The Care and Feeding of Clergy

Christ United Methodist Church
Columbia, Maryland
Jackson H. Day, June 25, 1989

"The Care and Feeding of Clergy"

There is an old story -- I'm sure it has shown up in many sermons - about a woman who had a chance to be shown hell and heaven. Taken to hell first, she saw an enormous banquet room with every culinary treasure you could imagine. "How can this be hell?" she asked. "Look at the people," she was told. Then she saw them: thin, emaciated, starving, bitter, their arms were kept straight by eternal splints that kept them from feeding at this great banquet. "That is truly hell," she thought.

Then she was taken to heaven. Amazed, she found herself in an identical room, with similar tables, similar treasures of the palate. To her surprise, the people here too had their arms in splints, but they were happy and well-nourished. Incredulous, she asked, "what makes the difference?' "Look closer," she was told. And then she saw the difference between hell and heaven: the outward circumstances were just the same, but in heaven they had discovered that they could feed each other.

The relationship between pastors and congregations is like that. When the pastor goes unnourished, we find ourselves unfed. But the other side of that coin is a great possibility that lies before us: no matter what the circumstances which have brought any of us to where we are -- it is possible for us to have a church where all of us find the nourishment we need at the banquet table. That is pretty important to us in this time of transition between pastors.

1. FOUR BASIC NEEDS

A new relationship will begin next Sunday. We surely want to do everything possible to support that relationship. That makes it important to think about what clergy need, and what the care of clergy involves. Clergy need the same things as other people -- but when you start examining the situation it gets obvious that clergy may be less likely to have their needs met than others.

A. TRUTH

As air is the most basic need for our bodies, truth is the most basic need of our minds and souls. Jesus said, 'You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free." A person who can't tell truth from falsehood is not sane. If you want to literally drive someone crazy-- find a way to deprive that person of the truth of reality around them.

We need to know what the reality around us is like. We need to hear truth and we need to be truthful. But when it comes to ministers?...

We talk about respect for ministers, and put them on something of a pedestal-- but then use that pedestal to hide from them. I tend not to tell people I am an ordained minister--because a lot of people then get unnatural with me. Suddenly the profanity stops, the jokes get clean, the conversation topics turn to pious and reverent things--and something in me begins gasping for air.

Truth requires feedback. But how do ministers get feedback? (1) Little things are often ignored because it isn't polite to bring them up--so instead, while the minister goes on blithely unaware of small irritants, they get saved until they are big things; (2) Ministers get a lot of surface compliments because again it seems like the polite thing to do. In seminary we joked about the person who shook hands with the minister on the way out of church and said "Nice sermon, preacher"--on a Sunday the minister hadn't preached. (3) A third way minis- ters get feedback is through the grapevine. Ultimately the word does get back to the minister--and by then it's a matter of he said she said who said...

Young ministers quickly learn that if they doubt a particular doctrine it's better to keep that to themselves. Preach, perhaps, that questioning strengthens your faith, but don't let anyone catch you actually doing it.
What is the result when over the years we train clergy to get used to dishonesty? The idealistic seminarian becomes the unctuous, impenetrable, dishonest old clergyman or woman that novelists love to caricature.

B. RELATIONSHIP
What food is to our bodies, relationship is to our souls. We are social beings. Without relationships, we shrivel up. Statistically, people without significant relationships die younger. Ministers need relationships as much as anyone else. But what are their chances?

Unfortunately, we want to admire ministers. We want them to be role models. That's understandable--but the consequence is we want them to be different--people we don't relate to in the same easy way as others. And as a result, ministers may starve for relationships.

At my first church assignment I received a very warm welcome, with invitations to visit homes and as many Sunday dinners as a person could handle. So it confused me when I experienced being lonely. But I realized there seemed to be very few people among whom I felt I could let my hair down; I felt like I was putting up a front, trying to meet expectations of my role. Ministers, like the rest of us, need places they can be natural, take their shoes off and have a beer.

C. PRIVACY
If our bodies need shelter, our souls need privacy. We give the minister a parsonage for shelter, but what do we give for privacy?

All of us need a certain compartmentalization; we're taught not to put all our eggs in one basket. If things aren't going well at work, we can turn to our friends. If our friends are out of sorts with us, we can always go home and yell at the landlord. Ministers don't have that option. The job is the church; the friends are the church; the landlord is the church. All relationships have ragged times, but if things get ragged between minister and congregation, it's a "triple whammy."

A minister's family also has less privacy than we would wish for ourselves. We may resent a spouse who is too active because the spouse has a special access to the pastor that the rest of us don't have. On the other hand, if the spouse is not active, he or she becomes a negative reflection on the pastor. "I mean, if he can't even get his own family to come to church ...... People who are denied privacy gradually respond by becoming irritable and petty. It's a sign that an important need is going unmet.

D. ACCOMPLISHMENT
Finally, what exercise is to our bodies, accomplishment is to our souls. Clergy need that, too. Most of us find accomplishment at our jobs. If we don't, we generally move to another job. But ministers find it hard to get feedback on what their actual accomplishments are. What is the real impact of a given sermon? Counseling session? Meeting? Prayer? How should a minister's time be focused? There is never enough. Spend an extra hour on a sermon and skip the hospital visit? Make the hospital visit and skip the time with the children at home?

We in the congregation often resist focusing on specific goals. It's easier to just have great expectations. Without goals there is very little accountability, so if a minister doesn't do much, it takes a long time before we call him or her on it. On the other hand because we keep our great but unfocused expectations, it's a cinch that the minister will never meet them all. No matter what the minister does it will always be possible to complain that he or she is not doing more, or doing something else. We can set it up so the minister doesn't stand a chance.
When we run into clergy who are dishonest, or lonely, or petty, or lazy, it is jolting to realize that for the most part they didn't enter seminary that way. It's the result of slow star- vation over the years, the result of not being fed in the areas of truth, relationship, privacy or accomplishment.

11. THREE PRAGMATIC SOLUTIONS

In such a situation, how can we make a difference?

First, sensitivity can count for a lot. Simply understanding how the dynamics of ministry can starve ministers can help us nourish them. The Golden Rule is a necessary starting point. How would we want to be treated if we were the pastor?

Second, how we view the minister's role can make a big difference. If the way we see things is that God is the scriptwriter, the minister is the star performer and we are the audience, we will spend a lot of useless energy being critical critics. We can have the possibility of an active, nurturing congregation with a productive minister if we change the way we see things: God is the audience, we are the performers, and the minister is the coach.

This picture of how things are does some important things. It puts us all on the same team--which is a lot more harmonious than being on different teams. It puts us where we belong, on the playing field of our life with God, and not in the stands. And it gives us a way of looking at the minister as a professional person who is actually useful and helpful. The role of a minister is not so much to do special things nobody else can do, but to give us profes- sional coaching in the things all of us must do.

Third, we need to take our Letter of Agreement process very seriously. The Letter of Agreement between pastor and congregation is one of the most basic planning documents of the church. It is the one way we have of clarifying ahead of time what the congregation ex- pects of the minister and what the minister expects of the congregation. The LOA is an op- portunity to raise issues and resolve them before they become problems, an opportunity to as- sign responsibility beforehand rather than blame afterwards. The LOA is a personalized document about this congregation and this pastor-, it is a changing document that we can ex- pect to be different this year than last, next year than this. The LOA needs our best energy and it needs to be put in the hands of every member of the congregation. More than any other single document or activity in the church, the LOA gives a minister truth, creates the groundwork for relationship can define areas of privacy, and most important of all, gives the minister a specific sense of what accomplishment means for him or her and for all of us in this congregation at this time. If the care and feeding of clergy matters to us, we will ignore the LOA at great peril.

III. RIGHTEOUSNESS AND GRACE

Before we close, it's important to look at one more thing. We can hardly give much energy to the care and feeding of clergy if we ourselves are unfed. One way you can tell we aren't being fed is that we start having to be right about things.

Let me elaborate a little. Having to be right isn't just a matter of having the truth about something. Having to be right is thinking that we have the truth about something and that someone else doesn't. I don't have to be right about the grass outside being green be- cause there's no issue or controversy. When I have to be right I need someone else to be wrong. When I do, people around me experience me as a real pain.

The need to be right is a natural consequence of our intelligence and our values. We all do it. But something has gone wrong. When we insist on our rightness, we try to feed ourselves at the expense of others. Inevitably, we blame other people. Rightness becomes self-righteousness, self-justification. We can get so absorbed in our rightness that we don't even care what happens to anyone else.

The Bible recognizes this and takes it seriously. On Good Friday, the Pharisees got to be right, the Sanhedrin got to be right, Herod and Pontius Pilate got to be right, all the crowd got to be right--and Jesus got to be put to death on the Cross.

Read the newspaper. Wherever people are dying at the hands of other people, you can find someone insisting on being right. In Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants are "right". In Palestine Israeli Jews and Palestinian Moslems and Christians are "right'. In Iran the Ayatollah Khomeini spent ten bloody years being very, very, "right."

Because we are human, there is not one of us who doesn't have in our inner being some piece that's like the Ayatollah Khomeini; and that will get in the way of anything we try to do as a church, including the care and feeding of our minister.

The Good News of the New Testament is that we don't have to be right. We can let go of that need and receive God's acceptance as a gift. The phrase used by St. Paul in the second chapter of Ephesians is "Justification by Grace through Faith." That means being made right by God, as a gift, because of our relationship to God. Martin Luther put that at the very cen- ter of the Protestant Reformation. If we give up trying to be right, we can have the rightness we crave--in the form of forgiveness and acceptance by God.

The next time any of us has an impulse to blame someone for something, we need to treat that impulse as a red flag, a warning about our own condition. Are we insisting on being right to someone else's detriment? If so, we are leaving a gift from God behind at the banquet table, and spiritually starving ourselves to death instead.

When we accept the gift of God's grace, it flows through all our relationships. It is no accident that grace and graciousness are related words. God's answer to our need to be right keeps open the possibility of our being gracious people in a gracious church. That is essential to all the other things we do in the care and feeding of our clergy. That is the essential element that will make it all work.

May the grace of God be with us all.

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