Dearest darlings,
I am inspired by a recent exchange with a colleague to compose a bit of a rant for you.
It has come to my attention in the past years working with a wide variety of clergy persons and seminarians that we too often make the grave error of thinking that we have access to, or somehow magically receive, the spirit of Wisdom in a superior or more frequent manner than do our parishioners.
And this attitude is pure horse dootie.
What we have access to and wisdom about is broad enough: training in the spiritual care and nurture of community, pastoral ministry training, leadership skills for the effective running of a volunteer organization, knowledge of our theological traditions, scholarship on the history of the Church, experience connecting social issues of the day with the Biblical tradition, and so on. The list is impressive.
All of that does not mean that we are wiser or more insightful on all matters than are the un-ordained, and it doesn’t assure that we aren’t huge jerks ourselves, either. It should mean, in fact, that we are trying harder than other people not to be total jerks. My friend Kate works with a priest as her spiritual director, and told him, “I’m not very good at praying. I just have one prayer and it is, ‘God, I hope I can avoid being an ***hole today.” The priest thoughtfully replied that that was one of the best prayers he had ever heard and that he thought it should be included in the vows of his own religious order.
Another friend tells of a professor at Catholic University who spoke of the Spirituality of French Fries. It goes like this, “I like french fries, so they must be spiritual.”
Do you understand?
Just because we love the Church, feel drawn to serve God, and have an aesthetic and emotional preference for religious things – music, prayer, sacred Scripture, service, community, worship, pot luck suppers — doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It certainly doesn’t mean that we have a handle on Truth in a more real and true way than the people we serve.
Our job is to witness to the sacred nature of reality in our world. It is to listen for and look for God’s presence in all things and to lift up the hope and vision of a God-soaked reality for our people. It is to interpret God’s word and to follow Christ as best we can. It is not to receive a “Get Into Heaven Free” card and then deign to lead the poor, unenlightened masses (like those... sigh… unenlightened lay people without whom we would have no community and no job) to the same level of amazingness that WE have already achieved.
AUGH! It is NOT OKAY!
Don’t you just feel so sad and frustrated at clergy meetings when that drab, angry minister starts griping again about how his prophetic message isn’t being properly appreciated by his people? And you think, “Well, you obviously have nothing but contempt for them, so why should they!? It’s amazing they still employ you!” Or that Hollywood production of a clergy person who has a fan club rather than a congregation and who speaks of her parishioners as if they were her toddler children? Or you get caught at the dinner table at the retreat when the open hostilities (however disguised in passive-aggressive ways) toward lay people begin and you just want to crawl under the table and across the room to get the hell out there because it’s just so gross and so offensive?
I speak about these things in public because I am more devoted to and loyal to God’s church than I am to any collegial bonds of silence and secret-keeping. Clergy superiority and obnoxious judgment of the people we serve — and I mean just the general harping and insulting, not specific disappointments and airing of failures and frustrations or clergy abuse — is a form of clergy misconduct. Maligning the people of God is not okay. It hurts the church. It hurts the church because it leads to attitudes and then to practices that leave the minister all alone at the very tippy-top of the ice cream sundae, the only cherry up there, baby, and unconnected and unaccountable the rest of the community.
We are part of the body of Christ. Even if we’re the head — and we all agree that the head is an important part of a body — is a body a body if its just a decapitated head? No. It’s ugly and scary and something out of a horror movie. Ephesians 4:11, please. We are building up the body of Christ until we ALL reach the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God. NONE of us is there yet, and we’ve been given a tradition that insists that we cannot get there alone.
So please speak up when you hear lazy griping or outright insulting of our communities by the clergy or clergy-to-be. Seminarians, please help the generations that preceded you to question and push against and admonish this pernicious practice. When you hear the bitching begin, ask the complainer to stop speaking in generalizations and to name the specific problem. Question their assumptions. Ask them to clarify their grievance. Ask if they might have something to do with the problem. Insulting the integrity of the people we serve is never an acceptable way to let off steam. It is not harmless and it is not contribute to the justice we wish to see in the world.
Just because we care intensely about something does not make us a prophet. And when people ignore us, it doesn’t mean we are a prophet ignored in our own town, or whatever. When people disagree with us, it’s much more productive to enter into conversation with them with a genuinely open mind rather than retreat to the place of ugly assumptions, that they’re some kind of “_____ist” or “_____phobe.” Who knows? You don’t, until you bother to find out.
And there is the wee possibility that no matter how passionately certain we feel about certain things, we might be wrong about some of them. My feeling is, if you want to win converts to policy, run for office. If you want to minister in the Church, be prepared again and again to be humbled by the striking variety of ways that people experience the world. And get over yourself.
That’s all I will say for now. I think this post may speak to you in this post-election week. I hope it will.
If it doesn’t speak to you, thanks for reading anyway.
Um okay but by your definition of things specific mention of specific issues is okay? Because, I gotta say, when I was preaching on the stewardship of creation and one woman told me, “We shouldn’t even try. God’s going to destroy the earth anyway!” in the most ugly tone ever, I sure did talk about that with my colleagues…and yes, I have tried to reach out to her before and since that comment and I only get more and more of the same. So, I pray and just try to remain as open and civil and loving as I can in such circumstances. Or, lets say when someone in the same clique called me an apostate heretic. Yeah. Or when another person told my husband to stop bringing our son to church, “Just stay home.” Then there was the grandmother who told her friend within hearing of the teenage granddaughter, “She dresses like a slut.” No wonder that young woman ran out of the church crying and won’t come back. Or the pater familias of the church who, when a two-mommy family started attending and getting active complained that the priest (me) is “hanging out with too many homo women.” What I am getting at here is that there are places that are truly unhealthy and that clergy need safe people and places to talk about this sort of stuff. Of course, it is also important to step back and gain some perspective. For example, most situations like this come from a loud but small minority. So, as we learn in family systems, build up the healthy. I am struggling currently to not ignore the unhealthy but not empower them either.
[YES, yes, yes. Minister to the health of the congregation! Talk with colleagues about the difficult people, the destructive people. That’s not at all the same as this kind of insidious disrespect and frustration I hear clergy expressing when their people are not in lock-step with their views. As clergy, we have a lot of power. We can actively teach doctrine, for instance — which should help the woman with end-times beliefs to understand why you’re preaching stewardship of creation, and help you make a biblical case for why it’s not appropriate for people to exclude a teenager or to worry about how much time you’re spending with lesbian members. Clergy should absolutely strategize together to find ways to respond to dysfunction in the congregation, and to celebrate the good things. But when the conversation turns to WOE IS US, OUR PEOPLE ARE SO DIFFICULT, I just want to say, “Really. Are you sure it isn’t you who isn’t the difficult one? What are your expectations? How about expectations of your own growth, willingness to stand corrected, etc.?” God’s blessing on your ministry. – PB]
Amen to this. And I’m totally using that prayer.
Some of you are ministering in difficult and very troubled congregations. I trust that you will understand the difference between speaking frankly with colleagues about the challenges you face vs. the sort of ego issues I’m calling out here.
And sometimes our parishioners strain at gnats. Or have bad liturgical habits that precede our entry into the community. Or don’t share our tastes in wine, paraments, or Communion vessels. None of these issues are earth-shattering, but each has subtle symbolic power that affects us at some level.
Clergy have two ways of dealing issues: quickly and tyrannically, forcing and enforcing our way and letting the heads of those who differ roll. Or, slowly, in dialog and learning and patience and education and . . . . frustration.
I submit that a healthy way to “manage” the frustration is to find trusted colleagues among whom one can kvetch, especially if you’re an extravert like me and often find out what you think by articulating it. And sometimes, through articulation, and more often from input from a colleague, you see another side, and that perhaps you have indeed BEEN an a**hole.
Also, if one goes slowly enough through an issue, one often in fact learns from the supposedly benighted layfolk and one changes one’s mind. Sometimes the layfolk change theirs. Sometimes nothing changes, and it’s OK, after all.
But no kvetching as a way of dealing with the tension of dealing with differences and frustrations? Not healthy, at least not for me.
But I do need to choose my “kvetchee” carefully. My husband, as a lay person, does not understand how I can manage to get up any energy around what kind of oil is used in the stock. Although he has a point, that’s not the point. I was taught there was a preferred, thought-through way of doing things, and although it may not matter to him, or even to God, what’s in that stock, I must have a way to fuss about it just a wee bit, and then deal with it in a way that keeps everyone cherished, both in the community AND in my own heart.
Perhaps it’s not our words, or even our actions, but our attitude. I think what you’re actually talking about is whether or not we have any humility as we go about our vocation. Humility is something that you can learn, but you can’t fake. [Yes. It’s the orientation of entitlement and cynical contempt that really upsets me. It’s that us-vs-them bitter camaraderie that I don’t want to participate in. – PB]
It’s all about the love. I really believe that pastors and congregations have to love each other. We don’t have to agree, or like each other, but we do have to have some love.
I once heard from a therapist that the hardest kind of relationship to save is one where the people involved feel contempt or disdain for one another. Anger, pain, silence, distance–all these things can be overcome, because there is love still there. Disdain leaves no room for love or affection. That’s the kind of talk you seem to be describing here.
If you don’t love your people–even when they are driving you crazy–the relationship is broken, and may not be able to heal without serious help and intervention, and humility on both sides.
Bravo, PB, for calling it out.
In no other profession would it be considered ethical for the professional to speak of the intended patient/client/audience the way clergy speak of laity. Thanks for bringing this up.
I’m not clergy, so I partly hesitate to add my 2 cents, but….
I hear what you’re saying. As a “non-professoinal” Christian I do find it really irritating to hear the “professionals” talking like this. (Because if you get into the habit of talking like this in private among collegues, then sooner or later it slips out in front of people and its hurtful, divisive and unncessary.)
But the purpose of my comment is to pick up on another point. PB I agree with what you say about the church as the body of Christ, but I don’t buy that the pastor is the head. Christ is the head – I think that if pastors remembered that – and remembered that they with their call and their gifts are PART but not ALL of the body – then we might not have the problem you evoke to the same extent. [You’re just catching me in a bit of sloppy Bible quoting, Alison, and I apologize. I was thinking of “head” in the way that I THINK Paul uses it, when he says that we’re all part of the body and that some are the head (meaning having an emphasis on intellectual skills, right?) and some are the heart, etc. I did not mean the head of the Church as it is often used in the epistles, to mean authority. I completely agree with you and what kind of scholar of Puritan covenant tradition would I be if I didn’t know that Christ is always and forever the only head of the church! 😉 Thanks for catching the error. – PB]
I’ve always been bothered when colleagues talk about “My people” — kind of like the Overseer on the Plantation…We are all God’s people, and some of us just have different jobs. This is also God’s church and if anything this is “their” church; they were here before me and they’ll be here after me.
I recently walked out of a lecture in tears because of this same issue. A large group of clergy hired a well-known theologian to speak at a retreat/continuing education event. Responding to some of the decisions made in our churchwide policies (where the voting body has a certain quota of lay people), he said, “Maybe lay people should be able to decide what color carpet to buy for the church basement, but that’s about it.” I’m so ashamed to know that some of my colleagues have so little respect for the people who have called them into service. [Sickening. Hang in there. – PB]