Abstract Background: About fifty percent of Swedish Non-Lutheran Clergy leave the vocation before retirement resulting in huge personal, financial, psychological, emotional, spiritual and social costs. The factors behind this substantial flood out has scarcely been researched. From the multifaceted problematic aspects of pastoral work, the aim of this study was to explore the clergy’s experiences of work stressors with the focus on Role-stress. Method: A qualitative approach with 19 open ended interviews was used and the interview material underwent qualitative content analysis. Results: Multiple external role-senders together with the individual pastor’s experienced, internal expectations and demands, generated different types of Clergy role-categories that surfaced during the analysis. These roles were accompanied by several role-stressors as apparent with the roles Servants of men and Servants of God and the presence of Vision Conflict. Further the pastor as the Church’s ultimately responsible person is plagued by Role-ambiguity and Role-confusion, and as the Proven trustworthy administrator struggling with Role-conflict. Family-work and Work-family conflicts, especially for female pastors, contributed to Work overload, this consequence also effecting the male colleagues during the generic attempts to meet as many of the Church members’ expectations as possible. The accumulated Work overload, together with a lowered level of Work Satisfaction, boosted the Turnover intentions. Conclusions: Mutual succinct information between employer and employee, active continuous communication and refined and updated organizational structure need to be coordinated in order to lower the level of experienced role stress and thus reduce the present substantial number of Clergy leaving the vocation prematurely.

A common critique of Pentecostalism from other Christian traditions is that Pentecostals lack an adequate response to evil and chronic and unrelieved suffering. I will propose a response to evil and suffering that is not expressed solely in repeated calls to faith or in stark black and white terms of faith versus doubt. This essay will address the role of the pentecostal faith community in its social dimension in response to suffering. I will also suggest a “practical” pentecostal theodicy, one grounded in the stories of the outpouring of the Spirit in the book of Acts and in deep pastoral concern. Finally, I will address the inscrutable activity of God, who often works ad hoc, mysteriously, variously through miracle, pentecostal pastoral concern, or deep existential encounter.

Habitat fragmentation plays a major role in species extinction around the globe. Previous research has determined that species richness in fragments is affected by a number of characteristics. These include fragment age, size, and isolation, edge effects, vegetation coverage, habitat heterogeneity, and matrix content. Although most studies focused on one or a few of these characteristics, multiple characteristics work together to affect species richness, showing that the effects of habitat fragmentation are complex. The goal of our study was to partition the complex effects of habitat fragmentation by determining the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of multiple habitat fragment characteristics on rodent species richness. In 2013, we determined rodent species richness in 25 habitat fragments within Thousand Oaks, California. In addition, we measured the following characteristics for each fragment: fragment age, area, isolation, shrub coverage, habitat heterogeneity, perimeter/area ratio, and percent non-urban buffer. Path Analysis was used to test the hypothesized model which described the direct, indirect, and cumulative effect of each habitat fragment characteristic on rodent species richness. Overall, the path model explained 67 % of the variation in rodent species richness among habitat fragments. Habitat heterogeneity had the greatest direct and total effect on rodent species richness. Fragment size had the next greatest total effect on rodent species richness but this was nearly entirely indirect through its influence on habitat heterogeneity, suggesting that large fragments containing the greatest diversity of habitats will support the most species. Our study shows that large habitat fragments support the greatest habitat diversity, which provides the highest likelihood of conserving rodent species richness in an urban landscape.