Interfaith Women Leaders’ Wellbeing and Leadership

Workshop for interfaith women leaders' wellbeing and leadership

Religious women in the interfaith spaces have experienced serious burnout and greatly suffered under heavy stresses. For the last 5 years, I have worked with religious women leaders and studied about their burnout and internal and external factors of the stresses. The effects of burnout in the medical field during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis are well-documented (Leo et al., 2021). However, this burnout pattern during the COVID-19 crisis was also strongly present in women religious leaders (Hydinger et. al., 2024). Women of color were especially more likely to experience distress during this time than their white counterparts (Lee et al., 2024; Francis & Village, 2023; Palmer et al., 2024). Factors correlated with this increased risk for distress and burnout include being early in one’s religious vocational career, living and working in urban or suburban areas, and having young children (Lee et al., 2024). The stresses of women in religious leadership result from both individual and systematic challenges. As they deal with personal religious conflicts and limited resources, women and femmes often struggle with the strong influences of patriarchal and hierarchical religious beliefs against women’s religious leadership. As they contend with gender roles and the glass ceiling in a sexist society, women in religious leadership are up against female clergy stereotypes and the “stained-glass ceiling” phenomenon in religious communities. These double struggles escalate their burnout more quickly. The intensity of these stressors is compounded by how interfaith women leaders experience limited access to professional support from providers who understand their perspectives and challenges (Gutiérrez, 1990).  They also often find themselves excluded from the support opportunities that professional networks often afford (Robinson et al., 2023).

The purpose of this workshop is to listen to the needs of women/femmes in interreligious leadership, to allow them to share their suffering with one another, to create space for their wellness together, and to enhance their leadership skills. This workshop aims to equip interfaith women leaders who are either currently in religious organizations or preparing for religious vocational careers with the wellness tools they need to sustain a lifetime of religious work and avoid burnout. By creating a small group, this workshop provides a space that encourages participants to develop and sustain their own network even after finishing this workshop program. This means that a study will be conducted by inviting participants into the community with one another in a closed group of the same members throughout the year. 

This workshop has two goals. The first is to foster religious women leaders’ wellness. To facilitate women’s wellness, it is necessary to learn about women’s bodies and minds in terms of physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being. By providing an educational opportunity to learn about their bodies and minds, this workshop will cultivate the well-being of support programs for women in religious leadership in a holistic sense. The second is to empower their leadership styles and enhance their confidence. As they explore their own identities and their capacities in terms of physical, psychological, and spiritual health, it becomes much easier to develop their own leadership style. By providing lectures and workshops, this workshop will promote how they can build and increase their self-confidence and learn good skills to lead their congregations and organizations.

This workshop is designed for a small interfaith women leaders’ group in the format of a monthly meeting. This monthly gathering will serve the purpose of creating a brave space for interfaith women’s cohort to establish healthy group norms, listen to one another’s struggles, and name their support needs. All participants will engage in group activities to get to know one another better and build community to create a sense of belonging among group members. They will identify and share their own struggles in a circle in the morning session. In the afternoon, a guest speaker will give a talk about clergy burnout and they will reflect their own burnout. This conversation aims to invite participants to explore ways to meet their psychological needs and prevent burnout, especially considering the unique intersection of institutional and structural demands that participants experience as interfaith women leaders. 

          Four intended outcomes and impacts on faith and health for this workshop are expected. First, interfaith women leaders would give more attention to their physical, psychological, and spiritual health and learn the skills to prevent burnout. By sharing their struggles and listening to the guest lectures, they would experience how to take care of their own needs and make a balance between work and life. Second, as these women share their struggles throughout the year, they would make this group one of their networks and learn how to cultivate support groups for others. This workshop would serve them as one of the models of cultivating a small support group in their vocational settings. Third, by sharing their struggles and listening to others’ struggles, participants would experience healing in a more collaborative way. No one can be healed alone. Cultivating a good environment, this workshop would empower interfaith women leaders to renew their strength and develop self-confidence collaboratively together. Fourth, by fostering a healthy community with the potential to develop openness to relationships across denominational and/or religious lines beyond US, this workshop aims to cultivate lasting interfaith connections in the local and global immigrant communities.