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Exit Interview:  Why Pastors Are Leaving the Ministry

Orginally published on Monday, November 20, 2006 at 5:00 AM
by Todd Rhoades

Why do pastors leave the ministry? Several common issues emerge from the research of Dean Hoge and Jacqueline Wenger: preference for another form of ministry, the need to care for children or family, conflict in the congregation, conflict with denominational leaders, burnout or discouragement, sexual misconduct, and divorce or marital problems. Of these factors, which form the basis for the central chapters of Pastors in Transition, two are especially important: conflict and a preference for specialized ministry. A close third is the experience of burnout, discouragement, stress and overwork. As the authors explore these factors, they provide significant insights into what can be done to help people stay in ministry.

Hoge and Wenger’s study is part of the larger Pulpit and Pew research project on the state of pastoral ministry, based at Duke Divinity School and funded by the Lilly Endowment. Hoge has authored two previous volumes (one coauthored with Wenger) on the status of the Catholic priesthood. Pastors in Transition is the first book-length Pulpit and Pew publication to examine the state of Protestant clergy.

The authors conducted extensive interviews with clergy who have left parish ministry, voluntarily or involuntarily, and with denominational leaders from five church bodies—the Assemblies of God, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Methodist Church. The narrative is peppered with numerous quotes from clergy and enhanced with helpful graphs and concise summaries of the findings.

Hoge and Wenger learned, first of all, that polity matters. This finding is most clearly illustrated by the high degree of dissatisfaction expressed by United Methodist clergy in relation to their denomination’s deployment systems and the level of support they received from judicatory officials. Among the denominations included in the study, “the United Methodist Church stands out for the level of centralization, supervision, and commitment to its clergy.”

The denomination sets up a standard of dependence between clergy and denominational leadership that is hard to live up to. Furthermore, social trends such as greater freedom of choice and the tendency of pastors’ spouses to be working outside the home have made the itinerant model increasingly difficult to implement. The authors conclude that “the more a pastor’s career is determined by his or her denomination, the more conflict that pastor will potentially feel with denominational leaders.”

Conflict in the parish also looms large. The top five conflict issues cited by pastors who left ministry were pastoral leadership style, church finances, changes in worship style, staff relationships and building projects. Organizational and interpersonal issues, rather than doctrinal differences or hot-button issues such as homosexuality, were the most likely to motivate pastors to move on. “Most notable about the main conflicts experienced by ministers who left parish ministry is their ‘everyday,’ prosaic nature.” As they reflected on this finding, Hoge and Wenger “came to believe that the conflicts most often experienced by our participants are ones that could probably be resolved and in the process offer growth experiences for both pastor and congregation.”

The importance of collegiality to pastors’ flourishing emerges in several places in this study. Isolation and loneliness contributed directly or indirectly to pastors’ moves out of local ministry. Of those who left due to sexual misconduct, 75 percent indicated that they were lonely and isolated. In all five denominational groups, the top motivating factors for leaving were the same. Pastors reported:

“I felt drained by demands.”
“I felt lonely and isolated.”
“I did not feel supported by denominational officials.”
“I felt bored and constrained.”
Furthermore, Hoge and Wenger discovered a consensus among judicatory officers regarding pastors who have left local church ministry: “These pastors tended to be loners in the district or presbytery, for whatever reason not part of ministerial friendship groups or action groups.”

Leaving ministry is hard to do, and ex-pastors said “there are at least parts of ministry” that they miss. “Their accounts were remarkably consistent: they most missed leading worship and being a meaningful part of people’s lives.” Pastors who had left ministry under circumstances not of their own choosing or who felt that they had in some way been mistreated mourned the loss of pastoral ministry most intensely. The researchers note that “several interviews were interrupted when pastors cried.” Former pastors who were content with their new vocational setting also told of their love for local church ministry. The sense of loss says something important about the good that is intrinsic to the work of pastoral ministry and about how this work shapes a way of life that is not easily transferable to other vocational contexts.

The gap between the ideal and the reality of pastoral ministry also matters. A significant gap between pastors’ ideal about how long it should take to accomplish particular tasks—preaching, teaching, pastoral care, administration—and the amount of time it really takes has a direct and predictable bearing on their level of stress and dissatisfaction. Striking a balance between what one wants to do in ministry and what one has to do is crucial.

This raises the critical question of encouraging pastors to manage their work in ways that take into account both their particular skills and capacities and the full breadth of demands and tasks that make up pastoral ministry. A correlative question is how congregations might become more active in helping pastors strike this balance.

There are two issues on which I would have liked to see the authors elaborate further. They assert in one of their introductory chapters that pastoral ministry is no more difficult today than it was four decades ago. Hoge and Wenger concede that ministry is different—indeed, they mention both differences that have emerged in Protestant life since the 1960s and differences in seminary graduates. However, they contend that the differences do not translate into a greater degree of difficulty. They leave unexplored the social and cultural changes of the past 50 years and the possibility that these changes have made pastoral ministry more difficult as well as different. The proliferation of communication technologies, the changing structure of everyday life (due largely to technology), the growing complexity of family life, the changing understandings and norms of sexual conduct and the expansion of consumer culture (as evidenced by unprecedented levels of consumer debt) are only a few of the conditions that present pastors with new kinds of demands.

The authors’ apparent dismissal of this possibility is puzzling, and it prevents them from raising questions about social and cultural factors that may contribute to the negative experience of pastors. Addressing these new challenges would not diminish the challenges of past decades; nor would such a discussion need to claim too much for current circumstances. Rather, it would help pastors to make the connection between larger cultural shifts and their experience of the work they are called to do.

A second issue is the authors’ assumption that collegiality among pastors, though important, is inherently limited because “ministers feel unavoidable competition with each other, which gets in the way of forming healthy support groups.” But is such competitiveness inevitable? Or is it possible for denominations and judicatories to create conditions under which competitiveness becomes less likely and strong collegiality more common?

By conceiving of collegiality in terms of “support groups,” the authors fail to appreciate the potential for strong forms of collegiality that have the character of friendship, in which fellow pastors share each other’s lives and help shape each other’s character. Friendship sustains pastors over time and not simply during crises—it is the kind of collegiality that is crucial to the cultivation of self-knowledge, relational intelligence, the capacity to remain dynamically engaged with one’s work and the ability to identify and negotiate conflict, all of which are relevant to preventing the dynamics that cause clergy to leave pastoral ministry.

In his book on the experiences of Roman Catholic clergy, The First Five Years of the Priesthood, Hoge claimed that one of the most important findings of his research was that priests left the ministry because they “felt lonely and unappreciated.” Loneliness was the one factor always present among the various reasons priests resigned in their early years of ministry. Hoge claims that when loneliness “is absent, resignation from the priesthood is unlikely. Whether a priest is heterosexual or homosexual, in love or not, it will not drive him to resign unless at the same time he feels lonely or unappreciated.”

This same dynamic appears to be present among Protestant clergy. The indication of loneliness and isolation among pastors who leave parish ministry warrants a more positive view of pastors’ potential for collegiality and calls for a vigorous exploration of the conditions that encourage noncompetitive relationships between clergy.

Precisely because this book succeeds in providing us with an unprecedented, multidenominational reading of why pastors depart from ministry, it is bound to leave readers asking for an equally in-depth discussion of why pastors stay and how they thrive.

SOURCE:  The Christian Century Review by David Wood


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  There are 14 Comments:

  • Posted by kent

    Todd, your review of this study is excellent. It raises powerful issues and the two exclusion that you articulate are essential.

    Yes minsitry is different than 40 years ago. Expectations are accelerated, and the respect of the average pastor has diminished. The critics of the church have risen exponentially. And yes it is harder to have close supportive relationships as pastors, but it is not impossible. We can over come competetive consumeristic mentality and see each other as colleagues.

  • Posted by

    I distinguish between leaving “the ministry” and leaving “insitutional positions”. 

    It must be feasible for some people to do both in tandem together, but certain compromises of individual integrity will inevitably be made to succeed in this.  When I no longer believed I could be true to Truth, I did the only thing I could, I set aside position for the sake of conscience. 

    Institutions (and perhaps religious ones in particular) have little room for sincere questions.  I can work for a secular organization that makes no pretense of spiritual superiority, but for “Christian organizations” to take such a posture would simply be too threatening. 

    As a Christ-follower, I will never leave “the ministry.” Isn’t that what Christ-following is?

  • Posted by

    I agree with Dean and Kent, Much has changed and the institution of religion is waning. The pastor who seeks to care for the religious shop may find the inventory of that shop shrinking. Those who want to be world changers for Christ will be frustrated by the slow movement of an institution whose primary objective is the maintain stability and become inert. It is why in each denomination across the board that they rally members to plant churches. This is seen as the wave of the future while many older churches try to make others conform to their depiction of faith. As Jesus said, “ No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

    Our faith needs to maintain its orthodoxy while being given the chance to breath with new life.

    Aaron

  • Posted by Leonard

    Thanks for the review.  I think that one of the reasons people are leaving the ministry is the rising cost of being educated for the ministry and the corresponding low pay of vocational ministry.  I know many pastors who just cannot afford to be pastors and still provide for their families.  Another reason is that ministry attracts unhealthy people, who want to do something that matters.  Once in the flow and pace of ministry we tend to manage unhealthiness verses pursue wholeness.  I have come across more and more people in ministry who come from shattered homes, abusive pasts, childhoods filled with hurt and tragic pain.  Alcoholism and divorce are common in many pastors’ histories with their parents and grandparents. They are in my history too.  Because growing healthy is difficult and requires skilled discipleship and even some professional counseling, few ever take the time to resolve the conflict and pain of their histories. 

    Ministry plays into the unhealthiness of our souls when it comes to acceptance, fear of conflict, controlling or addictive behaviors and seeking to do right.  Too many pastors leave ministry because they can no longer manage the unhealthiness of the soul.  When that unhealthiness becomes unmanageable it leaks out into other areas and so we see people leave ministry.

  • Posted by

    I’ve seen many of our seminary friends leave because of disillusionment.  Are they really being prepared to deal with people?  Not sure today, but we weren’t 25 years ago, that’s for sure.

    And I see your point Leonard.  My pastor husband jokes about the “CEO Wanna Be’s” who see the church as their own little mini-corporation to head up.  They are in ministry for the wrong reasons, basically for power.  And I have honestly been horrified by some of the stories I’ve heard via pastor’s wives, with husbands who have no business whatsoever being a pastor.  They need SERIOUS counseling.

    We’ve been in full time and bi-vocational ministry.  And having a secular career apart from ministry was the most healthy thing we could have done.

    But getting back into full time ministry was very difficult, since churches are reluctant to take a chance on someone who has stepped out.  I wonder if the pastor candidating process also influences why pastors don’t go back into ministry and leave permanently.  I

  • Posted by

    I would agree with you Leonard. Sometimes the busy of religious life is the honorary badge to be unhealthy.
    The continued spiritual and emotional homework on your own life is very challenging in the pastorate. You have to create pockets of time and place to revive your spirit and continue to build your relationship with God. Not in a professional manner, but a personal intimate way. It has to be your heartbeat, not your designed heartbeat.

    And don’t even start me on the candidating process Jan. You are so correct.

  • Posted by Don Aycock

    This reminds me of a comment from Will Campbell in his book, “Brother To A Dragonfly.” He said of a pastor that he left the church in order to enter the ministry. There’s a thought to chew on!

  • Posted by

    Wish they had done more interviews with those outside of denominationally centralized ministry. What I have seen so far on this book is more a commentary on the state of effectiveness of denmoniational control and the pastors in those ministries. Is this really a wide-angle lense?

  • Posted by

    I, too, am lonely in the ministry. I’ve tried to cultivate friendships with other pastors, but there is no reciprocation--unless you are a golfer, which I am not, and I don’t have the interest or the money to start. Other pastors are either too busy or already have their circle of friends. After a while, I simply give up and try to find godly hobbies to take my mind off of things. Meaningful friendships within the parish are not possible because parishioners don’t want to get too close to the pastor--one person even told me that she thought about having my wife and myself over for supper, but she was afraid of being called the pastor’s pet. I’ve asked elders to go fishing with me and do other things, and the answer is always, “no thanks.” Perhaps, for some of us, loneliness is part of our cross to bear.

  • Posted by

    ministry for me sucks.  Wasn’t supposed to.  But it does.  Denoms offer nothing and only take.  The attendees want to be just that and don’t want to be put out.

  • Posted by

    I’m leaving the ministry, well, sort of.  And it’s not exactly my choice.  When one of our children got into serious drug use, things began to unravel.  And the ‘denominational’ support was just not there.  We also had a church in turmoil over my conservative preaching/teaching/views, and I received very little real support from the denominational ‘head’.  I could go on, but the ‘denomination’ now has ‘judged me’ and basically blackballed me.  I know this is not fair, not at all. (Sorry, I’m leaving out a lot of detail here.) But I guess I’m at a point where I can walk away from ministry...at least parish ministry.  I"ve had enough.

  • Posted by

    I’ve just turned in my ‘notice’ after serving our church as Worship Pastor for almost 26 years. One observation that I’d like to make is this: the “powers that be” need to look down the road to see that someone who serves their church in this capacity and for this length of time is given a “compensation” package. I will be leaving with what little money I have been able to contribute to my retirement plan, and no health insurance. I believe that someone who has served a body for this length of time needs to be treated in a more positive fashion.

  • Posted by

    Christianity is war. In my experience, the church has more charity for their critics than their clergy. The wounded are ignored and pastors are stabbed in the back. This is not true of all Churches, Yet the situation requires adjustment.Perhaps Bible boot camp to protect both congregation and pastor from each other.

  • Posted by

    Ministry has been so disappointing. It’s been 20 years and I’m done. I agree with so many of the comments I’ve read here. The compensation packages are ridiculous! The interview process is just as bad. It’s lonely, full of politics, and unhealthy people. What kind of work does a pastor do when leaving ministry - besides selling insurance??

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