Is There Enough Good In Your Ministry?

I’m sticking this here because I want to write more about it when it’s not 1:43 AM.

It’s an article by Susan Beaumont about how to assess the goodness in our ministries, especially when we’re feeling burned out.

I will be entering my twentieth year in the parish starting next September, so I’m thinking a lot about this “lifetime in ministry” thing! I never imagined going into parish ministry when I began seminary, and God knows I never thought I’d be working there still twenty years after graduation! But I graduated and was ordained in 1997, and here I am.

A few thoughts before I go nie-nie:

I have had some hideous years in ministry. HIDEOUS. But they were mostly hideous because I had bought into a lot of the romantic notions about clergy life and persona was suppressing my nature, which is a killer when you’re in the midst of conflict and animosity.

I thought that the love I was supposed to feel for my people at all times would feel like soft, warm, hearts ‘n’ rainbows LUVVVV.
Nope.
Love in ministry looks more like a mama tiger carrying her young around by the scruff of their necks. God’s got your scruff and you have your people’s scruffs. You are just trying very hard to keep them fed and alive and safe in their souls. You have to use a rough tongue sometimes. If this seems maternalistic, I cop to it. I can be super angry at things people do, say or suggest. I can be super angry at the conflicts they engage with one another that are destructive to individuals and to the institution. I can heartily dislike people at times. And yet, boy, if they need a meal, a prayer, a visit, counseling, I would saw down trees with my bare hands to get to them. They are my MINE. They are my dearly beloved. That’s what it means. I know them to be people who will die someday: I hold that awareness for all of us every day. Petty stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is that we all try to be as fully alive and deeply aware of what that requires of us before God and each other as we can be.

The biggest pain about anger and hurt in the parish isn’t that I get angry and hurt but that those stupid things keep people who need a minister estranged from their minister.

I have worked with some super toxic people and I really wish I had known at the time that it is perfectly okay to freeze them out, organize around them, empower and support lay people who also find them toxic, and just generally let the health of the institution deal with them rather than taking it all personally and so hard.

I am far more resilient now, and more genuinely interested in difficult people and situations. I wonder what we are activating in each other. I am much more clear now that the church is in no way mine, so that helps a lot. I want everyone to have the best conditions for their own flourishing as members or friends of the church. I want them to find their spiritual expression and service and healing. Sometimes we all need some direction and even a noodge. I appreciate hearing how I might be screwing up. It’s so shocking and fascinating and helpful.

I know now that everyone in the room genuinely, actually hears things differently. You have to check and double and triple check and also take notes. My training in education is a huge help in taking this in stride: different learning styles are a real thing!

Somewhere along my path in the parish ministry I stopped listening so much to clergy and started listening more to lay people. I find most ministerial gatherings pompous and obnoxious and insulting. They are not meant to be, I know. But I find them to be so because they presume insulting things about lay people, and I am having none of that. Clergy condescension is a real problem and it comes from insecurity, woundedness and lack of spiritual life, talent and social skills.

My overall advice for long-term survival in the parish ministry is to get closer to your lay leaders than your best pals in the ministry. Of course you need your pals but they are never going to bring life and light and joy into your ministry like really hunkering down with your people will.

Read fewer articles and hang out more with your people. Keep before you at all times the truth that you’re no “Reverend” without the people confirming and ordaining you to that title every day. It doesn’t confer upon you any special holiness, so get over yourself. What it does do is obligate your to work your ass off every day to have a deep relationship with the living God and to do your utmost to bring about the Kingdom as best you can, with your people.
You have to be clear about who your people are so that your seeds can take root somewhere and live. Make sure that your people know where you are gardening. Give them seeds of their own so they can go plant in their own communities and families.

You have to love learning.
You have to be fascinated by failure.
You have to be a fearless observer of your own fear and guilt.
You have to take time for the grief that builds up, to release and heal it. You have to.
You have to put yourself together shiny and beautiful every time you show up out of respect for the office and the community for which you speak and to whom you speak.
You have to fiercely guard your silent time, but don’t be a big diva about it.
You have to have a fantastic sense of humor and perspective.

You have to be brave if the goodness has all gone out of it and get out.