Tending the Church’s Inner Life: A discerning lens for leaders who want more than survival—for themselves and for the living body they serve

Ministers are taught self-care. Thank God.

Across traditions and training spaces, the guidance often arrives with the same steady heartbeat: self-care isn’t indulgence; it’s stewardship. Care for the whole self—spirit, body, emotions, relationships. Practice Sabbath and boundaries on purpose, not by accident. Seek accountability through peers, supervisors, counselors, spiritual directors. Watch the early signs of stress and compassion fatigue. Refuse the old lie that exhaustion is holiness.

This teaching matters. It has kept many of us in the work long enough to become wise.

And still—many leaders find themselves “doing self-care” while quietly unraveling.

Where common self-care teaching falls short

Most self-care guidance is organized by categories: spiritual, physical, emotional, relational. That’s helpful—until the week arrives when everything is urgent, everyone needs something, and you don’t have the bandwidth to run an internal inventory across four dimensions.

In those weeks, self-care becomes vague. Another item on the list. Another thing you’re failing to do well.

Even worse: when we’re depleted, we can start spiritualizing what is actually strain. We interpret anxiety as discernment. We mistake agitation for prophetic urgency. We call a flooded nervous system “a heavy spiritual burden.” And because ministry gives us meaningful language for suffering, we can unintentionally baptize our depletion and keep going.

A leader can have good theology and a well-written self-care plan—and still miss the simple, stubborn truth: unmet needs do not disappear. They find a way to speak.

A word of personal testimony

I was taught self-care the way the church often teaches it: spiritual practices, Sabbath, boundaries, support systems. I believed it—and I practiced it. And still, the needs of the church could feel like an onslaught. My instinct was to overfunction. I tried to keep up with the demands, to be faithful by being available, to love by being endlessly responsive.

It wasn’t until I began observing my own habits with meticulous honesty that an old teaching finally became a lived one: we are taught to love our neighbors as ourselves. If we do not learn how to love ourselves with clarity and tenderness—especially in the body—we may not yet understand what love feels like when it isn’t strained, performative, or anxious. And if we don’t know that kind of love from the inside, we will keep trying to offer it from empty hands.

A framework from my Daoist training: Hun and Po

In my Daoist training, we began not with religious performance, but with observation—learning to notice what is happening beneath what is happening.

The language we used was Hun and Po.

• Hun names the human spirit—the inward life where meaning, direction, courage, and connection live.

• Po names the body—the embodied life where breath, sleep, appetite, warmth, rest, play, and closeness reside.

I was taught a set of needs for each—two complementary “maps” for staying aligned.

For Hun, I learned the Six needs of the Human Spirit (adapted from the work of Cloé Madanes). In my own teaching I often translate “certainty” into clarity—not perfect assurance, but the next faithful step:

• Clarity (the next right step, without demanding the illusion of certainty)

• Significance (to matter, grounded in inner integrity rather than performance)

• Contribution (to be useful without purchasing worth through overfunctioning)

• Growth (to ripen through steady practice rather than self-attack)

• Connection (to belong and be seen in relationships without control)

• Variety (freshness and novelty that renew rather than distract)

For Po, I learned seven embodied needs—plain, unromantic, and often neglected in ministry precisely because they seem “too ordinary” to matter:

• Hydration

• Eating

• Sleep

• Intimacy and affectionate connection

• Rest (time off without guilt)

• Relaxation (downshifting the nervous system; breath returning home)

• Play (lightness, joy, humor—medicine for the soul)

You don’t need to share my training tradition to recognize the wisdom here: when Po is neglected, Hun gets loud. And when Hun is loud, it will try to solve embodied depletion with spiritual effort.

A discerning process: observation before interpretation

What this framework offers is not merely “more self-care.” It offers a discernment practice—a way of asking better questions before you draw spiritual conclusions.

When you feel reactive, resentful, numb, unusually exhausted, or spiritually “foggy,” begin here:

1. Observe Po first.
   Not because spirit doesn’t matter—because the body is often the simplest truth-teller.
   Ask: Am I hydrated? Have I eaten real food? Have I slept? Have I downshifted? Have I had warm, non-performative human connection? Have I played, even briefly?

2. Then observe Hun.
   Ask: What need is underfed?
   Is it clarity (too many spinning plates, no next step)?
   Significance (feeling invisible unless you produce)?
   Connection (loneliness dressed up as competence)?
   Variety (monotony turning into irritability)?
   Growth (stalled, or perfectionism punishing you)?
   Contribution (doing too much to prove you matter)?

3. Name the distortion without shame.
   Because unmet needs often get met sideways: overwork, control, people-pleasing, retreat, irritability, spiritual performance, numbing habits. The goal isn’t self-accusation. The goal is gentle accuracy.

4. Take one small action that meets one real need.
   Not a grand plan. Not a vow to “do better.” One faithful act of care that brings you back to yourself.

This is how self-care becomes discernment: not an escape from ministry, but a return to the steadiness from which ministry can be offered without harm.

Reading the congregation as a living body

Here is where the framework becomes especially useful for church leadership: Hun and Po can also be used to read a congregation.

A church is not only an institution. It is a living body with an inner life. It has habits, appetites, anxieties, hopes, and reflexes. And, like a person, when its needs go unmet, it will meet them sideways.

Consider a few examples—not as diagnoses, but as invitations to observe:

• When a congregation is starving for clarity, it may chase certainty: rigid answers, quick fixes, or scapegoats.

• When it is starving for connection, it may mistake control for closeness: cliques, gatekeeping, unspoken tests of belonging.

• When it is starving for significance, it may buy worth through performance: program-addiction, comparison, anxious growth narratives.

• When it is starving for variety, it may confuse disruption with renewal: constant reorganization, reactive changes, fatigue disguised as innovation.

• When it is starving for growth, it may punish risk: conflict avoidance, spiritual stagnation, nostalgia as protection.

• When it is starving for contribution, it may overfunction: a few exhausted saints carrying everything, while others disengage.

And yes—congregations have a kind of “Po,” too. There is an embodied life to the system: how rested the leaders are, how conflict is metabolized, whether the community can breathe, whether there is play, warmth, and genuine human connection—not only meetings.

A living example from a congregation in transition

I spoke recently with a church leader guiding a congregation through transition. A long-term minister had retired, and the departure left a visible absence—not only of leadership, but of containment. That pastor had been holding more of the congregation’s ache than anyone realized. Once they were gone, the needs surfaced all at once.

The congregation’s instinct was to keep everything running and add more: healing work, transition tasks, a search process—more meetings, more motion, more effort. But what I heard underneath the activity was not energy; it was hunger. They were starving for clarity (What is ours to do next?), connection (How do we belong to one another without the pastor as glue?), and significance (Do we still matter if we’re not producing?). And at the same time, the living body of the church needed rest, relaxation, and play—the kind of downshift that tells the nervous system, “You are safe.” Without those needs being met, the drive to do more wasn’t devotion. It was a strategy for surviving what had not yet been named.

This is not about importing Daoism into the church. It is about learning to see—to honor that spiritual leadership is never disembodied, and that the health of the church’s inner life is inseparable from the health of the people who hold it.

Begin with the greatest need: clarity

So where do we begin—personally and congregationally?

With the greatest need we all have: clarity.

Not certainty. Not a five-year plan. Clarity: the next faithful step. Clarity comes when we slow down enough to tell the truth, and quiet ourselves enough to listen for the whisper of God.

Two simple practices can open that door:

• A clarity pause (individual or team): before you add one more thing, ask: What is ours to do next—and what is not ours to carry? Name one “yes” and one “no” for the coming week.

• A Po downshift (because discernment is embodied): choose one small act that tells the body it is safe—hydration, a real meal, a protected nap, a walk without an agenda, ten minutes of quiet breath, an unhurried laugh with someone who loves you.

Clarity is not found by pushing harder. It’s received when the vessel is tended—so the Spirit’s guidance can be heard without being distorted by hunger, strain, or fear.

And that is how we begin tending the church’s inner life: not with more strain, but with truer seeing—of spirit, of body, and of the living body we serve.