PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
What are we paying you for? Shifting the way we ask lay leaders to run the church
IN AN ARCHIVE ARTICLE FROM 2009, PRESBYTERIAN PASTOR JAN EDMISTON PROMPTS US TO RECONSIDER THE WAY WE EMPOWER LAY LEADERS
Do you know any lay leaders who are spiritually depleted rather than spiritually enriched as a result of their leadership duties? Have you ever known an elected church leader to worship occasionally with a church across town because it has become almost impossible to worship authentically in the congregation where he runs the education program or she runs the annual stewardship campaign? Does the question, “What are we paying you for?” have a familiar ring? How about the following scenario?
A faithful member serving as the chairperson of the congregation’s property committee takes her seat in the pews for worship on a Sunday morning only to have an usher track her down and whisper into her ear, “Do you know where we could find extra light bulbs?” She leaves her pew to go find light bulbs, during which a Sunday school teacher breathlessly tells her that the toilet in the kindergarten restroom is flooding. After many months—or years—of these kinds of interruptions to her own spiritual nourishment, she feels spiritually bankrupt and bitter by the time her term of service ends.
Or how about this story? The elder who heads up the mission committee has found it easier to do much of the mission herself, so she serves dinner at the shelter every Monday night with one or two reliable helpers, shelves soup cans and cereal boxes every fourth Saturday of the month, and drags her husband along to help her move donated furniture several times a year. She complains often that she “needs more help.” And she considers herself less a “spiritual leader” and more an unappreciated committee of one.
Or perhaps this story is more familiar: The “worship elder” who is in charge of heading up that particular committee doesn’t have time to pray for herself much less to pray for other church members—which she heard somewhere was her role as a “spiritual leader.” And besides, she feels uncomfortable praying out loud one-on-one with her friends. They might think she’s acting “holier than thou.”
Outmoded Ways
If these stories don’t sound familiar to you, they certainly do to me. After 15 years of serving a Presbyterian congregation of 150 accomplished, busy, well-educated professionals, it had become excruciatingly clear that something had to change in terms of the programming responsibilities of the elders in charge. (The position of “elder” has a different name in different traditions, but “elder” here refers to the elected lay leaders who are vested with responsibilities of church oversight and spiritual leadership.)The role of our elders was to chair committees of the church—an organizational model familiar to many mainline congregations. Each elder was responsible for a committee, which we often called a team, but the truth was that our elders were often teams of one. And our monthly Session meetings often ran like committees of the whole; each elder promoted his or her own committee’s programs, competing for budget dollars. And they all ran themselves ragged as overworked volunteers.
In my church, the idea of commit-tees was a myth. Most “committees” were run by one or two individuals who often complained about having no support while at the same time clinging to the responsibilities or congregational “power.”
Elder-led committees were the preferred organizational model during the mid to late 20th century. When mainline membership numbers were at their peak, when many more women were home during the day—either with school-aged children or as retirees—
the pool of volunteers with free time was much larger. And many congregations could afford to call multiple pastors, as well as educators, music professionals, and support staff to run the church.
The impact of 21st-century cultural shifts on the church is well-documented, but our organizational models in the church have not shifted—or at least not enough. Increasingly, congregations that allow elected officers to “run the church” are finding that this model no longer works—for several reasons:
- People do not become members of a church in order to serve on committees.
- Elected officers charged with being spiritual leaders do not have the time or energy for spiritual leadership if they are also organizing mission trips, scheduling educational events, and overseeing stewardship programs.
- Recruiting new officers becomes increasingly difficult as the congregation observes the enormous time and energy involved in being an elder or deacon.
- “People are too busy to volunteer. We can’t even get them to serve as officers!”
- “Nobody’s going to do this kind of work for the church without getting paid!”
- “What if they do something we don’t like? Can volunteers be fired?”
- “What if new members want to be on this so-called staff? They don’t know enough.” However, the truth is:
- People with a passion for ministry make time to serve those passions.
- Many individuals can indeed volunteer their time and find it energizing.
- Volunteer staff members can work with clear job descriptions and within the parameters of established core values (and the annual budget).
- New members are often the best staffers because they come with fresh ideas.
Our Biblical Charge
The “priesthood of all believers” is a cherished doctrine of the church and a foundational idea for Protestants, but the reality is that few parishioners consider themselves to be anything resembling priests. Especially if those who gather for worship are “participating Christians” rather than “practicing Christians,” then the divide between those who lead and those who follow increases.Martin Luther wrote that we are all consecrated priests through our baptism, quoting 1 Peter 2:9 and Revelation 5:10:
“You are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people . . .”
“You have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God . . .”
But most parishioners happily relinquish all priestly duties to professional clergy, excusing themselves for a variety of reasons:
They are not sufficiently educated in biblical and theological studies.
They have their own vocations to worry about—and their vocations have little to do with their spiritual selves.
They are concerned about being seen as fanatics if they openly talk about their faith or their spiritual leadership role apart from Sunday mornings.
They are paying someone else to fulfill all spiritual responsibilities in the church.
Many professional priests and pastors happily assume all spiritual responsibilities for similar reasons:
- We have professional degrees that attest to our biblical and theological training.
- We have chosen a spiritual vocation replete with spiritual garb, accoutrements, and historic significance.
- We are expected to speak of holy things and refer to spiritual matters in conversation.
- We are paid to do this, and some of us even spend our off-duty time in church-owned housing.
“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ . . .”
The word for “pastor” here—poimen in Greek—is also translated “shepherd,” which is a problematic word for clergy in a church culture that demands that the pastor’s role is to serve the sheep. Perhaps we have confused the role of sheep and shepherd because our 21st-century culture is so far removed from agricultural metaphors. Current-day parishioners are often under the impression that the pastor’s role is to lead their congregational sheep into green pastures and beside still waters so that the sheep can spend their lives relaxing in the sun eating clover. But in actual farm life, the purpose of the sheep is to benefit their owner. In fact, in some cases, they give their very lives for the one who owns them. Hmm.Paul Borden, for one, points out that we professional ministers have completely misunderstood the whole sheep/shepherd metaphor. We call ministers who are supposed to “pastor” congregations—primarily offering pastoral care—when actually, according to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, the congregation is called to carry out those responsibilities for each other. The pastor/professional minister is called to teach the sheep to do this for each other. Our most fundamental role is to equip the saints for ministry, not to do it all ourselves.
This is a profoundly threatening premise for many professional ministers. We generally enjoy the power of being the one who gains entrance into the intensive care unit by virtue of our pastoral credentials. We like the power of being called in the night and meeting traumatized families in the emergency room like heroes in the night. We might relish the role of savior, often to the point that we hesitate to surrender our power to mere laypeople. And yet to refuse to share in this ministry is an affront to the premise that all baptized people are called to be priests.
Any pastor will attest to the fact that it is a profound privilege to be the one who is called to the bedside of a dying parishioner or to the operating room before a crucial surgery. Some of our holiest moments occur by the incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit or in the living rooms of newly widowed church members. But we should not be the only ones who get to participate in these holy moments. Our chosen lay leaders have been called to participate in this ministry, too. We professional pastors are called to equip them and set them free to serve accordingly.
Just as clergy must relinquish some of the pastoral care to the ruling lay leaders of their congregations, the ruling leaders must also relinquish their assumed power to those who are called and able to run the church’s programs on a day-to-day basis. If elders, for example, are freed from running the stewardship campaign and the annual mission fair, they can focus on vision casting and pastoral care while unelected volunteers run the church. Again, this requires giving up often-cherished power and granting permission for others to do these jobs.
Laying the Foundation
Our congregation is now led by a staff of paid and volunteer ministers who run the programs of the church. Our elders and deacons are charged, respectively, with overseeing the ministry in accordance with our core values and offering pastoral care. This has been a dramatic shift in the way our congregation is organized. No longer do our ruling elders control the programs of our church. No longer does the pastor serve as the sole spiritual leader of the parish.In order to accomplish such a change in congregational organization, certain preparatory work must be done:
- The elders must establish the core values of their particular congregation, and an annual budget must be created that provides parameters for both volunteers and paid staff. As long as the church staff works within the basic values and budget of the congregation, they have the freedom to plan programs and events that enhance the spiritual community.
- All staff—both paid and volunteer—must have clear job descriptions that spell out their responsibilities, which include the basic duties of recruiting, training, supervising, and evaluating those who assist them on their particular ministry teams. For example, if a volunteer heads up the mission ministry, that volunteer is called to coordinate the mission program of the congregation but not to serve unilaterally. He/she will create a team to serve in the local and global mission efforts of the congregation. To avoid the “committee of one” issue, the passions and gifts of the members must be assessed. (There are church information programs—some similar to Facebook—that can assist church staffs in collecting information on member interests and talents.)
- Volunteer and paid staff are evaluated annually by the pastor and/or personnel committee. Church members often feel queasy about evaluating other church members, but a focus on call and gifts makes this endeavor more about serving God and less about personal turf and negative criticism. Sharing with members what their gifts are and what their gifts are not is part of the discernment process. Again, if ministry is about serving God’s purposes rather than personal power, then leaders will appreciate placement in an area of ministry in which they are gifted and called.
- Elders, deacons, and other officers also need job descriptions that clarify their roles. No longer are they called to “run the church.” Their responsibilities are more far-reaching, in the tradition of the Apostolic Church. In addition to overseeing the ministry, offering pastoral care, and serving in whatever capacity their particular denomination requires, they make a commitment to spend time reflecting theologically on the overall ministry of the congregation. They commit to praying, studying scripture, and taking advantage of workshops and other educational opportunities offered by higher judicatories. And all officers make the commitment to support the congregation financially.
While, by definition, the pastor continues to serve as a shepherd within this model, he or she no longer merely watches the sheep graze, tending to those who are sick or who fall into ditches. Instead, the pastor becomes an entrepreneurial shepherd who raises the sheep in a way that they will best benefit the Chief Shepherd who owns them. The professional minister equips the officers and staff, the officers and staff equip others, and eventually the congregation indeed sees itself as engaged in ministry together.
a church full of people who get this. Imagine a congregation that wants its pastor to be not a chaplain who primarily offers pastoral care but a servant leader who teaches others how to be excellent servants. Imagine elders and deacons who are inspired and nourished spiritually during their terms of office. Imagine volunteers who discover their skills as coordinators of life-changing ministries.
longer do the organizational models of the late 20th century work in the 21st century.
the culture continues to shift, the church is
also shifting into a community that is becoming more collaborative and more spiritually nurturing, more about practicing our faith and less about participating in a steady stream of programs. It’s about time.
for Reflection
- Name a specific situation in which your ministry transformed the life of someone in your congregation.
- Name something in your ministry which has spiritually fed you in the last month.
- What about your church work energizes you spiritually? What saps you of spiritual energy?
- How does the organizational structure of your church leadership spread the responsibilities for ministry?
- If you asked your congregation, “How many true ministers do we have?” what would they say? Who would be identified as a “minister” in your church? Why?
Jan Edmiston's article is just one of the hundreds available in the Alban archive. Visit now »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: LAY LEADERSHIP
Faith & Leadership
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
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 re-imagining 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 clergyperson 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.
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
“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 UMCFor 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
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.”
“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.
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 clergyperson 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.
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
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 UMCFor 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
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
Rethinking the role of pastor
CONGREGATIONS, LAITY, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
David Lose: Rethinking the role of pastor
Pastors shouldn't be the only ones to interpret Scripture and connect faith and daily life. Their role ought to be to form congregants to do that work themselves.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a four-part series. Read the first part here.
Harvard leadership guru Ron Heifetz(link is external) makes a critical distinction between technical and adaptive problems. In the former, we need to revise our way of doing something in a particular context; in the latter, we need to revise (or reinvent) our whole way of thinking about the context in which we are doing things.
“Moneyball” helps us see the difference -- and how it relates to our life in the church. (If you haven’t seen the film (link is external)or read the book(link is external), it may be helpful to refer to my earlier post to recap the story.) If the problem is that the A’s don’t have enough money to buy the best players, they really only have one option if they want to win. They have to make their scouting and player development systems even better than they have been. That’s the way baseball teams have always solved that problem.
But in the following clip, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) argues that the real problem is an insufficient understanding of baseball itself and, in particular, how baseball games are won.
CONGREGATIONS, LAITY, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
David Lose: Rethinking the role of pastor
Pastors shouldn't be the only ones to interpret Scripture and connect faith and daily life. Their role ought to be to form congregants to do that work themselves.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a four-part series. Read the first part here.
Harvard leadership guru Ron Heifetz(link is external) makes a critical distinction between technical and adaptive problems. In the former, we need to revise our way of doing something in a particular context; in the latter, we need to revise (or reinvent) our whole way of thinking about the context in which we are doing things.
“Moneyball” helps us see the difference -- and how it relates to our life in the church. (If you haven’t seen the film (link is external)or read the book(link is external), it may be helpful to refer to my earlier post to recap the story.) If the problem is that the A’s don’t have enough money to buy the best players, they really only have one option if they want to win. They have to make their scouting and player development systems even better than they have been. That’s the way baseball teams have always solved that problem.
But in the following clip, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) argues that the real problem is an insufficient understanding of baseball itself and, in particular, how baseball games are won.
He asks coach Billy Beane not to refine or change established practices (technical change), but rather to reconsider his whole way of thinking about baseball and, in light of that changed pattern of thought, to discover new practices (adaptive change).
How can we apply this thinking to the church? Rather than refine preaching by adding a slide show, changing worship by employing contemporary music or jazzing up confirmation by showing cartoons, we need instead to reconsider the fundamental nature of being the church in the world today.
In the previous post I suggested that the dominant reality is the one to which we’ve paid the least attention: Church is no longer an assumed part of people’s lives. More than that, our people are besieged 24/7 with obligations and opportunities and will not keep giving more than one hour a week to an activity unless it contributes tangibly to improving the other 167 hours.
Yet we continue to practice ministry like they’ll come back if only our pastors figure out how to do what they’ve always done, only better. And that’s just the problem: our focus is on what the pastors do. In our current model of church, the pastors are the interpreters of Scripture. They are the ones who make connections between faith and life. And they are the ones comfortable talking about their faith.
To put it both more bluntly and more accurately, the pastors are typically the only ones who interpret Scripture, make connections or talk about their faith. They are, in a very real sense, the professional Christians. And, oddly enough, we are at a point where I think the better our pastors perform these tasks the deeper the crisis gets, as after a riveting sermon the average lay person looks on in admiration and believes he or she could never do that.
This way of thinking, if not medieval, is at least better suited to the church of the mid-20th century rather than the 21st century.
We need to shift from a “performative” model of ministry -- in which the mark of competence is that the professional does the central tasks of the faith well -- to a “formative” model of ministry. In this model, the mark of competence is that, as time passes, the congregation members get better themselves at the central skills of the faith, such as interpreting Scripture, making connections between faith and life, and sharing their faith with others.
What does this mean for our practices? I can’t provide a complete answer, but I do have some hunches.
Read more from David Lose »
Faith & Leadership
In the previous post I suggested that the dominant reality is the one to which we’ve paid the least attention: Church is no longer an assumed part of people’s lives. More than that, our people are besieged 24/7 with obligations and opportunities and will not keep giving more than one hour a week to an activity unless it contributes tangibly to improving the other 167 hours.
Yet we continue to practice ministry like they’ll come back if only our pastors figure out how to do what they’ve always done, only better. And that’s just the problem: our focus is on what the pastors do. In our current model of church, the pastors are the interpreters of Scripture. They are the ones who make connections between faith and life. And they are the ones comfortable talking about their faith.
To put it both more bluntly and more accurately, the pastors are typically the only ones who interpret Scripture, make connections or talk about their faith. They are, in a very real sense, the professional Christians. And, oddly enough, we are at a point where I think the better our pastors perform these tasks the deeper the crisis gets, as after a riveting sermon the average lay person looks on in admiration and believes he or she could never do that.
This way of thinking, if not medieval, is at least better suited to the church of the mid-20th century rather than the 21st century.
We need to shift from a “performative” model of ministry -- in which the mark of competence is that the professional does the central tasks of the faith well -- to a “formative” model of ministry. In this model, the mark of competence is that, as time passes, the congregation members get better themselves at the central skills of the faith, such as interpreting Scripture, making connections between faith and life, and sharing their faith with others.
What does this mean for our practices? I can’t provide a complete answer, but I do have some hunches.
- Preaching needs to become more participatory(link is external), in which congregants don’t simply sit back and listen to what the professional Christian says but are given a chance to acquire and practice some new skills.
- Worship needs to be concerned less with looking like a concert performance (whether of traditional or contemporary music) and more like a dress rehearsal for our life in the world.
- Confirmation needs to give our youth and the significant adults in their livesopportunities to work out why their faith matters and practice using that faith to help them navigate the challenges they are facing.
- Foremost, we need to re-imagine that pastors are not first and foremost excellent practitioners or performers of the faith but rather are coaches, teachers and conductors(link is external) whose success is gauged by their ability to increase our skills and confidence in using our faith in daily life.
Read more from David Lose »
Faith & Leadership
Asking more of laypeople
LAITY, WORK LIVES, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Asking more of laypeople
Influential laypeople yearn for deep relationships with Christian institutional leaders. We can nurture those relationships by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work -- not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders.
The billionaire businessman, a devout Christian, told the denominational executive that the denomination’s leaders needed to be more visible and bold. They needed, the businessman said, to ask more of laypeople like him.
The executive, unsure, hesitantly asked, “How would you like to be more involved in the church?”
But the businessman had already “done his time” serving on church committees to fill a slot rather than accomplish a purpose.
The businessman was imploring the denomination’s leaders to demand more about how he lived his discipleship in the world -- and not by prophetically criticizing the wealth he had accumulated while regularly turning to him to support capital campaigns or building maintenance (a common experience among the wealthy).
When I witnessed this exchange, I interpreted the word “ask” as a request.
The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations.
More recently, I have become aware of a deeper interpretation of the businessman’s plea: we can discover what is in laypeople’s imaginations only if we focus on what it means to “ask” in the sense of inquiry. The businessman was seeking holy conversations with church leaders, hoping that church leaders would ask more of him by asking more about him.
What are the issues he is wrestling with as a business leader? How might his faith inform his responses to management challenges and his thinking about leadership? How should his faith help him decide how to schedule his time? Nurture his personal and professional relationships?
Inquiry is a central activity for Christian institutional leaders in cultivating teams and discovering innovative possibilities for an organization.
It is also crucially important for developing deep, personal relationships with people on their own terms rather than just fitting them into “our” contexts. Christian institutional leaders often engage with empathy when laypeople come to us for spiritual direction or in crisis -- but we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions.
Why do Christian institutional leaders forget to practice inquiry?
Perhaps we believe that our role is to provide expertise, to offer answers to life’s questions. Or maybe we feel insecure around people who have been better trained, and have more experience, at leading and managing organizations. So we become defensive and assert that our work is different and somehow better, more pure, because we run not-for-profit organizations.
Or perhaps we believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived. Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.
Our forgetfulness typically involves a combination of these dynamics.
Their cumulative impact results in Christian institutional leaders assuming that border crossing goes only one way. We will welcome others to cross from the secular world to the church world, but we don’t choose to leave our comfortable perches to venture in the other direction. That can alienate the laypeople the church needs to bear faithful witness to God’s kingdom.
Through genuine, mutual inquiry -- not just asking what you can do for me or I for you -- Christian institutional leaders will experience the vocations and contexts of laypeople.
Our efforts ought not to be limited to those already involved in church but should extend also to those who might be outside or even marginalized by our institutions. Christian renewal movements, such as the Wesleyan revival of the 18th century, have typically been led by pastors and other Christian leaders who were adept at crossing multiple borders to inquire after people.
In so doing, we will need to cultivate the trait of interpretive charity, which requires us to listen to the perspectives of others with the most charitable perspective we can imagine. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with the others, but it does involve patiently listening to what is said and why it is being said.
Early in my service as dean of Duke Divinity School, I was invited to meet with a wealthy business leader.
I was tempted to focus on what he could do for me, namely, make a large gift to the Divinity School’s capital campaign. I was also aware of my biases about wealth and greed, but I knew I likely wouldn’t get what I needed either by challenging him to give his wealth away in general or by asking him directly for a gift.
We didn’t have a relationship, so I asked him how he had gotten into his business.
He told me that he had considered going into ordained ministry but ultimately had decided that his calling was to business. He then described how he had learned to practice his business as a lay ministry. He described how his vision had helped articulate his company’s mission and its relationship with employees and customers.
As I asked him about how he expressed his faith through his leadership, I was humbled to learn that his company has often undertaken education and health initiatives, because the company believes it is important to support its employees and the people in the wider community. He was more attentive to the community’s ministry needs than are many congregations and Christian institutions.
Our conversation turned out to be the beginning of a long-standing mutual relationship in which we each ask much of and give much to the other.
We have discovered that as our border-crossing Christian relationship has developed and deepened, we will often challenge and even critique each other. But because the borders have been crossed in more than one direction, my challenges and critiques of him, and his of me, are typically life-giving rather than polarizing.
Christian institutions have been started and sustained, renewed and transformed over the centuries through remarkable partnerships among leaders of Christian institutions and Christian leaders of other kinds of institutions. We need to ask more of each other, in the first instance by learning to ask -- to inquire -- in fresh ways.
LAITY, WORK LIVES, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Asking more of laypeople
Influential laypeople yearn for deep relationships with Christian institutional leaders. We can nurture those relationships by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work -- not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders.The billionaire businessman, a devout Christian, told the denominational executive that the denomination’s leaders needed to be more visible and bold. They needed, the businessman said, to ask more of laypeople like him.
The executive, unsure, hesitantly asked, “How would you like to be more involved in the church?”
But the businessman had already “done his time” serving on church committees to fill a slot rather than accomplish a purpose.
The businessman was imploring the denomination’s leaders to demand more about how he lived his discipleship in the world -- and not by prophetically criticizing the wealth he had accumulated while regularly turning to him to support capital campaigns or building maintenance (a common experience among the wealthy).
When I witnessed this exchange, I interpreted the word “ask” as a request.
The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations.
More recently, I have become aware of a deeper interpretation of the businessman’s plea: we can discover what is in laypeople’s imaginations only if we focus on what it means to “ask” in the sense of inquiry. The businessman was seeking holy conversations with church leaders, hoping that church leaders would ask more of him by asking more about him.
What are the issues he is wrestling with as a business leader? How might his faith inform his responses to management challenges and his thinking about leadership? How should his faith help him decide how to schedule his time? Nurture his personal and professional relationships?
Inquiry is a central activity for Christian institutional leaders in cultivating teams and discovering innovative possibilities for an organization.
It is also crucially important for developing deep, personal relationships with people on their own terms rather than just fitting them into “our” contexts. Christian institutional leaders often engage with empathy when laypeople come to us for spiritual direction or in crisis -- but we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions.
Why do Christian institutional leaders forget to practice inquiry?
Perhaps we believe that our role is to provide expertise, to offer answers to life’s questions. Or maybe we feel insecure around people who have been better trained, and have more experience, at leading and managing organizations. So we become defensive and assert that our work is different and somehow better, more pure, because we run not-for-profit organizations.
Or perhaps we believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived. Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.
Our forgetfulness typically involves a combination of these dynamics.
Their cumulative impact results in Christian institutional leaders assuming that border crossing goes only one way. We will welcome others to cross from the secular world to the church world, but we don’t choose to leave our comfortable perches to venture in the other direction. That can alienate the laypeople the church needs to bear faithful witness to God’s kingdom.
Through genuine, mutual inquiry -- not just asking what you can do for me or I for you -- Christian institutional leaders will experience the vocations and contexts of laypeople.
Our efforts ought not to be limited to those already involved in church but should extend also to those who might be outside or even marginalized by our institutions. Christian renewal movements, such as the Wesleyan revival of the 18th century, have typically been led by pastors and other Christian leaders who were adept at crossing multiple borders to inquire after people.
In so doing, we will need to cultivate the trait of interpretive charity, which requires us to listen to the perspectives of others with the most charitable perspective we can imagine. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with the others, but it does involve patiently listening to what is said and why it is being said.
Early in my service as dean of Duke Divinity School, I was invited to meet with a wealthy business leader.
I was tempted to focus on what he could do for me, namely, make a large gift to the Divinity School’s capital campaign. I was also aware of my biases about wealth and greed, but I knew I likely wouldn’t get what I needed either by challenging him to give his wealth away in general or by asking him directly for a gift.
We didn’t have a relationship, so I asked him how he had gotten into his business.
He told me that he had considered going into ordained ministry but ultimately had decided that his calling was to business. He then described how he had learned to practice his business as a lay ministry. He described how his vision had helped articulate his company’s mission and its relationship with employees and customers.
As I asked him about how he expressed his faith through his leadership, I was humbled to learn that his company has often undertaken education and health initiatives, because the company believes it is important to support its employees and the people in the wider community. He was more attentive to the community’s ministry needs than are many congregations and Christian institutions.
Our conversation turned out to be the beginning of a long-standing mutual relationship in which we each ask much of and give much to the other.
We have discovered that as our border-crossing Christian relationship has developed and deepened, we will often challenge and even critique each other. But because the borders have been crossed in more than one direction, my challenges and critiques of him, and his of me, are typically life-giving rather than polarizing.
Christian institutions have been started and sustained, renewed and transformed over the centuries through remarkable partnerships among leaders of Christian institutions and Christian leaders of other kinds of institutions. We need to ask more of each other, in the first instance by learning to ask -- to inquire -- in fresh ways.
Read more from L. Gregory Jones »
Discerning God's Will Together: A Spiritual Practice for the Churchby Danny E. Morris & Charles Olsen Bible study, research, and fieldwork merge in this book of practical principles for decision making by spiritual discernment. The step-by-step approach can be used to help any size group learn a new way to make decisions--a way that is interactive, spiritual, and rooted in faith practices and community. Small groups, committees, church boards, church leaders at all levels, and seminary professors will find this book valuable. This is a revised and updated version of the book, originally published in 1997.
Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
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Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
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