Date

5-23-2025

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Education in Community Care and Counseling (EdD)

Chair

Ward Jason

Keywords

Wellbeing, clergy, pastoral, resilience, ministry, stress, Igbo, JD-R

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

The research provided a description of the pastoral resilience of the Igbo clergy in the United States. It began with an exploration of pastoral stresses and coping strategies employed in mitigating the impacts associated with the exercise of their priestly ministries in the States. The study was theoretically grounded in the framework of Job Resources (JD-R), which integrated positive psychology to guide the research process. The JD-R framework is a model for work that shows how stress in ministry happens when the demands on clergy are greater than the resources they have, including positive psychology, to handle those demands. The study highlighted the clergy’s ministry demands and resources to predict both individual and organizational outcomes, as well as the interaction between ministry expectations and resources in relation to well-being. It applied a qualitative research method to describe the lived pastoral experiences of the participants' nature and contextual patterns from their perspectives. Its systematic approach was a semi-structured interview for data collection, with qualitative content analysis to categorize the results into three themes and five sub-themes that answered three research questions and filled the gap of the previous study. The study identified a limitation: the need to further explore the organizational (Diocese) resilience with the focus of the discussion and conclusion on the pastoral stresses and coping skills of the Igbo clergy in the United States.

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