I’ve been thinking about the church a lot lately with the release of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What It Will Take to Bring Them Back by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge, and the gravity of suddenly living in a world where the social cache of church attendance has dissipated like a vapor. I’ve written a short series* of my initial thoughts in my first read of the book, and am going to be reviewing it more carefully for the Christian Research Journal in the next week or so. The authors detail the many and various reasons that people leave, and I find my inner ear has been tuned to stories of leaving in a new and fresh way. I was therefore happy to come across this article over the weekend, if only for the curiosity of reading first-hand accounts of how people are thinking about the church–what it is for and why one might bother. The piece is not about a churchgoer abandoning the Sunday morning pew, it’s about the pastor leaving his pulpit. He has become part, he says, of The Great Pastor Resignation. The job was too exhausting in this polarized social and political landscape.
I was drawn in right away out of sympathy for the writer, so burdened by tasks and expectations:
If I was to articulate my perspective on the contrast between the two, what you don’t realize is how enmeshed you will become in other people’s lives. As a pastor, you are there for all the peaks and the valleys. You are there to celebrate the weddings and the births. You are also there for the sicknesses, tragedies and deaths. I don’t think anyone becomes a pastor not knowing this is what you are signing up for. However, the reality of what this does to you mentally and emotionally is taxing over the long haul.
And also:
Like almost every facet of being a pastor, this is a double-edged sword. It is a privilege to be given a window into these very private aspects of people’s lives, but the responsibility that comes with that privilege can often be overwhelming in ways that those on the outside of the pastorate cannot fully comprehend.
In some ways, it seems the most useless kind of job. The pastor is often only invited into the life of a family when things are going badly, or for the funeral, or perhaps the wedding. He doesn’t make anything, except yet more sermons, and he is easily forgotten in a good economy. Not very many people want to devote their lives to the Lord–body and soul–and the people who do are not always that easy to get along with. Being their pastor feels futile and exasperating. As I said, I felt an enormous amount of sympathy for this beleaguered laborer in the vineyard.
But then, as the piece continues, you might be able to see why so many people are fleeing the pew and abandoning the pulpit. When you count the job of pastoring a church in the same category as every other job, you end up being one of those people who tries to portion all the tasks by their dollar value, much the way stay-at-home mothers used to do five years ago. I’m basically the CEO of a company, you say, after making a list of all the ways you could be employed–laundress, cook, child-minder, house cleaner, tax specialist, personal shopper–turns out I could be a millionaire, you say to Facebook, except that you’re not. The only valuation that matters is the economic one. Thus, the young, resigned pastor delineates his tasks:
Putting all this together, you can see how crazy this is:
Professional Speaker
CEO
Counselor
Fundraiser
Human Resources Director
Master of Ceremonies
Pillar of Virtue
In a normal company, you would have a different person doing most of these jobs; sometimes, multiple people. Nobody is capable of being proficient at all of these skills. And yet, pastors are expected to do all of these things and do them well for $55,000 a year.
The trouble with having to pay the pastor a fair wage is that he ought to be getting almost all of his rewards in heaven, and yet he is so unsatisfied and insists on being paid in real money. It is too bad. But more than that, observe what he thinks the job is–Speaker, Fundraiser, Master of Ceremonies. That’s such a spiritually desolating way of putting it. In the bad old days, the pastor had a cure of souls. He had to keep the people in his care spiritually safe until he could deliver them up to God at death. He had to guard them against sin and error, against apostasy and spiritual shipwreck. He toiled under an awful responsibility, for the people huddled in his pews would sin no matter what he did or preached, and he would sin too.
Preaching, of course, isn’t the way that people sort out their inner, hidden travails. Even the pastor has to see a therapist:
I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy over the years as a way of processing the challenges of the church. My most recent therapist introduced me to the concept of growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. A growth mindset is when a person is willing to take chances, enjoys learning new things and is not afraid to fail. Conversely, people with fixed mindsets don’t like to be challenged. They perceive failure as the limit of their abilities. They tend to be scared of learning new things, particularly if that education disrupts their current worldview.
Observe how the pastor, however unintentionally, has replaced the spiritual idea of the person with current therapeutic and personality-based categories. It isn’t that the people should not sin against a holy God, that when they do they should repent, be absolved, and thereby be bound ever more tightly in a mystical communion with every other Christian in all time and space, being wrapped up in the very presence of a powerful, just, merciful, and loving God. No, they need to be “challenged” out of their “fixed mindsets.” The way this person is expressing himself isn’t Christian, not in a classical, orthodox sense. It’s also a manipulative and invasive way of thinking about the human soul:
Most Christians don’t want their thinking challenged. They come to church to reinforce what they’ve believed their entire lives. From their perspective, the job of the pastor is not to push them to grow, but to reassure them that they are already on the right track. Any learning should support the party line and comfort them that their investment of resources in the church will result in a payoff somewhere down the line, particularly once they reach the afterlife. This is the exact opposite of how I function. Although I always try to end my messages with a sense of hope, my goal was to make you think. Nothing was off limits. I have no problem dismantling the traditional Christian belief system in service of logic and reason, particularly if it helps us make sense of the world. Whereas most pastors eschew nuance in favor of black and white thinking, I believe we discover God’s presence by digging into the complexity of those details.
What does it matter “how he functions?” Why does he have “no problem dismantling the traditional Christian belief system?” Who is he to think that his version of logic and reason, apparently untethered to a truly and deeply Christian way of thinking and talking about Christ’s Body will either be logical or reasonable or, perish the thought, true? Really, who does he think he is? He has one job–to lay wide open the way to eternal life. He has one master–Christ. He is a hireling if he thinks his job is to “make you think,” to dig into the “complexity of those details” without having first submitted himself to his Lord. It is slanderous to say that faithful believing Christians need to have their traditional Christian belief system dismantled by some mid-wit as if they aren’t already thinking people. It’s patronizing. And selfish, actually.
So anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. God willing, I’ll be back here next Monday. Have a nice day!
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