In my twenty years of ordained ministry, the word professional has been both friend and foe.
With my colleagues I have enjoyed more legitimacy for days off and days on, regular paychecks, standards for salaries, and clergy journals. I have benefited from clinical pastoral training and concepts such as boundaries, self-differentiation, and rescuing. I picked up a second language, that of psychology, which, added to theology, has been useful. Bounded and bordered relationships can be like a good garden. They look better and feel better and grow better.
I have learned other languages: staffing, time management, and programming. I have learned sociological types for congregations, the pastor-centered and the program-centered and the like. I have learned organizational dynamics: that at certain levels of worship attendance, for example, congregations are poised for different behaviors.
Professionalism has been good. It has also been an enemy, an insect boring out the tree from within.
My ministry lost a bit of its sap while professionalizing and credentializing. This loss of sap makes me nervous, especially in my new job as area minister for 125 United Churches of Christ.
Now I have the odd privilege of hearing clergy stories all day long.
Yesterday one minister told me his largest problem was convincing his congregation he did not have time to do pastoral visits.
As he listed his obligations, and the congregation’s resistance to those obligations–they wanted church meetings to decrease and the pastor’s ministry to shut-ins to increase–I winced. He expected me to confirm his resistance to pastoral calling. I could not.
In my own ministry, pastoral calling was central. I visited every member every year and the shut-ins monthly. I did this for the sap. The stories. The connections.
It not only gave me joy; it profoundly affected my congregations. They became more open to the mission I proposed. They trusted me. Had I not been calling, I could never have started soup kitchens or shelters.
Only now do I see the value of those visits. Then I didn’t evaluate.
The man I spoke to yesterday was wearing himself out giving his parish something they didn’t want. He wanted to keep the chairs in his committee room warmed. Participation. Activity. Shared decision-making.
They didn’t want more education or a better investment policy. They wanted him to know them.
His professional works, good as they are, cannot replace the basic intimacy between pastor and people. When that intimacy is absent, all the professionalism in the world cannot fill its space.
When I got home that night, a letter was in the box from a woman who had gone from one parish to a larger one. What did she miss the most? The calling. Now when she meets someone on the street, her question is not how your great aunt is faring since the triple by-pass, but “Who are you?” She misses the sap of the stories, too.
That same day, I met with a 55-year-old clergyman and his wife. He’d just discovered the chair of his board of trustees has Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“I’d thought about leaving this parish soon,” he said, “but now I couldn’t possibly. I have to at least go through this with him.”
A woman pastor recently told me the chair of her trustees had cancer. She had to move, she said, because she couldn’t bear having to minister to the S.O.B. at the end of his life.
The striking contrast in the two statements is surely due to each trustee being a different kind of person. But the softness in the one statement when compared with the hardness in the other matters. One is connected to the key leader; the other disconnected.
Professionalism can disconnect us by giving us permission even to say things like she said. That permission should be withdrawn. We should develop instead a clergy peer culture that encourages us to love “them” no matter what–while not being the slightest bit naive as to what that “what” may be.
Parishes today want us to love them. I think they test us with wild behavior just to see if we do.
I just placed a woman minister whose previous church’s job description stipulated that she mow the lawn! I was reminded that professional boundaries can be beneficial.
Then I saw an African-American layman yell at his pastor for mowing the church lawn. The pastor said the lawn needed it. The layman said he was embarrassed to have his pastor do that. Go figure.
Boundaries clarify, but they’re meant to be crossed. Boundaries also are crosses. They give. They also take.
The wonder of the ministry for me is in the permission we have–through faith–to cross and to be crossed.
Do I want to go back to the pocket cash or the seven-day work week? No. Do I want to look my people in the eye, even the difficult ones, and at least know we are talking the same language?
Yes. I want the sap.
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Donna Schaper is Western Area Minister of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ in Ludlow, Massachusetts.
Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
