One of the joys of doing a PhD is that your reading rarely goes where you planned. This post isn’t a research finding. It’s a trail of thought from the last few weeks of reading, and I’m sharing it because it has changed how I think about the relationship between ministers and the congregations they serve.

Starting with the work environment

Much of my thinking sits within the Job Demands–Resources model, a well-established framework from work psychology. Put simply, every job has demands that take energy and effort and resources that provide impetus for the work and for us. Not all demands are adverse, getting the right balance bewteen deands that challenge and those that drain is important. Resources don’t just motivate us; they can also modify the impact of demands. A heavy week is survivable when you feel supported. A heavier loading on the ministry activities that closely align with one’s ministry convictions can be energising, whereas a week taxing on things that seem peripheral will hit differently.

For clergy, the one question I have is about the contextual demands and resourdes in interacitons with one’s congregation. The ministry context is unusual. The people you serve are also, in a sense, your employer, your community and your spiritual charges

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Do we “fit”?

That led me to read the research around person–organisation fit: the idea that we do better when our values match those of the place we work. There’s a small body of research applying this to clergy, and it suggests that the match between a minister and their congregation matters for wellbeing. One study even found that a minister’s own sense of living by their values mattered most when the fit with their congregation was poor.

The wider fit literature goes further. It’s not only about shared values. It also asks: does this place give me what I need? Do I have what this place needs from me? Needs and supplies. Demands and abilities.

Useful questions. But something about them started to bother me.

It all started to sound like a ledger

I tried a little thought experiment. What would a happy congregation say about their minister? Probably things like: they know us, they’re there when we need them, the preaching feeds us, they don’t push change too fast.

And what would a happy minister say about their congregation? Perhaps: they trust me to lead, lay leaders share the load, they’re open to vision, they respect my days off and my family.

Both lists are reasonable. But read them side by side and they sound like an exchange. What I give, what I get. Availability traded for boundaries. Stability traded for change. And you can imagine a congregation that is very happy precisely because its minister is quietly over-giving, until one day they can’t.

It all felt rather transactional. And I don’t think that’s what most of us signed up for.

What would Gottman say?

So I found myself reaching for a very different body of work: John and Julie Gottman’s decades of research on what makes couple relationships last. It’s an analogy, not a direct comparison, but it’s a surprisingly fruitful one.

One of the striking ideas in that literature is that keeping score is a sign of a relationship in trouble. Healthy couples don’t track who did the dishes more often. When the ledger comes out, trust has usually already slipped.

Instead, Gottman describes relationships built on things like:

• Knowing each other’s world — the story, the struggles, what lights the other person up.
• Fondness and admiration — speaking well of each other when the other isn’t in the room.
• Turning toward — responding when someone reaches out, even in small ways.
• Giving the benefit of the doubt — a missed visit becomes “they must be stretched” rather than “they don’t care”.
• Accepting influence — both sides can be moved by the other.
• Repair — coming back to each other after conflict.
• Shared meaning — building something together that neither could build alone.

The Gottmans also noticed that many conflicts in lasting relationships are never actually resolved. They’re managed with goodwill.  And the most corrosive thing of all was contempt.

Now imagine a minister and congregation describing each other in those terms. It sounds very different from the lists above.

The organisational world has a word for this too

Interestingly, work psychology has been circling the same idea. Research on the “psychological contract” (the unwritten expectations between a worker and an organisation) distinguishes between transactional contracts, which are specific and short-term, and relational ones, built on trust, loyalty and mutual investment over time. There’s even a third kind, sometimes called an ideological contract, where both parties are bound together by a shared cause bigger than either of them.

That last one got my attention. For ministers and congregations, there’s always a third party in the room: the mission, and the God behind it.

And when these unwritten contracts are broken, the research consistently links that sense of breach to lower trust, lower commitment and people wanting to leave. Which, for anyone who has walked alongside a minister thinking about walking away, sounds very familiar.

The Matter of Love

I couldn’t help reading all this back through 1 Corinthians 13. Can we get to the point where as a body  we become caught up in our competing needs, which expresses itself in competing demands and expectations –  and our relationships become a bit of a scorecard. 

But the chapter speaks about  not keeping an account of wrongs. The very thing the Gottmans found in distressed couples, and the very thing a transactional contract runs on.

Patience that can live with unresolved disagreement. Kindness. Not insisting on one’s own way. Not rude. Believing the best. Hoping. Enduring. It reads almost like a description of a healthy workplace relationship, if the workplace happened to be a community of love.

Where this leaves me (for now)

I’m not sure yet where this thread leads. But it has shifted the question I’m asking. Instead of only “do this minister and this congregation fit?”, I’m wondering: is this relationship functioning as a mutual serving or has it slipped into a contract, conditional giving?

A few questions I’m sitting with, and would love to hear your thoughts on:

• If you’re in ministry: where do you notice yourself keeping score? What would help you put the ledger down?
• If you’re a church leader or member: what does “turning toward” your minister look like in practice?
• What does repair look like in your congregation after a hard season?

More musings to come as the reading continues.

Valerie Ling