The Pastor Disconnect (Part 1)

For the last few days, I've been at a training event for ministers in their first three years with a congregation, many of us in our first parishes. Over and over, I've heard similar comments aired, all dealing with the same frustration: we're too bogged down with administrative details to do "real ministry," the kind of ministry to which we feel called and for which we were educated.

It seems we all experience a disconnect upon entering congregational life. It usually happens something like this: you have some sense of a calling from God toward ordained ministry. So, you enter seminary, where they fill your head with ideas and ideals about theology, ethics, liturgy, counselling, mission, and leadership. You fill your whole life with God, or at least God-talk. Then you head off to your first church, full of excitement and curiosity and hope for the ways you will impact the lives and faith of these congregants.

Of course, when you arrive, you start leading meetings, and before you know it, most of your decisions have to do with service times and property issues and fundraisers, while mission and transformative learning are pushed to the periphery. You answer phone calls demanding that you use the King James Version of the Bible and sing patriotic hymns, and no amount of theological reasoning convinces them that you have anything approaching a satisfying reason for not doing these things. You navigate second-hand complaints that you spend too much time doing denominational business and having a personal life rather than making the church your top priority, which makes you both laugh and scowl, because you have no personal life, and your responsibilities to the larger church have hardly begun. Something is always broken. Something is always lost. Before and after worship, you're inundated with inquiries about why there was no altar cloth on the communion table, the merits of real vs. oil candles, and whether it seems too cold in the sanctuary - is there a problem with the heater? You consider answering that you wouldn't be surprised if the power company had stopped bringing oil because giving is too low for the church to afford it...and then you stop yourself, and turn to wondering: is this really what I'm supposed to be doing with my life? How can this be my calling?

These questions just lead to more questions. Does anyone even hear those carefully researched and crafted sermons? Do any of the people in that Bible study think about what they read after they go home? When you respond to complaints by pointing people toward a broader picture of God and faith, do they listen, or just start thinking you're a compassionless theology snob? Why didn't anyone ever tell you in seminary that it would be like this?

And from all of these questions comes the looming potential for despair. If you go down this road very far, it suddenly becomes uncomfortably obvious why so many clergy burn out. Churches seem so very far divorced from the faith that enabled us to believe in our callings. Without a continued sense of that faith, faith that transforms our lives, how can anyone persevere in this vocation?