Departures and Arrivals

A tangential response to some essays on ministry

While I was gallivanting about northern New Mexico last week for a few days, a couple of essays about leaving or staying in ministry were making the rounds.

If you’re in ministry yourself, you likely already saw them; if you aren’t looped in on social media around clergy and vocation and preaching, you may have missed out, but in church circles they’ve gotten quite a bit of play. Enough that, after making a semi-obligatory repost on my own platforms, I read a few sitting in airports and temporary quarters, and thought “I really don’t have much to add here.”

The original essay was titled “Departure” and as has been already noted, the author seems to have some blind spots. So do we all, and those blind spots have been honked at loudly enough, I think, on the internet superhighways. Another, not intended as a response, was often used as one, titled “Jubilee,” which is delightful. (Trust me, if you want the links, you can find them with those titles and the term “ministry.”) There are others out there, too.

What has me pulling a Proverbs 26:11 here is that I’m torn between a reaction to some pretty harsh words I’ve seen about the “Departure” guy, and some equally caustic statements about congregations in general. Usually framed as “some” but working out in the discussion to “many.” As in the way congregations have been and are driving people out of ministry . . . and then wondering why it’s hard to find a new preacher, especially at their price point and fulfilling their expectations about experience, qualifications, certifications, et cetera. There’s too much out there about churches unironically “searching for a young pastor, at least 20 years of experience required” to just laugh it off.

So the debate, or discussion, or too rarely dialogue has been around who’s leaving ministry, who should leave, why some stay, and what staying or leaving means, mostly about the person who is making that decision in their ministry. I’ve got a slightly different tack I want to take.

Because as I was reading all these hot takes about “Departures and Arrivals” I was navigating airports, two legs out and two legs back “home,” checking “Departures and Arrivals” boards, making my way from a unique role as a minister in speaking to a not-small, not-large congregation on a Labor Day weekend retreat, but teaching and even preaching to them over three days and two all-too-short nights, back to my regular congregation of one. I had over the weekend a ministry to audiences of 35 to 70 depending on the session or service involved, and an awareness of the larger congregation that would soon be hearing second-hand about this preacher’s ideas and inspirations (and truly, feeling accountable to that invisible presence of those not present), and now I’m settled back into a very real ministry of a practical sort to a single individual who counts on me for much, but with whom I communicate very poorly if at all, more by pattern and habit and near-ritual than in the words I speak which he cannot mostly hear, but a few words I put each day on a whiteboard which help give my father-in-law guidance and direction.

On one hand, a fairly typical congregation in many ways, but my relationship was temporary . . . which is also true for many of us in parish ministry, when you get right down to it . . . and on the other a familial more than ministerial relationship which is basically ’til death do us part, with him fairly certain at 94 that this is soon, but it’s been quite a while that we’ve been in this cycle of days and nights and months and now years.

I left traditional parish ministry largely because of this latter calling, if you will allow me to call it that. Needing to be here every weekend, more or less, wasn’t compatible with parish preaching; I found a fulfilling side gig that worked around the need to be in service here, but when last fall the needs pushed beyond a few days a week, I quit that job, and moved in essentially full time. Until recently, I kept up supply preaching every third Sunday or so, but I’ve made some friends & colleagues sad by turning down such requests looking ahead. The details are neither here nor there, but the bottom line is my ministry needs to be even closer to “home,” or here, which has become a temporary home of sorts. Preaching is out for the foreseeable future.

What I can do, have been doing, and will continue to do as long as they ask it of me, is to teach Disciples of Christ history and polity for Phillips Theological Seminary, in their Center for Ministry and Lay Training. It’s an online program, and I’ve had five sessions of eight weeks each, some 75 students already in sum. That, and my longtime newspaper columnist work, keeps me engaged outside of the small orbit I’m circling right now.

They also give me a parish of a very peculiar sort. And that’s what has me thinking about “Departure” and “Jubilee” and many other reflections on ministry I’ve read online over the last few days. From four years of student ministry in a campus ecumenical church at Purdue, to four more years of student associate ministry at CTS through seminary, and 34 years of ordained ministerial service, I’ve felt a call to parish work. Christian congregations are my calling, as preacher and teacher. I grew up in one, and serving them has felt like where I needed to be. But if you will allow a theological aside, God has made it abundantly clear that I’m not going to be serving a typical congregation for some time, if ever again, and that’s a hard thing in some ways for me to hear, from God or anyone else, and in other ways it was the easiest transition in the world.

As I said, I have a church. Or two. Or three. My primary ministry is to a deaf elderly person, and to be honest, there are many, many, many many parallels to what I’ve experienced in the last thirty-eight years as a parish minister, just that it’s focused on one individual whose relationship with the temperature, the volume of the sound system, and the facts around us is somewhat variable if not outright unrealistic. Again, that’s not new, it’s just that it’s one guy, not a few dozen.

And the wider parish I have, or a couple of them: there’s the social media environment, much in flux with Elon’s latest evolutions or devolutions, but a world of posts and comments and messages and emails where a certain audience I know is listening, and even seeking certain things, which sometimes steps sideways into a less public, personal request for guidance on matters spiritual and personal. There’s the now largely closed but still bubbling sphere of churches hoping I can come preach a word to them on a Sunday when they don’t have a preacher, and I hear from those often, with asides and questions about what’s to come and what shall we do, all of which seem like a ministry.

Then there’s the teaching, a congregation of a certain sort that changes with each eight weeks, now a regular three cycles a year of them. The dialogue each week, and the side messages and emails — oh, it’s a ministry for sure, mostly to people who are feeling their way into congregational leadership themselves, but all across the country (Canada has not yet come up, but God willing…).

So I find myself hoping the “Departure” fellow is open to how vocation in ministry can be a funny thing, and leaving congregational ministry is a departure, yes, but the doors that open on ahead should be noted, even if only in passing. 

The woman in “Jubilee” I honor and I celebrate with her, because hers is the ministry I’d first seen ahead for myself back in seminary. My goal, my hope, was to find a place not too many moves ahead, and stay put a while, as she has, and yes, “to outlast the bullies by working with them…”

She does refer as well to the drudgery and the “monotony of ministry (3 hours of email a day?!?). And the getting-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you of ministry. That same Roman collar, to quote a colleague, is the perfect blank screen for parishioner to project their home movies onto. And ministers make excellent scapegoats for any anxiety and distress afoot in the family system of the church.” 

Then, she goes on to note the all-too-well-known stats of the last twenty years, including from an “Alban Institute study in the early oughts, 50% of seminary grads dropped out of ministry in the first five years.  A Duke University study just a few years later (2007) reported that a whopping 85% dropped out in the first five years. They both agree that 90% of ministers don’t make it past the 20-year mark.” 

Many other commenters on either essay, about staying or going, have pointed out the huge upsurge of departures since COVID. I’m part of that. And . . . it’s complicated.

To go somewhere no one will thank me for going, there are a number of parallels between why you can’t find service staff at drive up windows or to take your order in sit-down restaurants, and where all the ministers are going. First, the idea that this is all due to governmental checks of 2021 & 2022 is just partisan foolishness. Soon, we’ll go back to where we were before, with some arguing it’s too generous a set of welfare benefits that’s keeping a lid on the labor force. The COVID blaming whether Trump’s or Biden’s checks is quite beside the point; again, I’m not going to post links you might be well educated by through searching them up yourself, but the pertinent point is that for many of us, and when I say us I mean me, too: COVID put some family issues into stark contrast. The million COVID deaths helped to clear out some nursing home beds to be sure; of some six million or more who’ve been hospitalized with it, not a few ended up filling those beds.

For the elderly who didn’t get it, or survived it, the ripple of COVID pushed a bow wave to either side, lifting up the fragile state of many older people who are technically competent, but really unable to comprehensively care for themselves, and on the other hand forcing caregivers, those already providing care and those who were rushed into it, to sort out their feelings around work, expectations, and costs. My wife and I, and my sister (who has our mother living with her since this post 2020 tsunami) all keep finding out quickly in casual conversations just how many other households are shifting and jarring and upheaving themselves to adapt to the needs of a marginally competent parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle (and in some cases, older siblings).

You can look at me with a master’s degree and a professional background as being quite different than a high school dropout with a rental home and modest skills on paper, but trust me, we make exactly the same sort of calculations when it comes to “what do we do with Mom/Dad?” And for clergy, at least in my tradition, I have to reach back to give you a big windup to make the pitch: when I was a child, people had hospital insurance and paid cash for doctor visits. When I got to seminary in 1985, it was starting to become a near necessity to have health insurance, but it was still new and not widespread outside of unionized jobs. We had “Church Wide Health Care” and as I hit my last year, in 1988 it was pushing $8000 a year for family coverage and people said “it really can’t get any larger than that, or churches won’t be able to cover it.” In fact, barely half of congregations posting full-time positions offered participation in CWHC over and above salary, housing, and Pension Fund’s 14% . . . and once you got away from urban centers, much less than half. By 2000 it was around a quarter of full-time ministry positions, with lots of Kabuki theater around hoping to find a preacher married to a teacher, nurse, or other occupation where they could access health insurance. 2004 was my last year with health insurance within my compensation, and changing or ending that provision is why I left parish ministry the first time that year, as my spouse did what was so clearly implied and went out and got a job that did have it.

For the rest of us, the COVID jolt shook the last cohort off the tailgate, and my point now about job changes, ministry, and family needs. If someone has to take care of an aging or ailing family member, is it going to be the one who has the health insurance with their job, or the one who doesn’t? You can talk about call and vocation and God’s leading at length, but in 2020 ff. you do not walk away from health insurance. Yes, in theory, and I’m sure a few in practice, families have had one person with insurance quit to facilitate care, and the couple goes on the exchange to find it on their own, but I suspect you can see how the math will rarely work out.

Do I think other factors are driving this trend of ministry departures? Sure. I think when I entered ministry it was easier, not easy, but easier for a person who was an introvert to do parish ministry and feel secure and affirmed in their calling. Social media even before the deluge of 2016 has wreaked havoc on such persons: you might manage email and platforms largely in a room alone, but it’s an emotionally exhausting thing for an introvert to keep up with for an organization, church or otherwise. And yes, the politics of the last eight years has roiled what were often bipartisan waters, adding stresses that were not present previously. The church I served in 2012 was to the best of my knowledge (which may be imperfect) pretty evenly split red and blue, Romney and Obama, and the results of the election left no one out in the cold. Four years later, the well-known outcome started deep fissures and angry accusations which swept up many ministers of my acquaintance, and helped to encourage many of us to depart. It wasn’t a large segment much of anywhere, it was that the small contingent of
hardcore partisans were harsh and relentless, and the other side rarely if ever spoke up to defend preachers who weren’t even getting political, in the pulpit or elsewhere. The “you’re with us or you’re against us” spirit helped kick the exit door open.

Which brings me to the observations around congregations that occur to me as I live in this period, perhaps open ended, of not serving a local church on an ongoing basis. I’m looking back at congregational life, and outwards across today’s landscape, again as pastor to a church of one who is more interested in what I do than what I say (which he can’t hear), and as parson to a diverse collection of people around my home county and across the country most of whom I couldn’t pick out in a lineup unless they held screen names up under their chins instead of numbers.

Three things: first, congregations aren’t, I would argue, more unhealthy than they used to be. No, seriously. (I hear some of you laughing at me; stop that.) The problems are different, even worse, and the way we used to do our polity and governance and just plain church culture don’t work the way they used to. But we didn’t change — yep, THAT is the problem.

I would argue, I think without needing to show my work in detail, that there have always been, and always will be, grandiose and narcissistic and even borderline personalities trying to enter church life and scrabble their way into authority and control, over the congregation in general, and the pastor in particular. Let’s just stipulate for argument’s sake: some churches handle this well. They do discernment in their calling, not just for ministers but for the diaconate and elders and officers, and they know how to handle pot stirrers and outright fabricators of crisis. How did they get there? That’s a different conversation, but suffice it to say there aren’t enough of them, and their actual number is almost certainly FEW. God bless them, and may their tribe increase.

And yes, there ARE toxic churches. Congregations with a long and unbroken history of using and using up clergy, with a malign closed circle of leadership, and whatever their facade to the community and religious judicatory, the parson who pulls up stakes and relocates into such a church quickly realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake (and just maybe have been lied to), but can’t always get out in a timely fashion. The end game in such churches, whether by ministerial volition or church action, is always ugly. But I’m going to argue, against some observations I’ve seen in the last week’s worth of discussion, that these sorts of toxic sinkholes are actually pretty rare. They DO exist, no doubt, but they aren’t a huge cohort while they are well worth avoiding (let the reader understand).

In between is most of them. And this is the heart of the matter these days. Most congregations, at least in the traditions I know best within Christianity (but I hear about other non-Christian groups and the troubles of their leaders enough to wonder how much of this is a purely American problem, also a discussion for another day), are getting along from day to day, not toxic, not optimal, either.

Friends, for ministers whether ordained or commissioned, for lay leaders, for any of us who care about public worship and shared mission and the congregational life that inevitably results from those two impulses: we live in evil days for a faith community that’s just getting by. Optimal is getting to be minimal for survival. I say that grimly, through clenched teeth even, but advisedly.

Optimal doesn’t mean wealthy, or well attended. It does mean that when controlling and manipulative people are weaseling their way into leadership, your governance documents and culture of shared authority and models for conflict resolution had better be up to the challenge of turning them aside. It does mean when relative outsiders to the process start driving the bus, with heat and hostility and charges and claims flung over the online transom or stuffed into the cubbyholed mailbox rack, the church leadership is ready and willing to stand together, including on behalf of the minister they called, as well as for each other.

And if you don’t, once you get one like this worming into your life and mission as a church, you will find it’s like a flame to some remarkably durable moths, enough of whom can mindlessly batter the flame itself into extinguishment. There’s a nearly endless supply of borderline characters out there, and while they don’t get along with each other, they do notice where their sort of controlling and sometimes abusive horse hockey is played.

Worse yet, people who are simply looking for a faith community in which to place their hopes and fears, and wanting a gathering where they can feel a little less alone in a hurting world, will quietly drift away when they see the leadership is tolerant of such shenanigans. The open battle may be over whether or not the minister stays; the quiet casualties are the critical mass of everyday folk who simply leave, because they always can.

Clergy, though, are even more in a worse state in a church that’s trying to continue as “how it’s always been.” Seriously, I’m not THAT old, but I recall when most churches didn’t offer health insurance, then a period in which most did, and watched with no little dismay as most now don’t even try. I also have dim recollections of a church, not that I was aware of it in this way, where 99% of clergy were male, 100% of them had never been divorced, and the overwhelming majority had wives for whom the church was their other job, the first one being in the parsonage. The pendulum was most assuredly swinging in the 1960’s, but that’s what it was swinging from. Elders were all of the above, but their wives might work as secretaries or clerk-typists. Deacons wore suits, shined their shoes Saturday night if they were serving Sunday morning, and maybe even if not because if someone was sick, you wanted to be ready. Deaconnesses made up the communion trays and cleaned them after the service.

BOINGGGGG….. and then it was 2020. C’mon, this is well plowed ground. I don’t need to spell it all out for you. What I do think I should say out loud: in too many settings, change has happened, but it’s been merely tolerated. Not embraced? It hasn’t even been understood. I spent time at every church I served post-campus ministry through 2020 trying to explain to older church members why younger women don’t come to help or participate at weekday programs or service opportunities. Yes, increasingly there were a few who understood, but it never really went away as an issue for complaint and grievance, and rarely did I hear others chiming in to help me out explaining where we were at today. Younger women are working, and may well have the job which the family depends on for benefits. And work schedules for both men and women have become much more frequently contingent on processes which they don’t understand at all, but they don’t know what days or hours they’re working until Thursday night the week before. You don’t know why they won’t sign up (on a clipboard, for pity’s sake, since a Google Form is just way too out there) for a slot in three weeks? It’s not lack of commitment, it’s their lack of clarity, which they’ve told us/you more than once.

In the middle of all of this, family issues and who will do what becomes a simple pragmatic question of “what makes sense?” And keeping a job where the insurance isn’t makes no sense. Staying where expectations are unrealistic makes no sense. Prioritizing a vocation over family? Makes no sense.

Back before “boinggggg” I was at a clergy gathering, and I was asked, not gently, why I never came to the spring men’s retreat. I explained that due to camp, then for our area always over July 4th weekend, I was never at home for the Fourth, and I always worked Christmas and Easter because well duh, so the spring event was always on the weekend across our anniversary, so I didn’t go. 

The response was half a dozen ministers laughingly explaining how rarely they had their anniversaries with their spouses — as if that was an answer. After this sad recitation, the first interlocutor said “so, you’ll be there this May?” I said “probably not” and to shaking heads, they did at least change subjects. I learned never to bring up my family as a motivation in that gathering again, though.

Did it ever make sense to put church before family relationships? I’d say no, except like so much of all this, it’s complicated. How many family gatherings over the last forty years have been clipped at the beginning or end (or both) due to funerals or hospital calls? How many vacations cut short due to a truly awful crisis back at the church? Sadly, I did do that over the years, even if not often enough according to some. Today, does it make the same sort of sense? Or to be brutally frank: the work of the church is not always the call of God. If God calls, I want to respond faithfully. If God calls on me to take risks for the Gospel, I want to be ready. If someone from the church calls to get into the building to borrow tables, and needs me there now, that’s not God calling.

But that not-toxic, not-terribly healthy church? It can be “the voice of God” if you don’t drop everything, or even just leave a birthday dinner early, to go unlock for someone who can’t find their keys. Or you can stand your personal ground, don’t go, and find it taken out on you in unexpected ways at a subsequent board meeting (or budget planning session, or elders meeting).

I would argue in a healthy church if they were to call and employ a minister for their mission and ministry as a Christian congregation, it would not be a matter of concern as to whether the clergy lets their chains get yanked, because chain yanking would be frowned upon by one and all. Could there be mildly unhealthy ministers who are ridiculously scrupulous about their personal time, and hyper attentive to not working when they are with their families? Yeah, hypothetically, they could exist, but I’m not aware of having run into such creatures.

The reality is that we still have a ton of 1962 assumptions and expectations around our ministers, and in our common life as members of churches. You can revise the constitution and bylaws three or four times since 1962, let women become elders and even call them to the pulpit, you can add screens to the sanctuary and even have a praise band with a drum kit, you can declare yourselves to be open & affirming while also using sustainable products in the church kitchen, but… still not change your basic culture of how you do leadership. 

So I think it’s harder for some people who used to be able to do ministry adequately to stay in it, yes. If that sounds harsh, that’s not my point. The point, as with fast food cashiers, is that there are people who used to do things who don’t anymore, because not everyone can cope with handling two lanes at the same time in headphones while making change. Cashier ain’t what it used to be. Neither is ministry. Some people who used to be just fine in certain circumstances can’t keep up with today’s pace: they aren’t slower, it’s just that the candy line went to “speed it up!”

And not a few of us who were in ministry, who would love to still be in work they felt called by the Lord God Almighty to do, just can’t meet those expectations around access and availability anymore. Maybe they were never realistic, maybe they are more intrusive than before (“didn’t you have your phone on? didn’t you see my text?”), but the reality is that most families have someone who needs care or at least attention, and the not-so-terribly long ago “maiden aunt” who stayed home to watch Great-Aunt Esmerelda? That ain’t happening. Ministers who aren’t the primary breadwinner in the home anyhow? They are at least a candidate. If churches had been working more realistically on compensation and benefits? That choice might have been different. Hard to say, now, but that’s what the landscape is showing us today.

Maybe some people who shouldn’t have been in ministry are being weeded out. I shouldn’t dismiss that too quickly; neither should I dismiss the idea that I could be in that number, when the clergy go marching out. Some of us are past our sell-by date, maybe some of us should never have been stamped “ready for circulation,” I suppose. I think this argument makes more sense if you can sustain the case for there having been in former days a higher percentage of excellent clergy, which is now less excellent as a whole — as I’ve been saying, I don’t think there’s more of us not-ready-for-prime-time clergy today so much as social forces and the tenor of the times makes it harder to hold on if you aren’t in a position to give 100% of yourself all week and then double it on Sundays. You could be at least functional and still hold onto a regular ministry position in former times, and today you need to be bringing the whole package, and charging under market rates to boot.

One thing I always loved about parish ministry was the ability on weekdays to slip into the sanctuary and sit with scripture, talk with Jesus, and find my quiet center. I did it quite often, and that’s a big part of what got me through some weeks. There was also the reality that rarely did such time end at my own choosing, but because someone would come in and either whisper loudly “Jeff, can I bother you?” or just bellow “what are you doing in here with the lights off!” I’ll be candid. One measure of spiritual health I’d impose, fairly or unfairly, was on how casually people would interrupt a minister sitting in a pew in a church building. Some, not a few even, would come in, I’d hear them, see what I was about and quietly leave or go find something else to do . . . or even sit in silence with me. That interruption factor was telling to me; there was usually a correlation between that behavior and the person’s willingness to impose otherwise. Sure, sometimes it’s an emergency, but I think you know it almost never was. Or maybe I spent too much time in there, and forced people to impose.

Ironically, I’m now as I said the pastor to a congregation of one, and that one is intent on their own schedules, their needs, and I’m on my own in terms of looking out for my own self-care and distractions. As with my time in parish ministry, setting up barriers and boundaries is tricky, because my lines get crossed all the time by reality. Certain issues have to be dealt with NOW, and if I don’t, the price later can be steep. So here I am, back to dropping what I’m doing (as I’ve done five or six times through typing this meandering reflection) so I can go find a simple issue needs taken care of this very minute. If I were entirely away, it probably would have been handled differently, but knowing I’m within earshot means I’m on call. I could ignore certain shouts, but if I’m wrong about my guess as to why . . . so up I jump.

I do not believe we will ever get this factor out of congregational life. And as I turn 62, I’m aware this is sliding into dangerous territory, but with the steady increase of elderly people in our churches, this factor of “I need help or attention right now” will increase. Doing triage with pastoral care has in the last two decades (okay, three) my most second-guessed issue with leadership: why did you spend time on this situation and not that one? Or more often, why not more time on all three (without ever coming back to the question of your own family, let alone personal time). An elderly person who wants company or attention is not, to me, the same as an elderly person or a young one who is about to go into surgery; a great-aunt whose nephew wants you to do what he won’t is not going to get the time you’re putting into a funeral, even for an inactive member. And so on. Meanwhile, the number of elderly people needing some attention even for simple practical reasons, with no relatives living nearby, keeps increasing.

Do you see the dilemma for just us ordinary, “doing the best we can” clergy? On top of this, we often hear from colleagues at churches in a different sort of equilibrium say “you shouldn’t even be the one doing that; that should be a Stephen Ministry or elders work.” Thanks for the guilt trip ticket! I know, this shouldn’t be the role of the minister all of the time, yet the expectations (remember, unadjusted at essence since 1962) won’t budge in many churches.

Molly Baskette’s “Jubilee” essay commends the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, which she notes “has helped me immensely--see in particular the Clergy Clinic,” and she suggests churches “invite/voluntell the healthiest lay people in the church to do their trainings for lay leaders, and to the degree that you are able, make it a condition of future leadership in the church.” This is the sort of guidance I wish more middle judicatories would make more often into the lives of congregations where they can: do more discernment on your leadership process from bottom to top. We put so much time and effort into doing discernment around a ministerial call, but too often the diaconate and elders and officers are an exercise in last minute slot filling.

Slot filling. Yeah, I said it. I’ve lost members over saying it, and I look back and fear I said it too rarely, without enough emphasis. Molly is 100% correct, there should be certain conditions of future leadership in churches, and having had the office in the past isn’t enough. With great pain and effort (I was there) in the 1970s & 1980s we introduced term limits and “roll off” time periods in the Disciples of Christ post-Restructure, but as with civic term limits, you can see people just marking time, cycling in and out of offices just to stay in the hunt, and the principle behind it is left in the dust. The expansion of leadership is minimal, the recycling of leadership is constant, and the culture of governance changes not at all.

Meanwhile, in too many congregations lay leaders want the clergy to do everything they won’t do, and that list is extensive. Plus what they won’t get around to, or can’t do but expect you to cover them on that without letting anyone know, either. Some so-called “Nominating Committees” say “but everyone says no to us!” as a defense of slot filling — well, here’s a big hunk o’ discernment for you: why do you think that is?

[stares grimly at you through the screen, inviting you to contemplate that last question]

The sorting has been going on for a while, and it will continue. Getting by isn’t going to be good enough in the foreseeable future. Optimal, functional leadership is necessary, large, small, or in-between, with full time clergy or bivocational ministers or commissioned ministers with marginal compensation for “part-time”* work. It doesn’t matter how congregations finesse the lead or senior or paid minister part of the equation, though many churches are hoping a bargain solution will be a quick fix. (Don’t ask me about quick fixes, but Mencken has something to say about that.)

Discernment and intentional disciplines around church leadership is what’s going to determine which congregations survive, and which will become coffee shops or condos, building-wise. Doesn’t matter if you’re downtown with no off street parking, rural and never more than 75 a Sunday in decades, or any other challenging configuration of church setting. If you have a healthy pattern for calling lay leaders, and managing church affairs practically, almost any adequate minister can come and help you thrive. Without it, an excellent and gifted cleric (they’re out there) will not be able to change a durn thing.

Lombard Mennonite Peace Center is one tool; there are others. “Unbinding the Gospel” is another; some have said it didn’t work for them, but usually what I hear is they never really got past Chapter 3. But business as usual for your church? It’s not going to cut it. Christianity was always a team effort (check out your Patristics texts), and there have always been flies in the nard (consider the Judases and how they blossom). The managerial, semi-corporate, vaguely military “table of organization” had a day, and that day is over.

In other words, if you’re reading this and wondering if your minister will leave, or stay, you probably have more influence in that decision than you might think. But it won’t be as simple as just asking them to stay, and “do it for Jesus.” It isn’t about money, but it is about discernment, and budgets and benefits have a role in discernment, as do who you put “over” your minister as committee chairs or board moderators.

If you just want them to leave so you can try your luck with another minister, and hope they will make your church work better, I can’t stop you. But I hope I’ve made the case for such readers that it’s not a good bet at all. You’d be better off with the lottery. And I don’t play the lottery. Neither should you. It feels risky enough buying an airline ticket these days: like I said, things have changed. Think of healthy discernment as being like travel insurance; you may not end up doing anything all that much differently, but when you need it, you’ll need it right now.

*We all know about part-time in ministry positions, right? Right.

Coda:

If you didn’t recognize the images I used here, through to the quite recognizable George Clooney, here’s the end of the movie I have in mind: