“Shake the dust off your feet” and move on, Jesus tells his disciples after they are rejected. That is sound advice even in this day. But as we make our way out of town, we will have to traverse some potentially dangerous streets.
—Robert Kemper
We all wish it never happened. Pastors are hurt by it. Congregations suffer for it. The whole body of Christ aches when it happens. But sometimes it happens: a pastor is asked to leave a pastorate. To put it in business terms, sometimes pastors get fired. Like the crash of an airliner, the news is jarring and the effect on people is wide and most unwelcome.
When it happened to Peter Hudson (a composite of fired pastors I’ve known), he was stunned. It had never occurred to him that anyone as sincere and well meaning as him could be told by a group of parishioners that his services were no longer needed.
So now what does a pastor do? “Shake the dust off your feet” and move on, says Jesus. That is sound advice even in this day. But as we make our way out of town, we will have to traverse some potentially dangerous streets. Often knowing the names and shapes of those streets helps us get safely through them and on to another community of faith.
Be Angry but Do Not Sin
To be dismissed is to be rejected. To be rejected is like being struck a blow. It hurts. The natural, visceral instinct is to hit back, to hurt others as we have been hurt.
For pastors, public recrimination may be the most tempting recourse. We are professionally articulate, and when wounded, we can easily imagine all sorts of ways to verbally assault people or defend ourselves eloquently.
As Peter Hudson packed his books, each pitch of a book into a box punctuated some great defense he was fashioning in his mind. Like Perry Mason, he mentally cross-examined his accusers, demonstrating that every one of their complaints were wrong, shallow, or mean spirited. With the resounding thud of a concordance he heard himself say aloud and with passion, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you must find this defendant innocent on all counts!”
Some pastors, when fired, mount nonverbal assaults on a congregation, resorting to stealing from the church, destroying records, telling secrets.
And never mind how we’ve counseled people—those getting a divorce, for example—that retaliation gets people nowhere; rejected pastors feel their case is different!
Nonetheless, in our better moments, we recognize that we will find little help or healing in getting back. So this is a difficult street to walk through as we make our way to the next town.
Negotiate the Dismissal
Even if the dismissal is immediate, the pastor will want to negotiate the terms of severance. Although we may not feel as if we’re in a strong bargaining position, a body of custom and law is behind us. The church has accomplished its goal—your dismissal. The price of reaching that goal is subsidized time for you. Take advantage of that time to seek health and healing for yourself.
Use of the parsonage, salary for six months, and benefits for one year (or until next employment) are not uncommon. So pastors will want to keep their heads clear enough to negotiate the maximum severance arrangement and have it put in writing.
In any case, it’s wise to negotiate for as much time as possible. To begin with, dismissed pastors have to find a new position, and those who’ve gone through the process recommend going slowly—lest they repeat the same mistakes they made in choosing the previous parish.
In addition, hurt and anger take time to heal. Before moving into a new position, those emotions must be dealt with.
A Family Affair
Dismissed pastors soon realize they aren’t the only ones being “fired.” There is also the pastor’s family. They are not being fired technically, but they feel the pain nearly as keenly. In addition to feeling victims to the pastor’s sudden career change, they also feel vulnerable to the whims of a congregation.
Certainly pastors can expect some support and help from their immediate family, but the care must flow the other way, as well. The family members do not see themselves as vocational counselors; it’s not a role they bargained for. So they’ll be of limited help in that regard. In addition, they have their own hurts and angers that need attention, some of which must come from the pastor.
In any case, healing family pain will take time and patient effort, as Peter Hudson realized one evening soon after his dismissal. The atmosphere in the home had been tense. During one dinner, Peter’s wife, Emily, handed him a bowl of soup, but the bowl was hotter than he had anticipated. It dropped through his fingers. The bowl, a special memento from Emily’s family, shattered on the floor with a loud crash.
Emily and Peter just looked at each other, wondering what else could happen. Immediately their 10-year-old, Joanna, dashed from the room, as if to avoid the approaching storm.
But she soon returned with her tube of Super Glue. She told her parents to pick up the pieces. They were going to have to put them together again. It occurred to Peter that such was the task in regard to him, his family, and their future together.
Shame on Me
Another street to traverse is shame. Public rejection, even if unjustified, produces shame in the rejected. And shame is more invasive and corrosive than guilt. We acknowledge the destructive presence of guilt but rarely acknowledge the wages of shame. Yet shame seems more primal: Adam and Eve hid from God not from guilt but from shame.
Shame is powerful because it’s directly related to one’s self-image. We have high expectations of ourselves, of how we should be treated and understood. To lose one’s job is to be judged a failure. To lose one’s work is to sense a loss of identity, status, and social relationships.
Like Adam and Eve, then, we want to hide when made ashamed. Some hide literally, not showing their faces in public. Other hide figuratively, not showing their souls even to themselves.
Peter Hudson had little acquaintance with shame, so little in fact, he did not recognize it in himself. He felt inadequate, misplaced, and embarrassed for himself and his family. He slumped when he walked. He looked at no one in the eye. He laughed little.
The outward and visible signs of shame recede when the inner spirit recovers its strength and power. Holding one’s head up and looking another in the eye is not just a function of the skeletal system, but of the human spirit.
Recovery from shame happens in two ways. First, we recover a realistic perception of what has happened. The fact is, we’re never as totally benighted as shame seems to make us. Second, we allow a sense of grace slowly to grow anew within again.
Vocational Doubt
An old sermon illustration goes like this: A farmer in his field saw a vision one day; in the sky, he read the letters GPC. What did it mean? he wondered. He concluded he was being told, “Go Preach Christ.”
So he left the farm and went into ministry. It was a disaster. Three times he tried and three times he failed at pastoring a church. After his third failure he poured out his story to a wise colleague who said, “You fool! GPC meant Go Plant Corn!”
So he did, and both God and the farmer were satisfied.
Fired pastors immediately wonder if they were mistaken about that sense of call they felt long ago, a call they were so sure about at the time.
Not everyone can or should be a minister, of course. We have a difficult calling. Not everyone has the gifts necessary to pastor a church. And, frankly, sometimes a dismissal is a sign of that.
But not necessarily. Certainly deciding such an issue at the time of dismissal is not a wise course. We are too vulnerable then.
George Will, in his book Men at Work, quotes Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn: “Baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time.” George Will adds that no other vocation so remorselessly looks at the performance of its participants, publicly listing daily the box scores of each game.
Well, Mr. Will has not studied the pastorate. For pastors are rigorously judged every week by congregations. And when congregations judge them harshly, pastors judge themselves more harshly still.
But like baseball players, pastors are wise not to decide their career while in the middle of a slump, or worse, when they’ve been benched. Better to first ask why we’re in a slump and what can we do to get out of it.
Often pastors find it helpful to begin by figuring out exactly why they’ve been dismissed. Often congregations are vague about why they’re letting a pastor go: “We just weren’t a good match,” they say. And sometimes they’re simply mistaken as to what went wrong.
Often pastors discover there has been confusion about what the rules of the game were. The congregation was anxious for a preacher, the pastor was an administrator. The congregation wanted a minister in the community, the pastor wanted to shepherd souls.
Because of the intensity of their emotions, many pastors find it helpful to consult a colleague or trusted member of the congregation to help them make this analysis. But it is important that they do so. It often puts the cosmic soul searching about divine vocation into a manageable light.
Back to the Future
A final street to traverse is making plans for the next parish, more specifically, restructuring one’s ministry to make the next position more successful. This restructuring, of course, will be based on the analysis made above.
To see the Rev. Dr. Peter Hudson today you would never know he was once fired by a congregation. He is much loved and respected. Only he knows that his present status is the result of having learned that he had special skills but not all skills, that he is good at some things, and not all things. To his amazement and gratitude, he has discovered there are churches that desperately need what he has to offer.
At a minimum, the pastor will approach the next pastorate with a deeper humility and a greater awareness of the complexity of pastoral life. After such an analysis and new plan for ministry, the pastor will also approach the next position with more hope as well.
Shaking the dust off our feet and moving on to another community, then, is a long process. The streets we traverse are potentially dangerous, but with prayer, patience, and the help of loved ones, it can be traversed, and ministry can be renewed.
Copyright © 1991 by Christianity Today
