The Cinderella of positive psychology: spiritual well-being as an emerging dimension of flourishing in pastoral work

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The invaluable, yet challenging role of pastors in the community signifies the need to understand and care for their well-being. Well-being, conceptualized in the multidimensional construct of flourishing, does not explicitly include spiritual well-being, yet, it is the foundation of pastors’ well-being. In this article we aim to describe pastors’ spiritual well-being and in so doing, highlight its fundamental importance in pastors’ flourishing in the ministry.

Methods

Positioned in the interpretive pragmatic paradigm, data were gathered and analysed from three focus groups with 18 pastors in the Dutch Reformed Church and the Uniting Reformed Church of South Africa. Interactive qualitative analysis was applied, and results were conceptually refined through narrative synthesis.

Results

Four themes were constructed to describe pastors’ spiritual well-being namely: i) an altruistic calling; ii) discipleship iii) seasons of the ministry; and iv) ethics.

Conclusion

The findings highlight the importance and essence of the spiritual aspects predominant to pastors’ well-being. Attending to spiritual well-being will enhance their resilience and constructive coping and is integral to their way of flourishing at work. This proposes an extension of the flourishing framework to include spiritual well-being as an explicitly conceptualized sub-dimension for application to the study’s Christian pastoral context.

KEYWORDS:

• Pastors
• well-being
• spiritual well-being
• flourishing
• interactive qualitative analysis
• IQA
• narrative synthesis
• interpretive pragmatic paradigm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Cinderella metaphor is about unrecognized value—someone useful and important yet whose importance has for some time been ignored or neglected (Deacon, 1993; Esterhuysen, 2012).

2. The first author was the facilitator and primary researcher of the study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Cornelia Rudolph

Dr EC (alias Liné) Rudolph, MA Theology, M Com HRM, PhD Psychology, Registered Industrial Psychologist (PS0114146/PR0427926) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Human Resource Management (HRM) at the College of Economic and Management Science. She is the Chair of the HRM Research Ethics Review Committee (DREC) at the Department of HRM and the Deputy Chair of the College of Economic and Management Science.

Antoni Barnard

Prof HA (alias Antoni) Barnard, DLitt et Phil, Registered Psychologist (Industrial & Counseling) PS0050164, professor in the Department of Industrial and Organisational Psychology (IOP) at the College of Economic and Management Science. She is the Chair of the Higher Degrees Committee at the Department of IOP.