Oh boy, howdy.
Please, please don’t take yourselves so seriously, okay?
Chickens, let’s always remember that our seminary experience is so deep and intense and ALL ABOUT US and our fascination with our fascinating call to the mysterious God’s fascinating ministry.
And once you graduate, no one cares.
Trust me.
Yes, it’s a calling and it’s deep and you need to stay deep and spiritually connected and all that. That’s true.
But sweet Jesus, if you stay as fascinated with yourself as seminary and the formation period require you to be, you will be a wicked pain in the ass to ordinary mortals such as the ones who privilege you by calling you pastor and, you know… provide you with a paycheck.
If you don’t get over yourself, you can’t serve real people. And also, people like me won’t trust you as far as we can throw you, and will stay away from you in the collegial setting. I’m sorry, yes, it happens. I’ve known a tiny handful of truly holy people and a WHOLE lotta sanctimonious also-rans who were so invested in presenting a Sincerely Holy Religious Leader persona that I wouldn’t ask them to organize a one-car funeral with me. Who needs it? These people never say in three words what can be said in 10,000. Their blathering e-mails alone will drive you to drink. Hello, Earth is your planet! Butt-scratching people are your colleagues and parishioners! Get over thyself.
And speaking of the collegial setting? Maybe this generation of clergy can break the disgusting habit of getting together and laughing in hearty, hollow ways about the stupidity and stubbornness of their pesky laypeople. God knows there are a lot of clergy-killers out there, I’ve met some of them. But there are also lovely congregations being served by arrogant jackasses who strut around under the mistaken impression that the lay folk are there to obey his or her every command and fulfill his or her vision. I have been tempted so many times to throw a cup of bad coffee into the face of the colleague who sits in a circle at clergy gatherings and drones on about his/her frustrating parishioners, when I myself know that minister to be a bore in the pulpit and elsewhere, and to articulate his/her faith is such a hesitant, incoherent provisional or negative way as to inspire no one except the most generous of listeners. BAH. I’m calling it out. I truly loathe this kind of hail-fellow-well-met nastiness among us. It sucks, it tears the psychic bond between pastor and parish and the fabric of the Church and it has to stop. Conflict and difficulty in the ministry are painful and hard. To be evaluated, judged and either accepted and loved or rejected for what amounts to our very personhood by congregations is scary and profoundly upsetting. We are always vulnerable. To engage in puerile, defensive insults of our congregations within the “safety” of the clergy gathering is not an appropriate response to that vulnerability. Have I said enough on this? I hope so.
An elderly married couple are sitting in church during a service. During the prayer, the woman passes a note to her husband. It says, “Oh my! I have terrible gas! I just let loose an enormous but silent fart! What should I do?” The husband passes her back a note. It reads, “Dear, the first thing you should do is turn up the volume on your hearing aid.”
What’s not funny about that joke?
A. “Married couple” shouldn’t assume a man and a woman. It could have been two women or two men!
B. Gas is not funny.
C. The word “fart” is crass and you won’t find it coming out of my mouth in public.
D. All of the above.
What’s great about that joke?
A. We loved it at the Worship Committee meeting! Thanks, Marcia!
B. The hearing aid thing is a riot! Great punch line!
C. Gross subject matter but I got a wicked chuckle out of it.
D. All of the above.
Once we get out of seminary, it’s time to stop, stop, stop with the intensely self-aware, me-centric approach to ministry. It’s a JOB, hon. You’re done with your formation. Now it’s time to turn your attention to the community and help them with theirs. Sad as it sounds, no one wants to read your paper on feminist theology, your theology of parish ministry, your 20-page tome on The Call As You Received It, or your verbatims from CPE. They won’t tell you how ridiculous your BIG SONOROUS MINISTER VOICE sounds when you’re standing up there intoning the Lord’s Prayer with rrrrround vowels like Lina Lamont during her lesson with the vocal coach in “Singing In the Rain.” They’ll just shrug and poke each other and say, “It’s just an affectation of hers. I think they teach that silly voice at seminary nowadays. ” Our people are forebearing people, boys and girls. Remember that. When they ask you at a wedding reception about how you became a minister, they don’t want you to hold them hostage for the next thirty minutes until they have to sneak away for wedding cake; they’re interested in a few minutes tops, and then YOU ask about THEM. Love humanity and spare them your whole story, okay?
Believe me, I know this is hard. I have bored enough people to glistening, yawn-suppressing eyes to have figured it out by now: once you get out of seminary, find a group of close, trusted colleagues to yammer to about how God is working in your life, your prayer practice, your amazingness, your holiness, and keep it minimal with lay people, who should always be the focus of your attention and receive the most air-time. Meet regularly with those colleagues. Get a spiritual director. Develop a prayer practice. And then shut up about it, seriously.
And if you can’t appreciate a good fart joke, well, Lord have mercy on ya, child. I’ve done what I can.
* = Religiously Correct (which always includes lots of jargon and PML [Precious Ministerial Language] and always a healthy, hearty dose of Political Correctness for maximum irritation effect.
Um, just, yeah. The sad thing is the colleagues that try so hard to be holy just make their churchgoers nervous.
Funny enough, my extended family keeps me grounded. They truly are not impressed by the fact that I am a minister. We don’t talk about church, hardly at all. (They are not exactly holy rollers themselves.) This is the same extended family that made me take a VOW against frumpiness the night before my ordination (all they’d ever seen are sloppy women pastors in those romper-type dresses), and afterward my sister performed a song she had composed for the occasion entitled, “Pastoricious” to the tune of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.” It was HILARIOUS. I spend as much time as possible with them, obviously…
[Hi, HH! I edited this piece quite a bit in the minutes since you read it. Read again and enjoy again! 🙂 – PB]
I agree with everything, except your assertion that formation ends when you graduate from seminary. Formation never ends, but it becomes a solitary pursuit for most of us, or for a few of us who find like-minded colleagues, in much smaller groups.
If we do not continue our own personal and professional formation, then we do become stagnant and ineffective. [Very true, and thanks for making that clear. – PB]
The ministers who have taught me the most spiritually have proved their ability to give me a serious intellectual asskicking first. It turns out that once this has occurred, I become fascinated by what else you know and if you believe in the soul and your ideas about God and will ask you about that stuff ad nauseum.
CC
who isn’t saying that this is a good or mature approach, but it is how I function. Also, I’m anti-fart joke.
[I would agree with you there, and I think that’s a very UU way to become attracted to someone’s spiritual leadership. Now, I wouldn’t TELL a fart joke, but I’ll definitely laugh hard at one. – PB]
Thank you – from a person in the pew who has often felt manipulated and “less than” the person in the pulpit.
Baptism with bad coffee! I like it.
you have SO described my Senior minister. you forgot to mention that these people are also incredibly challenging to work with. If it weren’t for the people in the pews, i would be off like a dirty shirt….
Profound wisdom in this rant. Keep up the good work.
Oh, thank you! This is fantastic.
This is, of course, spot-on. Like the previous poster, I disagree on the issue of formation. But I understand your point: the rawness of it, the bubbliness of it, the newness of it must subside. We continue to be formed, and we can continue to be inspired and awed, but we need to do so with gentleness and maturity as we try to let others be bubbly 🙂
There’s a lot here to unpack. One of the problems with seminaries is that you get a ‘community’ of people who are intensely together for a relatively short time (revolving door–one class goes, another comes), and all for the same purpose. It’s really easy to forget that you will NOT be ministering in that kind of setting. Once you’re in parish ministry, you won’t have the shared experiences, the ‘in-jokes’, the loved/hated professors and classmates.
‘Formation’ is ongoing–and one of the things seminaries are not very good at is remembering that as much as the pastor forms the congregation, the congregation also forms the pastor. One advantage of local ministry training (which sadly is being phased out here), is that the ordinand does not leave the congregation in which and to which they are called, except for a few months on placement. They are seen, heard, questioned, challenged and affirmed by a real congregation. I think residential/full time training institutions need to make sure that students are firmly part of congregations on Sundays in addition to the seminary community–and that there are adequate reporting mechanisms for the way in which the minister in training is coming along with their ‘formation’ as a future pastor. Self-awareness shouldn’t diminish (one should always be aware of how one’s own demeanour, words, etc, will influence others), but self-centredness should all but disappear.
Additionally, there needs to be a taking-serious of the state of being ‘holy’, but not ‘holier than thou’. And this has to be something that ministers exude not only when they ‘let their hair down’ with other ministers, but that is visible to their congregation members. They need to be seen and experienced to be ‘ordinary’ people who are trying to live lives according to higher aspirations, and to help others to do so as well.
Finally, I am not anti-fart joke. Last All Saints’ day, I preached the Great British Farts and Poo Sermon (as a guest preacher). But I am a lay person, and I suppose I am not meant to be all that holy! 🙂
This is beautiful. Speechless I am. I needed to read this today.
Wow, there really is a lot to unpack here! I agree with Jim that a good pastor’s formation is always, always ongoing. To be effective as a minister, I should be continually growing and learning and becoming what I am becoming.
That being said, you make some good points. I have a clergy friend who calls colleagues out when they brag on Facebook about how overworked and tired they are- saying that we make the overworked, overtired stereotype of a denim jumper minister reality when we brag about it on Facebook as if overtiredness is an idol.
I think the same reasoning works here: it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of complaining about our congregations as an idol.
I was in a clergy-killer, and part of healing was to separate out my feelings of pain from suffering abuse from a boss from my feelings of success at working with the congregation. So now I can honestly say, “The congregation was good people, but the rector did in the relationship.” And in my last parish, it was too easy to get caught up in, “Oh, they are a clergy killer”. They really arent’- to heal, I had to learn to say, “Look guys, you really want a different type of priest than me. But you are good people, and I bless you and will think of you with many good memories.” Only two people were really deadly to me.
Healing from the brokenness involved naming the idol of whining about parishioners for what it was.
And as a supply priest, I’ve had the gift to work with several clergy in their parishes, and I love reporting to them with fresh eyes: “Wow, you have this incredible energy here.”
It’s not really the fart that I laughed at so hard, it’s recognition of the familiar. Self-delusion has a nasty habit of sneaking up and smacking us between the eyes on a regular basis, doesn’t it?
Preach it, sister, preach it!
Thanks for these comments, gang. I wish I had been more careful in crafting the post (but I rarely write drafts). I do believe that formation is on-going. What I meant to say, more specifically, is that seminary requires an intense time of formation when it’s all about ME ME ME without the context of the parish (because the parish is a hypothetical at that point). Once one becomes a minister, formation is never just about “ME” again.
Amen. If I have to hear (once more, with feeling) about Family Systems and how “in seminary” and blah blah blah get an original thought that’s relevant to today.
Thanks for the great rant!
Julie: I think “family systems” once a minister is out of seminary should only come up in the context of pre-marital counseling!
When, you know, family systems suddenly loom large & take on MAD importance.
But not the MINISTER’s family system!!
Thanks for this fabulous post! You are so right about pretty much everything!
I often wonder when I hear pastors ranting about their congregations, and then about how people are “out to get them” in said congregations, how it could be different if they just LOVED the people a little more? Like, sincerely tried to develop a genuine affection (not to be miscontrued with something inappropriate, but a genuine, though professional, affection) for their folks. How might that change things? [Right. I think we’re having a very hard time in this generation moving out of the old martyrdom mode… but erring too far in the other direction, which I would call the entitled mode. – PB]
Amen.
Preach on, sister! I was an elder, deacon and Sunday School teacher for over 20 yeasr before I went to seminary- DO NOT DISS the people in the pews- they are us, we are them- that is, together, the Body of Christ-
Reading this makes me grateful for my tradition’s practice of dropping a full-time, year-long, far-from-campus Internship smack dab in the middle of one’s seminary education.