Leaving the pastorate of my congregation in June was the hardest vocational decision I’ve yet had to make. After reading Alexander Lang’s recent article, “Departure: Why I Left the Church,” I wanted to write about leaving my church while still loving it.
I left my church as pastor to go to a place where I could help future pastors love the church well. I teach congregational and community care leadership (such as pastoral care) in a seminary where a significant portion of students intend to serve in a congregation. My bias is toward loving the church. Growing up as a gay kid in a Southern Baptist context, I could have every reason not to, but I do.
Cody Sanders
Articles like Lang’s, proclaiming the pitfalls of the pastorate, are becoming ubiquitous amid increasing pastor burnout. They unveil some hard truths that resonate with me and nearly every pastor I know. But there are other stories of pastoral ministry to tell, too. Clergy-in-training need to hear the wide spectrum of stories.
Congregants also are reading these articles. And churches don’t just need to hear about how dysfunctional and unhealthy they are — although there’s sometimes need for that. They also need to hear stories of congregational growth and maturity so they can become better supports to their pastors, healthier in their communication patterns, more focused on their mission and ministry in the larger community. Churches also need to hear a word about what is unique about being a congregation today.
There are two caveats I need to make about my former congregation and me as their pastor:
First, the congregation is rather politically homogeneous. That doesn’t mean we agreed on everything, but our disagreements didn’t cut along political lines, nor were they exacerbated by the polarization of the sociopolitical milieu. If anything, seeing the escalation of division all around us made cultivating a healthy and caring community seem even more vital.
Second, I wasn’t trying to raise a family within the church I served as Lang and other pastors are. I have a partner and two dogs, none of whom felt the pressure some pastors’ families do to conform to a certain image of a “proper pastor’s family.” And if I ever took a risk that resulted in my getting run off, as I had witnessed happen to other pastors, I didn’t have the well-being of children to think about. I recognize the freedom and privilege that afforded me in some situations.
Yes, it’s hard
Being a pastor is hard. Congregations need to know that. And it’s only getting harder. The reasons have been enumerated by others and I don’t need to rehearse them in detail here: declining attendance, financial woes, political polarization dividing congregations, consumerist attitudes reflected in congregants’ attitudes toward church, white Christian nationalism, etc.
Although I’m not sure there is only one set of circumstances that make the pastorate a difficult vocation. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, written during his early years as a pastor beginning in 1915, displays the challenges of being a pastor a century ago. While Niebuhr makes being a pastor sound exciting, he certainly doesn’t make it sound easy.
“Many of the things that make serving a congregation exciting are the very things that make it hard.”
Many of the things that make serving a congregation exciting are the very things that make it hard. Churches are places where people bring their biggest questions and most pressing concerns alongside all their joys and pain and relational foibles. Then they put all that into relationship with others who have different questions (and answers) and concerns and joys and pain and foibles. Of course, this is going to produce tension and make leadership an exceptional challenge.
But how many places in life are we entangled in non-biological relational networks that do not exist for any transactional purpose? There are fewer and fewer communities in which long-term multigenerational relationships across at least some forms of difference are cultivated. This is a gift that congregations offer beyond the particularities of their specific religious life. It’s also what makes the work of leading congregations so hard.
How my congregation helped sustain me as a pastor
Interim pastors are often the unsung heroes of healthy congregations. Their tenures are short, and then they’re gone. But the ministry they perform can affect a congregation for years.
My church had a couple of good interim pastors in the two years between the end of a very long pastorate and my arrival. They weren’t just placeholders who filled the pulpit and made pastoral visits. They helped the congregation learn about their own relational and communication patterns and confront some of the most unhelpful ones. They helped the church see possibilities for greater health and discern how to get there.
Churches that make the decision to use interims in this way are giving a gift to their future pastor. My experience would have been incredibly different if not for these interim pastors.
During this time, the congregation wrote and adopted a behavioral covenant that was read aloud before every congregational business meeting. It described how they wanted to be together, what communication patterns were acceptable, and which were not, and how conflict should be addressed when it arose. They were promises made to one another in community, and we strove to keep these promises.
The church also formed a Pastor-Parish Relations Committee with a robust understanding of the role that group of laypeople served in helping sustain the health and vitality of the pastor. They met with me monthly, and we talked about everything from whether my salary was sustaining my cost of living in an increasingly expensive city, to active conflicts I was confronting with congregants, to how I was taking care of my mental, spiritual and physical health.
About five years in, the lay leadership noticed I was increasingly frustrated by various aspects of the congregation’s life, and they recommended I find a clergy coach the church would pay for. Then they started preparing for a sabbatical to come after my sixth year, educating the congregation about the value of this practice as we got closer to the date of my three-month departure. (Little did any of us know at the time how much a sabbatical would be needed after what unexpectedly became a year of pandemic pastoring.)
Lest you think I just inherited an exceptionally healthy congregation, I had been warned by some senior clergy colleagues before I accepted this call that this congregation had a history of being rather hard on its pastors. And that makes it a story worth telling!
“Congregations can grow and become healthier places over time with lots of intentional and careful work.”
Congregations can grow and become healthier places over time with lots of intentional and careful work. And long before I arrived, interim pastors and engaged lay leaders were doing that important work.
How I grew in my role as a pastor
Most parishioners don’t know how to be a pastor. That’s something I had to recognize early on. They know what they like in a pastor, but that doesn’t mean those qualities are what it takes to be a good pastor for the whole congregation in a particular time and place.
If I had spent several years doing the job outlined in my initial job description, the church would have languished. They needed things from me that neither they nor I knew they needed at first.
That doesn’t give pastors the right to be a black box and appeal to our mysterious authority as the only ones who know what this job entails. It means we must teach the congregation what being the pastor of this particular church looks like today, then do it again next year, and again the year after that.
Every year I wrote an annual report of between 2,000 and 6,000 words. It never was a simple list of the year’s accomplishments and next year’s goals. It was more of a field report of what it was like being the pastor of this church in the last year and what it was going to take for me to be sustained in that role in the year to come. Every year, I told them how my job was changing in response to new challenges that had arisen in the church, the community or the world.
Sometimes the brutal honesty of how far toward the end of my rope I was getting came through in those reports. Other years, they were mainly celebratory. But I always tried to ask for what I needed from the congregation (such as fewer committee meetings, more laypeople involved in pastoral care, a different approach to leadership development). Sometimes it took a few tries and increased elevations in volume, but the laity usually stepped up to the challenges in just the ways needed. But they had to hear the challenges explored and explained and to receive an invitation that they could accept.
I had to get comfortable with the fact that I would displease some congregants and, at times, make some angry. I think that’s hard for every pastor. It’s hard for most people to just exist in that relational tension. We want to do something to relieve it … fast. But neither sycophantic placations nor hardline insistence that someone come around to seeing things your way because you’re the pastor are effective. Relating through conflict is part of the job.
“Pastors and lay leaders can’t reward behaviors that are unhealthy to the community — including giving in to someone’s desire to be wooed back after storming out.”
People got upset and left from time to time. I didn’t chase them out. But I didn’t chase after them. It was imperative that I help lay leaders in the church not chase after them either. (Sometimes laity are less comfortable with conflict than pastors.) Pastors and lay leaders can’t reward behaviors that are unhealthy to the community — including giving in to someone’s desire to be wooed back after storming out.
When folks needed to leave, I tried to send them off with a list of other area churches that might be a good fit for them. Some inevitably would return once they realized not getting their way is, at times, just part of being in community. And likely they knew no one was going to care about them more than we did.
Lang is right about the generalist nature of pastoral ministry: public speaking, fundraising, care and counseling, leadership development, interpreter of ancient texts and church teachings, chief chair folder. It’s true that seminarians aren’t prepared for everything they’ll encounter or all the tasks they’ll be called on to perform once they graduate seminary. There’s more to learn on the job.
I had a unique advantage in some areas like pastoral care. While many pastors have only one course in pastoral care, I earned a degree in counseling alongside my M.Div., and then a Ph.D. in pastoral counseling and had ample training in clinical pastoral education and clinical counseling internships. So I never felt overwhelmed meeting the pastoral care needs of my congregation and community. There were days, however, when I envied my pastoral colleagues who studied business before going to seminary. And times when I coveted the community organizing experience of other colleagues. And moments when I resented my colleagues who could read the Greek text with the ease of a comic strip.
A few years in, I realized I really didn’t know very much at all about fundraising practices in congregations (and our lay leaders really didn’t either). So, I dedicated a summer to learning everything I could from every resource I could access on the subject. Then I spent a few months teaching the congregation’s leadership everything I had learned. We considered how we could put some of these learnings into practice and developed a new giving plan. We grew together in this area, and it had an impact on congregational giving in the ensuing years.
“Pastoral education is a career-long pursuit.”
We all lack in some areas of necessary pastoral skill when we enter the role. Pastoral education is a career-long pursuit. Time and funds for continuing education are another gift churches can give to their pastors.
Finally, having good clergy colleagues always was critical to my health as a pastor. When I got to town, I emailed every pastor in my area of the city. We soon started meeting monthly just to build relationships and check in with one another. I befriended three other new pastors who were just starting at their churches. We met monthly too. I rekindled relationships with seminary classmates in other parts of the country and we would text each other a few times a week, commiserating and celebrating the pastoral life. I had mentors I could call when I needed to talk through situations that arose. None of those relationships were in place when I entered the congregation. If I hadn’t cultivated them, the pastoral life would have been incredibly lonely.
I would do it all again
I was blessed beyond description by the church I served as pastor, from the day they welcomed me until the day they sent me on my way eight years later. It was hard work, and it was exceptionally fulfilling. Some weeks I couldn’t imagine how I could do it another day, and other weeks I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. And I would do it all over again any day.
Maybe this is the exception to the average pastoral experience these days, but I’m not certain it is. Even if it is the exception, seminarians and congregations need to hear the exceptionally good stories alongside the exceptionally difficult ones. Because these stories help us not only to see what is wrong, but to imagine what is possible.
Cody J. Sanders serves as associate professor of congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minn. He is the author of several books on religion and ministry.
Related article:
Why I’ve stayed | Opinion by Tyler Tankersley