Alban at Duke Divinity School at Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 25 December 2017 "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: The top five stories of 2017" - Alban Weekly
NUMBER ONE: FIVE BORING PROBLEMS YOU CAN AND NEED TO FIX
Dan Wunderlich: Five Boring Problems You Can and Need to Fix by Nathan Kirkpatrick
As we begin new seasons in our ministries, we dream big dreams. We encourage our churches to be creative and think outside of the box. We launch new programs, start new groups, or re-brand our services. But what if we cast big visions while neglecting the things that really matter?Last fall, I counted down the days to the big MacBook Pro reveal, but now here I sit, typing away on my 5-year-old laptop.
While boasting of making the laptop millimeters thinner and ounces lighter, they loaded it with an old processor, and a battery so inconsistent that Consumer Reports withheld their recommendation of the model for the first time ever.
At the beginning of 2017, FastCo Design writer Mark Wilson put into words what many Apple fans are feeling:
Dear Apple, please fix boring problems this year. Stop trying to dazzle us. Just give us old-school great design that works.
As we begin new seasons in our ministries, we dream big dreams. We encourage our churches to be creative and think outside of the box. We launch new programs, start new groups, or re-brand our services.But what if we find ourselves in the same boat as Apple—casting big visions while neglecting the things that matter? Here are some boring problems you can and should fix:
1. Clean Up Your Website and Online Presence
There is nothing less sexy than reading every sentence on your own website, Facebook page, and your church’s page on the denominational website (like UMC’s Find-A-Church). But there is also nothing more frustrating for a visitor than showing up at the wrong time for a service.
And there is nothing more disappointing than someone who would have connected with your church choosing not to visit because your website is inward-focused or your Facebook page looks dead.
Cement this statement in your brain: Your website is for visitors, not members.Make sure someone who has never been to your church can quickly and easily find every piece of information they need to feel comfortable about visiting. This includes information about where to park and where families with children should go.
And make bright, smiling photos of real people from your congregation the first thing people see when they get to your website. They will connect with that much more than your building, pastor, or current sermon series.
2. Clean Up Your Facilities (Especially Children’s Areas)
You know those Febreeze commercials about being “nose blind” to smells we have gotten used to? The same thing happens with our church facilities—and with more than just smells.
We get comfortable with clutter. We ignore the shaggy bushes. We know that the stain on the carpet is just coffee. And the dust-caked air intake vent in the children’s wing? Doesn’t exist in our mental picture.
But those things 100% exist, and they can be both a turn-off as well as hazardous.
Cleaning and maintaining facilities is tedious and expensive. And if you don’t have the room in the budget to hire someone, you’re relying on volunteers, ministry staff, or even yourself. Things just don’t get done, they don’t get picked up, and they don’t get repaired.
You can argue that it gives the place a certain type of charm or that it feels like home, but remember: for a visitor, it is not home yet. And there is absolutely NOTHING charming about a dirty, cluttered children’s area.
3. Audit Your Services
Similar to the previous point, we can become “blind” to certain aspects of our services. We don’t notice that the greeters only talk to people they know because we are one of the people they know (or we don’t enter through the same door as everyone else). We accept music that isn’t as good as it could be because we know and love the music leader or choir director. We don’t notice awkward transitions or hiccups in the service anymore because they happen every week.
And we accept lackluster sermons because we know how hard we work and how many others things we have had to focus on lately…
This is where a “mystery worshiper” might come in handy. Like a mystery shopper who is sent into a store with fresh eyes to give honest feedback, find some people who don’t go to your church but are willing to evaluate it for you. Find both people who are familiar and unfamiliar with church, and ask them what their experience was like. What did they like? What turned them off? Where were they confused? What would have helped?
Before you buy that new piece of equipment or launch that new service, make sure that what you’re doing is working as well as it could.
4. Create an Intentional Guest Follow Up Procedure
This is one of those steps that we all know we should do, but it often falls through the cracks. We will have bursts of motivation for it, sending thank you emails or taking people small gifts after the start of the new year or after a weekend like Easter. But it is a week-in-week-out necessity.
Create a clear, easy, and low-pressure way to collect contact information from visitors. Ask for as little information as you need, like a name and email address (you can get all the kids’ birthdays when they join the church later).
Then make a plan for what to do with the information. Does someone send them a personal email? Does it come from the pastor or a lay person? Do you create an email sequence that can be sent over a week or two that thanks them and introduces them to difference aspects of the church and its mission?
Once you have the system figured out, make sure someone is following up on it every week. Making contact after someone visits is a great way to let them know that their visit mattered and that your church cares.
5. Make Next Steps and the Discipleship Path Clear
Ok, great—you have a follow-up system in place and people are coming back. What now?
Well, you have new members class, Wednesday night dinner, small groups, Sunday school, the food pantry, youth group, a mission trip, a prayer circle, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, mom’s ministry, single’s ministry, and a thousand other options. Talk about decision paralysis!
Create a clear sequence of next steps that help people get plugged into the church. It doesn’t have to be a 3-year process, and you don’t have to keep visitors, new members, or transfers from knowing about and participating in your other ministries. However, you have an awesome opportunity to introduce people to your church, what it believes, and what it does in an intentional way.
Offer multiple on-ramps based on where someone is in their walk with Christ. Someone who is new to the faith might benefit from a “Christianity 101” class or beginner-level small group, but a family that just moved to town and was active in their previous church may only need an introduction to your church.
And what better way to make sure that everyone is on the same page and focused on the same mission than to offer a standard “on-boarding” process? When you implement it, ask current members to go through it too so that it becomes a shared experience and something they can recommend or explain to visitors they meet/bring.
None of these are particularly flashy or exciting, and they’re certainly not new. But they are the kind of foundational problems that will undermine the flashy, exciting things you are dreaming about. Like a thinner lap top with an unreliable battery, it defeats the purpose. So, maybe it’s time to fix the boring problems.
Dan Wunderlich is a United Methodist pastor and creator of Defining Grace, where this article first appeared. He also hosts the Art of the Sermon podcast, a podcast that serves preachers, teachers and other communicators of the Gospel. You can connect with him at dan@defininggrace.com.
NUMBER TWO: WHAT TO DO WHEN MONEY GETS TIGHT
MONEY, BUDGET & FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
Dave Odom: What to do when money gets tight
MONEY, BUDGET & FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
Dave Odom: What to do when money gets tight
Bigstock / Kgtoh
Don't begin the conversation with the expenses to cut. Instead, focus on your organization's assets and how they can be leveraged in service of your missional impact, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
The email lands with a thud in the pit of your stomach: “The budget is down. We need to tighten up and reduce spending for the remainder of the year.”
How are you supposed to do that? Not travel? Not offer programs? Not serve lunch at meetings? Would those strategies even be enough?
Many congregations and other Christian organizations have a substantial portion of their budget committed to “fixed costs,” the personnel and building expenses the organization is committed to pay. The program expenses are often about 25 percent of the overall budget. These expenses are the easiest to reduce, yet it does not take long before the program staff does not have enough money to do its work.
Nearly every congregation and organization I know faces this challenge. The causes are varied, but the story is the same: the program director is expected to do the same work with less and less money.
How can we shift this conversation to something more productive? What questions could we raise before the email arrives and the cuts are required?
A fruitful conversation begins with understanding the assets of the ministry. What are the strengths of the organization? Do they lie in the building or the staff or the reputation? In whom does the community place trust? How do the strengths contribute to the mission of the organization? What is the impact of the mission in the community? Which strengths contribute the most to the mission, and why?
These questions are difficult to answer. It can be even more challenging to try to connect assets to revenues. The simplest place to begin might be the use of the building. Can the building be used more often to expand ministry and revenue?
For several generations, congregations in the United States have been key community institutions, contributing to developing other faith-based organizations like schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These congregations have understood themselves as charities that can offer money, space and time. Such generosity has been possible because leading members of the community have been members of the various congregations. The members have given generously to the church, and the church has been able to pass that generosity to the community and ministries around the world.
In some places, congregations continue to hold this central place in community life. But in other places, it is no longer expected that community leaders will join congregations. It is true that those who do have religious affiliations continue to be measurably more generous in charitable giving than those who do not. According to the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving, the average annual contribution of individuals with religious affiliations is more than double(link is external) that of those without such affiliations. Yet fewer people are coming to church, so the offering plate contributions are not keeping pace with congregational missions.
In the past, congregations could separate the revenues that support the work from the work itself. But in an era of fewer contributions and continuing need, congregations have an opportunity to think differently. How can congregations shift from thinking of themselves as charities?
The Christian faith provides a clear vision of what thriving communities and human flourishing look like. Such a robust vision is often lacking in distressed communities. Sharing the vision, along with practical ideas of how to contribute, is a great gift. We don’t have to give all the money we generate to a project or refuse revenue in return for our contributions.
What might happen if Christian organizations partnered with residents and other leaders to establish businesses that would contribute to the economic health of a community? What if congregations worked with others to provide essential services that young people or children need to thrive? What if part of the purpose was to pay living wages and return an appropriate portion to everyone who invested in the enterprise, including the congregation?
Facing the economic realities of our work requires looking at the work itself. What difference are we seeking to make in the world? Who cares about that difference? How can everything the congregation does contribute to that difference? How can the money that is invested contribute to an impact that is sustained over time?
A youth minister in Vancouver, Washington, started a lawn care business because he realized that he had deeper and more significant conversations working beside young people than he did in youth group meetings. I recently visited Matt Overton and his congregation, Columbia Presbyterian Church, because I wanted to know why the church’s senior pastor and session (governing board) had agreed to support the lawn care business.
I learned that the church has long studied missional theology and had intentionally called a pastor with a similar passion. The lay and clergy leadership understand the difference the gospel makes, and they recognized the difference-making potential in the idea of the lawn care business. They valued paying a fair wage to everyone involved, and they structured the ministry as a business that contributes to the economic health of all. The purpose of the business is to make an impact on the young people, but it is carried out in a way that has the promise of economic sustainability for the ministry and the young people.
Many of the organizations such as schools and hospitals that congregations started long ago moved away from a model of complete dependency on charitable giving. Congregations remain one of the few types of faith-based organizations with their finances based nearly exclusively on contributions. We all know that having more complex economic models can be difficult -- just ask any congregation that operates a child care center. Yet if we can keep the mission and impact on the community at the center of our planning, we might be able to leverage our assets.
The current circumstances mean that most of us are having to operate under very tight financial constraints. But we will not get to the next season of ministry by focusing exclusively on the expenses. We have an opportunity to focus on what impact we are called to make. With that clearly in mind, we must learn how to see all the ways that impact can create value.
Read more from Dave Odom »
Faith & Leadership
The email lands with a thud in the pit of your stomach: “The budget is down. We need to tighten up and reduce spending for the remainder of the year.”
How are you supposed to do that? Not travel? Not offer programs? Not serve lunch at meetings? Would those strategies even be enough?
Many congregations and other Christian organizations have a substantial portion of their budget committed to “fixed costs,” the personnel and building expenses the organization is committed to pay. The program expenses are often about 25 percent of the overall budget. These expenses are the easiest to reduce, yet it does not take long before the program staff does not have enough money to do its work.
Nearly every congregation and organization I know faces this challenge. The causes are varied, but the story is the same: the program director is expected to do the same work with less and less money.
How can we shift this conversation to something more productive? What questions could we raise before the email arrives and the cuts are required?
A fruitful conversation begins with understanding the assets of the ministry. What are the strengths of the organization? Do they lie in the building or the staff or the reputation? In whom does the community place trust? How do the strengths contribute to the mission of the organization? What is the impact of the mission in the community? Which strengths contribute the most to the mission, and why?
These questions are difficult to answer. It can be even more challenging to try to connect assets to revenues. The simplest place to begin might be the use of the building. Can the building be used more often to expand ministry and revenue?
For several generations, congregations in the United States have been key community institutions, contributing to developing other faith-based organizations like schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These congregations have understood themselves as charities that can offer money, space and time. Such generosity has been possible because leading members of the community have been members of the various congregations. The members have given generously to the church, and the church has been able to pass that generosity to the community and ministries around the world.
In some places, congregations continue to hold this central place in community life. But in other places, it is no longer expected that community leaders will join congregations. It is true that those who do have religious affiliations continue to be measurably more generous in charitable giving than those who do not. According to the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving, the average annual contribution of individuals with religious affiliations is more than double(link is external) that of those without such affiliations. Yet fewer people are coming to church, so the offering plate contributions are not keeping pace with congregational missions.
In the past, congregations could separate the revenues that support the work from the work itself. But in an era of fewer contributions and continuing need, congregations have an opportunity to think differently. How can congregations shift from thinking of themselves as charities?
The Christian faith provides a clear vision of what thriving communities and human flourishing look like. Such a robust vision is often lacking in distressed communities. Sharing the vision, along with practical ideas of how to contribute, is a great gift. We don’t have to give all the money we generate to a project or refuse revenue in return for our contributions.
What might happen if Christian organizations partnered with residents and other leaders to establish businesses that would contribute to the economic health of a community? What if congregations worked with others to provide essential services that young people or children need to thrive? What if part of the purpose was to pay living wages and return an appropriate portion to everyone who invested in the enterprise, including the congregation?
Facing the economic realities of our work requires looking at the work itself. What difference are we seeking to make in the world? Who cares about that difference? How can everything the congregation does contribute to that difference? How can the money that is invested contribute to an impact that is sustained over time?
A youth minister in Vancouver, Washington, started a lawn care business because he realized that he had deeper and more significant conversations working beside young people than he did in youth group meetings. I recently visited Matt Overton and his congregation, Columbia Presbyterian Church, because I wanted to know why the church’s senior pastor and session (governing board) had agreed to support the lawn care business.
I learned that the church has long studied missional theology and had intentionally called a pastor with a similar passion. The lay and clergy leadership understand the difference the gospel makes, and they recognized the difference-making potential in the idea of the lawn care business. They valued paying a fair wage to everyone involved, and they structured the ministry as a business that contributes to the economic health of all. The purpose of the business is to make an impact on the young people, but it is carried out in a way that has the promise of economic sustainability for the ministry and the young people.
Many of the organizations such as schools and hospitals that congregations started long ago moved away from a model of complete dependency on charitable giving. Congregations remain one of the few types of faith-based organizations with their finances based nearly exclusively on contributions. We all know that having more complex economic models can be difficult -- just ask any congregation that operates a child care center. Yet if we can keep the mission and impact on the community at the center of our planning, we might be able to leverage our assets.
The current circumstances mean that most of us are having to operate under very tight financial constraints. But we will not get to the next season of ministry by focusing exclusively on the expenses. We have an opportunity to focus on what impact we are called to make. With that clearly in mind, we must learn how to see all the ways that impact can create value.
Read more from Dave Odom »
Faith & Leadership
NUMBER THREE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR CLERGY TO STAY IN THEIR LANE?
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Greg Jarrell: What does it mean for clergy to 'stay in their lane'?
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Greg Jarrell: What does it mean for clergy to 'stay in their lane'?
People in Charlotte, North Carolina, protest the death of Keith Scott, who was killed by police. Photo courtesy of Charlotte Agenda
Pastors seeking to support justice movements should let people on the front lines lead. This means clergy are going to have to get used to being uncomfortable, writes a pastor from Charlotte, North Carolina.
Long into the night, the chant bounced up hundreds of feet of glass and steel. Tears of rage, despair and grief mingled with the sweat of marching, block after block, mile after mile along the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The cry roared on: “No justice? No peace!”
The crowds kept coming for more than a week in late September. They gathered to protest the killing of Keith Scott by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer. They demanded justice for this particular situation, but also for the long history of race-based oppression in our culture.
Clergy -- such as myself -- showed up as well. We represented many institutions and congregations, from storefront gatherings to some of the most prominent steeples in town.
Yet most of us clergy at some point found ourselves feeling a bit lost and useless, and more than a bit confused. In the midst of such an outpouring -- an act of resistance -- what was our role?
What should people responsible for, and to, our institutions do when people marginalized by institutions say “Enough!” and take to the streets?
During that period in September, we were trying to learn and reflect on this as we were doing it. Action and reflection were taking place in the same step, even in the same breath.
The first week of protest was dominated by meetings and organizing during the day and marches and rallies at night. At the meetings, leaders from the communities on the front lines offered strong critique and imaginative ideas about how to address the wrongs.
In those gatherings, we were able to ask them directly, “How do you see the role of clergy in this movement? What should we do to help?”
We got multiple answers, but they echoed one central idea: “Stay in your lane.”
Danielle Hilton, one of the frontline community organizers, explained to us that faith leaders could support the movement by offering authentic action within our existing spheres of influence. Don’t displace or duplicate the efforts of existing and emergent frontline leaders, she said.
This can be uncomfortable for faith leaders who are accustomed to being in charge, or to being gatekeepers of institutional power.
“Get used to being uncomfortable,” Hilton counseled.
The request that we stay in our lane was not a nice way of telling us to get lost. Rather, it was an affirmation that faith leaders need to show up and do the things that faith leaders know how to do.
Networks of frontline leaders and activists are already organizing acts of resistance to state violence and leading their communities to build alternatives. This is their lane.
Clergy -- I'm speaking here primarily about white pastors -- need to show up as clergy, and to bring with them the resources and gifts of their training and their networks.
What does that mean? Staying in our lane means first listening to those voices who are close to the ground. Our lane includes marching and chanting in the streets as a beginning point, but it only starts there.
Those who are suffering the most direct harm are asking us to live into our prophetic vocation by preaching with Isaiah from our pulpits that “every valley will be lifted up and every high place brought low.”
The influence of religious leaders is needed to hold powerful people and institutions accountable for violence against marginalized communities.
The lane of clergy is to grow the imaginations of our congregations, and then to mobilize our people to create imaginative solutions and perform acts of solidarity and liberation, both in the sanctuary and in the public commons.
We caught a glimpse of how this might work during the uprising in Charlotte. On the last night, most clergy had gone home to prepare for the important work of addressing their congregations the next day.
The only clergy remaining were a pair of us -- one black, one white -- who did not have Sunday morning responsibilities.
At midnight, the police announced they were going to enforce the curfew that had been in place, though not enforced, for several days.
The protest was now illegal. All present were subject to arrest. Police in riot gear arrived. Our energetic, peaceful protest became frenzied and anxious.
Preachers aren’t much account in these sorts of situations. So the Rev. Rodney Sadler and I did the thing that preachers know how to do: we prayed.
Each down on one knee, in the middle of the street, we lifted our voices and prayed that there would be no violence. A couple of dozen demonstrators joined us.
Then we began to do the other thing that preachers know how to do: we preached.
Our congregation was a unit of 70 riot police, lined up two deep across Davidson Street outside police headquarters. As we rose to speak, protesters gathered behind us, until only a few feet separated them from the police.
The two of us preachers occupied the space between the groups as an altar in the world, pacing back and forth while improvising our sermons.
We reminded those armed with batons, shields, rubber bullets and tear gas that the peaceful protest behind us was composed of their neighbors. We asked them to consider whether obeying orders to harm those neighbors was the moral thing to do. We encouraged them to disobey such orders. We spoke to their humanity, told them they were made by Love to be love in the world.
We named it and claimed it. “It” was peace -- if not yet deep, abiding peace, then at least the absence of direct harm.
We can’t tell you why the police packed up their tear gas canisters, put away their batons and got back on the bus. Did prayer change their hearts? We don’t know.
But we do know that if prayer changes anything, it changes us. It makes us bold, ready to speak truth in desperate situations. Prayer moves us to throw our bodies behind our words, because Love would have us do no other.
Staying in our lane as clergy does not mean turning every protest into a prayer meeting. Sometimes it means bringing the language of protest to our prayer meetings.
But it always means being present to do what we are able to do, and doing it without fear.
Showing up happens in the streets -- but also in the sanctuary, in the study, in the community meetings we attend, in every sphere where we exercise influence.
Peddlers of the gospel often speak about hope. We believe in a hope that we can’t fully account for. Yet hope-filled moments keep rising up, especially from our young leaders.
As we move into yet more troubling times, their counsel to us is wise:
Read more from Greg Jarrell »
Long into the night, the chant bounced up hundreds of feet of glass and steel. Tears of rage, despair and grief mingled with the sweat of marching, block after block, mile after mile along the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The cry roared on: “No justice? No peace!”
The crowds kept coming for more than a week in late September. They gathered to protest the killing of Keith Scott by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer. They demanded justice for this particular situation, but also for the long history of race-based oppression in our culture.
Clergy -- such as myself -- showed up as well. We represented many institutions and congregations, from storefront gatherings to some of the most prominent steeples in town.
Yet most of us clergy at some point found ourselves feeling a bit lost and useless, and more than a bit confused. In the midst of such an outpouring -- an act of resistance -- what was our role?
What should people responsible for, and to, our institutions do when people marginalized by institutions say “Enough!” and take to the streets?
During that period in September, we were trying to learn and reflect on this as we were doing it. Action and reflection were taking place in the same step, even in the same breath.
The first week of protest was dominated by meetings and organizing during the day and marches and rallies at night. At the meetings, leaders from the communities on the front lines offered strong critique and imaginative ideas about how to address the wrongs.
In those gatherings, we were able to ask them directly, “How do you see the role of clergy in this movement? What should we do to help?”
We got multiple answers, but they echoed one central idea: “Stay in your lane.”
Danielle Hilton, one of the frontline community organizers, explained to us that faith leaders could support the movement by offering authentic action within our existing spheres of influence. Don’t displace or duplicate the efforts of existing and emergent frontline leaders, she said.
This can be uncomfortable for faith leaders who are accustomed to being in charge, or to being gatekeepers of institutional power.
“Get used to being uncomfortable,” Hilton counseled.
The request that we stay in our lane was not a nice way of telling us to get lost. Rather, it was an affirmation that faith leaders need to show up and do the things that faith leaders know how to do.
Networks of frontline leaders and activists are already organizing acts of resistance to state violence and leading their communities to build alternatives. This is their lane.
Clergy -- I'm speaking here primarily about white pastors -- need to show up as clergy, and to bring with them the resources and gifts of their training and their networks.
What does that mean? Staying in our lane means first listening to those voices who are close to the ground. Our lane includes marching and chanting in the streets as a beginning point, but it only starts there.
Those who are suffering the most direct harm are asking us to live into our prophetic vocation by preaching with Isaiah from our pulpits that “every valley will be lifted up and every high place brought low.”
The influence of religious leaders is needed to hold powerful people and institutions accountable for violence against marginalized communities.
The lane of clergy is to grow the imaginations of our congregations, and then to mobilize our people to create imaginative solutions and perform acts of solidarity and liberation, both in the sanctuary and in the public commons.
We caught a glimpse of how this might work during the uprising in Charlotte. On the last night, most clergy had gone home to prepare for the important work of addressing their congregations the next day.
The only clergy remaining were a pair of us -- one black, one white -- who did not have Sunday morning responsibilities.
At midnight, the police announced they were going to enforce the curfew that had been in place, though not enforced, for several days.
The protest was now illegal. All present were subject to arrest. Police in riot gear arrived. Our energetic, peaceful protest became frenzied and anxious.
Preachers aren’t much account in these sorts of situations. So the Rev. Rodney Sadler and I did the thing that preachers know how to do: we prayed.
Each down on one knee, in the middle of the street, we lifted our voices and prayed that there would be no violence. A couple of dozen demonstrators joined us.
Then we began to do the other thing that preachers know how to do: we preached.
Our congregation was a unit of 70 riot police, lined up two deep across Davidson Street outside police headquarters. As we rose to speak, protesters gathered behind us, until only a few feet separated them from the police.
The two of us preachers occupied the space between the groups as an altar in the world, pacing back and forth while improvising our sermons.
We reminded those armed with batons, shields, rubber bullets and tear gas that the peaceful protest behind us was composed of their neighbors. We asked them to consider whether obeying orders to harm those neighbors was the moral thing to do. We encouraged them to disobey such orders. We spoke to their humanity, told them they were made by Love to be love in the world.
We named it and claimed it. “It” was peace -- if not yet deep, abiding peace, then at least the absence of direct harm.
We can’t tell you why the police packed up their tear gas canisters, put away their batons and got back on the bus. Did prayer change their hearts? We don’t know.
But we do know that if prayer changes anything, it changes us. It makes us bold, ready to speak truth in desperate situations. Prayer moves us to throw our bodies behind our words, because Love would have us do no other.
Staying in our lane as clergy does not mean turning every protest into a prayer meeting. Sometimes it means bringing the language of protest to our prayer meetings.
But it always means being present to do what we are able to do, and doing it without fear.
Showing up happens in the streets -- but also in the sanctuary, in the study, in the community meetings we attend, in every sphere where we exercise influence.
Peddlers of the gospel often speak about hope. We believe in a hope that we can’t fully account for. Yet hope-filled moments keep rising up, especially from our young leaders.
As we move into yet more troubling times, their counsel to us is wise:
- Listen carefully to the marginalized, honoring their experiences and work.
- Create spaces in our spheres for the disinherited to speak for themselves.
- Deploy our gifts and privileges in ways that destabilize oppressive systems.
- Show up as ourselves, acting authentically within our roles.
- Keep showing up, especially when it is uncomfortable.
Read more from Greg Jarrell »
Faith & Leadership
NUMBER FOUR: A MOVE TO PART-TIME CLERGY SPARKS INNOVATION
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, left, shares a laugh with the Rev. Carol Walton after a service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Henderson, Nevada. Dufendach carries out some traditionally priestly functions, such as presiding at the weekday Eucharist. Photo by Ronda Churchill
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, left, shares a laugh with the Rev. Carol Walton after a service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Henderson, Nevada. Dufendach carries out some traditionally priestly functions, such as presiding at the weekday Eucharist. Photo by Ronda Churchill
Although church leaders often worry that switching from full-time to part-time clergy will lead to decline, congregations across the country are finding new vitality by reimagining the roles of clergy and laypeople.
Editor’s note: Research for this story was funded by The BTS Center, a Maine-based think tank focused on 21st-century faith communities. It included visits to nearly two dozen vital mainline congregations that have shifted from full- to part-time clergy.
Adjusting to life without a full-time pastor has become a pressing challenge for thousands of congregations in mainline Protestant denominations across the country.
Shrinking attendance and ever-leaner budgets have forced churches to pare back the pastorate, and many wonder how effective ministry can happen when clergy are working just 30, 20 or 10 hours a week for the church.
Relearning how to do effective congregational ministry with part-time clergy is no easy task, and denominational officers have no easy answers. The traditional model for mainline churches relies on full-time clergy, and it can be difficult to envision a thriving congregation with a part-time pastor.
“It’s the white, old-line that is having to make the adjustment,” said E. Brooks Holifield, professor emeritus of American church history at Emory University and the author of “God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America.”
“The transition is being felt most deeply by churches that had an expectation of a full-time clergy person who devoted all of his or her time to the church. In other groups and other traditions, that expectation was not always there.”
More and more congregations are likely to face this issue. According to the National Congregations Study, nearly 40 percent of mainline Protestant congregations had no full-time paid clergy in 2012.
In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
Yet not all congregations struggle after transitioning to a part-time pastor. Dozens have found vitality by avoiding pitfalls that have caused other churches to stumble when making the shift. As more churches go part time, instructive stories are emerging.
“They recognize their reality that they can’t afford a full-time pastor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to have a ministry,” said Darren Morgan, the associate conference minister for the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ, where 68 percent of the 156 congregations have no full-time clergy.
“The leadership within those churches is strong. They say, ‘We’re not going to be a weak church. We’ll be a strong, small church.’”
Some see it as recovering an ancient tradition for a new time.
“We’re doing things kind of the way the early Christians did before they built churches,” said Mark Raymond, a member of New Sharon Congregational Church (UCC) in New Sharon, Maine, where a handful of laypeople take turns leading worship around a table each week. “There’s more of that spirit,” he said.
The research for this story shows that vitality in those “strong, small churches” doesn’t look the same in every congregation.
Signs of vitality can include growing average Sunday attendance, increasing engagement in ministries, expanding community outreach or some combination. All the congregations featured here have stabilized church finances since going part time and have taken steps to reinvigorate ministries.
Three models have emerged that illustrate how vital churches are making the adjustment: the pastor as equipper of laypeople, the pastor as ambassador and the pastor as team member.
1. Pastor as equipper of laypeople, not provider of services
With part-time ministries, denominational leaders see a common problem. The pastor has diminished capacity for ministry, and parishioners don’t pick up the slack. Much of what the church once had to offer gets lost or hollowed out.
Vital churches, however, head off this problem by rethinking the pastor’s role. She or he becomes less a provider of religious services and more an equipper of laypeople to perform duties that had previously fallen to clergy.
What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
These congregations are reclaiming dormant threads in their denominational traditions and finding meaning in the process.
Consider the Episcopal Church, where 48 percent of congregations have no full-time paid clergy, up from 43 percent five years ago. Lay Episcopalians are reclaiming ministries they’ve long been authorized to do but seldom did when full-time clergy were around.
If part-time clergy encourage laypeople to take responsibility and experiment, congregants can learn to spread their wings.
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, for example, average Sunday attendance has grown 44 percent (from 55 to 79) since its pastorate went part time in 2014. New ministries to raise vegetables for the hungry and shelter homeless men have taken off since then, parishioners say, in part because part-time vicar the Rev. Alissabeth Newton doesn’t try to “run the show,” as founding church member Bob Ewing put it.
Volunteers at St. Columba's take on ministries such as raising vegetables for the hungry.Photo courtesy of St. Columba's Episcopal Church
“What I found,” said Micah Kurtz, a young father who used to attend a nearby megachurch, “was an openness to let people own things and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this? It might meet your skills. Give it a shot.’” Kurtz is now an active member at St. Columba’s, where he oversees the Just Garden ministry.
In vital churches, priests may defer to laypeople to carry out some traditionally priestly functions. At St. Timothy’s Church in Henderson, Nevada, laypeople sometimes preside at funerals and always at the two weekday Eucharist services.
Laywoman Muriel Dufendach distributes elements consecrated the prior Sunday by the congregation’s priest-in-charge, the Rev. Carol Walton, who sits in a pew and receives with everyone else.
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, right, serves Communion to the Rev. Carol Walton during a Lenten service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church. Photo by Ronda Churchill
“Laypeople can do an awful lot of stuff in the church,” Dufendach said. And Walton, who serves 24 hours a week, is happy to accommodate.
“I’m not going to take over something that a layperson has been doing, because I think that’s part of vitality: having ministry that people want to do,” Walton said.
Sometimes laypeople have gifts just waiting for an outlet -- and for permission to use them. At Christ Church in Bethel, Vermont, 10 of the 20 members of the congregation take turns preaching. That lightens the load for their volunteer priest, the Rev. Shelie Richardson, who works full time as an insurance agent and preaches just a few times a year.
Not every church has such a stable of talent ready to go, but some congregations are addressing this by making the part-time pastorate into a trainer’s role. This works especially well in a three-quarters-time arrangement, where the pastor can satisfy some congregational needs and still have time to train laity to do parts of his or her job.
For example, at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington, the Rev. Peter Mohr uses a portion of his three-quarters-time role to equip laity for functions he used to fulfill.
He meets with Bible study leaders once a month and then leaves the teaching to them. Rather than preaching every Sunday, he meets with congregants who fill in, answering questions they might have about texts or interpretations.
At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, full-time priests used to maintain an active presence around town, inviting people to church, but times have changed.
At 30 hours a week, the Rev. Bret Hays lacks the time for that. Instead, he has trained congregants in a multiweek workshop to be lay evangelists. And like many coping strategies, this approach yields additional benefits.
“It’s not just a strategy of equipping the laity,” Hays said. “It’s also a strategy to respond to the phenomenon that makes an invitation from a layperson count for much more than an invitation from a priest.”
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, average Sunday attendance has grown since its pastorate went part time in 2014. Photo courtesy of Daniel Hershman/St. Columba
2. Pastor as ambassador through strategic use of time
A second type of challenge arises when churches cut clergy hours back to part-time and then fall, sometimes unwittingly, into an insular chaplaincy situation. Pastors spend the little time they have leading Sunday worship and visiting the sick, so that they’re left with no time for anything else.
“But what we know for vital congregations -- those that are having an impact on their communities, are growing and have increased access to resources -- is that a pastor needs to be doing less visiting and more leading and engagement externally with their local community,” said the Rev. Sara Anderson of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Some congregations have avoided the chaplaincy model by counterintuitively revamping the part-time pastorate to make sure it includes more time, not less, for community engagement.
Since switching to part-time five years ago, St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lakewood, Washington, has doubled average Sunday attendance, from 25 to 50. It’s seeing newcomers from nonfaith, Buddhist and Mormon backgrounds, among others. The church has boosted mission giving from zero to 7 percent of the budget over that period.
The Rev. Joe Smith envisions his three-fifths-time pastorate as St. John’s ambassador. And he gets creative with it. He sometimes stands at the curb at rush hour and waves to commuters passing the church. He visits Boy Scout troops as they meet at St. John’s and organizes Scout Sundays, which bring dozens of scouts and their families to worship.
“There was no playbook at all” for how to do part-time ministry effectively, Smith said. “Without it being a circus or too much of a publicity stunt, you do whatever you can to have people in the church, because the critical mass is important. If people come into what feels like an empty space, they won’t come back.”
Down the road in an East Tacoma public housing development, Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission gathers a self-reliant flock of 15 or 20 for worship in the Holy Family of Jesus Cambodian Episcopal Church.
For worship, the group needs nothing from its pastor, authorized lay minister Lauren Vignec, except a sermon (and sometimes the Cambodian priest covers that part, too). Congregants handle everything else. Therefore, when he’s not on his day job as a financial adviser, Vignec can pour his ministry time into community outreach.
He finds plenty to do. One day he’s delivering emergency food from World Vision to homes in the neighborhood. The next day he’s visiting one of three local casinos, where he tells people he’s a pastor and lets the conversations flow.
Several times a year, Vignec organizes a Salishan “dance church” called Fear No Evil, where street dancers compete before a judging panel. It draws more than 100 dancers and spectators, including many young African-American, Latino and Native American men.
Winners of a dance contest sponsored by Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission. The event is part of the pastor's outreach. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission
Vignec is on a dance team and takes his turn competing. Between rounds, he delivers Scripture readings and a sermon, usually about resolving conflict or managing mental illness.
“The really cool stuff we’re doing here, like with dance church -- I don’t think this would be possible in a normal relationship between a normal pastor and a normal church board,” Vignec said. “The reason why I’m capable of even trying this stuff is because they just told me, ‘Lauren, do whatever you want to do to revitalize this church. Just try it.’”
Pastor Lauren Vignec participates in the "dance church" as a member of a dance team. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission
In Vignec’s experience, mainline churches often get the part-time model wrong.
“They think of it like, ‘We can have a 15-hour-a-week pastor, because it will take 15 hours to do all the things we want the pastor to do.’
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “The church should do those things and let the pastor do something to bring in new people to the church, however that is going to work. And there are a ton of different ways to make it work.”
Sometimes, new experiments require letting go of what had been expected duties. Unlike her full-time predecessors, the Rev. Linda Brewster of Tuttle Road United Methodist Church in Cumberland, Maine, doesn’t attend committee meetings. And once a month, laypeople take over preaching.
With that carved-out time, Brewster, who works full time as a nurse practitioner, tries new types of outreach. Overall, the approach is working. Average Sunday attendance at Tuttle Road has doubled, from 30 to 60, since the church went part time three years ago.
One successful outreach experiment: Messy Grace. Around 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoons once a month, families with young kids who don’t otherwise go to church stop by for a 10-minute taste of worship, followed by music, supper and an environmental lesson, such as gardening or composting.
Children take part in Messy Grace, an informal ministry for young families. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMC
For parents and kids who attend, Messy Grace has become their church.
“We had a wonderful baptism,” Brewster said. “We had a pool of water with some white ducks in it. People sang ‘Wade in the Water’ and danced down the aisle. They wouldn’t have done that during Sunday morning worship, but for some reason they would do it on Saturday afternoon.”
The Rev. Linda Brewster, second from right, talks with families involved in Messy Grace. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMC
3. Pastor as team member, sharing the pastorate with other part-timers
When cash-strapped congregations do whatever it takes to retain a full-time pastor, they sometimes court a burnout situation. A disproportionate share of the budget -- and consequently, the ministry expectations -- land on one person who can become overworked and unhappy.
In such situations, switching to part-time clergy, where the pastorate is joyfully shared among multiple part-time staff, can be enlivening.
Clarendon Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Arlington, Virginia, for example, can afford a full-time pastor but has strategically opted not to do so.
Before Clarendon made its pastorate part-time in 2012, burnout was a real problem.
“Everything fell on the pastor’s shoulders, from running copies of Sunday morning bulletins to changing burned-out lightbulbs,” said the Rev. David Ensign. He said he told his board the model wasn’t helping the congregation, and “it was killing me.”
The solution: Ensign volunteered to go half time and let the savings go toward hiring a part-time administrative assistant. The change has renewed Ensign’s ministry by delivering less clerical work and more time for family, guitar and other creative pursuits.
The arrangement has helped the congregants as well. The new staffer handles administrative issues related to rental units owned by the church, a job that congregants once had to do.
Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
With more time for what’s fun and meaningful, people like Ron Bookbinder are more engaged in the Clarendon ministries they care about, such as writing pastoral care letters and going on a mission trip to help flood victims in West Virginia.
“The message I get from the change is that we can be open,” said Bookbinder, a ruling elder in the church. “We can do new things. We can focus on what we’re really good at. And we can explore -- try something different.”
Other congregations are trying a similar approach. Since First United Methodist Church in Hudson, Massachusetts, went part time in 2015, 10 new members have joined, and lay-led classes are thriving.
With those successes and others, some hope the pastorate will become full-time again soon. But the Rev. Rosanne Roberts, a retiree on Medicare, said hiring another part-time employee to work with children and families would be better stewardship.
“As soon as it became clear that we would be ending the year in the black, someone on the finance team said, ‘Oh, great! We can move you up to three-quarters-time or back to full-time,’” Roberts said. “I said, ‘No! You’re forgetting it’s not just the salary.’”
Having a full-time pastor would put the church on the hook for health insurance premiums, she pointed out. “And we’d be in trouble all over again.”
Willing and able laity
One key to all three models is the congregation. Motivated laypeople are instrumental to both the vision and the execution. From leading worship to pastoral care, their new roles are inextricably linked to their congregation’s destiny.
“In order to be successful, the laity have to be willing and able to do this,” said Morgan of the UCC’s Maine Conference.
How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
They’re proving they can step up, learn and lead. In the process, pastorates are becoming more distributed across entire congregations and less confined to one individual.
Whether growing vegetables for the hungry, reaching out to the church’s neighbors, presiding at services or sharing administrative duties, the clergy and laity of successful congregations are working together in new -- or rediscovered -- ways. They are reframing the part-time pastorate, allowing new vitality to emerge. And their stories hold lessons for congregations across the country.
Questions to consider:
Faith & Leadership
Editor’s note: Research for this story was funded by The BTS Center, a Maine-based think tank focused on 21st-century faith communities. It included visits to nearly two dozen vital mainline congregations that have shifted from full- to part-time clergy.
Adjusting to life without a full-time pastor has become a pressing challenge for thousands of congregations in mainline Protestant denominations across the country.
Shrinking attendance and ever-leaner budgets have forced churches to pare back the pastorate, and many wonder how effective ministry can happen when clergy are working just 30, 20 or 10 hours a week for the church.
Relearning how to do effective congregational ministry with part-time clergy is no easy task, and denominational officers have no easy answers. The traditional model for mainline churches relies on full-time clergy, and it can be difficult to envision a thriving congregation with a part-time pastor.
“It’s the white, old-line that is having to make the adjustment,” said E. Brooks Holifield, professor emeritus of American church history at Emory University and the author of “God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America.”
“The transition is being felt most deeply by churches that had an expectation of a full-time clergy person who devoted all of his or her time to the church. In other groups and other traditions, that expectation was not always there.”
More and more congregations are likely to face this issue. According to the National Congregations Study, nearly 40 percent of mainline Protestant congregations had no full-time paid clergy in 2012.
In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
Yet not all congregations struggle after transitioning to a part-time pastor. Dozens have found vitality by avoiding pitfalls that have caused other churches to stumble when making the shift. As more churches go part time, instructive stories are emerging.
“They recognize their reality that they can’t afford a full-time pastor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to have a ministry,” said Darren Morgan, the associate conference minister for the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ, where 68 percent of the 156 congregations have no full-time clergy.
“The leadership within those churches is strong. They say, ‘We’re not going to be a weak church. We’ll be a strong, small church.’”
Some see it as recovering an ancient tradition for a new time.
“We’re doing things kind of the way the early Christians did before they built churches,” said Mark Raymond, a member of New Sharon Congregational Church (UCC) in New Sharon, Maine, where a handful of laypeople take turns leading worship around a table each week. “There’s more of that spirit,” he said.
The research for this story shows that vitality in those “strong, small churches” doesn’t look the same in every congregation.
Signs of vitality can include growing average Sunday attendance, increasing engagement in ministries, expanding community outreach or some combination. All the congregations featured here have stabilized church finances since going part time and have taken steps to reinvigorate ministries.
Three models have emerged that illustrate how vital churches are making the adjustment: the pastor as equipper of laypeople, the pastor as ambassador and the pastor as team member.
1. Pastor as equipper of laypeople, not provider of services
With part-time ministries, denominational leaders see a common problem. The pastor has diminished capacity for ministry, and parishioners don’t pick up the slack. Much of what the church once had to offer gets lost or hollowed out.
Vital churches, however, head off this problem by rethinking the pastor’s role. She or he becomes less a provider of religious services and more an equipper of laypeople to perform duties that had previously fallen to clergy.
What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
These congregations are reclaiming dormant threads in their denominational traditions and finding meaning in the process.
Consider the Episcopal Church, where 48 percent of congregations have no full-time paid clergy, up from 43 percent five years ago. Lay Episcopalians are reclaiming ministries they’ve long been authorized to do but seldom did when full-time clergy were around.
If part-time clergy encourage laypeople to take responsibility and experiment, congregants can learn to spread their wings.
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, for example, average Sunday attendance has grown 44 percent (from 55 to 79) since its pastorate went part time in 2014. New ministries to raise vegetables for the hungry and shelter homeless men have taken off since then, parishioners say, in part because part-time vicar the Rev. Alissabeth Newton doesn’t try to “run the show,” as founding church member Bob Ewing put it.
“What I found,” said Micah Kurtz, a young father who used to attend a nearby megachurch, “was an openness to let people own things and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this? It might meet your skills. Give it a shot.’” Kurtz is now an active member at St. Columba’s, where he oversees the Just Garden ministry.
In vital churches, priests may defer to laypeople to carry out some traditionally priestly functions. At St. Timothy’s Church in Henderson, Nevada, laypeople sometimes preside at funerals and always at the two weekday Eucharist services.
Laywoman Muriel Dufendach distributes elements consecrated the prior Sunday by the congregation’s priest-in-charge, the Rev. Carol Walton, who sits in a pew and receives with everyone else.
“Laypeople can do an awful lot of stuff in the church,” Dufendach said. And Walton, who serves 24 hours a week, is happy to accommodate.
“I’m not going to take over something that a layperson has been doing, because I think that’s part of vitality: having ministry that people want to do,” Walton said.
Sometimes laypeople have gifts just waiting for an outlet -- and for permission to use them. At Christ Church in Bethel, Vermont, 10 of the 20 members of the congregation take turns preaching. That lightens the load for their volunteer priest, the Rev. Shelie Richardson, who works full time as an insurance agent and preaches just a few times a year.
Not every church has such a stable of talent ready to go, but some congregations are addressing this by making the part-time pastorate into a trainer’s role. This works especially well in a three-quarters-time arrangement, where the pastor can satisfy some congregational needs and still have time to train laity to do parts of his or her job.
For example, at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington, the Rev. Peter Mohr uses a portion of his three-quarters-time role to equip laity for functions he used to fulfill.
He meets with Bible study leaders once a month and then leaves the teaching to them. Rather than preaching every Sunday, he meets with congregants who fill in, answering questions they might have about texts or interpretations.
At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, full-time priests used to maintain an active presence around town, inviting people to church, but times have changed.
At 30 hours a week, the Rev. Bret Hays lacks the time for that. Instead, he has trained congregants in a multiweek workshop to be lay evangelists. And like many coping strategies, this approach yields additional benefits.
“It’s not just a strategy of equipping the laity,” Hays said. “It’s also a strategy to respond to the phenomenon that makes an invitation from a layperson count for much more than an invitation from a priest.”
2. Pastor as ambassador through strategic use of time
A second type of challenge arises when churches cut clergy hours back to part-time and then fall, sometimes unwittingly, into an insular chaplaincy situation. Pastors spend the little time they have leading Sunday worship and visiting the sick, so that they’re left with no time for anything else.
“But what we know for vital congregations -- those that are having an impact on their communities, are growing and have increased access to resources -- is that a pastor needs to be doing less visiting and more leading and engagement externally with their local community,” said the Rev. Sara Anderson of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Some congregations have avoided the chaplaincy model by counterintuitively revamping the part-time pastorate to make sure it includes more time, not less, for community engagement.
Since switching to part-time five years ago, St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lakewood, Washington, has doubled average Sunday attendance, from 25 to 50. It’s seeing newcomers from nonfaith, Buddhist and Mormon backgrounds, among others. The church has boosted mission giving from zero to 7 percent of the budget over that period.
The Rev. Joe Smith envisions his three-fifths-time pastorate as St. John’s ambassador. And he gets creative with it. He sometimes stands at the curb at rush hour and waves to commuters passing the church. He visits Boy Scout troops as they meet at St. John’s and organizes Scout Sundays, which bring dozens of scouts and their families to worship.
“There was no playbook at all” for how to do part-time ministry effectively, Smith said. “Without it being a circus or too much of a publicity stunt, you do whatever you can to have people in the church, because the critical mass is important. If people come into what feels like an empty space, they won’t come back.”
Down the road in an East Tacoma public housing development, Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission gathers a self-reliant flock of 15 or 20 for worship in the Holy Family of Jesus Cambodian Episcopal Church.
For worship, the group needs nothing from its pastor, authorized lay minister Lauren Vignec, except a sermon (and sometimes the Cambodian priest covers that part, too). Congregants handle everything else. Therefore, when he’s not on his day job as a financial adviser, Vignec can pour his ministry time into community outreach.
He finds plenty to do. One day he’s delivering emergency food from World Vision to homes in the neighborhood. The next day he’s visiting one of three local casinos, where he tells people he’s a pastor and lets the conversations flow.
Several times a year, Vignec organizes a Salishan “dance church” called Fear No Evil, where street dancers compete before a judging panel. It draws more than 100 dancers and spectators, including many young African-American, Latino and Native American men.
Vignec is on a dance team and takes his turn competing. Between rounds, he delivers Scripture readings and a sermon, usually about resolving conflict or managing mental illness.
“The really cool stuff we’re doing here, like with dance church -- I don’t think this would be possible in a normal relationship between a normal pastor and a normal church board,” Vignec said. “The reason why I’m capable of even trying this stuff is because they just told me, ‘Lauren, do whatever you want to do to revitalize this church. Just try it.’”
In Vignec’s experience, mainline churches often get the part-time model wrong.
“They think of it like, ‘We can have a 15-hour-a-week pastor, because it will take 15 hours to do all the things we want the pastor to do.’
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “The church should do those things and let the pastor do something to bring in new people to the church, however that is going to work. And there are a ton of different ways to make it work.”
Sometimes, new experiments require letting go of what had been expected duties. Unlike her full-time predecessors, the Rev. Linda Brewster of Tuttle Road United Methodist Church in Cumberland, Maine, doesn’t attend committee meetings. And once a month, laypeople take over preaching.
With that carved-out time, Brewster, who works full time as a nurse practitioner, tries new types of outreach. Overall, the approach is working. Average Sunday attendance at Tuttle Road has doubled, from 30 to 60, since the church went part time three years ago.
One successful outreach experiment: Messy Grace. Around 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoons once a month, families with young kids who don’t otherwise go to church stop by for a 10-minute taste of worship, followed by music, supper and an environmental lesson, such as gardening or composting.
For parents and kids who attend, Messy Grace has become their church.
“We had a wonderful baptism,” Brewster said. “We had a pool of water with some white ducks in it. People sang ‘Wade in the Water’ and danced down the aisle. They wouldn’t have done that during Sunday morning worship, but for some reason they would do it on Saturday afternoon.”
3. Pastor as team member, sharing the pastorate with other part-timers
When cash-strapped congregations do whatever it takes to retain a full-time pastor, they sometimes court a burnout situation. A disproportionate share of the budget -- and consequently, the ministry expectations -- land on one person who can become overworked and unhappy.
In such situations, switching to part-time clergy, where the pastorate is joyfully shared among multiple part-time staff, can be enlivening.
Clarendon Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Arlington, Virginia, for example, can afford a full-time pastor but has strategically opted not to do so.
Before Clarendon made its pastorate part-time in 2012, burnout was a real problem.
“Everything fell on the pastor’s shoulders, from running copies of Sunday morning bulletins to changing burned-out lightbulbs,” said the Rev. David Ensign. He said he told his board the model wasn’t helping the congregation, and “it was killing me.”
The solution: Ensign volunteered to go half time and let the savings go toward hiring a part-time administrative assistant. The change has renewed Ensign’s ministry by delivering less clerical work and more time for family, guitar and other creative pursuits.
The arrangement has helped the congregants as well. The new staffer handles administrative issues related to rental units owned by the church, a job that congregants once had to do.
Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
With more time for what’s fun and meaningful, people like Ron Bookbinder are more engaged in the Clarendon ministries they care about, such as writing pastoral care letters and going on a mission trip to help flood victims in West Virginia.
“The message I get from the change is that we can be open,” said Bookbinder, a ruling elder in the church. “We can do new things. We can focus on what we’re really good at. And we can explore -- try something different.”
Other congregations are trying a similar approach. Since First United Methodist Church in Hudson, Massachusetts, went part time in 2015, 10 new members have joined, and lay-led classes are thriving.
With those successes and others, some hope the pastorate will become full-time again soon. But the Rev. Rosanne Roberts, a retiree on Medicare, said hiring another part-time employee to work with children and families would be better stewardship.
“As soon as it became clear that we would be ending the year in the black, someone on the finance team said, ‘Oh, great! We can move you up to three-quarters-time or back to full-time,’” Roberts said. “I said, ‘No! You’re forgetting it’s not just the salary.’”
Having a full-time pastor would put the church on the hook for health insurance premiums, she pointed out. “And we’d be in trouble all over again.”
Willing and able laity
One key to all three models is the congregation. Motivated laypeople are instrumental to both the vision and the execution. From leading worship to pastoral care, their new roles are inextricably linked to their congregation’s destiny.
“In order to be successful, the laity have to be willing and able to do this,” said Morgan of the UCC’s Maine Conference.
How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
They’re proving they can step up, learn and lead. In the process, pastorates are becoming more distributed across entire congregations and less confined to one individual.
Whether growing vegetables for the hungry, reaching out to the church’s neighbors, presiding at services or sharing administrative duties, the clergy and laity of successful congregations are working together in new -- or rediscovered -- ways. They are reframing the part-time pastorate, allowing new vitality to emerge. And their stories hold lessons for congregations across the country.
Questions to consider:
- In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
- What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
- How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
- Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
- What support do part-time clergy need to sustain their vocations? What support do laity need during and after such transitions? Is your organization able to offer these resources?
Faith & Leadership
NUMBER FIVE: THE SPACE BETWEEN DEATH AND RESURRECTION
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Shelly Rambo: The space between death and resurrection
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Shelly Rambo: The space between death and resurrection
Shelly Rambo
A theologian who works in the discipline of trauma studies says that Christians need to pay more attention to Holy Saturday. Believing in the promise of resurrection doesn't eliminate suffering -- and in witnessing this suffering, we are about the work of redemption, she says.
Theologians have always wrestled with questions about suffering: Why do we suffer? Where is God in the suffering? Does God allow suffering? Does God will suffering?
But new research into trauma “pushes them to the extreme,” said theologian Shelly Rambo.
“I think what’s different is the way that trauma exposes the extreme vulnerability of human persons in relationship to larger historical forces,” Rambo said.
She became interested in the field of trauma studies while at Yale University in the 1990s, where researchers were studying the effect of the Holocaust on survivors. She has continued to explore the theological issues of suffering and witness with military chaplains and others who have experienced trauma.
An associate professor of theology at the Boston University School of Theology, Rambo is the author of “Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining,” in which she rejects a triumphalistic theology of resurrection and develops a theology of Holy Saturday.
Rambo spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School for the Center for Reconciliation’s 2014 Summer Institute(link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is trauma studies?
Trauma studies is not one field. It’s multiple fields coming together to say, “How do we understand what seems to be an extreme and overwhelming effect of violence and suffering in our day?”
The study of trauma largely emerged at the end of the 19th century -- you could say it all began with Sigmund Freud. He was trying to make sense of what he was seeing in the midst of World War I, when he was seeing veterans return from war.
This phenomenon of trauma seemed to be a different form of suffering from what he had witnessed in his patients, and so some of Freud’s early theories birthed a whole study of trauma.
Certainly, the study of war continued with World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. And a lot of what we know about trauma is from studying veterans, because they went to hospitals, and this could be documented.
Also, post-Holocaust studies were very instrumental to what we think about as the study of trauma. How do we think about an overwhelming, historical event of suffering and its effects? A lot of the study of trauma emerged about what seemed to be overwhelming suffering that can’t be explained or that can’t be narrated straightforwardly in a kind of clinical relationship.
Trauma moved off the psychoanalytic couch because suddenly the study of trauma became interesting to historians and to neurobiologists and to philosophers and to people like Toni Morrison, who I think writes the best about the trauma of slavery and how it’s experienced, and the kind of haunting of history into the present.
The study of trauma as a theologian became really important, because theologians always study suffering.
Q: The suffering component seems a natural fit with theology.
One of the perennial questions of human existence is, Why do we suffer? And for theologians, Where is God in the suffering? Does God allow suffering? Does God will suffering? Is God absent or present in suffering?
Theologians have always asked that, but I think what’s different is the way that trauma exposes the extreme vulnerability of human persons in relationship to larger historical forces.
Often, trauma was thought of as very individual, right? Often we think about trauma as a traumatic event. An event happens.
But what we’re beginning to see is that traumatic events don’t end. Traumas are moving -- and we could say bleeding -- into other traumas. We don’t see a clear end to a suffering event but instead a kind of overflowing of suffering.
I think that trauma takes all of our theological questions -- and theological answers -- and it pushes them to the extreme.
I would look at someone like Jürgen Moltmann and say he was trying to make sense of Christian theology in light of the extreme suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, and Christian theology could no longer be read the same way. That’s the birth of trauma and theology for me.
We can’t do a light touch on suffering anymore. It really is going to challenge our fundamental assumptions about the nature of God and humanity.
Q: How did you get into this field?
Well, I first studied English literature, and I’m at heart somebody who is a great lover of story. I was raised with this great sense of the biblical imagination and these great stories of David and Goliath, and it kind of fed me and bred me to love literature, I think, at its best.
It really was when I started to read the post-Holocaust literature where I started to see this is a story that can’t be told.
Q: Because of issues of memory or just because it’s so horrific?
Issues of memory, and yes, I think questions of the impossibility of speaking -- recovering a memory, speaking -- and the question of whether anybody could hear it if it was spoken.
These were all questions that someone like Elie Wiesel made very clear to me: What does it mean to write the horror of the Holocaust? What does it mean to write an event that can’t be written?
The post-Holocaust literature became really interesting to me, and then when I was at Yale Divinity School, I would trudge down the hill and I would go sit in on brown-bag lunch seminars that the Yale Psychiatric Institute was doing.
At that time, the Yale Psychiatric Institute was doing some of the primary clinical work with Holocaust survivors and their children, and so I was listening to it. It was, strangely, open to the public.
I was listening to psychoanalysts discuss the cases of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the challenges of trying to think about a suffering that transmits across generations. And I thought, wow, this is a profound level at which the human story is disrupted, and yet somehow violence continues.
So it was from literature to this phenomenon of human experience that I’d really never heard about before -- the experience of suffering after catastrophe -- and I just trudged back up the hill at Yale Divinity School and I said, “Theology really needs to take this seriously.”
At that time, Serene Jones was at Yale Divinity School, and I did a directed study with her because she was interested in reading some of the trauma studies that were happening at Yale at that time.
We can do better in Christian theology to think about suffering, not as something abstract, but as a phenomenon around us that needs to be addressed, and that’s what I do with returning veterans. We have an obligation to re-integrate persons into a new community, and theology matters in doing that.
Q: Do you look at the resurrection in a different way in light of trauma?
Yes. The first book that I wrote was really a refusal of a kind of triumphalistic theology of resurrection. It was because, in the case of many people who are living beyond traumas, the resurrection was often heard as a rush to get over it, to recover, or as pressure to live into resurrection when in fact the reality of their trauma was still very present.
There’s this sense that because it’s a part of the narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, yes, there may be extreme suffering, but we have the good news in the end. The effect of that is that often we don’t linger very long in the suffering in Christian churches.
Walter Brueggemann says that we don’t pause on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter because we already know the end. But that moment, the moment of Holy Saturday -- which I develop quite extensively -- is that important moment in which you’re living beyond a death, a kind of metaphorical death, but can’t see life clearly ahead.
So what does it mean to take that theological moment -- that Saturday -- as really a descent into hell? People who experience trauma will narrate something like a descent into hell, which is a sense of survival but not living anew again.
So that moment became really important for me to develop theologically. So what is the call of the Christian community to live all of those moments -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Because they come around again every year, right?
I’m working on a book now on resurrection wounds, so I’m rereading the story of Thomas’ encounter with the risen Christ, that Gospel of John story that’s so visually powerful, in which the resurrected Christ shows Thomas the wounds, and the wounds still remain there.
So often we read that story as Thomas doubts that it happened, and so Thomas becomes the believer because he comes to faith because of the wounds. I think we’re still not reading the wounds as seriously as we could in terms of the way in which life is marked by suffering.
It’s not doomed to be the only thing there, but the wounds, for many people, constitute part of how they understand their new life.
Maybe the work of the Christian community is to witness the wounds and bring them back into life again.
So there’s a different reading of the resurrection if you read a lot of trauma literature. Basically, what I do invites me into a new way of thinking about suffering, and then I’ve got to go back to my Christian texts and say, “OK, what does this biblical story mean in light of the wounds that I’m seeing all around me?”
Q: How does someone in a position of Christian leadership use what you do in working with people?
I went back to the biblical narrative with all of this reading about trauma -- what happens to the brain, and some of the deeper philosophical questions about what does it mean not to know an experience that has happened to you, the cognitive inability to know.
So I took all of this back to the biblical texts, and one of the things that stood out to me was the importance of those who witness at the foot of the cross, and the importance of those moments in which the disciples don’t recognize Jesus when he appears -- Is he the gardener? -- those moments of not being able to discern what’s going on.
That made me think about how hard it is to witness suffering, how hard it is in the chaos in which you don’t know whether life’s going to emerge for someone. So in a sense, the preacher or the Christian leader becomes the Mary and the beloved disciple and the Thomas who don’t have a clear sign of life.
None of those witnesses really have some triumphant understanding of “Oh, it’s all going to be good in the end.” Their work of witnessing is part of the redemption story, so that it puts a kind of pressure on Christian leaders to say that in the witnessing of suffering, we are about the work of redemption.
So all of a sudden, the disciples got really exciting to me. Now I look and I say how confusing it is to be able to stare death in the face and to live beyond that, and the grief and sorrow of not being able to understand what’s going on.
Christian leaders are called into that space in a way that I hadn’t realized before. The proclamation of the good news of the resurrection has to do with participating in this process of witnessing the dying and the rising of all creatures, witnessing the new creation coming into being.
So that seemed to me like a different emphasis. Instead of proclaiming a very positive, triumphant kind of word, you had witnessing as a slow, almost unsatisfying, unrewarding process of accompaniment. The accompaniment often means not knowing, not having that certainty.
It doesn’t mean you don’t have the promise, but the certainty’s not there. You can hold on to the promises of God that life will come about, but holding on to the promise is different from a certainty that we know how this is going to end. Because often we don’t, when we’re with people and communities who are in such pain.
We don’t really know how that life is going to come about, so we cling to the promise and we do the slow work of witness.
Q: Do you work with trauma survivors?
When I was first teaching, I’d done my dissertation and I was really interested in trauma studies from a literary perspective, from a philosophical perspective, and so I was doing highly conceptual work like you do as a Ph.D. student.
I got a real education when I started to teach classes related to trauma. First of all, they would fill up and people would seek them out, because these were the questions that people wanted to ask. So I started teaching this class rather innocently, thinking people were going to be so excited about all this trauma theory and neurobiological research.
It is fascinating stuff, but what happened is I got pulled into multiple levels of engaging trauma and some very on-the-ground work.
The area that’s been probably most sustained over the last six years is issues related to military trauma. I started to get military chaplains in the trauma and theology class. The ways in which these military chaplains embodied the intersection between trauma care and theology was just astounding.
I started to say yes to any invitations that they extended to me to learn about their world, and that took me to places like the Naval War College in Rhode Island and the [Air Force Chaplain Corps College] at Fort Jackson. I was interested in how chaplains were being trained theologically to do their work.
They kept saying, “This is exactly what we need to have training in,” and so I just kept accepting invitations, which led me to develop a chaplaincy track at Boston University(link is external)with members of the Religion and Conflict Transformation program.
I think Christian ministers are really struggling with the realities of violence, the pervasiveness of it, and the degree to which their own communities are being exposed to that violence and are really craving theologies of suffering.
Devastating things are happening to people in their congregations and in their communities, and how do you get up and preach? How do you teach the biblical stories? So I got an education in trauma, but I also have a passion to help religious leaders translate some of their stories into a new day.
The rituals of lament and rituals of baptism -- these are very profound rituals that I think can be re-purposed. So there’s a kind of new purposefulness in my teaching, to keep addressing some of these issues.
Read more from Shelly Rambo »
NEW IN THE ALBAN LIBRARY IN 2017
Supervising and Supporting Ministry Staff: A Guide to Thriving Togetherby Kevin E. Lawson and Mick Boersma
Surveys of pastoral staff repeatedly show that senior or supervising pastors consistently rate their working relationships with their associate staff members higher than do the associate staff members. Satisfaction levels follow similar patterns. In many cases, supervisors are not aware of or attentive to the concerns of their staff, and yet, these staff members are critical to the success of the church.
Supervising and Supporting Ministry Staff is a research-based guide to the senior/associate staff relationship that is filled with real-life stories and practical advice to help readers negotiate their staff relationships successfully. The book focuses not only on the business mechanics of the supervisor/supervisee relationship, but also the full experiences of the associate staff, including emotional and spiritual needs. This helpful resource addresses congregations of all sizes across denominations and discusses a range or supervisor/supervisee relationship types.
Learn more and order the book »
Engage: A Theological Field Education Toolkit edited by Matthew Floding
Theological field education, in which a ministry student steps out of the classroom and begins practicing with the supervision of a mentor, is a critical part of accredited ministry programs. Engage equips both students and their supervisor-mentors to engage in this important opportunity with energy and imagination, and it prepares students for the challenging work of integrating theory into real-world practice.
Engage provides coaching from recognized experts in the arts of ministry: preaching, administration, evangelism, pastoral care, public ministry, leadership, faith formation, liturgical arts and more. Other chapters address themes such as race, gender, and ministry across faith traditions (or no faith tradition). The book addresses field education in a range of contexts-from churches to non-profits.
Engage offers a valuable resource for students making the most of their transition from the classroom into real world ministry with all its joys and many challenges
Learn more and order the book »
From all of us at Alban at Duke Divinity School, we wish you a very happy holiday season. Your ministries inspire everything that we do here. So, we thank you for the leadership and ministry you offer through communities of faith around the world. We look forward to serving you in 2018.
The Alban Weekly will return on Monday, January 8, 2018.
Theologians have always wrestled with questions about suffering: Why do we suffer? Where is God in the suffering? Does God allow suffering? Does God will suffering?
But new research into trauma “pushes them to the extreme,” said theologian Shelly Rambo.
“I think what’s different is the way that trauma exposes the extreme vulnerability of human persons in relationship to larger historical forces,” Rambo said.
She became interested in the field of trauma studies while at Yale University in the 1990s, where researchers were studying the effect of the Holocaust on survivors. She has continued to explore the theological issues of suffering and witness with military chaplains and others who have experienced trauma.
An associate professor of theology at the Boston University School of Theology, Rambo is the author of “Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining,” in which she rejects a triumphalistic theology of resurrection and develops a theology of Holy Saturday.
Rambo spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School for the Center for Reconciliation’s 2014 Summer Institute(link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is trauma studies?
Trauma studies is not one field. It’s multiple fields coming together to say, “How do we understand what seems to be an extreme and overwhelming effect of violence and suffering in our day?”
The study of trauma largely emerged at the end of the 19th century -- you could say it all began with Sigmund Freud. He was trying to make sense of what he was seeing in the midst of World War I, when he was seeing veterans return from war.
This phenomenon of trauma seemed to be a different form of suffering from what he had witnessed in his patients, and so some of Freud’s early theories birthed a whole study of trauma.
Certainly, the study of war continued with World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. And a lot of what we know about trauma is from studying veterans, because they went to hospitals, and this could be documented.
Also, post-Holocaust studies were very instrumental to what we think about as the study of trauma. How do we think about an overwhelming, historical event of suffering and its effects? A lot of the study of trauma emerged about what seemed to be overwhelming suffering that can’t be explained or that can’t be narrated straightforwardly in a kind of clinical relationship.
Trauma moved off the psychoanalytic couch because suddenly the study of trauma became interesting to historians and to neurobiologists and to philosophers and to people like Toni Morrison, who I think writes the best about the trauma of slavery and how it’s experienced, and the kind of haunting of history into the present.
The study of trauma as a theologian became really important, because theologians always study suffering.
Q: The suffering component seems a natural fit with theology.
One of the perennial questions of human existence is, Why do we suffer? And for theologians, Where is God in the suffering? Does God allow suffering? Does God will suffering? Is God absent or present in suffering?
Theologians have always asked that, but I think what’s different is the way that trauma exposes the extreme vulnerability of human persons in relationship to larger historical forces.
Often, trauma was thought of as very individual, right? Often we think about trauma as a traumatic event. An event happens.
But what we’re beginning to see is that traumatic events don’t end. Traumas are moving -- and we could say bleeding -- into other traumas. We don’t see a clear end to a suffering event but instead a kind of overflowing of suffering.
I think that trauma takes all of our theological questions -- and theological answers -- and it pushes them to the extreme.
I would look at someone like Jürgen Moltmann and say he was trying to make sense of Christian theology in light of the extreme suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, and Christian theology could no longer be read the same way. That’s the birth of trauma and theology for me.
We can’t do a light touch on suffering anymore. It really is going to challenge our fundamental assumptions about the nature of God and humanity.
Q: How did you get into this field?
Well, I first studied English literature, and I’m at heart somebody who is a great lover of story. I was raised with this great sense of the biblical imagination and these great stories of David and Goliath, and it kind of fed me and bred me to love literature, I think, at its best.
It really was when I started to read the post-Holocaust literature where I started to see this is a story that can’t be told.
Q: Because of issues of memory or just because it’s so horrific?
Issues of memory, and yes, I think questions of the impossibility of speaking -- recovering a memory, speaking -- and the question of whether anybody could hear it if it was spoken.
These were all questions that someone like Elie Wiesel made very clear to me: What does it mean to write the horror of the Holocaust? What does it mean to write an event that can’t be written?
The post-Holocaust literature became really interesting to me, and then when I was at Yale Divinity School, I would trudge down the hill and I would go sit in on brown-bag lunch seminars that the Yale Psychiatric Institute was doing.
At that time, the Yale Psychiatric Institute was doing some of the primary clinical work with Holocaust survivors and their children, and so I was listening to it. It was, strangely, open to the public.
I was listening to psychoanalysts discuss the cases of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the challenges of trying to think about a suffering that transmits across generations. And I thought, wow, this is a profound level at which the human story is disrupted, and yet somehow violence continues.
So it was from literature to this phenomenon of human experience that I’d really never heard about before -- the experience of suffering after catastrophe -- and I just trudged back up the hill at Yale Divinity School and I said, “Theology really needs to take this seriously.”
At that time, Serene Jones was at Yale Divinity School, and I did a directed study with her because she was interested in reading some of the trauma studies that were happening at Yale at that time.
We can do better in Christian theology to think about suffering, not as something abstract, but as a phenomenon around us that needs to be addressed, and that’s what I do with returning veterans. We have an obligation to re-integrate persons into a new community, and theology matters in doing that.
Q: Do you look at the resurrection in a different way in light of trauma?
Yes. The first book that I wrote was really a refusal of a kind of triumphalistic theology of resurrection. It was because, in the case of many people who are living beyond traumas, the resurrection was often heard as a rush to get over it, to recover, or as pressure to live into resurrection when in fact the reality of their trauma was still very present.
There’s this sense that because it’s a part of the narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, yes, there may be extreme suffering, but we have the good news in the end. The effect of that is that often we don’t linger very long in the suffering in Christian churches.
Walter Brueggemann says that we don’t pause on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter because we already know the end. But that moment, the moment of Holy Saturday -- which I develop quite extensively -- is that important moment in which you’re living beyond a death, a kind of metaphorical death, but can’t see life clearly ahead.
So what does it mean to take that theological moment -- that Saturday -- as really a descent into hell? People who experience trauma will narrate something like a descent into hell, which is a sense of survival but not living anew again.
So that moment became really important for me to develop theologically. So what is the call of the Christian community to live all of those moments -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Because they come around again every year, right?
I’m working on a book now on resurrection wounds, so I’m rereading the story of Thomas’ encounter with the risen Christ, that Gospel of John story that’s so visually powerful, in which the resurrected Christ shows Thomas the wounds, and the wounds still remain there.
So often we read that story as Thomas doubts that it happened, and so Thomas becomes the believer because he comes to faith because of the wounds. I think we’re still not reading the wounds as seriously as we could in terms of the way in which life is marked by suffering.
It’s not doomed to be the only thing there, but the wounds, for many people, constitute part of how they understand their new life.
Maybe the work of the Christian community is to witness the wounds and bring them back into life again.
So there’s a different reading of the resurrection if you read a lot of trauma literature. Basically, what I do invites me into a new way of thinking about suffering, and then I’ve got to go back to my Christian texts and say, “OK, what does this biblical story mean in light of the wounds that I’m seeing all around me?”
Q: How does someone in a position of Christian leadership use what you do in working with people?
I went back to the biblical narrative with all of this reading about trauma -- what happens to the brain, and some of the deeper philosophical questions about what does it mean not to know an experience that has happened to you, the cognitive inability to know.
So I took all of this back to the biblical texts, and one of the things that stood out to me was the importance of those who witness at the foot of the cross, and the importance of those moments in which the disciples don’t recognize Jesus when he appears -- Is he the gardener? -- those moments of not being able to discern what’s going on.
That made me think about how hard it is to witness suffering, how hard it is in the chaos in which you don’t know whether life’s going to emerge for someone. So in a sense, the preacher or the Christian leader becomes the Mary and the beloved disciple and the Thomas who don’t have a clear sign of life.
None of those witnesses really have some triumphant understanding of “Oh, it’s all going to be good in the end.” Their work of witnessing is part of the redemption story, so that it puts a kind of pressure on Christian leaders to say that in the witnessing of suffering, we are about the work of redemption.
So all of a sudden, the disciples got really exciting to me. Now I look and I say how confusing it is to be able to stare death in the face and to live beyond that, and the grief and sorrow of not being able to understand what’s going on.
Christian leaders are called into that space in a way that I hadn’t realized before. The proclamation of the good news of the resurrection has to do with participating in this process of witnessing the dying and the rising of all creatures, witnessing the new creation coming into being.
So that seemed to me like a different emphasis. Instead of proclaiming a very positive, triumphant kind of word, you had witnessing as a slow, almost unsatisfying, unrewarding process of accompaniment. The accompaniment often means not knowing, not having that certainty.
It doesn’t mean you don’t have the promise, but the certainty’s not there. You can hold on to the promises of God that life will come about, but holding on to the promise is different from a certainty that we know how this is going to end. Because often we don’t, when we’re with people and communities who are in such pain.
We don’t really know how that life is going to come about, so we cling to the promise and we do the slow work of witness.
Q: Do you work with trauma survivors?
When I was first teaching, I’d done my dissertation and I was really interested in trauma studies from a literary perspective, from a philosophical perspective, and so I was doing highly conceptual work like you do as a Ph.D. student.
I got a real education when I started to teach classes related to trauma. First of all, they would fill up and people would seek them out, because these were the questions that people wanted to ask. So I started teaching this class rather innocently, thinking people were going to be so excited about all this trauma theory and neurobiological research.
It is fascinating stuff, but what happened is I got pulled into multiple levels of engaging trauma and some very on-the-ground work.
The area that’s been probably most sustained over the last six years is issues related to military trauma. I started to get military chaplains in the trauma and theology class. The ways in which these military chaplains embodied the intersection between trauma care and theology was just astounding.
I started to say yes to any invitations that they extended to me to learn about their world, and that took me to places like the Naval War College in Rhode Island and the [Air Force Chaplain Corps College] at Fort Jackson. I was interested in how chaplains were being trained theologically to do their work.
They kept saying, “This is exactly what we need to have training in,” and so I just kept accepting invitations, which led me to develop a chaplaincy track at Boston University(link is external)with members of the Religion and Conflict Transformation program.
I think Christian ministers are really struggling with the realities of violence, the pervasiveness of it, and the degree to which their own communities are being exposed to that violence and are really craving theologies of suffering.
Devastating things are happening to people in their congregations and in their communities, and how do you get up and preach? How do you teach the biblical stories? So I got an education in trauma, but I also have a passion to help religious leaders translate some of their stories into a new day.
The rituals of lament and rituals of baptism -- these are very profound rituals that I think can be re-purposed. So there’s a kind of new purposefulness in my teaching, to keep addressing some of these issues.
Read more from Shelly Rambo »
NEW IN THE ALBAN LIBRARY IN 2017
Surveys of pastoral staff repeatedly show that senior or supervising pastors consistently rate their working relationships with their associate staff members higher than do the associate staff members. Satisfaction levels follow similar patterns. In many cases, supervisors are not aware of or attentive to the concerns of their staff, and yet, these staff members are critical to the success of the church.
Supervising and Supporting Ministry Staff is a research-based guide to the senior/associate staff relationship that is filled with real-life stories and practical advice to help readers negotiate their staff relationships successfully. The book focuses not only on the business mechanics of the supervisor/supervisee relationship, but also the full experiences of the associate staff, including emotional and spiritual needs. This helpful resource addresses congregations of all sizes across denominations and discusses a range or supervisor/supervisee relationship types.
Learn more and order the book »
Theological field education, in which a ministry student steps out of the classroom and begins practicing with the supervision of a mentor, is a critical part of accredited ministry programs. Engage equips both students and their supervisor-mentors to engage in this important opportunity with energy and imagination, and it prepares students for the challenging work of integrating theory into real-world practice.
Engage provides coaching from recognized experts in the arts of ministry: preaching, administration, evangelism, pastoral care, public ministry, leadership, faith formation, liturgical arts and more. Other chapters address themes such as race, gender, and ministry across faith traditions (or no faith tradition). The book addresses field education in a range of contexts-from churches to non-profits.
Engage offers a valuable resource for students making the most of their transition from the classroom into real world ministry with all its joys and many challenges
Learn more and order the book »
The Alban Weekly will return on Monday, January 8, 2018.
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