Happy Pastors!

Okay- Since I published the "Pastors hate life and die early, ugly deaths" statistics awhile ago, I thought I needed to balance that with this post from Out of Ur today.

Apparently, we pastors are enjoying life a bit more than the common wisdom suggests:

"Last month the Chicago Tribune reported that pastors are the happiest people on earth—really. Research done by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that clergy ranked highest in job satisfaction and “general happiness.” They even out ranked highly paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers.

The article reports:

Eighty-seven percent of clergy said they were "very satisfied" with their work, compared with an average 47 percent for all workers. Sixty-seven percent reported being "very happy," compared with an average 33 percent for all workers.

"They look at their occupation as a calling," Carroll said. "A pastor does get called on to enter into some of the deepest moments of a person's life, celebrating a birth and sitting with people at times of illness or death. There's a lot of fulfillment."

Can this possibly be true?"

Read the rest here, (including the statistics on how bad off pastors are)

Comments

[Jeremy Fagan]

In the UK, clergy seem to come 2nd to hairdressers in happiness rankings...

[chris Leonardo]

bob, our old pastor back in the day probably didn't get called in for this survey :-)

i love reading this kind of stuff, it feels right to think that bearing such a strange and profound weight in the lives of so many people would have its difficulties but ultimately be worth the cost and...satisfying.