Tribal Church

A commissioner to the General Assembly (our denomination’s national meeting that happens every two years), came back to report on what he did. He was a bit disappointed that he was on the church growth committee. The first day they sat down and talked about how if the church continues to decline at the same rate, then there will be no members left in forty years. The second day, they studied Matthew 25. The third day, they studied Matthew 25. They went on a couple of field trips, and they studied Matthew 25 some more.

The people hearing the report were shocked. That was it? I mean Matthew 25 is super, but… that’s it?

Perhaps there was more to it than that, and that’s just what the commissioner reported, but wow. Why not come up with a strategic plan for growth? I realize that there is no denominational master plan that we can follow. We tend to be much more grassroots. But we had the best and the brightest minds of our denomination gathered in one place, why not dream a bit about what we could do? We have a lot of money, a lot of property, and some of the most gifted pastors… what could we do? Here’s what I would love to see happen:

1) Become determined to keep our recent grads. If anyone has met anyone who has recently graduated from seminary, you will know that we have a glut of qualified candidates, and no place for them to go. Actually. Let me rephrase that. We have some of the most brilliant people in our church who are unemployed. I have seen the most incredibly gifted minds walking around, wanting to be ordained, and we have no place for them. Some of them are finding jobs as interns, or working in seminaries, or non-profits, but they can’t get ordained without a traditional call. Can we begin to open up our idea of what a validated ministry is? Can we make sure that we track these graduates? Could Presbyteries support them and encourage them while they look for positions? Can we offer internships and educational opportunities for them? (I know you guys need jobs, not more education, but untill then….) We’re going to need them soon, and we don’t want to lose them.

2) Quit giving incentives to ministers who are past retirement to stay employed. I’m not sure what other denominations are doing, but in the Presbyterian Church (USA), pastors get incentives to stay in their jobs beyond the age of 65. This is going to take action from the General Assembly to change. I’ve written on this before, and here’s a comment from a Pension representative to explain exactly what they’re doing. With grads not able to get jobs, this seems like a bad idea.

3) Help churches to die well. There are many things that we do, as pastors, when we stand beside the bed of someone who is dying, and there are many things that we don’t do. It’s the same with our churches. We don’t tell churches that they are failures because they are dying. We don’t shame them for not living a few years longer. We celebrate their lives. And with churches, we can help them to imagine how they can use their resources and assets to plant new churches.

4) Support people who want to plant churches. While going to Bible School, I was told there was one way to “make disciples” and that was to plant churches. In our denomination, only a couple of New Church Developments were started nationally in the last couple of years, but I know at least twelve people who would start a church tomorrow, if they could. Many of them have been approved by the denomination. They are raring to go, but there’s no place for them to go. They have been told to just plant the church, and then look for denominational support. But they have children. They need insurance. They need some support.

I’m a part of a group of pastors who are starting to fundraise for NCDs outside of the denominational systems. They are DOC, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Post-evangelicals.

There will be some NCD failures, just like a percentage of new businesses fail. We can plan for those. And we can let the pastors decide what makes sense in their context—a traditional church, an emerging church, a monastic community, a coffeehouse church, a nesting church, or whatever…. There are a million ways to do it now.

Generation X is an entrepreneurial, innovative generation. We start businesses. We create new technology. And we are itching to start new churches. (The DOC is doing a great job of this.) And the Millenials are a very large generation. Can we begin to imagine congregations that make sense in their context?

Will we support our innovators? Will we allow people to retire? Will we give dignity to churches who are dying? Can we have a better vision for the next forty years? What would you like to see happen?

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Pastors have a fifty percent burnout rate. In the first couple of years of ministry, half of them will drop out. I expect this from nursing and teaching, but I didn’t know that the rate would be quite so high for the pastorate. Do our churches realize what we’re doing to our professionals? What about our denominations? When we put so much time and energy into preparing pastors for the ministry, isn’t it disconcerting to watch half of them leave within a couple of years? I have often seen people shrug off the burnout. They figure that the ones who were not tough enough left. We question their call into ministry, or find another way to blame the pastors for the failure.

But what if our assumptions are not true? What if blaming the pastor is not the solution to our problem, but compounds the problem? What if we’re losing our most gifted and talented professionals? What if it’s the healthy ones who are leaving? What if we ought to be looking at the employment situations instead of assuming it’s the minister’s fault? I wondered about this, so I asked my twitter community of pastors (I’m @CarolHoward) about why we fizzle out so quickly. This is the feedback that I heard.

The Financial Realities—No one entered the ministry to make a lot of money. We don’t expect to. But the problem occurs when it takes an awful lot of money to go to college and seminary. After seven years of no income and high tuition, most of us have tremendous debt, and when we take that first call in a small church or as an associate pastor, we simply cannot make the numbers add up. Too often, pastor salaries are decided by people who have never had to live with the reality of school loans, and the fact that their new pastor might be 40k in the hole never occurs to them. But the financial burden becomes too difficult for the pastor, and she has to walk away.

The Professional Loneliness—Clearly, after you become a pastor, going to a party will never be quite the same experience again. There are people who will tell you every problem they have had with religion, or every problem that they have in general. They will apologize for cursing or for drinking. Or they are entirely too happy that you’re a minister. And all of it can make a pastor long to be just an ordinary citizen of the world. The problem becomes compounded when the pastor is single. I recently went to lunch with a wonderful group of clergywomen, who explained that they do not tell guys their profession on the first few dates. They tell them that they work for a non-profit.

The Gaping Disconnect—There was also the sense that there was a detachment between the theory we learned in seminary, and the practical application that we needed in the church. For instance, we weren’t taught enough about finances, budgets, technology, or conflict management. I would add that we’re not taught evangelism in a way that is practically applicable either.

The Downward Trajectory—There was the difficulty of walking into a church that has been plummeting in membership for the last forty years. The frustration , anger, and longing to recreate the past looms large. Then when the new pastor walks in, he or she is considered to be either the bearer of salvation or the reason for the failure.

The Idea Dam—There was the palpable frustration over leaving seminary with great excitement and an innovative spirit for ministry, and then having all of that creativity blocked in the first few years. When a pastor is full of ideas, going into a declining church that is looking back, hoping to re-create the past, can be like a rush of water that hits a giant, concrete wall and has nowhere to go. As I look at generational theory, I can see that this could be a particularly frustrating thing for Generation X (those who are 28 to 48), because a leading characteristic that marks our Generation is innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. Yet, in our churches, our creative flow can get quickly jammed.

Then there was The Problem of Productivity–We live in a world of metrics, reports, and data. Our congregants want to see our output, they want measurable proof that we have been working, that our time has been used in a valuable way. But what do you do when you spend ten hours of your week, counseling a couple through a terrible divorce? What do you do when you read a theological text to prepare for a sermon? How do you measure those hours, when you sneak off to the hospital to visit the teenager who just tried to commit suicide, but her parents don’t want anyone in the church to know about it? What about those weeks when your work calls you to be out of the office more than in it?

So much of our time is filled with work that cannot be measured, sometimes it cannot even be accounted for, but it is incredibly valuable. Not only that, but there seems to be a lack of trust underlying much of this inquiry. It can be quite frustrating to be laboring overwhelming hours, and then have anxious members checking to see if your car is in the church lot or have others proclaim that you “only work one hour week!”

It is clear that we cannot continue to train so many people and have them leaving the profession after a couple of years. So can we begin to imagine churches in which pastors can flourish? How can we communicate these problems to our congregations? What can we do for pastors who are starting out that might ease some of these tensions? What do you wish someone had done for you?

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Season Two of God Complex Radio has begun, and Bruce Reyes-Chow had a wonderful conversation with Diana Butler-Bass. Join us as we talk about civility and graciousness.

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Priests molested small boys in their beds at night. The boys were pulled into the confessional booth and groped. Horrors abound–stories that make our mouths fall open in shock, our guts wrench in grief, and our heads redden with fury. Predators are everywhere, and they don’t turn into something else when they put on a collar or earn an R-E-V for the front of their name. But the pernicious sins propagate when the church protects its institution over the wellbeing of children, when we hide pastors in far-away mission fields instead of in prison, and when we would rather not face the pain of upsetting an established school or congregation because of the tale of a small boy. When a religious person molests a child, trauma crashes through the child’s life, affecting the sexuality and spirituality of that person the rest of his or her years. The emotional turmoil ripples through the family and keeps reverberating through the community. For clergy to think that it is in our power to hide the assault, for us to turn our heads so that it can happen again and again, makes us complicit in the abuse. What can we do to stop it? What can church leaders and the people in the pews do to make sure that these things are not happening in their own congregation?

First, work on the local level, ensuring that practical things are in place. Wherever children are in a classroom, there needs to be uncovered windows in the walls or doors. Your faith community should have a child protection policy, which might include things like making sure there are two nursery workers or Sunday school teachers in every classroom. Leaders who teach children on a regular basis should go through a background check. All pastors should have a background check. Find out your church’s attitude toward reporting. Do they report sexual violations to the police, or do they feel that it is enough to alert the church authorities? When crimes are committed, clergy have a bad habit of protecting each other, and a nice retirement on the mission field or a cushy parish in a rural out-of-the-way area is not enough punishment for a pedophile pastor, and the move only puts more children in danger.

Second, find out how your church works. Just as corruption can spread in certain state governments, abuse can fester in particular church governments. Be wary if your church is a stand-alone congregation. If it is not a part of a denomination, then there may not be systems for background checks, reporting, or dealing with sexual abuse in place. On the other hand, if your church hierarchy is only made up of ordained pastors, then there may be a greater concern for the institution and not enough outside voices for clarity on sexual matters. When clergy and laity work together in the church, when they both have power, then there is less likelihood for the church to focus inward and protect itself.

Finally, make sure that women have appropriate power in your congregation or denomination. All women—and particularly mothers—can be fierce defenders of children in our society. Not only that, but in our country, many of us have been victims of sexual abuse ourselves. We know what it looks like, we know what it smells like, and many women will not tolerate it. Plus, if a church keeps the voices of women silenced, then you do not want to expose your children to a system of oppression.

The horror stories have to stop. Many of us feel powerless as we read about those who have been victimized in the past, but we can change what will happen in the future, if we take responsibility in our congregation and in our denominations.

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For those of you who are not Presby-geeks, I apologize for the series of posts that are about to follow… the short story is that Beau Weston wrote a paper for the denomination, which stated that we needed to Rebuild the Presbyterian Establishment.

I’m part of a group who responded to the paper. I joined the esteemed voices of Jose Luis Casal, J. Herbert Nelson II, and Cynthia Holder Rich, who are from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and positions in the church.

I’m white, and I’m a pastor. So as I thought about what I brought to the conversation, I figured that the one thing that I had going for me was that I was young (okay… so I’m 38… which means I’m really stretching this “young” label). I write about ministering to men and women in their 20s and 30s, so my responses center around that viewpoint.

Weston discusses my paper on his blog:

Merritt takes it for granted that the niche of the entire Presbyterian Church is to draw people like her – “writing as a woman who grew up a conservative Baptist and converted to Presbyterianism.” Her strategy for contextual evangelism is “in this particular time we can especially minister to those who are leaving politically conservative evangelical megachurches.”

Welcoming people who are leaving the Evangelical movement is not the core of my outreach strategy, it’s just one sentence from the paper, tacked on to a pleading hope that we “broaden our focus, from not only welcoming those who ‘know what it means to be Presbyterian,’ but also to inviting and accepting men and women from a variety of backgrounds.” So it seems a bit unfair to boil my position down to me wanting a church chock-full of people who look like me.

But, that’s okay. Pastors in growing churches often draw people with similar struggles and hopes. And, I suppose the same could be said for a certain latte-sipping academic white guy, who wants to make sure that the establishment is rebuilt with tall-steeple church pastors and executives. I mean, the last time I checked, most of those types are… well… white guys.

All snarky jabs aside though… reaching out to recovering fundamentalists isn’t a bad strategy. The fact that a new generation of Evangelicals is leaving their congregations goes far beyond my ministering from my small context and experience.

The Emerging Church movement is full of people who grew up Evangelical, and now they’re questioning what they had been taught. Sometimes EC gatherings feel like a Fundamentalists Anonymous group. UnChristian documents the negative attitudes of a new generation toward Evangelicalism. Christine Wicker reports a study that suggests that roughly over 1,000 people leave the Evangelical Church every day.

I’m not happy about this trend. It makes my heart ache, because most of those men and women are leaving Christianity, and leaving for good. So please don’t read this as some sort of sheep-stealing vitriol. (And, yes, I realize that there are PCUSA types who are Evangelical…)

It is just that my experience of the Presbyterian Church was different from the conservative Baptist Church in which I was formed. The leaders of my denomination showed me grace when I had been told that women could not be ordained. The church was there, giving me encouragement, education, and mentors to guide me. They taught me how to be a leader, even as a 22-year-old woman.

Not only that, but so many men and women surrounded me, as I wrestled with my faith, telling me it was okay to doubt, because my eternal salvation did not rely on my personal conviction from one moment to the next. I was held in a community of grace, and God could handle any question that I might spew at God.

It was such good news to me… and I have seen that it’s good news to so many others.

We have a strong and vibrant history of social justice and spiritual traditions. We have a connection with God and the world for which so many people long. And if I’m looking at the future of my beloved denomination, I’m not betting that efforts to rebuild its establishment is going to do much good. The world has shifted too much from the 1950s. We need a new strategy.

And focusing our efforts to reach out to a new generation–a generation who is ethnically diverse and longs to make a difference in the world–that is what gives me hope for vital ministry.

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Recently, we had a continuing education event at our church on responding to the economic crisis. As we all know, even though the markets are up, and things seem to be stable, the unemployment rate is still high. While the general population is moving on with their Christmas shopping, a huge percentage of our country is still unemployed, trying to get a job in an incredibly tight market. So the needs in our congregations, as well as the level of anxiety and depression, can be quite high.

So we gathered, with two counselors, to find out how to best support people who are suffering during this time–our friends, our loved ones, our members, and often ourselves. One pastor began his question, “When we counsel people who have lost their jobs….”

And the counselor stopped him and said, “You don’t counsel people who have lost their jobs. You are not counselors, you’re not therapists. You can free yourself from that notion.”

It was a relief, in a sense. There are many times when I realize the huge difference between the relationship between a pastor/parishioner and a therapist/patient. When a patient sees a therapist, and then runs into that person in the grocery story, the therapist is not allowed to speak to her patient. The boundaries are set and clear.

When the therapist says something that angers a patient, the patient may discontinue the services, but it probably won’t hurt the therapist too much.

However, when someone comes to see us, we are not in a position to speak truth for an hour and say good-bye. The boundaries are a lot more fluid than that. We always greet them in the grocery store. We are intimately involved with the births, deaths, weddings, and sicknesses in their lives.

I’m not sure that we have the ability to speak the truth in the same way. Although we usually have more trust built in our relationships, we have to live with the consequences in a much more profound way. For instance, most of us have heard of pastors who counseled a spouse to leave a marriage, and then they were forced out of their jobs, or suffered retaliation within the congregation as a result.

All in all, it’s messy. But I don’t know that we can divorce ourselves from the notion altogether.

In Louisiana, pastors did a lot of counseling because it was a rural town, and there were no therapists available. In Rhode Island, pastors did a lot of counseling, because it was a pretty traditional place, and people were often more comfortable talking to their pastor than they were going to a professional counselor. In DC, pastors do a lot of counseling because a visit with me does not show up on medical records or a security clearance.

Also, you don’t have to wait a month to talk to a pastor. We are available, when people need us. The person does not need insurance or even money to talk to us at the moment of distress.

In different parts of the country, in the wealthiest areas and the poorest areas, there was usually a reason why people went to their pastor. There are just many times when we are the counselor. And I feel equipped to be—at least—a gateway to more professional care. And I know that I can provide things that many counselors cannot—like prayer and spiritual direction.

So what do you think? Should pastors be counselors? Are we counselors whether we like it or not? Is the relationship too enmeshed to really do any good?

Photo by dm74

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One of the amazing things about our congregation is that I look out on it, and realize that I would be friends with a good 85% of the people there, even if I just met them out on the street.

You know how it is. As a pastor, you love people. You learn to deeply appreciate them. And often, you grow these wonderful friendships with men and women whom you would never ordinarily interact with. That’s the beauty of church. But, for some reason, I am now in a very enviable position of being around people whom I love, appreciate, and would be friends with.

At the church, our book club picks out books that I would read. Groups get together for theater nights to see shows that I would pick out. And… I feel a bit guilty about this… but… we probably vote the same way. Most of us get outraged about Styrofoam cups, our medical system, and exclusive language for God.

I have never been in a church like this. Most of the time, I have been the pastor who’s making a big deal out of the war when everyone else is boycotting “French” fries.

It makes me extremely thankful for the church that I serve. When I was looking for a congregation, I read Let Your Life Speak, and realized that in the next call, I needed to pastor a church that I would ordinarily attend. And now I do.

As much as it makes me grateful for the congregation that I’m in, strangely enough, it also makes me thankful for the congregations that I served in previous years.

I was a skilled pastor, and yet I was a good thirty years younger than most of my congregation. I was continually reminded of the palpable longing for the retired interim who came before me. I thought that it was because he spent every afternoon in each person’s home—and so I would try to keep up with the visitations, but it would never be enough. I was trying to redevelop the church, and that’s difficult to do if you spend every afternoon with the elderly women in your congregation.

It wasn’t just about the number of hours in each living room. I know now that it wasn’t just the daily visitations for which they longed. It was also the friendship. A friendship with someone who was at the end of his career, working out what he was going to do with his retired days, whether he was going to take a trip to Europe this year or the next. In contrast, I was a scrappy young pastor with a child who was trying to figure out how to pay for her utility bills. He lived in a swanky neighborhood, instead of a starter home, in a city my parishioners looked down upon. He was an equal, a friend, in a way that I never could be.

And as much as I was frustrated by it then, I am feeling thankful that they welcomed me. They must have really enjoyed having a pastor who was a friend. Not in the forced sense, but in that comfortable sense. They read the same books, they went to the same theater, and they probably voted the same way. They would have been friends with him if they had met him on the street. And yet, they gave a gift to the next generation of the church by hiring me.

We are in a particularly difficult point in our denominational life. We have churches that are dwindling, and fewer of them can call pastors. The average age of our parishioners is getting higher each year. We have a lot of retired ministers who are reluctant to let go of their jobs, because they have a great deal to offer, and because they receive tremendous financial incentives to hold on to their positions.

On the other hand, we have many, many young pastors who are looking for calls. And if we’re going to be a faith that is proclaimed from generation to generation, we cannot neglect to hire, support, sustain young pastors, even if current congregants feel uncomfortable with them. Even if they would not normally be friends with them.

Why? Because youth attracts youth. Young pastors will reach out with ease to their friends. If they are allowed to flourish, many ministers are able to bring people into their congregations who look like them. That might be a scary proposition for many older church members. But, if they are able to put their own need for pastoral friendships aside, then their church will gain a life beyond them. It could be a very selfless gift for the next generation.

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In the Presbyterian Church, we call the process of ordination being “Under Care.” It is supposed to be a time of discernment, when we listen for God and our community to find out if we are called into pastoral ministry.

As an admittedly naïve twenty-three-year-old in the process, I took this to be the truth. I felt that I needed to be as honest as possible, and that my community would support me. This worked for me, most of the time, until I got to one sticky point in the process… and then, a trusted professor and friend took me aside, and said, “This is not a time for total and complete honesty. You need to start treating every step in this process as a job interview, not a discernment group.”

I am so thankful for the advice. I quickly changed my attitude, and gathered support from other people as I struggled with the very crucial decision of whether I was called into the ministry. It reminded me of the many complications of our ordination system. It can be a very difficult and most un-caring process.

While we (my husband and I) were “under care,” our promised book money was taken away from us. We were told that a church governing body was using us as a “political football,” and we ended up being thousands of dollars in debt.

While we were “under care,” we were homeless for three months. We had a job and a manse waiting for us. But there was some mix-up in the paperwork… and paperwork came before people. So we lived out of a tent.

I bring this up, not because I’m carrying resentments ten years later. Although I did feel sucker-punched at the time, years later I can identify that along with these frustrations also came wonderful moments of people who supported me in my journey.

But I bring it up because I hear too many horror stories, of church budgets being slashed, and along with the budgets, the seminary scholarships get gouged. And seminary students end up suddenly not knowing how they are going to pay for groceries for their small children.

A Psychologist gives out a strange result for a candidate’s exam, and then she find out that the good “Doctor” has hit on three female seminarians in her class.

And, don’t get me started on the ordination exams….

I guess what I’m trying to impress is the message that the professor gave to me. The church, in their most idealistic and hopeful moments, wants this to be a process that is full of love and concern and care. They want to walk alongside their candidates and support them.

But they don’t always do that. And in some ways they can’t. It’s like the ideal of your pastor being your counselor, or your Executive Presbyter being your pastor. There are so many complications in these roles….

So, I implore you who are “under care,” try to gather a real caring community. One in which you can really share your doubt and frustrations. One who knows your family, in which you can count on, who will not look at you as a line item in the budget that can easily be slashed. One that realized the importance of listening to your struggles, doubts, and fears.

You deserve that, as a candidate, and you will need it as a pastor.

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We just had a new member class this week, which is always wonderful. We hear the stories from so many different people about why they decided to join. And, we get to hear the reasons why they didn’t join other churches:

“Not friendly, too friendly, too creepy, too old….”

What often draws people to our congregation is the diversity—a mix of ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic levels. Miriam’s Kitchen. The music. The preaching.

Pastors shudder at the term “church shopping.” It just sounds so crass in our consumer-driven society. But, I daresay, if I did not have my job tomorrow, I would be doing the same thing. I would not call it shopping, I would put a much more spiritual label on it, like “discerning.” But I would have my list of wants/needs/expectations. I would be visiting churches, to see which ones were not friendly, too friendly, too creepy, too old.

I would not go to the nearest Presbyterian Church in my neighborhood, because the pastor–who is a wonderful person–is also an evangelical guy, who hopes that the congregation will become a megachurch in a couple of years. (Actually, that was a couple of years ago. I wonder if he’s still going for that…). Not only would I chafe hearing his theology on Sunday morning, but I would also make his life a living hell. That just wouldn’t be pretty. So, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with trying to find the right fit.

What would I be looking for? I love church, so I could go on and on about that. But, maybe I’ll start with the things that annoy me in church:

•Boomers trying to play rock music to “get the kids in.” You know, when a church starts a “contemporary” worship service, even though the word “contemporary” evokes bad 80s hair, and everyone in the praise band remembers the 60s. They’re really sure that’ll bring in the young families, but they never actually asked anyone under the age of 40 what they wanted in church.

•Sexism. Okay, every church will claim that they are not sexist. Even the most sexist churches. And I’m still shocked at the number of women who think that the rules of sexism apply everywhere but inside the church. You know, wonderful businesswomen who work for equality in their place of employment, and then don’t think anything about worshiping in a congregation where they discourage women leaders.

What is the trigger for me? Usually, the wall of men.

You’ve seen it. You walk into the church and the very first thing that you meet is every pastor that the church has had for the last two hundred years. Sometimes they’re photos. Other times we run into a seven-foot oil painting of some man, with a benign smile, in his preaching robe, big cross necklace, holding his dog-eared Bible. I always stand in front of the gentle giant and wonder, Who had that portrait made? Was that the pastor’s idea? Did they make it when he died? When he retired? Was he embarrassed? How did the next guy feel when they didn’t make one of him? Which always makes me wonder, Have I EVER seen one of these with a woman in it?

We all love our histories, and they’re important… but if you have a wall of men, and you haven’t even thought of having a lovely portrait made of one of the female associates for that wall, then, to me, that just screams sexism.

Am I saying that having a history of male pastors is sexist? Of course not. But… if all the hallway space makes us want to belt out the chorus of “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men,” then you have a lot to overcome in the sanctuary before I have that image out of my mind. That is… if I would even make it to the sanctuary.

What about you? What little things set you off in your first impression? What makes you realize that a certain congregation won’t be the right fit?

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Here’s my sermon from Sunday morning. So what’s best? posting the audio or the manuscript? I guess I’ll check the stats and see what gets the most traffic.

Our sermons can be found on iTunes, by searching “The Progressive Christian Voice.” Most of the sermons are John Wimberly’s, because I’m not good at the details… meaning… I stink at making sure that little stick is plugged into iRecord on Sunday morning….

I preached on the Lectionary passage, which was various verses in Esther, but I just incorporated the whole story. Because, it’s such a good story.

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