Mindy Caliguire welcomes Jeff Gokee to Soulcare Conversations to discuss the crucial intersection of spiritual formation and leadership.

Jeff, a pastor for 27 years, shares his personal journey from a life spent in "go mode" and fulfilling others' dreams to a turning point that demanded soul health.

This transformation began when, at age 40, he asked the invasive question, "What if it's me?".

His path included six years of counseling, discovering that he had repressed all emotions, and a harrowing cancer diagnosis (which miraculously disappeared).

The doctor's words—"You're really sick... and your mind has told you you're fine"—served as a dramatic wake-up call from God. Jeff realized he had never asked God for help for himself.

His experience led him to embrace the idea of "not wasting the pain" and relaunch his non-profit, Phoenix One, with a new mission: to help church staff and leaders get healthy in their souls and relationships.

He explains how leading from a place of "nothing to prove and no one to impress" allows him to prioritize people and service over achievement and scale.

Jeff and Mindy discuss the challenge of bringing implementation and pathways to soulful leadership and how Phoenix One's services, like the Love Well assessment app and staff health evaluations, are providing safe spaces for honesty and healing within church organizations.

In this episode of Soul Care with Mindy, Mindy Caliguire speaks with qualitative researcher Lacey Mason about their project focused on the soul health and flourishing of missionaries and pastors in the Global South.

The research aimed to understand the state of soul health in this group, particularly given the high rate of attrition and reports of people leaving the field deeply unwell, sometimes experiencing PTSD. The goal was to understand how supporting organizations and churches can be better partners.

Lacey Mason shares key findings from the 37 interviews conducted with missionaries and pastors, who were primarily driven by a profound sense of gratitude for their salvation and a desire to serve God with their whole self, often leading to a willingness to make great personal sacrifices.

This devotion often created implicit narratives where ministry work was viewed as external to one's own life ("out there" versus "here"), making their agency, value, and spiritual growth secondary to serving others.

The research found that practices like prayer and Bible study started to function as "fuel" for the engine of service rather than practices for one's own soul health.

This mindset can lead to a "can't stop, won't stop" work mentality, or a striving posture, which is often reinforced by the actual immense burden of responsibility in the field (where there are more laborers to be done than labor).

When this "flywheel" of constant work becomes imbalanced, missionaries start to exhibit warning signs of burnout, with the greatest deficit reported being relational. This isolation and loneliness is amplified because missionaries often fear sharing their interior struggles—such as those related to marriage, emotion, or spiritual life—with their team or leaders, believing it could cause people to lose confidence in them.

Many participants expressed deep gratitude to the researchers for the opportunity to talk, saying, "Nobody ever calls to check on me".

The path forward for those experiencing disruption and burnout involves a journey from striving to abiding. To find this new path, relational support and a non-judgmental guide are essential. This support helps them identify and rework false narratives about themselves and God (e.g., God is not just a CEO interested in performance), leading to an integration phase marked by soul-care rhythms, embracing human limitations, and a redefinition of success as relational and small-scale impact (one person rather than 900).

The episode concludes with five core insights for sending organizations:

1. Timing matters: Early introduction to soul health makes missionaries more likely to stay in the field.
2. Perspective matters: Transformation is cyclical, not linear.
3. Intentionality matters: Organizations embracing an abiding narrative have personnel with a smoother path toward integration.
4. Behavior matters: Leaders' actions influence permission to engage in soul care more than their words (the "silent curriculum").
5. Relationship matters: The primary need is for restorative, impartial relationships, and the safest guides are often outside third parties, not people within the sending organization.

In this episode of Soul Care with Mindy Caliguire, the speaker, joined by Lacey Mason, discusses the key findings from a "listening tour" that led to the team's full-time venture into vocational soul care work. The conversation centers on four key learnings:

• The Deep Refusal and Inflection Point: There is a growing, deep refusal to continue in the "business as usual" culture of driving and burning out, marking an inflection point for leaders across various contexts.
• The Future is About Integration: People long for an integrated life where their soul health, body, mind, work, and faith life are not isolated in different "buckets" but are supportive of one another, allowing them to fulfill their callings from a different place.
• Confusion and Suspicion: The topic of soul care is often met with confusion about its definition and suspicion that it could lead to the end of one's career, or that it is a "selfish" pursuit. The hosts clarify that caring for one's soul is not selfish but a first-order priority that enables an overflowing, integrated life.
• The How Matters More Than Ever: The approach to discussing soul care is critical, as the topic can easily be interpreted as legalistic or a critique that a person is "failing," rather than a gracious invitation. The hosts encourage listeners to "do as you can, not as you can't," and to recognize that God's presence and connection are available to everyone, regardless of their circumstances.

The episode concludes with the reading of the poem "The Interim Time" by John O'Donohue.

Welcome to the first episode of Soul Care Conversations with Mindy Caliguire, and teammate Lacey Mason. 

Mindy and Lacey share their personal burnout stories and discuss the growing conversation around soul care, particularly the tension between "jet fuel drinkers" (high-capacity leaders) and "candle lighters" (spiritual formation people). 

Lacey, a qualitative researcher, shares her deep exhaustion and decision to earn a master's degree in spiritual formation and leadership from Friends University. 

Mindy recounts her "wakeup call" after being completely sidelined with physical neurological symptoms while church planting in Boston. The episode closes with a moment of silence and prayer.