A clergy mental health crisis
The stress of the past few years has brought many to the breaking point.
It was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and David Peters thought he might be dying. It wasn’t COVID; it was his liver—but his illness was directly related to the conditions the pandemic had created.
An Episcopal priest and church planter in the Diocese of Texas, Peters was no stranger to close encounters with mortality. He had served as an enlisted marine and later as an army chaplain in Iraq. He’d written about his experiences, and those of other veterans, in Post-Traumatic God: How the Church Cares for People Who Have Been to Hell and Back. But this was happening to him smack in the middle of a viral contagion with no end in sight.
At the beginning of the pandemic, his fledgling congregation met outside in all kinds of weather conditions, but Peters was haunted by the feeling that it wasn’t enough. Two of his kids, now teenagers, lived 60 miles away, and he rarely saw them. His youngest, on the other hand, was doing Zoom kindergarten full time at home.
