Posts by Andrea Sielaff

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Pastors and the Problem of Social Constraint 

Social constraint is the perception that other people don’t want to hear about your life and problems. It’s the thing that makes you decide not to give a real answer when someone asks how you are doing. It’s the thing that makes you swallow your own hurt or stifle your own joy even though others

Blog

To Stay, Walk Away

When vocation intersects with calling—like church ministry—it can be difficult to step away and unplug. We often feel guilty for not being always available, for not pouring every waking moment into the work of ministry. Here, Andrea Sielaff, Program Evaluation Manager at the Center for Transforming Engagement, argues that if we hope for long-term sustainability

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Chronic Stress as Trauma: Resilience in the Time of COVID-19

I live near Seattle, one of the first places in the US that COVID-19 hit hard. The first time I went to the grocery store after we all started to get a sense of the magnitude of this crisis, I took pictures of empty shelves where rice, flour, and chicken had been, as if I