim retreat, to claim time set apart. Could be going and sitting at the water’s edge, that could be taking yourself on a walk in the woods, that could be locking yourself in a room while your kids take a bath, having some sort of retreat. But I think we could all find one hour in the next week. And while we’re looking at our calendar, look and see what is one half day that you can clear in the next month. And then what is one day or overnight that you can clear in the next six to 12 months. I don’t think we can start out with “We really need retreat right now.” I think a lot of us really need retreat right now, and if I tell someone find a two-day block in the next month, a lot of people are going to tell me that’s impossible. So, I tell them what is possible and that is starting with the smallest increment. If you want to make it even smaller, what’s 15 minutes today, by the end of the day, what’s an hour in the next week, what’s a half day in the next month, what’s a two-day period in the next year. In so doing and taking that time set apart, you can begin to think about the other practices.
You don’t even have to give lots of thought. All you have to do is follow what I call your soul cravings. We all have cravings, right? And like when I was pregnant, I learned that my cravings were actually things that indicated what my body needed more of. Like I just wanted a ton of ground beef tacos when I was pregnant with my second. And I realized that my body was really needing a lot of iron. When we have a soul craving, when we see someone’s picture on Instagram of the Bahamas and we like just have this like ping of longing or even jealousy or something like that, I think it’s telling us something. It’s telling us, maybe it is straight that we need to go to the Bahamas. But more often than that, like what’s the takeaway from that? It might be that we also need time off, that we need a vacation, that we need to be near water—things that are more accessible than getting on a plane and heading to the Bahamas. So, when you’re on retreat, that 15 minutes or that hour or that half day even, what are you wishing you had more of? “I wish I had more time. I wish I had enough time to drive to the ocean today.” Or what are you being fulfilled by? And I’m like, “Ugh, I haven’t sat and listened to an album from end to end in months.” Pay attention to those things and then start to find ways to incorporate those. One little practice at a time. Don’t start with the whole umbrella. Start with one practice and let that lead to another.
Jessica Anschutz: I appreciate your looking at this in an incremental way and sort of baby steps. Unfortunately, our time is drawing to a close, but I want to highlight for our listeners again, that your book is From Weary to Wholehearted, and I encourage them to check it out. But as we wrap up our time together, I want to invite you to think about the laity who are supporting their pastors—even other church leaders who are experiencing burnout. How can those who are surrounding the people in leadership be supportive or attentive to those who are feeling weary?
Callie Swanlund: Absolutely. I’m so glad you asked that. A lot of the clergy I talked to as I was prepping for the writing of this book said, “I am so weary because of the systemic pieces like oppression, sexism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, etc.” And … and I touch on that in the book, but I also say that’s not on those who are weary to solve. Those are some bigger issues, yes, but we can’t, while we’re weary, solve the oppressive forces that are that are over us. And so, it takes a community to notice where some change needs to take place. To have some deeper conversations about expectations of clergy. Simple things like asking your clergy or your—there are plenty of lay ministry professionals who would identify with all of this too—asking them their vacation plan. Are you planning to use your vacation and retreat time this year?
Making space for those things, being part of the solution when you bring up a problem. Often especially the head pastor, head of staff, rector, whichever denomination you’re coming from, that lead clergy person, is hearing lots and lots and lots of feedback. And some of it is negative by nature. And so, if someone comes up and says, “Ah, it just, the sound system in here is awful” or “I can’t read how the small the print is in the bulletin” or whatever it might be, those things stack up. They might just be small, but they stack up. And so, if you are presenting a problem, are you also willing to present a solution or come alongside? Come alongside the person you’re presenting that to and say “I’m willing to come in the office and help reformat the bulletins or edit them each week” or whatever it might be. Recognizing the humanity that we all share. Clergy are no more divine than any other human. We don’t have a secret red phone that we pick up and talk to God in some special way. And so while we are leaders and often interpreters between God and God’s faithful people, remembering that your clergy are people too, and that they are likely struggling just as you are struggling, and just giving some compassion and grace with that. Letting them know that they are—that you’re grateful for them, that they’re appreciated. Those are things that go a long way. I often have my clients keep a drawer or a folder on their email of like positive notes to remember on the days when things just feel really negative and really hard. So yeah, there are many, many, many ways that you can support.
Your clergy person might not open up to you. That’s another thing to know is that like even if you are very well meaning and you go in and you say, “I’m here to listen,” there are sometimes some structures in place. So don’t take that personally but tell them that you hope that they will find a supportive person to talk to or give them a certificate for a massage or something like that.
Jessica Anschutz: Thank you so much, Callie, for taking the time to talk with me today and for pouring your heart into From Weary to Wholehearted and for sharing it not only in print form, but also in the conversation today with our listeners in hopes that folks who are experiencing that weariness or burnout may begin to take steps to being more wholehearted. So, thank you.
Callie Swanlund: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for this invitation and for doing this work to also help clergy know that they’re not alone.
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From Weary to Wholehearted: A Restorative Resource for Overcoming Clergy Burnout by Callie Swanlund (Church Publishing, 2024). This book is available from the publisher, Cokesbury, and Amazon.
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