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Rev. Laurie Hays Coffman: Finding Balance Within the Calling
Ministers play multiple roles, sometimes struggling to balance who they are with the need to minister to those with divergent views. Loving Kindness Meditation helps one pastor recenter herself and draw in others.
THE PROPHET AND THE PASTOR
Pastor Laurie Hays Coffman has never been one to shy away from a challenging situation regarding her faith.
After hearing an unequivocal call to ministry at age 17, she spent years balancing the expectations of marriage and motherhood with seminary courses and cross-country moves. She earned her divinity degree at Duke Divinity School, despite being told by some that her commitment to her family would be too much of a conflict with the itinerancy required of a Methodist minister.
Her first post was pastor at Calvary UMC in Durham. Under Pastor Laurie’s leadership, it became the first Methodist church in North and South Carolina to welcome gay men and women, creating a place where LGBTQ people felt included, loved, and cared for.
Pastor Laurie earned a reputation as a prophet who preached inclusivity, and her church reflected that.
“It wasn't just gay people, it was also people out of prison, off the streets, vice presidents at Duke, lawyers in the statehouse, doctors, psychiatrists, Jewish people, Black people, brown people, Asian people,” she says. “I always thought it was the best picture of the Kingdom of God I've ever seen.”
After 17 years at Calvary (now Elizabeth Street UMC), and a brief hiatus while the Bishop tried to find a new placement for a female pastor with a “troublemaker” reputation, Pastor Laurie was named Chaplain at Croasdaile Village, a Methodist Continuous Care Retirement Community with some 800 residents and more than 400 employees.
Over the past 13 years, she’s worked to balance her desire to continue preaching inclusivity with a deep passion and calling for providing pastoral care. Maintaining that balance has been quite stressful at times.
At Croasdaile, Pastor Laurie’s prophetic messages weren’t always so well received. When she began an anti-racism study group after the death of George Floyd, some residents complained that they felt attacked, and Pastor Laurie feared for her job.
“I'm in a dual role where I'm both the Christian prophet and the village chaplain,” she says. “I believe in both of those callings, but I walk a fine line between being too prophetic and too political when what I mean to be is humble and self-explanatory.”
Fortunately, the practice of Loving Kindness Meditation has helped Pastor Laurie navigate that line while remaining true to herself and her faith. Even better, it has become a tool for connection and fellowship among those to whom she ministers. And as those connections have grown stronger, so has the spirit of loving kindness.
A LOVING KINDNESS JOURNEY
Pastor Laurie first discovered Loving Kindness in 2005 when supporting a fellow female pastor who had suffered a serious accident and months-long recovery. “Three of us clergy sisters would go visit her weekly and decided that we were going to read a book called The Prayer of Loving Kindness together as a way of sustaining her spirit and giving us some solidarity,” she says.
That was roughly 20 years ago. In 2010, she started learning more about mindfulness meditation through a course in spiritual direction at Duke Divinity School. “We didn’t call it mindfulness meditation, but that’s what it was,” she says. “I fell in love with it and began practicing it. I took it back to Calvary to share what I’d learned.”
In 2014, when Pastor Laurie was a few years into her position at Croasdaile Village, the Life Enrichment Director asked her to provide some education to residents to celebrate Mindfulness Meditation month. She agreed and began teaching mindfulness to a small group. That group persisted and grew, and now, ten years later, some of the original participants remain regulars.
So, when Pastor Laurie saw the opportunity to participate in the Selah Stress Management trial program offered by Duke’s Clergy Health Initiative in 2020, she was all in. “I was so thrilled, I jumped on that,” she laughs.
She was immediately drawn to the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class offered by the program and within that the Loving Kindness Meditation. “It has helped me tremendously,” she says. “Sometimes when I'm in a tizzy, it takes me a little while to remember I've got a tool. I've got a way of dealing with this. I definitely use it to calm myself down.
“I religiously practice it once a week, but I also do it intermittently at home, on my Sabbath day, on vacation, and when too much of life is too much. When I have middle-of-the-night-wake-up angst and am just lying there, staring at the ceiling, I do the Loving Kindness Meditation for every part of my body, and it'll put me back to sleep.”
Through meditation, Pastor Laurie has begun to notice how she reacts to her own intrusive thoughts and feelings. “I really love how meditation can help rewire the brain to move us from reactivity to responsiveness. That feels so holy and Jesus-y, so sane and non-combative. I want to get better and better at that,” she says.
I really love how meditation can help rewire the brain to move us from reactivity to responsiveness. That feels so holy and Jesus-y, so sane and non-combative. I want to get better and better at that.
Loving Kindness Meditation has even become a family affair. She and her two adult children have practiced live, guided meditations together online. Her youngest son has been doing it on his own for years and her husband practices with her occasionally. The whole family uses it for mental health and emotional well-being, for which Pastor Laurie expresses deep gratitude.
SPREADING LOVING KINDNESS IN COMMUNITY
At Croasdaile, that anti-racism group that almost cost Pastor Laurie her job is now called Cultural Awareness and has roughly tripled in size.
Together, the group meets weekly to explore issues of immigration, anti-Semitism, Christian nationalism, all forms of racism, and more. “We are still cutting a line and trying to open eyes,” she says, but she consciously brings more of her pastoral, rather than prophetic, self to those discussions. “Week by week, we take the issues apart and look at them and have great conversations.”
And, every Friday morning at 10:30, the meditation group that Pastor Laurie started a decade ago continues to meet, too. Each week, she reads something new about mindfulness meditation, such as the benefits to the body, health, and longevity, or how meditation helps individuals learn how to be responsive instead of reactive. “We always close with a prayer of loving kindness,” Pastor Laurie says. “They've all got it memorized.”
“Sometimes there are tears and sometimes there's laughter, and sometimes there are confessions," she observes. "It's just beautiful. It all has grown richer and deeper. Every time a new person comes to the group, I'll go around the circle and ask people, what's your name and why do you come? And the things they say are just so rich: ‘This is how I find my center’ or ‘I'm looking for peace’ or ‘I'm always amazed at what I didn't know about myself,’ or ‘My trust is growing,’ or ‘I'm becoming less reactive to other people because I'm becoming less reactive to my own thoughts.’ It's so valuable and so life transforming for so many people, and that's very reinforcing to me.”
She shares the story of one man who identifies as post-Christian and does not attend church but comes regularly for spiritual practice. A career go-getter, at first, he was very argumentative and impatient to “fix” things with meditation. Now, he practices regularly during the week, shares books he’s read with the group, and gets teary-eyed with gratitude for what it's done for him.
“He hugs me every time he leaves and says, ’You have changed my life,’" says Pastor Laurie. “It's given him awareness of his inner self that he didn't get to know for 80 years because he was too busy being brilliant and brave and productive and getting rich. Now he feels like he has really gone inward and found a wonderful soul.”
Pastor Laurie also has used the Loving Kindness Meditation in the pulpit on Sundays and as a prayer in village-wide gatherings. Given the broad spectrum of views and opinions in the community, she recognized that providing a traditional Christian prayer could be a setup for danger. Instead, she creates a more welcoming and inclusive space by using the Loving Kindness Meditation to allow everyone in the room to translate it into their own faith tradition.
Pastor Laurie has seen first-hand – through her own practice and through her relationships with others – that Loving Kindness Meditation is a valuable tool for improving physical, mental and spiritual health. That goes doubly for pastors.
Until my own cup has been filled, I don’t have anything to pour out on anyone else, and that’s an important part of doing ministry.
“Jesus invites us to come away and rest, and meditation is one way that we can rest our soul,” she says. “Until my own cup has been filled, I don’t have anything to pour out on anyone else, and that’s an important part of doing ministry. As pastors, we often think that we can run on empty for days, just pouring out on everybody else. But we can’t.”
This is the final of four stories from pastors using Loving Kindness Meditation to love their neighbors. Learn more about Loving Kindness Meditation and other evidence-based tools for ministry well-being on our Resources page.