A clergywoman received a letter or e-mail from someone affiliated with her congregation that provided quotes from that minister’s Facebook page that the letter writer found unbecoming of a minister, and so this minister went and deleted all of that content.
I’m sure she isn’t the only one who has had this happen to her and who made that same decision. It’s very sad.
Let’s call out that kind of fine-tooth combing of any of our writings for what it is:
obsessive behavior. Internet stalking, even.
No one healthy or fair does that.
Some folks may fall down a rabbit hole of following their minister’s writings or postings, sure. But healthy people do this out of curiosity and the desire to better understand or know someone who fascinates and influences them and they do not carry a yellow highlighter along the way, looking for offense and feeling entitled to present their findings.
I hope none of you will feel compelled to edit and delete your honest observations because someone bullies you into it.
We all say things we regret, and it may also be that we take time to develop our own social media best practices and make some mistakes along that way. So what? Are you a criminal? Are you a terrible person? Probably not. And if you are, that will be discovered by other means than stalking your Facebook page.
Being yourself in all your interesting complexity is not objectionable. Also, lest you forget, not everyone needs to like you. It’s part of this generation of ministers’ task to pop the balloon of old, outmoded clergy archetypes.
If confronted with evidence of your failure to live into someone’s Pastor Fantasy via a roster of your objectionable remarks or photographs, you might direct people to focus their laser atttention and their red pen on a more worthy set of writings than your Facebook page — say, Scripture, or the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or the journals of May Sarton. Surely little ole you isn’t worthy of all that energy and study. Or perhaps this ultra fan might consider doing a very close reading of all your sermons: surely there’s time better spent mining the gold there than examining your Facebook posts through a microscope.
I am not surprised that this happened to a woman minister and by a woman antagonist. Quite seriously, women tone-policing and emotionally controlling other women is the great underreported abuse in the Church. There are still many women in religious communities who expect women to lift their pinky every time they dare venture an opinion, and pass a plate of brownies and praise the name of Jesus before making an observation. If you challenge them, they will attack. This is a generational form of sexism that plenty of women internalize — even women clergy.
It makes me grateful every day that I’m a Unitarian Universalist. We’ve done a lot of work confronting sexism and misogyny and our communities have alwasy encouraged and supported this strong woman. Thanking God for them tonight.
In a previous congregation, in a meeting with the then-vice president (male, who had secretly made no bones about wanting me to leave, and who was ascending to the presidency) to discuss our changing relationship, he took me to task about my Facebook presence… that it was un-ministerial. His complaint: that during the Superstorm Sandy crisis I posted about our struggles of getting through it with no power – no lights, no heat, no cooking – in the Parsonage. “So many people and it worse, lost everything,” he said, and “all I did was complain”. I tried to explain (bad idea) that my Facebook persona is “all of me” – woman, partner, mother, minister, etc. – and he wasn’t even my “friend”. And yes, I did post about how we were coping, and I did post more pastorally too. The energy it took for him to be so upset and use his anger in such a destructive way, trying to undermine my ministry, took me by surprise. However, I did not make any changes, realizing that this was more about him than me, and I felt confident in the appropriateness of what I was sharing. But it did pave the way for my eventual resignation a year later.
Hoo boy, I went through this during a time of conflict in our church. There were screenshots of a status being passed around, among other acts of aggression. I ended up unfriending everyone in my church, even people I trusted, because I was so afraid that something I commented on would get misconstrued, or that the lay leaders I care about would be impugned by association.
All that really did was make me feel disconnected and sad, and it didn’t do a darn thing to fix the larger problem, which was a group of very mean, very sad people. A few months later, I started re-friending people that I spend a lot of IRL time with. I don’t friend other church members, but I always accept requests, simply because I want them to control their level of engagement with me online.
And all this over the use of the word “genitals.” Seriously.
@Susan, wow. Not surprised, though. It is SO hard to accept the profound irrationality of that kind of complaint. If we logically follow this guy’s expectations, you would either have to be pathologically detached from your own reality in order to post only about the plight of others, or you would have to be consciously and constantly manipulating your public image in order to seem as saintly as he apparently expected you to be. It reflects very sadly on his sense of compassion (and perhaps reveals an emotionally impoverished upbringing) that he would regard the sharing of fears and anxiety as “complaining.” Something is off and needs spiritual care. However, as is the case with too many such personalites, he’s “fine” and you’re the one who has a problem. Too many folks think that spiritual care is something that should only be offered to those in grief or mourning or in crisis, yet a person like the VP you describe is in desperate need of pastoring and would never seek (or probably welcome) it.
@Ellen, hoo boy, indeed! What a true “Get a LIFE!” moment in your ministry. Unfortunately, those who take it upon themselves to police the minister’s every remark and use it to stir trouble completely fail to realize that the healthy members of the congregation think they’re an exhausting pain in the genitals, and that their insistence on bringing forth their bizarre complaints to the leadership is a theft of time and energy from the rest of the congregation. Oh dear, I seem to have said the word “genitals” along with you.
In my first church (1980) a man in the church sent the secretary corrections to the newsletter weekly. She wasn’t a very good secretary (daughter of a prominent member) but it was so passive aggressive. [This could start a whole ‘nuther conversation about authority and staff supervision, couldn’t it? Generations of vague clergy-lay supervision of church staff lends itself to exactly this kind of behavior, justified by people thinking that no one will point out the errors if they don’t. Reporting lines and job evaluations have been unclear and untended in our institutions, and ministers get accused of being less than sweet and Christlike when they do supervise well, and garnered frustrations when they don’t supervise, or take a hands-off, conflict-avoidance approach. It’s all a recipe for bad relationships and unsupported church staff either caught in the middle, neglected or left on their own to be awesome. – PB]
My second parish found a list of priests that attended a forum on same gender blessings(as it was called) I was of course on the list, back in 2006. This was circulated via emails and set the tone for a very tumultuous 5years. I received hate mail, phone calls and had parishioners at the altar rail turn their backs on me and refuse communion (which of course made me very sad because ITS NOT ABOUT ME they just turned their backs on Jesus) So now I am very careful to manage my profile- not edit or hide, but make sure there are no surprises. Congruency is my watch word!
Whenever I post, I assume the first person who will read it is my bishop. He’s not a FB friend – I don’t know if he even has an account. But, it’s a useful hermeneutic on what to post.
Where I do my pastoral interfacing on FB is with Messenger. Especially with the under-40 set, that works beautifully, and it’s relatively private. That said, I also realize that anything I say can be cut and pasted, screenshotted, and otherwise abused. So, be wise as serpents . . .