Quitting your job is scary and hard and weird and exciting and nauseating, but when you’re a pastor, it’s a lot like leaving a cult.
For most people, the phrase “You know, it was just time” is a sufficient enough explanation as to why one might recently have decided to make a lateral leap from a mid-level account payables gig without a breakroom to another mid-level account payables gig WITH A BREAKROOM. However, when you are — for all intents and purposes — paid to pray, telling people that it was “simply time” can only be met with one of three response options:
- Terrific, which church are you working for next?
- Did they fire you for getting divorced?
- Did you do something embarrassingly weird like embezzle from the Lord’s petty cash account, or go #2 in your boss’s private bathroom?
To which my answer (in each of these cases) is a resounding “no.”
(INFINITE SILENCE, AVERTS GAZE, LOWERS TONE)
Friend: “So, uhhhh … are you, like, leaving Christianity altogether?”
Me: “Nope, still foolishly attempting to follow that long-haired-water-walking-wonder-working first-century political dissident with my whole life. Which, honestly, now that you ask, is why I decided it was probably time to stop drawing a salary for things Jesus did for free (before, of course, being killed). Am I right?!”
(AN EVEN MORE INFINITE SILENCE)
Friend: “Well (rubs back of neck), I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now, but I’d love to catch up when you’re more settled. And, you know what, this is my bus so I better go ahead and grab a seat before it leaves.”
Me: “But isn’t that your car right over there? And isn’t that your son in the backseat? And that’s not even a bus, it’s just a really long line of grocery carts being pushed back into the store.”
Friend: (tosses keys) “Take it, it’s yours. Him, too!” (rides away on carts, changes identity).
Let’s be honest, it’s so much easier when professional Christians, rather than admitting to having a great number of questions about God’s divine whereabouts, simply affirm — among other things — all of our preconceived notions about the three most important G’s in the American religious experience: guns, gays and gabortion. It gets even better when, as a now unprofessional Christian, you attempt to apply for a job that doesn’t require one to give an eyes closed-10 minute-sermon recap prayer backed by a crescendoing keyboard:
Manager 1: “So, it says here you have experience performing, I’m not sure I’m saying them correctly, ‘weddings’ and ‘funerals,’ is that right?”
Me: “Yes, and I also worked in an office with a copy machine for four years, sent emails, drank weak coffee and dealt with angry and sometimes unrealistic customers who were really just mad at my boss. I’m sure you know what that’s like! Am I right?!”
Manager 1: “(unflinchingly) Yes, but we’re really looking for someone with more Excel experience and less, again correct me if I’m mispronouncing it, ‘sermon’ (?) experience. I just don’t think your skill set is a good fit for the point-of-sale position here at Barnes and Noble.”
Me: “I understand. Oh, and would you mind telling me where your bathrooms are? I’d love to stick a whole roll of toilet paper in one of the stall toilets and flush it repeatedly before I go. Also, thanks for the opportunity, and please keep me in mind when more seasonal jobs become available.”
Now, I say all of this not out of anger or regret, it really was time for me to go, but because the experience of quitting has been most akin to farting in an elevator, alone. As the relief is profoundly welcome, but that which follows the initial feeling of release, is somewhat suffocating and embarrassing to talk about when someone joins you just one floor later.
(STARES AT SHOES)
Counterintuitively, I’ve discovered — despite the pain and embarrassment and confusion accompanying this decision — when people, especially professional people of faith, lose the ability to ask questions, tell good jokes, say hard things, and sometimes even leave because they’re afraid of failure, or strange looks, or Dog the Bounty Hunter repo-ing their 2006 Avalon WHICH IS ALMOST PAID OFF THANK YOU VERY MUCH, we stop being and representing something that matters.
Mostly, because we need the money.
So, I quit being a paid-for-pastor not because I don’t believe in God anymore, but precisely because I desperately want to continue believing in the politically naive, sometimes ill-formed, and decidedly unpopular teachings of an executed first-century rabbi. Not to mention, continuing to retain the ability to blame a person, a pastor or an institution for why I’m not living a life of transformative meaning and worth is terribly destructive to my efforts at putting flesh and blood and spirit and breath on the resurrection of my city, my neighborhood, my family and even my own threadbare soul.
Friend: “But Eric, can’t you just do that at church already? And regardless, THEY BROUGHT SNACKS AND BAD COFFEE.”
Sadly, rather than serving as a launching pad for liberation, healing and hope, church can very often become the one place keeping a great number of us from coming face-to-face with what it is we actually believe and actually do with our actual lives.
Which for many people, is nothing (and, by “nothing” I most certainly mean “going to a building weekly in order to complain endlessly about the music, or the sermon, or the website, or the dress code”).
Inevitably, someone will say (preferably in the comments of this very diatribe):
YOU AREN’T BRAVE! YOU KNOW WHO’S BRAVE, TIM TEBOW, THAT’S WHO. MAN STANDS UP FOR HIS UNENDING BELIEF IN A SIDE-ARM DELIVERY, AND ALSO, JESUS. GO BUCS!*
*Science has proven that almost all anonymous website comments are penned by the 13 remaining Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans. GO BUCS!
Oh, and you’re right, I don’t believe I’m brave either, I just think sometimes the most faithful and honest and humble decision we can make as people of faith is to admit that a rather large majority of what we’ve been doing and saying and thinking and praying in large groups over the years has, oftentimes, very little to do with the concrete work of the crucified and resurrected Jesus (looks directly at person wearing the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat and refuses to break eye contact even when it become uncomfor… DEAR LORD, MY EYES ARE WATERING, BUT I WILL NEVER STOP PASSIVE AGGRESSIVELY STARING AT YOU, AND I’VE GOT ALL KINDS OF TIME NOW).
Perhaps it may be time for many of us (reverends included) to rethink a great number of the things we’ve been giving ourselves to on the weekends for the very sake of our faith, and not in spite of it. Who knows, maybe in the midst of our occupational wreckage we might finally come face-to-face with that self-sacrificing-God we’ve been talking about for all these years?
Am I right?!
Image: Reddit