Alban Weekly - Alban at Duke Divinity School inDurham, North Carolina 27701, United States "Done and left undone: Grace in the meantime of ministry" PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS for Monday, 19 March 2018
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Scott Benhase: 'Done and Left Undone: Grace in the Meantime of Ministry'
Book cover detail
"Done and left undone: Grace in the meantime of ministry"
AN EPISCOPAL BISHOP OFFERS AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
In his new book, an Episcopal bishop offers an alternative approach to pastoral leadership, rooted in a deep knowledge of self and the Benedictine values of stability, obedience and conversion.
AN EPISCOPAL BISHOP OFFERS AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
In his new book, an Episcopal bishop offers an alternative approach to pastoral leadership, rooted in a deep knowledge of self and the Benedictine values of stability, obedience and conversion.
Pastoral leadership is not about having all the answers and always being right. It's about knowing deeply and authentically who you are, with all your flaws and brokenness, says the Rt. Rev. Scott Benhase.
"And that comes out of self-knowledge and self-reflection about your own things 'done and left undone,' your own fragility," said Benhase, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.
In his new book, "Done and Left Undone: Grace in the Meantime of Ministry," Benhase draws on the writings of St. Benedict to propose an alternative approach to leadership.
"It's not 'Do these things and you'll be fine' but instead 'Take on the authentic self that you have and be willing to share that with other people.' Create a context in which the leader is one who stands in the midst of the people, constantly proclaiming the great narrative of redemption in Jesus Christ," he said.
Benhase called pastoral ministry "the hardest job in the world" but said it can be done well without losing one's soul and mind.
"But to do that, you have to be clear about who you are, and where you stand, and who you're standing next to, and who you're kneeling before, and what your word is to yourself and to the world around you," he said.
Benhase was elected bishop of Georgia in September 2009. Before that, he served for 25 years in pastoral ministry, most recently at churches in Washington, D.C., Durham, North Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia.
He spoke recently with our colleagues at
Faith & Leadership about his new book.
He spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about his new book. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: To start, explain the title, “Done and Left Undone: Grace in the Meantime of Ministry,” which of course comes from the confession of sin in the Book of Common Prayer.
It’s tied in to my own kind of Benedictine theology and approach.
Leaders in the church often don’t come from a place of humility and authenticity about themselves. Clergy feel like they always need to be right and have all the answers so when a problem comes up, they can say, “This is what we need to do.” They’ll be strong visionary leaders with a “take the bull by the horns” approach.
I tried that for a while when I was young, and I crashed and burned big-time.
But as I got back into my Benedictine roots, I wondered how Benedict talked about the role of leaders in the monastery.
To Benedict, leadership was not about having all the answers -- “If we just do these three things, the church will be turned around.”
We see that all the time now. Everybody has a prescription for how to turn around a church in a post-Christian culture. But most of those [success stories] are anecdotal and contextual; they’re usually around a particular personality and are few and far between.
The frustration that I hear from clergy, and that I experience, is not so much about technique -- “Do these three things and be successful” -- it’s more about who you are in the context of your leadership.
And that comes out of self-knowledge and self-reflection about your own things “done and left undone,” your own fragility.
Q: So you’re saying it’s critical for clergy to be able to acknowledge their own flaws and humanity?
Exactly.
People in the pews are actually attracted to that, and they connect with it. It’s not that you stand in the pulpit and talk about all your great sins. But if leaders can be honest about themselves and their own struggles with following Jesus, then they give people a space to join in that.
If it’s about some sort of Pelagian achievement, that “I’m this perfect disciple of Jesus, so I’m asking you to do that, too,” people may follow you and underline biblical passages that you quote, but they’re not going to be invited to go deeper into their own souls and into self-reflection and own their brokenness and who they honestly are.
If you can’t have compassion for your own foibles and sin and brokenness, then you’re not going to be very compassionate to other people.
The book is not a blueprint. It’s the opposite of that. It’s not “Do these things and you’ll be fine” but instead “Take on the authentic self that you have and be willing to share that with other people.” Create a context in which the leader is one who stands in the midst of the people, constantly proclaiming the great narrative of redemption in Jesus Christ.
Q: That’s a major theme in the book, the church leader as steward of the great narrative of redemption. What do you mean?
Many churches are looking for a social activities director or a community organizer or a CEO. At times, the pastor needs to embody all those roles, but if any of them become your primary identity, then you’re sacrificing the one word that we have for this world -- that God has made things well in Jesus Christ.
The primary task of the parish church leader is to be a steward of that great narrative, tell that story of grace and redemption again and again and invite people into it.
When we get sidetracked being CEOs or community organizers or social activity directors or glorified administrators, we lose the very thing that we have that no one else has -- the story we tell. If we tell that story authentically and from our own sense of humility and the mercy that God has showed us, then the leader really does have something to share.
At the core of the Christian proclamation is that God, in Jesus, reconciled the world back to God. If we’re not telling that story, if we’re not the primary stewards of that narrative, then what are we selling? Membership in some liturgical civic club?
Q: So the primacy of the redemption narrative, in turn, shapes pastoral leadership?
No question about it. If the clergyperson is not clear about his or her own relationship with God from a perspective of grace, then you’re going to be dispensing self-help and a kind of semi-Pelagian message to your people, and that is, “Get your act together. Why aren’t you a better disciple? Just do these three things.”
But all that does is heap the law on people, and they get that at their jobs -- or at home, if they don’t have a very loving spouse.
We live in a performance culture, and we’ve turned the church into another place where people have to perform rather than a place where they go to receive the good news that God loves them no matter what. That’s the only thing we’ve got. But we try to make it a secondary or tertiary thing around some techniques that we’re taught to get the church back from its post-Christian context.
That train has left the station. We’re not going back to the 1950s.
Q: In your book, you propose what you call an ascetical theology of leadership drawn from St. Benedict.
“Ascetical” simply means the practice of certain things. In ancient Greece, askesis was the practices, the training, that a Greek athlete would do to prepare for the Olympics. So what are the practices that pastors can do that will lead to a healthy, vibrant life for themselves and their congregations?
It’s not so much “Do these five things and everything’s going to be fine.” But begin to take on patterns and practices in your life that are rooted, for example, in the daily office, saying your prayers, confessing your own sin, having some self-reflection time where you can recognize how much you’ve screwed up and how many times yesterday you weren’t kind to your spouse or whatever. It’s about taking on practices that help you be aware of yourself so that you’re grounded in grace and not in works and in judgment on folk.
For a good part of my life as a parish priest, I spent entire sermons criticizing members of the congregation indirectly for their lack of stewardship, their lack of evangelism or whatever. It made me feel good and self-righteous, but it didn’t help change those folk.
The only thing that would is the spiritual medicine of the gospel -- that God loves them beyond anything they can imagine and went to the cross for their sins, and for the sins of the whole world, and therefore it’s OK. As Dame Julian of Norwich said, “All things shall be well.”
Q: Speak some to the specific Benedictine principles that you mention in the book -- stability, obedience, conversion. How do those fit into all of this?
Benedict was a genius. He understood that if the individual in community doesn’t have stability in his or her life, prayer life and community life, then it’s easy to get distracted. It’s easy to run away, to find the grass to be greener someplace else.
It’s like folks who church-shop. They are constantly looking for the perfect church. Well, that doesn’t exist, because the church is made up of imperfect, broken, sinful human beings. The perfect church isn’t out there.
So Benedict was saying, yes, you can run to a different monastery if you want to, but you can’t run away from yourself. You need to be grounded in something -- live in the rhythms of common life with other folk, say your prayers, do your work together, and not run away from yourself and from your problems but face them in a context of a community that’s going to love you and care for you. It’s the only way I can find any kind of capacity to be real and to be authentic and real with my relationship with God.
Obedience was not “Yes, sir, following orders” for Benedict. It was more about listening deeply to God in the longings of my own heart and the longings of people around me, listening to them, and listening to Scripture and ancient church teachings, and reflecting honestly on that. And by being obedient to that listening process, we place ourselves in the capacity to really hear God speak to us.
Conversion of life happens only when we have been willing to be stable, stay with something and not run away, and stay there long enough to listen, reflect and be self-aware about all those things. And that places us where we can receive grace and have that constant conversion in our lives.
It’s not technique. It’s about living in that mixture of stability, obedience and conversion where I’m constantly being renewed and refocused in my Christian life.
Q: The book’s subtitle is “Grace in the Meantime of Ministry.” What’s that about?
It has a double meaning. “Meantime” means the time between the first and second comings -- this in-between time, this time of constant anxiety and uncertainty that we live in, in the world.
As Paul says, we see in a glass darkly. Someday we’ll see clearly, face to face, but right now, everything is out of focus. God forbid that we think the world is the way God intended it to be. Come on. Really? Does anybody look at the world and say, “Yes, this is how God designed it; this is the way God wants it”?
No, this is not the way God intended the world to be. We are in the meantime.
But it is also a mean time.
This is true with identity politics and identity Christianity and social media.
Social media promised to connect us to the world, but we have learned that the world is not a very good place to be connected to. I write a weekly column for our diocese, and I get replies that say, “Shame on you for saying something bad about our president. You’re an idiot!” I’ve had a couple of personal threats.
We’re quick to tell people how wrong they are, but are we quick to reflect about stupid things we’ve done?
Q: And as you point out in the book, pastoral ministry can be a mean time for many clergy.
It can be. As a parish priest, sitting down and listening to somebody and suggesting ways they might address their problems, I’ve had people get up and leave my office and throw books at me and say, “How dare you!”
I had one person who just looked at me and said, “Well, you’re not very helpful” and stormed out, and then wrote letters to the senior warden about how awful I was.
So yes, people are angry and disappointed with themselves, and clergy become a very convenient, inexpensive way to place blame.
If we’re not equipped through our own stability, obedience and ongoing conversion of life to deal with people’s issues and problems, then we’ll be consumed by it. But if we understand that a lot of what people bring to us comes from their own deep pain, and if we’re aware of our own deep pain, then we can say to them, “Maybe I haven’t experienced exactly what you’ve experienced, but I know what it’s like to be depressed; I know what it’s like to feel grief; I know what it’s like to feel like I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, and let me tell you how God gets us out of that.”
And you share with them the great narrative of redemption.
When I’ve done that, most of the time it is the spiritual medicine folks need. They don’t need to be told to “buck up” or “adopt the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or “pray more often and then God will bless you.”
That doesn’t work. It’s the snake oil that the church has been selling for way too long, and it’s not helpful. It doesn’t change lives, and it doesn’t present the gospel, as least as I read the gospel in the New Testament. And it can drive clergy to the brink of crashing and burning.
I wanted the book to be a word of grace to clergy. You’ve got the hardest job in the world. There is no harder job in the world to do and to do well, but you can do it well, and without losing your soul and your mind.
You really can, but to do that, you have to be clear about who you are, and where you stand, and who you’re standing next to, and who you’re kneeling before, and what your word is to yourself and to the world around you.
If you can be clear about that, then you can survive all the other meanness that’s going on. You really can.
Read the interview with the Rt. Rev. Scott Benhase »
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: AMY BUTLER
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, HEALTH & WELL-BEING, VOCATION
Episode 1: Amy Butler on her role as the first woman to lead Riverside Church
In the premiere episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Bill Lamar talks with Amy Butler, the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York, about her experience in that historic pulpit.
"And that comes out of self-knowledge and self-reflection about your own things 'done and left undone,' your own fragility," said Benhase, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.
In his new book, "Done and Left Undone: Grace in the Meantime of Ministry," Benhase draws on the writings of St. Benedict to propose an alternative approach to leadership.
"It's not 'Do these things and you'll be fine' but instead 'Take on the authentic self that you have and be willing to share that with other people.' Create a context in which the leader is one who stands in the midst of the people, constantly proclaiming the great narrative of redemption in Jesus Christ," he said.
Benhase called pastoral ministry "the hardest job in the world" but said it can be done well without losing one's soul and mind.
"But to do that, you have to be clear about who you are, and where you stand, and who you're standing next to, and who you're kneeling before, and what your word is to yourself and to the world around you," he said.
Benhase was elected bishop of Georgia in September 2009. Before that, he served for 25 years in pastoral ministry, most recently at churches in Washington, D.C., Durham, North Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia.
He spoke recently with our colleagues at
Faith & Leadership about his new book.
He spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about his new book. The following is an edited transcript.Q: To start, explain the title, “Done and Left Undone: Grace in the Meantime of Ministry,” which of course comes from the confession of sin in the Book of Common Prayer.
It’s tied in to my own kind of Benedictine theology and approach.
Leaders in the church often don’t come from a place of humility and authenticity about themselves. Clergy feel like they always need to be right and have all the answers so when a problem comes up, they can say, “This is what we need to do.” They’ll be strong visionary leaders with a “take the bull by the horns” approach.
I tried that for a while when I was young, and I crashed and burned big-time.
But as I got back into my Benedictine roots, I wondered how Benedict talked about the role of leaders in the monastery.
To Benedict, leadership was not about having all the answers -- “If we just do these three things, the church will be turned around.”
We see that all the time now. Everybody has a prescription for how to turn around a church in a post-Christian culture. But most of those [success stories] are anecdotal and contextual; they’re usually around a particular personality and are few and far between.
The frustration that I hear from clergy, and that I experience, is not so much about technique -- “Do these three things and be successful” -- it’s more about who you are in the context of your leadership.
And that comes out of self-knowledge and self-reflection about your own things “done and left undone,” your own fragility.
Q: So you’re saying it’s critical for clergy to be able to acknowledge their own flaws and humanity?
Exactly.
People in the pews are actually attracted to that, and they connect with it. It’s not that you stand in the pulpit and talk about all your great sins. But if leaders can be honest about themselves and their own struggles with following Jesus, then they give people a space to join in that.
If it’s about some sort of Pelagian achievement, that “I’m this perfect disciple of Jesus, so I’m asking you to do that, too,” people may follow you and underline biblical passages that you quote, but they’re not going to be invited to go deeper into their own souls and into self-reflection and own their brokenness and who they honestly are.
If you can’t have compassion for your own foibles and sin and brokenness, then you’re not going to be very compassionate to other people.
The book is not a blueprint. It’s the opposite of that. It’s not “Do these things and you’ll be fine” but instead “Take on the authentic self that you have and be willing to share that with other people.” Create a context in which the leader is one who stands in the midst of the people, constantly proclaiming the great narrative of redemption in Jesus Christ.
Q: That’s a major theme in the book, the church leader as steward of the great narrative of redemption. What do you mean?
Many churches are looking for a social activities director or a community organizer or a CEO. At times, the pastor needs to embody all those roles, but if any of them become your primary identity, then you’re sacrificing the one word that we have for this world -- that God has made things well in Jesus Christ.
The primary task of the parish church leader is to be a steward of that great narrative, tell that story of grace and redemption again and again and invite people into it.
When we get sidetracked being CEOs or community organizers or social activity directors or glorified administrators, we lose the very thing that we have that no one else has -- the story we tell. If we tell that story authentically and from our own sense of humility and the mercy that God has showed us, then the leader really does have something to share.
At the core of the Christian proclamation is that God, in Jesus, reconciled the world back to God. If we’re not telling that story, if we’re not the primary stewards of that narrative, then what are we selling? Membership in some liturgical civic club?
Q: So the primacy of the redemption narrative, in turn, shapes pastoral leadership?
No question about it. If the clergyperson is not clear about his or her own relationship with God from a perspective of grace, then you’re going to be dispensing self-help and a kind of semi-Pelagian message to your people, and that is, “Get your act together. Why aren’t you a better disciple? Just do these three things.”
But all that does is heap the law on people, and they get that at their jobs -- or at home, if they don’t have a very loving spouse.
We live in a performance culture, and we’ve turned the church into another place where people have to perform rather than a place where they go to receive the good news that God loves them no matter what. That’s the only thing we’ve got. But we try to make it a secondary or tertiary thing around some techniques that we’re taught to get the church back from its post-Christian context.
That train has left the station. We’re not going back to the 1950s.
Q: In your book, you propose what you call an ascetical theology of leadership drawn from St. Benedict.
“Ascetical” simply means the practice of certain things. In ancient Greece, askesis was the practices, the training, that a Greek athlete would do to prepare for the Olympics. So what are the practices that pastors can do that will lead to a healthy, vibrant life for themselves and their congregations?
It’s not so much “Do these five things and everything’s going to be fine.” But begin to take on patterns and practices in your life that are rooted, for example, in the daily office, saying your prayers, confessing your own sin, having some self-reflection time where you can recognize how much you’ve screwed up and how many times yesterday you weren’t kind to your spouse or whatever. It’s about taking on practices that help you be aware of yourself so that you’re grounded in grace and not in works and in judgment on folk.
For a good part of my life as a parish priest, I spent entire sermons criticizing members of the congregation indirectly for their lack of stewardship, their lack of evangelism or whatever. It made me feel good and self-righteous, but it didn’t help change those folk.
The only thing that would is the spiritual medicine of the gospel -- that God loves them beyond anything they can imagine and went to the cross for their sins, and for the sins of the whole world, and therefore it’s OK. As Dame Julian of Norwich said, “All things shall be well.”
Q: Speak some to the specific Benedictine principles that you mention in the book -- stability, obedience, conversion. How do those fit into all of this?
Benedict was a genius. He understood that if the individual in community doesn’t have stability in his or her life, prayer life and community life, then it’s easy to get distracted. It’s easy to run away, to find the grass to be greener someplace else.
It’s like folks who church-shop. They are constantly looking for the perfect church. Well, that doesn’t exist, because the church is made up of imperfect, broken, sinful human beings. The perfect church isn’t out there.
So Benedict was saying, yes, you can run to a different monastery if you want to, but you can’t run away from yourself. You need to be grounded in something -- live in the rhythms of common life with other folk, say your prayers, do your work together, and not run away from yourself and from your problems but face them in a context of a community that’s going to love you and care for you. It’s the only way I can find any kind of capacity to be real and to be authentic and real with my relationship with God.
Obedience was not “Yes, sir, following orders” for Benedict. It was more about listening deeply to God in the longings of my own heart and the longings of people around me, listening to them, and listening to Scripture and ancient church teachings, and reflecting honestly on that. And by being obedient to that listening process, we place ourselves in the capacity to really hear God speak to us.
Conversion of life happens only when we have been willing to be stable, stay with something and not run away, and stay there long enough to listen, reflect and be self-aware about all those things. And that places us where we can receive grace and have that constant conversion in our lives.
It’s not technique. It’s about living in that mixture of stability, obedience and conversion where I’m constantly being renewed and refocused in my Christian life.
Q: The book’s subtitle is “Grace in the Meantime of Ministry.” What’s that about?
It has a double meaning. “Meantime” means the time between the first and second comings -- this in-between time, this time of constant anxiety and uncertainty that we live in, in the world.
As Paul says, we see in a glass darkly. Someday we’ll see clearly, face to face, but right now, everything is out of focus. God forbid that we think the world is the way God intended it to be. Come on. Really? Does anybody look at the world and say, “Yes, this is how God designed it; this is the way God wants it”?
No, this is not the way God intended the world to be. We are in the meantime.
But it is also a mean time.
This is true with identity politics and identity Christianity and social media.
Social media promised to connect us to the world, but we have learned that the world is not a very good place to be connected to. I write a weekly column for our diocese, and I get replies that say, “Shame on you for saying something bad about our president. You’re an idiot!” I’ve had a couple of personal threats.
We’re quick to tell people how wrong they are, but are we quick to reflect about stupid things we’ve done?
Q: And as you point out in the book, pastoral ministry can be a mean time for many clergy.
It can be. As a parish priest, sitting down and listening to somebody and suggesting ways they might address their problems, I’ve had people get up and leave my office and throw books at me and say, “How dare you!”
I had one person who just looked at me and said, “Well, you’re not very helpful” and stormed out, and then wrote letters to the senior warden about how awful I was.
So yes, people are angry and disappointed with themselves, and clergy become a very convenient, inexpensive way to place blame.
If we’re not equipped through our own stability, obedience and ongoing conversion of life to deal with people’s issues and problems, then we’ll be consumed by it. But if we understand that a lot of what people bring to us comes from their own deep pain, and if we’re aware of our own deep pain, then we can say to them, “Maybe I haven’t experienced exactly what you’ve experienced, but I know what it’s like to be depressed; I know what it’s like to feel grief; I know what it’s like to feel like I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, and let me tell you how God gets us out of that.”
And you share with them the great narrative of redemption.
When I’ve done that, most of the time it is the spiritual medicine folks need. They don’t need to be told to “buck up” or “adopt the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or “pray more often and then God will bless you.”
That doesn’t work. It’s the snake oil that the church has been selling for way too long, and it’s not helpful. It doesn’t change lives, and it doesn’t present the gospel, as least as I read the gospel in the New Testament. And it can drive clergy to the brink of crashing and burning.
I wanted the book to be a word of grace to clergy. You’ve got the hardest job in the world. There is no harder job in the world to do and to do well, but you can do it well, and without losing your soul and your mind.
You really can, but to do that, you have to be clear about who you are, and where you stand, and who you’re standing next to, and who you’re kneeling before, and what your word is to yourself and to the world around you.
If you can be clear about that, then you can survive all the other meanness that’s going on. You really can.
Read the interview with the Rt. Rev. Scott Benhase »
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: AMY BUTLER
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, HEALTH & WELL-BEING, VOCATION
Episode 1: Amy Butler on her role as the first woman to lead Riverside Church
In the premiere episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Bill Lamar talks with Amy Butler, the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York, about her experience in that historic pulpit.
At first, the Rev. Dr. Amy Butler chafed at being identified as the first woman to lead The Riverside Church in the City of New York. But she has come to believe that her role as a pioneer is something to embrace. In her conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Bill Lamar, she talks frankly about the sexism she has faced, the effect growing up in Hawaii has had on her leadership, and the memoir she is writing about taking on a new role while at the same time facing her younger brother's death. She also reflects on the power of community to help find life in the "valley of dry bones."
This episode is part of a series. Learn more about Can These Bones or learn how to subscribe to a podcast.
Listen and subscribe
ABOUT THIS PODCAST »
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Amy Butler
Patheos blog: “Talk with the Preacher”(link is external)
Sermon video: “Hysterical”(link is external)
USA Today: “The truth about my late-term abortion”(link is external)
Faith & Leadership: “Love God, love your neighbor,” by Edie Gross, on Calvary Baptist Church and Butler’s role in its revitalization
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.
Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is the premiere episode of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in their own “valley of dry bones.”
Bill Lamar: We are excited about the future of the church, and we want to share that excitement with you through conversations with interesting people doing some very, very interesting things.
Laura Everett: Bill, you are one of those interesting people I need to be in conversation with, and honestly, one of the reasons I said yes to doing this is I wanted the chance to talk with you.
Now, you and I have known one another for over a decade, and in some ways, our paths are quite different. But we both lead legacy institutions -- you at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and me at the Massachusetts Council of Churches, based in Boston.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I’m looking forward to talking with you and with others about the struggles and the joys of this life of service.
Laura Everett: We have a wonderful guest list lined up, and our first guest is Amy Butler.
Amy Butler is the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Bill, why was Amy the first on your list?
Bill Lamar: So, Laura, when I came to D.C. to serve at Metropolitan, Amy was serving at Calvary Baptist Church here in the city, and I had heard of her work. She was doing some very exciting things, but she was on her way out as I was beginning my tenure, so we didn’t get a chance to meet in Washington.
But subsequently, about a year ago, we had a chance to meet. And I have just been compelled by her honesty, by her willingness to be very, very clear about who she is and about her major change in scale and scope going from Calvary to The Riverside Church, one of the most storied pulpits in the United States of America.
When I spoke with her, for example, she was recovering from neck surgery, and she was willing to share all of those challenges with us.
Laura Everett: That sounds really good, Bill. Let’s listen to your interview with Amy Butler.
Bill Lamar: This is Bill Lamar, and joining me is Pastor Amy Butler, the seventh senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Welcome, Amy.
Amy Butler: Thanks, Bill.
Bill Lamar: Thank you for joining us. My first question is, how are you? I know that you have taken some time due to some [health] issues. I just want to check in and see how you are.
Amy Butler: Oh, thank you for asking. So I was two months out, recovering, but I’m back and ready to go.
Bill Lamar: Excellent. Well, one of the interesting things about your life is that you were born in Hawaii, and our conversations lead me to believe that your being born there deeply formed you in ways that affect who you are and your work in the world. Can you share something about what Hawaii means to you?
Amy Butler: Bill, thank you so much for asking that question. I feel like this summer, things have sort of shifted for me in terms of my identity as a native Hawaiian person, and the deeper understanding of how growing up in an island culture impacts my leadership.
I went to Hawaii in August with my children, and Hawaii is a place that is so tactile -- the air hugs you; you feel the water; you smell the flowers -- and I felt healed when I got there. And it caused me to reflect a lot on what I learned about how you build and lead a community by growing up watching my father, who is a native Hawaiian activist and community organizer, and just the idea that when you live on an island, you have to learn to get along or you’re all going to die.
[Laughter]
So [Hawaiian culture has] this pull toward community and making sure that everybody has a place at the table, and I think it’s foundational to who I am as a leader and as a pastor.
Bill Lamar: So -- Harry Emerson Fosdick, William Sloane Coffin, James A. Forbes, Amy Butler. What does it mean to you to be listed among those sainted persons?
Amy Butler: I might not forgive you for saying that. I try not to think about it, because in my mind, like in the minds of so many other people, they are legends, and the work that they did at the time that they did it really changed the world.
And I have come to know them in a different way from the inside, because they were people, just like I’m a person and you’re a person, and they had immense gifts and tremendous challenges, just like I do.
Where it leads me, Bill, is the constant thinking that I do about this platform and the faithful stewardship of this platform. It’s overwhelming some days, and scary.
Bill Lamar: So you did phenomenal work at Calvary Baptist, and I want you to share a little bit about what it was like to go to that place, and the significant ministry that you and that community birthed in Chinatown in Washington, D.C.
Amy Butler: I started looking for a pastorate when I became an associate pastor, because I loved the parish. And in the Baptist world, we don’t have a lot of places for women to serve in head leadership roles.
I grew up in Hawaii, as you mentioned, and so I need diversity around me all the time. I also have an adopted daughter who is biracial, and I needed to be in a place where she would fit -- and where all of my children would understand the family of God to be something other than how they looked.
Calvary, I think, was a bit desperate -- you know, they had this storied past, but they were having a hard time figuring out who they were and where they wanted to go.
And they called me, and I went. Probably both of us would rethink that decision if we had to go back again, because it was 11 years of really hard work and pain. And then the birth of, as you said, this amazing community. And we did it together.
For me personally, I learned so many critical lessons about leadership going through church conflict -- that for an institution to live through transformation, there has to be conflict.
And most of all, what I learned is it isn’t about me. So I have to really credit that congregation for teaching me how to be a pastor and a leader. I’m just eternally grateful for that lovely community.
Bill Lamar: I know that you have been about the business of writing. How much can you share with us about what your forthcoming project is about?
Amy Butler: Yes, I’m publishing a book, and, Bill, you’ll just die when you hear this. I finished it, and then all of my health issues happened, and I’ve sort of landed in a place where I feel like I need to rewrite the book and bleed a little bit more, and that is incredibly fear-inducing for me.
But I think the story of coming to Riverside is something that is important to tell. A lot of people don’t know the whole back story about how my brother -- my younger brother -- died at the same exact time, and I think I’m finally ready to write about that.
The book is a memoir, and it’s called “Beautiful and Terrible Things.” That moment was such a beautiful -- being called as the first woman pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York -- and [at the same time] my younger brother, having to take him off life support, and his death.
So here I am, trying to stare down the fear and make this book what it needs to be.
Bill Lamar: In this moment, Amy, for people -- personally, as a pastor, and then from the platform that you have been given to steward -- there are a lot of persons looking fear, in its various manifestations, in the face. How are you walking with people in that process?
Amy Butler: Well, I could use some tips, but one of the biggest things for me is my own fear. Naming it. Knowing when to name the darkness and call for the hope in a way that’s genuine and acknowledges the tremendous pain that we’re going through corporately right now.
Internally, within the church -- you know this -- when people are afraid, they behave badly. And so my work within our community is a work of reassurance and calling people to genuine community and trying to articulate how our work building beloved community can actually change the world -- that it’s worth it.
I’m very aware that people are watching me, especially other pastors who perhaps don’t have as much freedom in their pulpits as I do. I take that responsibility very seriously, and I want to help people become a voice of faith that is a counternarrative to what we’re hearing from evangelical right-wing pastors, because that’s not the witness of faith in this moment.
And I also want to say that I think, in a way, the church in America has been given a gift, and this is our moment. We -- there’s no question about what our work is here, and we have to have the courage to stand up for what’s right and to keep doing it. And in a way, I’m so grateful for that clarity.
I say sometimes in crazy church council meetings, “People, Donald Trump is the president! You know? Let’s focus.”
Bill Lamar: Amy, I think one of the hallmarks of your work is an ability to be very honest. You have talked and written about your divorce; you’ve talked and written about your late-term abortion. What is it about you that propels you to do these things as a part of your public ministry?
Amy Butler: Well, to be perfectly honest, Bill, it’s that I’m tired and I can’t maintain a faux persona. It’s too much work. And I -- at the very core of who I am -- I do this work because I need authentic community, too. And so I want to be honest about who I am and my journey of faith and how I think that impacts the church.
I never, I never want to be somebody different outside the pulpit than I am in -- ever, ever.
Bill Lamar: Another of the hallmarks of your leadership at Riverside, in my opinion, is your ability to gather some of the best and brightest folks as senior staff and other folks to push forward the great mandate for ministry that is a part of Riverside’s heritage and its present and its future.
So can you say something about this wonderful team that you have and how it’s been built and how you’re cultivating it?
Amy Butler: Oh, they are so incredible. I mean, I work with some of the brightest people I have ever met. I -- well, this is how it started. I’ve always had the management philosophy that you should hire people who are smarter than you are, and I have managed to do that.
And when I came to Riverside, I just thought that everybody in the church world would be like, “All right, let’s do this. I want to come and help.” And that really wasn’t the case. I think people were hands-off -- “Let’s see if she falls flat on her face.”
And so I decided to employ what is, for me, an avocation, as I know it is for you, too, Bill -- going out and finding the next leaders. You know, people who have this amazing talent and push and call who are willing to take a risk on me and on this church and who I might be able to help form into the next leaders of the church.
I feel like if I left Riverside today, I would be so proud of that work, because my colleagues will not be at Riverside for their whole careers. They’re going to leave, and they’re going to change the landscape of the American church. And you know, if I never preach a good sermon ever again, that’s something I’m really, really proud of.
Bill Lamar: So you have shared with me and with others in larger venues how women especially -- not just young women, but a lot of young women -- pull on your energy, because they see you, and then they can see themselves, doing this kind of work. They want mentorship. Can you speak to that?
Amy Butler: Sure. I mean, this issue has been so deep and evolving in my life for these past three years. And particularly as we’re watching issues of women leaders sort of roll out on the national and international stage, I’ve shifted exponentially around this issue.
When I came to Riverside, Bill, I was so annoyed that Time magazine, The New York Times, everybody’s like, “She’s the first woman. She’s the first woman.”
It just made me angry -- like you think I was called here because my hair is cute? I was so angry about that. And it had to do with sort of the philosophy I’ve had my whole career, which is, “Don’t tell me I can’t do something, because it will make me want to do it more, and I’ll just work harder and I’ll just do better. Just try to stop me -- you won’t be able to.”
And coming to Riverside, I learned that young women and young men and the church need to see women in these roles. And it particularly hit home to me when I published an article in USA Today about a late-term abortion that I had about 20 years ago. And, boy, the hate mail I got for that. Oh my gosh, that’ll make a great book someday.
But someone sent me an email and said, “We have never before in the history of the American church had a woman in a high-steeple pulpit as pastor talking about her personal experience of abortion, ever. And that’s so powerful.”
So there have been several incidents like that that have made me, whoa, take a step back and say, “You need to reframe this. This is important. It’s important for the church. It’s important for the world.”
And then the second thing I want to say about that is, you know, this is a pulpit that is deeply rooted in issues of social justice, and so a big part of my learning curve is, “How do I authentically be prophetic?”
In this past year, I’ve really come into more naming of misogyny as an injustice that happens. And part of that is because the sexism and misogyny that I face in this job is so overwhelming. I’m just stunned by it almost every day.
And the [third] thing is I don’t know who else is talking about this. I preached a sermon at the end of June called “Hysterical,” which was about Sarah laughing when she found out she was going to have a baby. And I made some joke about, “Can you just imagine a whole bunch of men sitting around talking about whether or not you can have a baby?” You know, these are issues that we face, and they need to be talked about from the pulpit.
So I’m growing into that, and I’m struggling with the whole, “Oh, she’s just a bitter woman who’s so negative about everything,” which actually was said to me two weeks ago. It is real, Bill. It’s real, and it’s wearying. It is so wearying.
Bill Lamar: So your moving from Washington and Calvary Baptist to Riverside was a huge jump in scale and scope, and for our listeners who are moving from one scale and scope of institutional work or ministry [to another], what wisdom can you offer when you’re taking that big jump?
Amy Butler: Right. When I left Calvary, there were about 250 members, probably an eight-person staff, and just a little over a $1 million annual budget.
So when I came to Riverside -- $12 million annual budget, 150 employees, this huge plant -- I had a big learning curve. You know, all of a sudden, I’m leading a corporation.
And one of the things that I did not anticipate that I wish someone had told me is the feelings of grief and loss that I had, and still have. I’m sort of tearing up now when I talk about it, because some of my favorite parts of being a pastor are now not part of my work.
For example, I don’t do weddings; I don’t do funerals; I don’t go visit babies in the hospital; I don’t visit people who are sick. I don’t have those kinds of pastoral moments that really fed my soul at Calvary.
There are 2,000 members at Riverside, and you can’t be that kind of pastor to such a large group and not die. So I’ve had to really think about some of the grief and letting go and trying to understand my call in a new way, and I wish I had been more prepared for that.
Bill Lamar: Can you say something about the institution that is Riverside Church and how you and your team are helping to shape a vibrant future? I mean, it’s a storied past, but -- I’m very much in a similar situation, with a place with a storied past -- but what future is emerging that’s giving you all energy?
Amy Butler: Bill, you know this about me. One of my huge passions is institutional leadership. And I think Riverside’s history is still in place, and it’s still a big part of who we are, but the church had come to a point where you can’t live in the past anymore. You can’t propel yourself forward with an orthodoxy of nostalgia.
Bill Lamar: Wow.
Amy Butler: It’s just not ...
Bill Lamar: Hold on. I think you just said -- that’s a book -- an “orthodoxy of nostalgia.” Wow. Hmm.
Amy Butler: Truth be told, I stole that from Brian McLaren, but, you know.
Bill Lamar: OK. We’ll give him his credit.
Amy Butler: Yeah. I think it’s a cool phrase.
I think the state of the world is propelling us forward, but I also think, from an internal standpoint, the church is finally at the point now where it’s ready to fly.
I’m doing a massive staff restructure, and we’re working to infuse health into our lay leadership, and as you know, that’s very time-consuming and tedious work. But I can see the progress being made, and I can see that the world needs this voice, and that just makes me very passionate.
Bill Lamar: What are your practices -- spiritual, physical -- that keep you, in the midst of so many demands?
Amy Butler: Well, this is, you know, a constant struggle for me, because, as I was saying to a friend yesterday, everything seems so important all the time. I’ve put into place some stricter boundaries around how often I’m in the office, and I try to leave -- I do leave -- every morning until 10 a.m. [reserved] for prayer, reflection, reading, writing.
I live right next to Central Park, and so I’m in the park every morning running. And I just got this new running shirt that says “I hate running,” which makes me so happy.
I have a spiritual director, who I see every two weeks. I have a coach. I have a group of colleagues that are very close to me, who I’ve been in intentional relationship with for 15 years.
So those things keep me going. One of the hard things for me, Bill, is that there are not a lot of people who understand this -- Riverside, New York, my job. You know, it’s kind of lonely, because I’m not going to call you and be like, “Oh, Bill, I’m so nervous because Hillary Clinton’s coming tonight,” you know, because then I’m going to sound like a jerk.
[Laughter]
So I don’t know -- I feel isolated and lonely a lot, and I feel the gap between what other pastors experience and the craziness of my life, which, you know, pulls me forward and also makes me wonder if it’ll kill me.
Bill Lamar: Wow. It seems like you’re doing a lot of things to make a full life, and will err on that side.
My final question is -- the title of the podcast, the name of the podcast, is “Can These Bones,” and as a great preacher yourself, you know that that comes from the Ezekiel text. And I just wanted to ask you where you are seeing life in the midst of death, where you are seeing resurrection across the landscape. What are you seeing that’s giving you that kind of hope?
Amy Butler: The landscape is so stark now, isn’t it? Yeah. You know, I believe so deeply in beloved community and in the church and in what we can be together in terms of the work of healing the world.
I remember when I was interviewing with the search committee, you know, it was all very secret, and I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I had never been to Riverside, so I took the bus up from D.C., and I did the tourist thing, and I walked in. And of course my manager mind is like, “Oh, those flyers need to come down off the wall right now.”
But I remember going into the nave and sitting in the third pew and feeling, like, the darkness, the lack of hope and just the darkness, and I just remember thinking, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it -- I cannot do this.”
And when I walked into the nave yesterday, I was reflecting on that, and I thought, “It’s light in here. It’s light, and there’s life, and there’s community, and there are children crying, and there’s beauty all around, and there are people who love each other and who are learning to love each other.”
And when I am assaulted by the news, just like everybody else, I hang on to those things, because beloved community can change us and can change the world, and I don’t know what I would do, Bill, if I didn’t believe in that.
Bill Lamar: Amy, thank you for your time and for your work, and we’re praying for your speedy recovery -- no more surgeries -- and I look forward to talking with you again real soon.
Amy Butler: Thanks, Bill. It’s good to hear your voice.
Bill Lamar: Thank you, Amy.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Amy Butler, the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Bill, as I was listening, I was struck by Amy’s bravery -- how willing she was to look fear in the face in so many settings.
You and I have talked about this, and I know you’ve experienced it, too. As the leader of a prominent black church after the shootings in Charleston, how did you look fear in the face in your institution?
Bill Lamar: Oh, Laura, it was quite a challenge. I recall that Wednesday night in 2015 when I began to get text messages from members of my denomination from around the country, most especially from South Carolina. I got news of the death of Pastor Pinckney and others before it was reported nationally, because of my personal relationships. And I was thrown into a tailspin, along with many of my congregants, because not only did we know Pastor Pinckney, but many of us knew multiple victims of that awful, awful tragedy.
That next morning, I got a call from my bishop, who asked me to begin to plan a national day of mourning at Metropolitan, which is considered the national church of our denomination. And so, really, I was struggling with trying to put together the kind of worshipful experience that would honor the lives of those who had fallen, but also trying to have a space of hope and trying to manage my own grief and difficulty.
And so it was much more than I would have imagined in the way of taxing me personally, along with those in the congregation. The eyes of the world were upon us. We were talking to media from Germany and Russia, Japan -- it was a very, very, very big undertaking.
But what I have considered, Laura, in the aftermath of that event, is how throughout the founding of our own denomination, this event in Charleston was not anomalous. Time after time, we have had to be the space of hope and the space of lament in the midst of countless tragedies and assaults on black bodies in the United States and around the world. It is a part of who we have been, and it’s a part of my ministry, and it is challenging.
But I gain strength from the strength of the people, and I gain strength from the strength of our ancestors, who continue to persist and to be brave and to move forward upon their theological convictions in the midst of a lot of struggle and difficulty.
Laura Everett: I hear in both your story, Bill, and in Amy’s a deep sense of this pastoral responsibility to name the fear and the darkness even as we are sitting with our own sense of fear and darkness.
Bill Lamar: I love Amy’s use of the phrase “orthodoxy of nostalgia.” I still think it could be a great book title. Laura, how do you encounter the orthodoxy of nostalgia in your own work?
Laura Everett: Well, I run an institution that’s 115 years old now, and it was really formed at a different time. That orthodoxy of nostalgia, in my experience, means that some parts of our life and history can be amber-colored, sort of frozen in time, as if that’s the only way to do God’s work in the world.
One of the ways that I’ve really had to learn to notice that orthodoxy of nostalgia, and break it open, is to ask, “What is the core commitment we are trying to enact, and are there other ways to do it?”
So, for example, we used to have a committee called the Strategy in Action Commission, and it was populated with the staff people in the denominations who had public policy or Christian public witness as a part of their portfolios.
Well, in Massachusetts, a lot of the denominational bodies have needed to cut staff, so the people who populated that committee no longer exist in the same sort of way. We still have an obligation to do the work; we just don’t have the people that were once in place to do it.
And people are really sad. People are really disheartened, and they think that the commitment to public Christian witness won’t continue if it doesn’t continue in that form. And so I’ve had to try to help my people see that there are other ways to fulfill the mission.
I think we’ve gotten stuck in an orthodoxy of nostalgia of structures rather than a core commitment to the values we’re trying to enact.
One of the other things I heard in the interview and found incredibly brave was the way Amy talked about sexism, and the way she changed her mind about being identified as the first woman to have the job of senior pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York.
I’m really grateful for you, also, for not including that in your introduction to Amy; it comes later in the interview. I’ve talked and written about misogyny and the sexism that I’ve encountered as a woman in ministry, and it is such a hard thing to do, to name it.
I confess that sometimes when I talk about it, I feel like it undercuts my own leadership. I wonder, as a male colleague in this work who I know is so committed to the liberation of all people to fully use our gifts for God, how do you work with the misogyny and the sexism you see in Christian leadership?
Bill Lamar: Laura, what I try to do is assume a posture as student and not as teacher when it comes to working with my woman colleagues in ministry.
It’s very interesting. Recently, I was having a conversation with a colleague who leads the Ethical Humanist Society here in town, and she was speaking with me about “mansplaining” -- a term which I had not heard. I assume that I have been living under a rock.
[Laughter]
She explained to me how she’ll go to meetings and she will say something perfectly wise and perfectly appropriate, and a male colleague will feel the need to interpret it. She talked about how she lives in the midst of mansplaining but how she also never lets mansplaining happen unchecked. She doesn’t check it in ways that are disrespectful, but she is very clear when mansplaining occurs.
My ignorance was such that I said to her, “Would you please, the next time we’re in a meeting and someone mansplains, just tap me?” And we were in a meeting and she tapped me at least three times, and so I finally got the gist of what it looked like.
So I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I’m growing. I’m always listening and learning from my colleagues who share with me where those things may even surface in me and I may not be aware of them. So I’m very thankful for colleagues who are willing to teach and very thankful that I know I’ve got a lot yet to learn.
Laura Everett: Bill, I’m so grateful for the ways that you notice the sexism in the church, and the ways that Amy named it in her interview, too. One of the things that came through so clearly in this interview is that Amy is a particular person with a particular past and a humanness that’s a model for public leadership.
She’s not some clergy-bot following the role of what it’s supposed to be to be the senior pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. But that authenticity of where she’s been and who she is and what she’s experienced is coming through loud and clear in that interview.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I think that you have coined a very helpful term in “clergy-bot.” I like that a lot. And I hope, as we continue learning the individual stories of these wonderful people, that no one who listens will determine they need to be a clergy-bot, or an automaton of any type, but that they can live fully into who they’re called to be. And that indeed is a point of resurrection for each and every one of us -- the authenticity of our calling and our work.
Laura Everett: Amen.
Bill Lamar: We want to thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” Laura, this was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?
Laura Everett: It was really good, Bill.
Bill Lamar: There is more about Amy Butler, including video of her preaching, on our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external). Laura, who are we talking with next time?
Laura Everett: Bill, we’ve got a great conversation with Astead Herndon, who covers the White House and national politics for The Boston Globe.
Bill Lamar: There’s nothing to say about politics or the White House or any of that stuff -- but I can’t wait for that conversation, Laura. Looking forward to it.
Laura Everett: I’ll see you soon, Bill.
Bill Lamar: “Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external) -- that’s the Roman numeral IV -- and you can reach Laura on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external). You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Shooting the rapids: The cycles of pastoral ministry
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
The formational stages of pastoral ministry are filled with turbulent, fast-moving waters that unfold quickly for pastors who are doing the paddling. Here's some tips on navigating the rapids.
Editor’s note: This article previously appeared on the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence(link is external) website.
In all the learning that we have experienced in the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program of the Evangelical Covenant Church, one of the most powerful has been the recognition that the life cycle of pastoral ministry takes place in fairly predictable stages. This “aha” moment was gleaned through general readings on church ministry, work being done by other denominations, books about clergy, discussions with retired Covenant pastors, our own anecdotal evidence, and statistical research that we conducted about our ministerial community.
Our findings, presented below in broad brush strokes, have clearly resonated with our pastors. In sharing this ministerial life cycle with more than 400 Covenant pastors, we received no words of dissent, only affirmation. The discussions around this life cycle have been so compelling that we have been asked by pastors to do presentations at their fall conference gatherings. One pastor, with 10 years of history in a particular district, told us their district cluster used the life-cycle for discussion and it created the most open, honest, and personal discussion they had ever had. Frankly, we have been surprised at the kind of chord this has hit.
Generally, we have found that the ministerial life cycle occurs in three predictable formational stages. Individual pastors may enter any of these stages earlier or later, depending on their particular life circumstances, but overall we find that these transitions take place in Years 5-8, Years 13-15, and Years 20-25. Whether a pastor is called to ministry as either a first- or second-career does not appear to make any difference in how these stages are encountered. Each stage is defined by a key question and a key word. Like rapids in a river, where the water moves faster and more intensely, these formational stages are filled with turbulence, unfolding quickly for pastors paddling in the river.
The first formational stage (years 5-8) is defined by issues of entry into the pastoral role. Expectations meet reality, strengths and weaknesses come into sharper clarity through experience, and pastors begin to know what they do not know. In this period, pastors re-examine their sense of call, and they feel an urgent need to “catch-up” in their learning.
The primary question pastors wrestle with in this stage is, “What am I doing?” Those who choose to shoot this first set of rapids honestly engaging this question and with strong connections to colleagues tend to have healthier growth as they proceed through the turbulent formational waters. Those who basically quit wrestling with this question, however, just holding on and hoping to ride through the rapids unscathed, seem to step out of the pastorate at a higher rate. Around year 5 the attrition rate shows a significant rise, spiking to a high point at year 8 in our setting.
Connection is the key word for pastors who successfully emerge from the rapids, sustaining themselves in ministry through this first stage. Ministers who have a community of similarly situated colleagues with whom they can share safely and deeply are more likely to remain healthy and establish habits of care and accountability. Essentially, when pastors shoot their first set of rapids they want people in the boat paddling with them.
The second formational stage (years 13-15) is basically a mid-life transition for ministers. In shooting the first set of rapids, the pastor has gained self-awareness. This leads, in turn, to a journey of personal re-discovery. These years between the first and second set of rapids are marked with deep transformational rumblings.
Those who make it to the second set of rapids generally have paid the price. They have been wounded from the work of ministry. Their families have paid a price. They know what they like to do and dislike doing. The question that pastors begin to ask as they approach the second rapids in years 13-15 is “Do I want to keep doing this? I have been doing this for 15 years of my life. Can I imagine doing this another 15 or 20 years”?
At this mid-point, pastors have to be able to re-imagine themselves in the pastoral role for the second half of their ministerial journey. Such re-imagining requires a high level of self-awareness, a growing contentment about one’s gifts and liabilities, and a mission motivation that outweighs the cost. Healthy habits formed early in pastoral ministry, even before the first set of rapids—and then honed in those rapids—give clergy strength as they enter this second set of rapids.
Such strength is needed, for these second rapids are the most intense in the river. These are category 5 rapids. They exact the highest cost. In this formational stage, the clergy community experiences the highest rate of attrition of any point in the river. The key word that marks this period is “sacrifice.” Being sustained through this stage, successfully emerging and paddling on towards the third formational stage, requires good self-awareness, healthy boundaries, relational fitness and a freshening of devotional patterns.
The third formational stage, which takes place in years 20-25, is marked by the realization that the end of the vocational journey lies up ahead, in the not too distant future. Pastors at this stage have now already spent more time in the pastoral role than they will in the future. The key word that rises up in these final stretches of the river is “legacy.” Here, the questions become, “How do I finish well? What will I leave behind of value?”
Pastors who choose to engage, struggle, and work with these questions do a better job of positioning themselves to finish well. Those who choose not to struggle with this question rust out, basically marking time until retirement.
My own reflections, generated out of conversations with pastors in this stage, suggests that this third set of rapids rises up at this point in the journey because old tools have become rusty. In 25 years the world changes, language morphs, the church’s focus and attention is different, a new generation is arising. One begins to realize that to speak to a new generation requires learning new things. Consider, for example, how technology has changed over the past 25 years. When I started as an associate pastor, we printed the Sunday bulletins on a mimeograph. Today, personal computers contain virtual print shops. I used to buy clip art books to spice up communications. Today, an eye-catching Web log with incredible resource links can be created in about the same time and with much less effort than it took to create a newsletter with a typewriter, clip art, and a mimeograph. Sustaining pastoral excellence through this last set of rapids requires a willingness to unlearn and relearn.
For our SPE initiative, the ability to name and describe a predictable ministerial life cycle and all its key stages has been enormously beneficial. Using this description of the pastoral life cycle, we have met with our pastors and asked them to write out their ministerial journey, based on this model. Amazingly, the highest percentage can!
Our growing knowledge about the notion of a predictable ministerial life cycle offers a key way to understand what it takes to sustain pastoral excellence. If this ministerial life cycle is real, if we know the map of the river and where the rapids lie ahead, we have a sound basis to help pastors understand how they can sustain ministerial health (a core component of excellence) for the long haul. If the habits established in the early years of ministry have a significant impact on the ability to navigate the formational rapids, seminaries, conferences, and denominations might be able to pinpoint with higher precision the disciplines they need to nurture, model, and promote. At the same time, this notion of a pastoral life cycle also helps identify potential intervention points. If we know, for example, that the first set of rapids arrive around years 5 -8, and we know that a pastor needs people paddling with them in the boat to allow the formational rapids to do their good work, shouldn’t we have a strategy in place to get those other paddlers, those other companions, in the boat? Doesn’t the ministerial life cycle suggest that first call/new call initiatives are on the mark and we should have something like this contextualized for us?
We are still giving flesh to this “aha” piece of learning. There is still much to discover. But it is this kind of learning that is generating conversation and movement for all of us in the Evangelical Covenant SPE initiative.
Read more from Dan Pietrzyk »
The pastor is the church's principal convener
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, VOCATION
Bigstock / RawpixelA pastor re-envisions his primary vocation not as a preacher, teacher, healer or administrator but as a host, a "convener." It wasn't what seminary prepared him for, but it's a high and holy calling.
I have learned a lot in the two and a half years since I was called as pastor of Grinnell United Church of Christ in Grinnell, Iowa. When I arrived in 2014, just a few years out of seminary, I thought of myself as something of an expert. Formed by my education and training, I knew things about the Bible, liturgical arts and human psychology that others in my community did not, and my task, clearly, was to share my hard-earned wisdom and knowledge.
But as I said, I’ve learned a lot since then -- mostly about my own limitations and the resourcefulness of others. I’ve discovered that my expertise is of little value to a congregation anxious about its future. Much more important is the strength of our relationships as members of a common body.
I’ve concluded that my primary role has little to do with my “expertise.” Actually, my job is to call the congregation together and nurture our collective identity. Many pastors have a guiding image that sustains them in their work -- perhaps “herald,” “midwife” or “wounded healer.” But I’ve come to see the pastoral vocation this way: I am the church’s principal “convener.”
I accepted the call knowing it wouldn’t be an easy job. For many years, a much-beloved pastor led the church, continuing to do so long after a traumatic injury in 1997 left him confined to a wheelchair. After he left in 2005, the church was served by five successive pastors before I was called in 2014, with some leaving under difficult and contentious circumstances.
By the time I arrived, it had been almost a decade since the congregation had experienced strong pastoral leadership. Worship attendance had dropped from about 120 to 60 or so. Offerings were anemic, but a large endowment and one family’s extravagantly generous annual pledge made it possible for the ministry to continue.
More concerning than the finances was the culture. Before I was even hired, on the day I preached my tryout sermon, a member lobbied me to support her favorite community initiative. She was not pleased when I confessed that I knew nothing about it. Similarly, when I arrived on my first day, another member was waiting for me in my office not to welcome me but to ask my opinion on another pet program.
Those first few months, worship announcements sometimes took longer than the sermon. One Sunday, a man determined to share news of his event grabbed the microphone out of my hand before I had finished speaking. Our church council meetings featured endless disjointed reports from more than a dozen boards and committees.
We never discussed our organizing purpose, strategic priorities or vision for the future. Instead, we regularly lamented lapses of “communication” -- which to me always sounded like, “Why can’t you fix this, pastor?”
Basically, we didn’t seem to trust each other. The church’s many programs and initiatives competed for attention, money and an ever-dwindling membership. Once upon a time, the church’s boards and committees served a ministry that our community held in common. But now it seemed that the church existed to serve the varied interests of its many boards and committees. Were we really a church or just a crowded ring of hobbyhorses?
I was lost. I’d studied at a fine seminary and even had the advantage of a two-year pastoral residency with a strong and vibrant congregation. But nothing had prepared me for the lonely challenges of ministry with a small-town congregation whose best days were in the past. I was living under the illusion that my formation had supplied me with the answers I would need.
The turning point came late in my first year, when I discovered the Art of Hosting(link is external), a leadership approach that views leadership primarily as a practice of hospitality. With the help of a consultant and ardent proponent of the Art of Hosting philosophy, our church focused on re-connecting with each other and “re-humanizing” our relationships. We spent time together, sharing meals, telling stories and reviewing our community’s history.
Soon, we held a series of retreats to engage church members outside our ordinary structure of boards and committees. Instead of recruiting people to existing bodies, we invited people to follow their energy and work on needs they had identified.
Gradually, I accepted that I was powerless to direct our ministry toward my own ideas of what a church should be. I began to think of myself primarily not as a preacher, teacher, healer or administrator but as a host -- a convener. My greatest asset was not my knowledge but my position in our community. So I started creating a space for church members to have more genuine encounters with one another. I learned not to look within myself for answers but to summon the gifts of others.
As it turned out, our congregation discovered that we have considerable resources for ministry when our relationships are strong. Effective community organizers know this, which is why they meet people one-on-one over coffee and conduct house meetings. They’re building relational power.
Our problem wasn’t that we had different ideas about the church’s mission. It was that our relationships had frayed through the stress and turmoil of our recent history.
As I began practicing a ministry of convening, our congregation came together and identified several areas in which we share a collective passion, including children’s ministries and social and environmental justice. Since then, after months of dialogue about our values and strengths, we’ve developed a Godly Play classroom for teaching Bible stories, which now boasts more than 30 children and a dedicated cohort of teachers. Working with faculty from Grinnell College, we’ve offered community workshops on climate change and launched an annual Earth Day worship. And in an effort to foster opportunities for spiritual growth, we’re piloting a small group program focused on fellowship over a shared meal, Scripture study and prayer.
As our relationships have deepened, our congregation has been transformed, and much of my work now focuses on bringing people together, building and strengthening those relationships.
When a staff position opened recently at our church, we were tempted to fill it with another seminary-trained expert. But we’ve learned that we don’t need more hermeneutics. We need deeper connections with one another. So we hired a community organizer to help our emerging ministry teams.
Our church and its ministry came alive when I finally decided to get off my own hobbyhorse. The power of our church does not lie in my expertise as pastor. It’s in the wisdom of Christ revealed through the faithful discernment of the whole body. I am an instrument God uses to bring the body together. That’s not what I thought I was being prepared for back in seminary, but it is a high and holy calling.
Read more from Cameron Barr »
Starting with Spirit: Nurturing Your Call to Pastoral Leadershipby Bruce Epperly
Starting with Spirit is a spiritual and professional resource for new pastors, their family members, and congregations, as well as ministers in every season of ministry who seek to grow in vitality and skill in the ongoing adventure of ministry. For more than thirty years, Bruce Epperly has followed the call of the spirit, moving through his vocations as a congregational pastor, university chaplain, seminary and university professor, and seminary administrator. Drawing on these experiences, he addresses the new pastor's transition from seminary student to congregational leader; pastoral authority; the 'honeymoon;' boundaries; death; the pastor's spiritual life, health, and relationships; the role of the associate pastor; and continuing education.
Learn more and order the book »
This episode is part of a series. Learn more about Can These Bones or learn how to subscribe to a podcast.
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Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Amy Butler
Patheos blog: “Talk with the Preacher”(link is external)
Sermon video: “Hysterical”(link is external)
USA Today: “The truth about my late-term abortion”(link is external)
Faith & Leadership: “Love God, love your neighbor,” by Edie Gross, on Calvary Baptist Church and Butler’s role in its revitalization
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is the premiere episode of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in their own “valley of dry bones.”Bill Lamar: We are excited about the future of the church, and we want to share that excitement with you through conversations with interesting people doing some very, very interesting things.
Laura Everett: Bill, you are one of those interesting people I need to be in conversation with, and honestly, one of the reasons I said yes to doing this is I wanted the chance to talk with you.
Now, you and I have known one another for over a decade, and in some ways, our paths are quite different. But we both lead legacy institutions -- you at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and me at the Massachusetts Council of Churches, based in Boston.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I’m looking forward to talking with you and with others about the struggles and the joys of this life of service.
Laura Everett: We have a wonderful guest list lined up, and our first guest is Amy Butler.
Amy Butler is the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Bill, why was Amy the first on your list?
Bill Lamar: So, Laura, when I came to D.C. to serve at Metropolitan, Amy was serving at Calvary Baptist Church here in the city, and I had heard of her work. She was doing some very exciting things, but she was on her way out as I was beginning my tenure, so we didn’t get a chance to meet in Washington.
But subsequently, about a year ago, we had a chance to meet. And I have just been compelled by her honesty, by her willingness to be very, very clear about who she is and about her major change in scale and scope going from Calvary to The Riverside Church, one of the most storied pulpits in the United States of America.
When I spoke with her, for example, she was recovering from neck surgery, and she was willing to share all of those challenges with us.
Laura Everett: That sounds really good, Bill. Let’s listen to your interview with Amy Butler.
Bill Lamar: This is Bill Lamar, and joining me is Pastor Amy Butler, the seventh senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Welcome, Amy.
Amy Butler: Thanks, Bill.
Bill Lamar: Thank you for joining us. My first question is, how are you? I know that you have taken some time due to some [health] issues. I just want to check in and see how you are.
Amy Butler: Oh, thank you for asking. So I was two months out, recovering, but I’m back and ready to go.
Bill Lamar: Excellent. Well, one of the interesting things about your life is that you were born in Hawaii, and our conversations lead me to believe that your being born there deeply formed you in ways that affect who you are and your work in the world. Can you share something about what Hawaii means to you?
Amy Butler: Bill, thank you so much for asking that question. I feel like this summer, things have sort of shifted for me in terms of my identity as a native Hawaiian person, and the deeper understanding of how growing up in an island culture impacts my leadership.
I went to Hawaii in August with my children, and Hawaii is a place that is so tactile -- the air hugs you; you feel the water; you smell the flowers -- and I felt healed when I got there. And it caused me to reflect a lot on what I learned about how you build and lead a community by growing up watching my father, who is a native Hawaiian activist and community organizer, and just the idea that when you live on an island, you have to learn to get along or you’re all going to die.
[Laughter]
So [Hawaiian culture has] this pull toward community and making sure that everybody has a place at the table, and I think it’s foundational to who I am as a leader and as a pastor.
Bill Lamar: So -- Harry Emerson Fosdick, William Sloane Coffin, James A. Forbes, Amy Butler. What does it mean to you to be listed among those sainted persons?
Amy Butler: I might not forgive you for saying that. I try not to think about it, because in my mind, like in the minds of so many other people, they are legends, and the work that they did at the time that they did it really changed the world.
And I have come to know them in a different way from the inside, because they were people, just like I’m a person and you’re a person, and they had immense gifts and tremendous challenges, just like I do.
Where it leads me, Bill, is the constant thinking that I do about this platform and the faithful stewardship of this platform. It’s overwhelming some days, and scary.
Bill Lamar: So you did phenomenal work at Calvary Baptist, and I want you to share a little bit about what it was like to go to that place, and the significant ministry that you and that community birthed in Chinatown in Washington, D.C.
Amy Butler: I started looking for a pastorate when I became an associate pastor, because I loved the parish. And in the Baptist world, we don’t have a lot of places for women to serve in head leadership roles.
I grew up in Hawaii, as you mentioned, and so I need diversity around me all the time. I also have an adopted daughter who is biracial, and I needed to be in a place where she would fit -- and where all of my children would understand the family of God to be something other than how they looked.
Calvary, I think, was a bit desperate -- you know, they had this storied past, but they were having a hard time figuring out who they were and where they wanted to go.
And they called me, and I went. Probably both of us would rethink that decision if we had to go back again, because it was 11 years of really hard work and pain. And then the birth of, as you said, this amazing community. And we did it together.
For me personally, I learned so many critical lessons about leadership going through church conflict -- that for an institution to live through transformation, there has to be conflict.
And most of all, what I learned is it isn’t about me. So I have to really credit that congregation for teaching me how to be a pastor and a leader. I’m just eternally grateful for that lovely community.
Bill Lamar: I know that you have been about the business of writing. How much can you share with us about what your forthcoming project is about?
Amy Butler: Yes, I’m publishing a book, and, Bill, you’ll just die when you hear this. I finished it, and then all of my health issues happened, and I’ve sort of landed in a place where I feel like I need to rewrite the book and bleed a little bit more, and that is incredibly fear-inducing for me.
But I think the story of coming to Riverside is something that is important to tell. A lot of people don’t know the whole back story about how my brother -- my younger brother -- died at the same exact time, and I think I’m finally ready to write about that.
The book is a memoir, and it’s called “Beautiful and Terrible Things.” That moment was such a beautiful -- being called as the first woman pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York -- and [at the same time] my younger brother, having to take him off life support, and his death.
So here I am, trying to stare down the fear and make this book what it needs to be.
Bill Lamar: In this moment, Amy, for people -- personally, as a pastor, and then from the platform that you have been given to steward -- there are a lot of persons looking fear, in its various manifestations, in the face. How are you walking with people in that process?
Amy Butler: Well, I could use some tips, but one of the biggest things for me is my own fear. Naming it. Knowing when to name the darkness and call for the hope in a way that’s genuine and acknowledges the tremendous pain that we’re going through corporately right now.
Internally, within the church -- you know this -- when people are afraid, they behave badly. And so my work within our community is a work of reassurance and calling people to genuine community and trying to articulate how our work building beloved community can actually change the world -- that it’s worth it.
I’m very aware that people are watching me, especially other pastors who perhaps don’t have as much freedom in their pulpits as I do. I take that responsibility very seriously, and I want to help people become a voice of faith that is a counternarrative to what we’re hearing from evangelical right-wing pastors, because that’s not the witness of faith in this moment.
And I also want to say that I think, in a way, the church in America has been given a gift, and this is our moment. We -- there’s no question about what our work is here, and we have to have the courage to stand up for what’s right and to keep doing it. And in a way, I’m so grateful for that clarity.
I say sometimes in crazy church council meetings, “People, Donald Trump is the president! You know? Let’s focus.”
Bill Lamar: Amy, I think one of the hallmarks of your work is an ability to be very honest. You have talked and written about your divorce; you’ve talked and written about your late-term abortion. What is it about you that propels you to do these things as a part of your public ministry?
Amy Butler: Well, to be perfectly honest, Bill, it’s that I’m tired and I can’t maintain a faux persona. It’s too much work. And I -- at the very core of who I am -- I do this work because I need authentic community, too. And so I want to be honest about who I am and my journey of faith and how I think that impacts the church.
I never, I never want to be somebody different outside the pulpit than I am in -- ever, ever.
Bill Lamar: Another of the hallmarks of your leadership at Riverside, in my opinion, is your ability to gather some of the best and brightest folks as senior staff and other folks to push forward the great mandate for ministry that is a part of Riverside’s heritage and its present and its future.
So can you say something about this wonderful team that you have and how it’s been built and how you’re cultivating it?
Amy Butler: Oh, they are so incredible. I mean, I work with some of the brightest people I have ever met. I -- well, this is how it started. I’ve always had the management philosophy that you should hire people who are smarter than you are, and I have managed to do that.
And when I came to Riverside, I just thought that everybody in the church world would be like, “All right, let’s do this. I want to come and help.” And that really wasn’t the case. I think people were hands-off -- “Let’s see if she falls flat on her face.”
And so I decided to employ what is, for me, an avocation, as I know it is for you, too, Bill -- going out and finding the next leaders. You know, people who have this amazing talent and push and call who are willing to take a risk on me and on this church and who I might be able to help form into the next leaders of the church.
I feel like if I left Riverside today, I would be so proud of that work, because my colleagues will not be at Riverside for their whole careers. They’re going to leave, and they’re going to change the landscape of the American church. And you know, if I never preach a good sermon ever again, that’s something I’m really, really proud of.
Bill Lamar: So you have shared with me and with others in larger venues how women especially -- not just young women, but a lot of young women -- pull on your energy, because they see you, and then they can see themselves, doing this kind of work. They want mentorship. Can you speak to that?
Amy Butler: Sure. I mean, this issue has been so deep and evolving in my life for these past three years. And particularly as we’re watching issues of women leaders sort of roll out on the national and international stage, I’ve shifted exponentially around this issue.
When I came to Riverside, Bill, I was so annoyed that Time magazine, The New York Times, everybody’s like, “She’s the first woman. She’s the first woman.”
It just made me angry -- like you think I was called here because my hair is cute? I was so angry about that. And it had to do with sort of the philosophy I’ve had my whole career, which is, “Don’t tell me I can’t do something, because it will make me want to do it more, and I’ll just work harder and I’ll just do better. Just try to stop me -- you won’t be able to.”
And coming to Riverside, I learned that young women and young men and the church need to see women in these roles. And it particularly hit home to me when I published an article in USA Today about a late-term abortion that I had about 20 years ago. And, boy, the hate mail I got for that. Oh my gosh, that’ll make a great book someday.
But someone sent me an email and said, “We have never before in the history of the American church had a woman in a high-steeple pulpit as pastor talking about her personal experience of abortion, ever. And that’s so powerful.”
So there have been several incidents like that that have made me, whoa, take a step back and say, “You need to reframe this. This is important. It’s important for the church. It’s important for the world.”
And then the second thing I want to say about that is, you know, this is a pulpit that is deeply rooted in issues of social justice, and so a big part of my learning curve is, “How do I authentically be prophetic?”
In this past year, I’ve really come into more naming of misogyny as an injustice that happens. And part of that is because the sexism and misogyny that I face in this job is so overwhelming. I’m just stunned by it almost every day.
And the [third] thing is I don’t know who else is talking about this. I preached a sermon at the end of June called “Hysterical,” which was about Sarah laughing when she found out she was going to have a baby. And I made some joke about, “Can you just imagine a whole bunch of men sitting around talking about whether or not you can have a baby?” You know, these are issues that we face, and they need to be talked about from the pulpit.
So I’m growing into that, and I’m struggling with the whole, “Oh, she’s just a bitter woman who’s so negative about everything,” which actually was said to me two weeks ago. It is real, Bill. It’s real, and it’s wearying. It is so wearying.
Bill Lamar: So your moving from Washington and Calvary Baptist to Riverside was a huge jump in scale and scope, and for our listeners who are moving from one scale and scope of institutional work or ministry [to another], what wisdom can you offer when you’re taking that big jump?
Amy Butler: Right. When I left Calvary, there were about 250 members, probably an eight-person staff, and just a little over a $1 million annual budget.
So when I came to Riverside -- $12 million annual budget, 150 employees, this huge plant -- I had a big learning curve. You know, all of a sudden, I’m leading a corporation.
And one of the things that I did not anticipate that I wish someone had told me is the feelings of grief and loss that I had, and still have. I’m sort of tearing up now when I talk about it, because some of my favorite parts of being a pastor are now not part of my work.
For example, I don’t do weddings; I don’t do funerals; I don’t go visit babies in the hospital; I don’t visit people who are sick. I don’t have those kinds of pastoral moments that really fed my soul at Calvary.
There are 2,000 members at Riverside, and you can’t be that kind of pastor to such a large group and not die. So I’ve had to really think about some of the grief and letting go and trying to understand my call in a new way, and I wish I had been more prepared for that.
Bill Lamar: Can you say something about the institution that is Riverside Church and how you and your team are helping to shape a vibrant future? I mean, it’s a storied past, but -- I’m very much in a similar situation, with a place with a storied past -- but what future is emerging that’s giving you all energy?
Amy Butler: Bill, you know this about me. One of my huge passions is institutional leadership. And I think Riverside’s history is still in place, and it’s still a big part of who we are, but the church had come to a point where you can’t live in the past anymore. You can’t propel yourself forward with an orthodoxy of nostalgia.
Bill Lamar: Wow.
Amy Butler: It’s just not ...
Bill Lamar: Hold on. I think you just said -- that’s a book -- an “orthodoxy of nostalgia.” Wow. Hmm.
Amy Butler: Truth be told, I stole that from Brian McLaren, but, you know.
Bill Lamar: OK. We’ll give him his credit.
Amy Butler: Yeah. I think it’s a cool phrase.
I think the state of the world is propelling us forward, but I also think, from an internal standpoint, the church is finally at the point now where it’s ready to fly.
I’m doing a massive staff restructure, and we’re working to infuse health into our lay leadership, and as you know, that’s very time-consuming and tedious work. But I can see the progress being made, and I can see that the world needs this voice, and that just makes me very passionate.
Bill Lamar: What are your practices -- spiritual, physical -- that keep you, in the midst of so many demands?
Amy Butler: Well, this is, you know, a constant struggle for me, because, as I was saying to a friend yesterday, everything seems so important all the time. I’ve put into place some stricter boundaries around how often I’m in the office, and I try to leave -- I do leave -- every morning until 10 a.m. [reserved] for prayer, reflection, reading, writing.
I live right next to Central Park, and so I’m in the park every morning running. And I just got this new running shirt that says “I hate running,” which makes me so happy.
I have a spiritual director, who I see every two weeks. I have a coach. I have a group of colleagues that are very close to me, who I’ve been in intentional relationship with for 15 years.
So those things keep me going. One of the hard things for me, Bill, is that there are not a lot of people who understand this -- Riverside, New York, my job. You know, it’s kind of lonely, because I’m not going to call you and be like, “Oh, Bill, I’m so nervous because Hillary Clinton’s coming tonight,” you know, because then I’m going to sound like a jerk.
[Laughter]
So I don’t know -- I feel isolated and lonely a lot, and I feel the gap between what other pastors experience and the craziness of my life, which, you know, pulls me forward and also makes me wonder if it’ll kill me.
Bill Lamar: Wow. It seems like you’re doing a lot of things to make a full life, and will err on that side.
My final question is -- the title of the podcast, the name of the podcast, is “Can These Bones,” and as a great preacher yourself, you know that that comes from the Ezekiel text. And I just wanted to ask you where you are seeing life in the midst of death, where you are seeing resurrection across the landscape. What are you seeing that’s giving you that kind of hope?
Amy Butler: The landscape is so stark now, isn’t it? Yeah. You know, I believe so deeply in beloved community and in the church and in what we can be together in terms of the work of healing the world.
I remember when I was interviewing with the search committee, you know, it was all very secret, and I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I had never been to Riverside, so I took the bus up from D.C., and I did the tourist thing, and I walked in. And of course my manager mind is like, “Oh, those flyers need to come down off the wall right now.”
But I remember going into the nave and sitting in the third pew and feeling, like, the darkness, the lack of hope and just the darkness, and I just remember thinking, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it -- I cannot do this.”
And when I walked into the nave yesterday, I was reflecting on that, and I thought, “It’s light in here. It’s light, and there’s life, and there’s community, and there are children crying, and there’s beauty all around, and there are people who love each other and who are learning to love each other.”
And when I am assaulted by the news, just like everybody else, I hang on to those things, because beloved community can change us and can change the world, and I don’t know what I would do, Bill, if I didn’t believe in that.
Bill Lamar: Amy, thank you for your time and for your work, and we’re praying for your speedy recovery -- no more surgeries -- and I look forward to talking with you again real soon.
Amy Butler: Thanks, Bill. It’s good to hear your voice.
Bill Lamar: Thank you, Amy.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Amy Butler, the senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Bill, as I was listening, I was struck by Amy’s bravery -- how willing she was to look fear in the face in so many settings.
You and I have talked about this, and I know you’ve experienced it, too. As the leader of a prominent black church after the shootings in Charleston, how did you look fear in the face in your institution?
Bill Lamar: Oh, Laura, it was quite a challenge. I recall that Wednesday night in 2015 when I began to get text messages from members of my denomination from around the country, most especially from South Carolina. I got news of the death of Pastor Pinckney and others before it was reported nationally, because of my personal relationships. And I was thrown into a tailspin, along with many of my congregants, because not only did we know Pastor Pinckney, but many of us knew multiple victims of that awful, awful tragedy.
That next morning, I got a call from my bishop, who asked me to begin to plan a national day of mourning at Metropolitan, which is considered the national church of our denomination. And so, really, I was struggling with trying to put together the kind of worshipful experience that would honor the lives of those who had fallen, but also trying to have a space of hope and trying to manage my own grief and difficulty.
And so it was much more than I would have imagined in the way of taxing me personally, along with those in the congregation. The eyes of the world were upon us. We were talking to media from Germany and Russia, Japan -- it was a very, very, very big undertaking.
But what I have considered, Laura, in the aftermath of that event, is how throughout the founding of our own denomination, this event in Charleston was not anomalous. Time after time, we have had to be the space of hope and the space of lament in the midst of countless tragedies and assaults on black bodies in the United States and around the world. It is a part of who we have been, and it’s a part of my ministry, and it is challenging.
But I gain strength from the strength of the people, and I gain strength from the strength of our ancestors, who continue to persist and to be brave and to move forward upon their theological convictions in the midst of a lot of struggle and difficulty.
Laura Everett: I hear in both your story, Bill, and in Amy’s a deep sense of this pastoral responsibility to name the fear and the darkness even as we are sitting with our own sense of fear and darkness.
Bill Lamar: I love Amy’s use of the phrase “orthodoxy of nostalgia.” I still think it could be a great book title. Laura, how do you encounter the orthodoxy of nostalgia in your own work?
Laura Everett: Well, I run an institution that’s 115 years old now, and it was really formed at a different time. That orthodoxy of nostalgia, in my experience, means that some parts of our life and history can be amber-colored, sort of frozen in time, as if that’s the only way to do God’s work in the world.
One of the ways that I’ve really had to learn to notice that orthodoxy of nostalgia, and break it open, is to ask, “What is the core commitment we are trying to enact, and are there other ways to do it?”
So, for example, we used to have a committee called the Strategy in Action Commission, and it was populated with the staff people in the denominations who had public policy or Christian public witness as a part of their portfolios.
Well, in Massachusetts, a lot of the denominational bodies have needed to cut staff, so the people who populated that committee no longer exist in the same sort of way. We still have an obligation to do the work; we just don’t have the people that were once in place to do it.
And people are really sad. People are really disheartened, and they think that the commitment to public Christian witness won’t continue if it doesn’t continue in that form. And so I’ve had to try to help my people see that there are other ways to fulfill the mission.
I think we’ve gotten stuck in an orthodoxy of nostalgia of structures rather than a core commitment to the values we’re trying to enact.
One of the other things I heard in the interview and found incredibly brave was the way Amy talked about sexism, and the way she changed her mind about being identified as the first woman to have the job of senior pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York.
I’m really grateful for you, also, for not including that in your introduction to Amy; it comes later in the interview. I’ve talked and written about misogyny and the sexism that I’ve encountered as a woman in ministry, and it is such a hard thing to do, to name it.
I confess that sometimes when I talk about it, I feel like it undercuts my own leadership. I wonder, as a male colleague in this work who I know is so committed to the liberation of all people to fully use our gifts for God, how do you work with the misogyny and the sexism you see in Christian leadership?
Bill Lamar: Laura, what I try to do is assume a posture as student and not as teacher when it comes to working with my woman colleagues in ministry.
It’s very interesting. Recently, I was having a conversation with a colleague who leads the Ethical Humanist Society here in town, and she was speaking with me about “mansplaining” -- a term which I had not heard. I assume that I have been living under a rock.
[Laughter]
She explained to me how she’ll go to meetings and she will say something perfectly wise and perfectly appropriate, and a male colleague will feel the need to interpret it. She talked about how she lives in the midst of mansplaining but how she also never lets mansplaining happen unchecked. She doesn’t check it in ways that are disrespectful, but she is very clear when mansplaining occurs.
My ignorance was such that I said to her, “Would you please, the next time we’re in a meeting and someone mansplains, just tap me?” And we were in a meeting and she tapped me at least three times, and so I finally got the gist of what it looked like.
So I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I’m growing. I’m always listening and learning from my colleagues who share with me where those things may even surface in me and I may not be aware of them. So I’m very thankful for colleagues who are willing to teach and very thankful that I know I’ve got a lot yet to learn.
Laura Everett: Bill, I’m so grateful for the ways that you notice the sexism in the church, and the ways that Amy named it in her interview, too. One of the things that came through so clearly in this interview is that Amy is a particular person with a particular past and a humanness that’s a model for public leadership.
She’s not some clergy-bot following the role of what it’s supposed to be to be the senior pastor of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. But that authenticity of where she’s been and who she is and what she’s experienced is coming through loud and clear in that interview.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I think that you have coined a very helpful term in “clergy-bot.” I like that a lot. And I hope, as we continue learning the individual stories of these wonderful people, that no one who listens will determine they need to be a clergy-bot, or an automaton of any type, but that they can live fully into who they’re called to be. And that indeed is a point of resurrection for each and every one of us -- the authenticity of our calling and our work.
Laura Everett: Amen.
Bill Lamar: We want to thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” Laura, this was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?
Laura Everett: It was really good, Bill.
Bill Lamar: There is more about Amy Butler, including video of her preaching, on our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external). Laura, who are we talking with next time?
Laura Everett: Bill, we’ve got a great conversation with Astead Herndon, who covers the White House and national politics for The Boston Globe.
Bill Lamar: There’s nothing to say about politics or the White House or any of that stuff -- but I can’t wait for that conversation, Laura. Looking forward to it.
Laura Everett: I’ll see you soon, Bill.
Bill Lamar: “Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external) -- that’s the Roman numeral IV -- and you can reach Laura on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external). You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Shooting the rapids: The cycles of pastoral ministry
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Shooting the rapids: The cycles of pastoral ministry
The formational stages of pastoral ministry are filled with turbulent, fast-moving waters that unfold quickly for pastors who are doing the paddling. Here's some tips on navigating the rapids.
Editor’s note: This article previously appeared on the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence(link is external) website.
In all the learning that we have experienced in the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program of the Evangelical Covenant Church, one of the most powerful has been the recognition that the life cycle of pastoral ministry takes place in fairly predictable stages. This “aha” moment was gleaned through general readings on church ministry, work being done by other denominations, books about clergy, discussions with retired Covenant pastors, our own anecdotal evidence, and statistical research that we conducted about our ministerial community.
Our findings, presented below in broad brush strokes, have clearly resonated with our pastors. In sharing this ministerial life cycle with more than 400 Covenant pastors, we received no words of dissent, only affirmation. The discussions around this life cycle have been so compelling that we have been asked by pastors to do presentations at their fall conference gatherings. One pastor, with 10 years of history in a particular district, told us their district cluster used the life-cycle for discussion and it created the most open, honest, and personal discussion they had ever had. Frankly, we have been surprised at the kind of chord this has hit.
Generally, we have found that the ministerial life cycle occurs in three predictable formational stages. Individual pastors may enter any of these stages earlier or later, depending on their particular life circumstances, but overall we find that these transitions take place in Years 5-8, Years 13-15, and Years 20-25. Whether a pastor is called to ministry as either a first- or second-career does not appear to make any difference in how these stages are encountered. Each stage is defined by a key question and a key word. Like rapids in a river, where the water moves faster and more intensely, these formational stages are filled with turbulence, unfolding quickly for pastors paddling in the river.
The first formational stage (years 5-8) is defined by issues of entry into the pastoral role. Expectations meet reality, strengths and weaknesses come into sharper clarity through experience, and pastors begin to know what they do not know. In this period, pastors re-examine their sense of call, and they feel an urgent need to “catch-up” in their learning.
The primary question pastors wrestle with in this stage is, “What am I doing?” Those who choose to shoot this first set of rapids honestly engaging this question and with strong connections to colleagues tend to have healthier growth as they proceed through the turbulent formational waters. Those who basically quit wrestling with this question, however, just holding on and hoping to ride through the rapids unscathed, seem to step out of the pastorate at a higher rate. Around year 5 the attrition rate shows a significant rise, spiking to a high point at year 8 in our setting.
Connection is the key word for pastors who successfully emerge from the rapids, sustaining themselves in ministry through this first stage. Ministers who have a community of similarly situated colleagues with whom they can share safely and deeply are more likely to remain healthy and establish habits of care and accountability. Essentially, when pastors shoot their first set of rapids they want people in the boat paddling with them.
The second formational stage (years 13-15) is basically a mid-life transition for ministers. In shooting the first set of rapids, the pastor has gained self-awareness. This leads, in turn, to a journey of personal re-discovery. These years between the first and second set of rapids are marked with deep transformational rumblings.
Those who make it to the second set of rapids generally have paid the price. They have been wounded from the work of ministry. Their families have paid a price. They know what they like to do and dislike doing. The question that pastors begin to ask as they approach the second rapids in years 13-15 is “Do I want to keep doing this? I have been doing this for 15 years of my life. Can I imagine doing this another 15 or 20 years”?
At this mid-point, pastors have to be able to re-imagine themselves in the pastoral role for the second half of their ministerial journey. Such re-imagining requires a high level of self-awareness, a growing contentment about one’s gifts and liabilities, and a mission motivation that outweighs the cost. Healthy habits formed early in pastoral ministry, even before the first set of rapids—and then honed in those rapids—give clergy strength as they enter this second set of rapids.
Such strength is needed, for these second rapids are the most intense in the river. These are category 5 rapids. They exact the highest cost. In this formational stage, the clergy community experiences the highest rate of attrition of any point in the river. The key word that marks this period is “sacrifice.” Being sustained through this stage, successfully emerging and paddling on towards the third formational stage, requires good self-awareness, healthy boundaries, relational fitness and a freshening of devotional patterns.
The third formational stage, which takes place in years 20-25, is marked by the realization that the end of the vocational journey lies up ahead, in the not too distant future. Pastors at this stage have now already spent more time in the pastoral role than they will in the future. The key word that rises up in these final stretches of the river is “legacy.” Here, the questions become, “How do I finish well? What will I leave behind of value?”
Pastors who choose to engage, struggle, and work with these questions do a better job of positioning themselves to finish well. Those who choose not to struggle with this question rust out, basically marking time until retirement.
My own reflections, generated out of conversations with pastors in this stage, suggests that this third set of rapids rises up at this point in the journey because old tools have become rusty. In 25 years the world changes, language morphs, the church’s focus and attention is different, a new generation is arising. One begins to realize that to speak to a new generation requires learning new things. Consider, for example, how technology has changed over the past 25 years. When I started as an associate pastor, we printed the Sunday bulletins on a mimeograph. Today, personal computers contain virtual print shops. I used to buy clip art books to spice up communications. Today, an eye-catching Web log with incredible resource links can be created in about the same time and with much less effort than it took to create a newsletter with a typewriter, clip art, and a mimeograph. Sustaining pastoral excellence through this last set of rapids requires a willingness to unlearn and relearn.
For our SPE initiative, the ability to name and describe a predictable ministerial life cycle and all its key stages has been enormously beneficial. Using this description of the pastoral life cycle, we have met with our pastors and asked them to write out their ministerial journey, based on this model. Amazingly, the highest percentage can!
Our growing knowledge about the notion of a predictable ministerial life cycle offers a key way to understand what it takes to sustain pastoral excellence. If this ministerial life cycle is real, if we know the map of the river and where the rapids lie ahead, we have a sound basis to help pastors understand how they can sustain ministerial health (a core component of excellence) for the long haul. If the habits established in the early years of ministry have a significant impact on the ability to navigate the formational rapids, seminaries, conferences, and denominations might be able to pinpoint with higher precision the disciplines they need to nurture, model, and promote. At the same time, this notion of a pastoral life cycle also helps identify potential intervention points. If we know, for example, that the first set of rapids arrive around years 5 -8, and we know that a pastor needs people paddling with them in the boat to allow the formational rapids to do their good work, shouldn’t we have a strategy in place to get those other paddlers, those other companions, in the boat? Doesn’t the ministerial life cycle suggest that first call/new call initiatives are on the mark and we should have something like this contextualized for us?
We are still giving flesh to this “aha” piece of learning. There is still much to discover. But it is this kind of learning that is generating conversation and movement for all of us in the Evangelical Covenant SPE initiative.
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The pastor is the church's principal convener Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, VOCATION
Cameron Barr: The pastor is the church's principal convener
I have learned a lot in the two and a half years since I was called as pastor of Grinnell United Church of Christ in Grinnell, Iowa. When I arrived in 2014, just a few years out of seminary, I thought of myself as something of an expert. Formed by my education and training, I knew things about the Bible, liturgical arts and human psychology that others in my community did not, and my task, clearly, was to share my hard-earned wisdom and knowledge.
But as I said, I’ve learned a lot since then -- mostly about my own limitations and the resourcefulness of others. I’ve discovered that my expertise is of little value to a congregation anxious about its future. Much more important is the strength of our relationships as members of a common body.
I’ve concluded that my primary role has little to do with my “expertise.” Actually, my job is to call the congregation together and nurture our collective identity. Many pastors have a guiding image that sustains them in their work -- perhaps “herald,” “midwife” or “wounded healer.” But I’ve come to see the pastoral vocation this way: I am the church’s principal “convener.”
I accepted the call knowing it wouldn’t be an easy job. For many years, a much-beloved pastor led the church, continuing to do so long after a traumatic injury in 1997 left him confined to a wheelchair. After he left in 2005, the church was served by five successive pastors before I was called in 2014, with some leaving under difficult and contentious circumstances.
By the time I arrived, it had been almost a decade since the congregation had experienced strong pastoral leadership. Worship attendance had dropped from about 120 to 60 or so. Offerings were anemic, but a large endowment and one family’s extravagantly generous annual pledge made it possible for the ministry to continue.
More concerning than the finances was the culture. Before I was even hired, on the day I preached my tryout sermon, a member lobbied me to support her favorite community initiative. She was not pleased when I confessed that I knew nothing about it. Similarly, when I arrived on my first day, another member was waiting for me in my office not to welcome me but to ask my opinion on another pet program.
Those first few months, worship announcements sometimes took longer than the sermon. One Sunday, a man determined to share news of his event grabbed the microphone out of my hand before I had finished speaking. Our church council meetings featured endless disjointed reports from more than a dozen boards and committees.
We never discussed our organizing purpose, strategic priorities or vision for the future. Instead, we regularly lamented lapses of “communication” -- which to me always sounded like, “Why can’t you fix this, pastor?”
Basically, we didn’t seem to trust each other. The church’s many programs and initiatives competed for attention, money and an ever-dwindling membership. Once upon a time, the church’s boards and committees served a ministry that our community held in common. But now it seemed that the church existed to serve the varied interests of its many boards and committees. Were we really a church or just a crowded ring of hobbyhorses?
I was lost. I’d studied at a fine seminary and even had the advantage of a two-year pastoral residency with a strong and vibrant congregation. But nothing had prepared me for the lonely challenges of ministry with a small-town congregation whose best days were in the past. I was living under the illusion that my formation had supplied me with the answers I would need.
The turning point came late in my first year, when I discovered the Art of Hosting(link is external), a leadership approach that views leadership primarily as a practice of hospitality. With the help of a consultant and ardent proponent of the Art of Hosting philosophy, our church focused on re-connecting with each other and “re-humanizing” our relationships. We spent time together, sharing meals, telling stories and reviewing our community’s history.
Soon, we held a series of retreats to engage church members outside our ordinary structure of boards and committees. Instead of recruiting people to existing bodies, we invited people to follow their energy and work on needs they had identified.
Gradually, I accepted that I was powerless to direct our ministry toward my own ideas of what a church should be. I began to think of myself primarily not as a preacher, teacher, healer or administrator but as a host -- a convener. My greatest asset was not my knowledge but my position in our community. So I started creating a space for church members to have more genuine encounters with one another. I learned not to look within myself for answers but to summon the gifts of others.
As it turned out, our congregation discovered that we have considerable resources for ministry when our relationships are strong. Effective community organizers know this, which is why they meet people one-on-one over coffee and conduct house meetings. They’re building relational power.
Our problem wasn’t that we had different ideas about the church’s mission. It was that our relationships had frayed through the stress and turmoil of our recent history.
As I began practicing a ministry of convening, our congregation came together and identified several areas in which we share a collective passion, including children’s ministries and social and environmental justice. Since then, after months of dialogue about our values and strengths, we’ve developed a Godly Play classroom for teaching Bible stories, which now boasts more than 30 children and a dedicated cohort of teachers. Working with faculty from Grinnell College, we’ve offered community workshops on climate change and launched an annual Earth Day worship. And in an effort to foster opportunities for spiritual growth, we’re piloting a small group program focused on fellowship over a shared meal, Scripture study and prayer.
As our relationships have deepened, our congregation has been transformed, and much of my work now focuses on bringing people together, building and strengthening those relationships.
When a staff position opened recently at our church, we were tempted to fill it with another seminary-trained expert. But we’ve learned that we don’t need more hermeneutics. We need deeper connections with one another. So we hired a community organizer to help our emerging ministry teams.
Our church and its ministry came alive when I finally decided to get off my own hobbyhorse. The power of our church does not lie in my expertise as pastor. It’s in the wisdom of Christ revealed through the faithful discernment of the whole body. I am an instrument God uses to bring the body together. That’s not what I thought I was being prepared for back in seminary, but it is a high and holy calling.
Read more from Cameron Barr »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Starting with Spirit is a spiritual and professional resource for new pastors, their family members, and congregations, as well as ministers in every season of ministry who seek to grow in vitality and skill in the ongoing adventure of ministry. For more than thirty years, Bruce Epperly has followed the call of the spirit, moving through his vocations as a congregational pastor, university chaplain, seminary and university professor, and seminary administrator. Drawing on these experiences, he addresses the new pastor's transition from seminary student to congregational leader; pastoral authority; the 'honeymoon;' boundaries; death; the pastor's spiritual life, health, and relationships; the role of the associate pastor; and continuing education.
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