Wendi, Jade, Jim Eaton: Amen!

Sometimes the most stressful times bond us closer to the calling. Sitting with the parents of a child who has just died, helping a girl inform her parents that she’s pregnant, giving up Christmas vacation with my family when a 36-year old father died on Dec 23. Those are never times that make me want to quit, even though I didn’t get an A in the class that covered those situations.

What makes me think of quitting are the weekends I can’t get off to go camping with the family because of the responsibilities of the weekend and my wife works Mon-Fri. Spending 20 minutes explaining to ballistic emotional matron that selling t-shirts at cost with the youth group logo is not the same as money changers in the temple--that makes me want to quit. The 3 board members who gripe about lack of outreach, and who when given an outreach assignment “can’t find the time for it,” they make me want to quit. 

Of course, an online ministry would be perfect. You can delete the ugly emails, and nobody has your home phone number! And weekends off! Genius!

Bishop dave says:
“Of course, an online ministry would be perfect. You can delete the ugly emails, and nobody has your home phone number! And weekends off! Genius!”

My online ministry has my cell phone number published on the front page, and I don’t ignore “ugly” emails.  I also don’t take the weekend off… usually. 

But I suppose if you want to run an online ministry like that, you could do the same with a church, only instead of the weekend off, pick two other days since Sunday is your prime work day.  Good luck, because I think this negative attitude would doom it.

“What’s the expectation,,, that Pastoring a church should be easy and kick-back?”

No, but the expectation is there - whether realistic or not - that when you’re involved in a church, at least the church leaders ought to be somewhat Christ-like.  Unfortunately, that is often far from reality.  In fact, I think in my experience it has most often been some of the leaders (titled and untitled, paid and unpaid) who have demonstrated the least Christ-like behaviors.  Maybe that should be expected, considering the example of some of the disciples (James and John jockeying for heavenly position, Judas grumbling over the waste of expensive perfume, and so on).

“Evangelist Jeff:” I’m curious what type of job you held.  And why in your opening paragraph you said you resigned, but at the end you said you lost your job.  (I also can’t believe you lost your job over a candy bar.  I have a feeling that wasn’t the reason you lost your job.)

Working in the secular world, there is a tightrope to walk when it comes to sharing our faith.  In fact, there are laws about it, and I don’t think that obeying those laws constricts us from being faithful to our evangelistic calling.  Harassment is so broadly defined these days that it includes “third-party” offenses (and religion).  In other words, if you and I are both Christians working together and talking at break about our faith, and someone walks by, hears us, and takes offense, we could be guilty of religious harassment. 

As Solomon said, there is a time and a place for everything.  As Christ-followers, we need to be wise in our evangelism.

EJ - I’m very sorry about your job loss right at the holiday season.  That’s always tough.

My experience is that in an employment relationship conflict as in any relational conflict, there is always some degree of fault on both sides.  The hardest thing for me when employment situations have become difficult (probably all people - that darned sin nature) is to see my part.  What I found though, was that when I did ask God to show me how He wanted to change and mold me through the situation, He was always faithful.

Randy is right about the tightrope Christians must walk in a secular job.  As a past HR director for a large company, I occasionally had to counsel some of my over-zealous Christian brothers and sisters about “better” ways to share their faith (if they wanted to keep their jobs).  I don’t see it as a problem, just a challenge to keep us on our knees and creative in our evangelism.

Earlier in this post there was significant discussion between Bernie and others about how difficult it is to really know what it feels like to be in FT ministry until someone actually has worked in FT ministry.  Your story reminds us (me at least) about the opposite side of that coin.  Sometimes we in vocational ministry are unaware of the challenges our people face every day working in an ever-more-worldly marketplace.  That, I think, is one of the values of having some second-career people on the staff team.

I’ll be praying for you and your family.

Wendi

Yep - I’m a HR director turned equipping pastor. There are quite a few of us around the country (HR to Equipping), as there are some real parallels between the two fields.  About 80% of us are in vocational ministry as a 2nd career.

Related again to this post, is that lay people often “leave the ministry” too.  They put their toe in the water of ministry, are in no way “equipped for the works of service” by us, but rather “used” to fill slots and keep the church machine running.  Their experience is hardly transformational, for them or those they serve.  They assume that their serving experience is the reality of what ministry feels like – after all, it is the only experience they know.  When their tour of duty is up, they settle back into their warm spot in the pew and begin consuming religious goods and services (the statistical data says that 85% of people who have a negative volunteer experience do not volunteer again).  We (church leadership), get mad at them for their lack of commitment, never stopping to ask ourselves what part we played in creating their paradigm.

Which then contributes to pastors leaving the ministry - - - a congregation that wants to be served without being part of the serving will eat any pastor up eventually.  Yet, my experience is that those who are fully invested with their time, energy and heart are not the loudest or meanest complainers.  Those who are fully engaged generally want to be part of solutions rather than constantly pointing out problems. 

How’s that for an equipping soapbox speech?  Did I manage to turn it back to the posted topic?

Wendi

Wendi,

I have found all of the above discussion rather interesting, since we are among the recent pastors stepping down and in transition for a time being. I can’t go into all the details and won’t, but will give you a snapshot of our situation.

I am a spouse of a pastor and we recently chose to resign a small church due to differences in vision and ministry values between us and the leadership.  Basically, we had built relationships for almost a year, then, proceeded towards reaching out into the community, not knowing that the leadership wanted to remain ingrown, and not out serving the community. My husband conducted a very good end of year recap and then projected into next year - with concrete goals for outreach and serving and loving our community.  This is when our own leaders sadly balked, even though behind the scenes they always supported my husband.  We already had had a rough year, were worn out, and knew we had done all we could to rebuild this congregation.  It was not an easy decision for us to make, but one that had to be made. 

I had formally served on staff at a church before we took this pastorate position.

We moved to an area of the country in which we never thought finding jobs would be difficult.  I finally gave up job hunting because I would go for interviews and they would go well, but I would not be selected. the “rules” for conducting interviews in this area were not professional at all - and many times the issue of me being a pastor’s wife came into play.  I think every HR ethics were violated at every one of my interviews except for one. 

Since my husband is now having to return to a vocational, non-pastoral position in the corporate world, are you willing and able to help us understand the HR process? Things seem to have changed since both of us had to search for work in the corporate world.  We are looking are relocating to two cities in which jobs should be plentiful.

He served 17 years in the corporate world before returning to pastoring.  Yet, is not getting the interviews. He has done all the internet job posting possible, and, monitors job openings several times a day. 

Can you help a displaced pastor and his family get back on their feet or at least headed in the right direction?

Many thanks if you can, and, are willing.

For the other pastors reading this, please pray for our family as we regroup and seek the Lord’s will for us at this time.
We know that somehow God is in this, redirecting us, and will take care of us and the people we left.  After all, He is sovereign, isn’t He?

1) One issue rarely mentioned about some leaving the ministry is the spouse.  I have known pastors in love with the ministry but their wives basically tell them - “Me or the ministry...” In Baptist circles, divorce is generally not considered a qualified for a pastor.  Some former pastors have told me their “official reason” for leaving the ministry - usually conflict or vision disputes but have privately confided is was a spouse who no longer shared the vision of ministry. 

2) The best experience that trained me for the ministry was my 20 years in the U.S. Army - I am a retired Master Sergeant.  I learned team building skills, developed public speaking, taught, recruited, managed conflict, and took care of my leaders.  I learned to nip problems in the bud early.  I never avoided conflict which is what I notice many pastors do.  My seminary training was okay for the church admin stuff and teaching doctrine...but it was all designed for the 400 plus member church which is not reality for the typical church.  This is one of the disconnects between seminary training and real life. 

3) I have been bivocational and fulltime.  I love both.  There are pluses and minuses with each.  Right now I am bivocational again:  fulltime pastor and part-time chaplain - and I’m lovin’ it!

Great comments!

Dan,

I agree with you about the spouses. Even though I am the spouse of a worship leader, when he was doing music and youth and our children were under 5 years old, it was so stressful I came close to heading out. It wasn’t lack of shared vision or anything, it was pure stress and overwork brought on by the specific situation. It was also some youthful ignorance on his part as to how to handle it, it was being set afloat on a raft by himself in a sea of sharks, it was the weight of responsibility that shouldn’t have been his and his accepting it and trying to rise to the occasion at the cost of his health and nearly our marriage.

And, now that we’re about 4 years past that, and facing a similar situation, we are better prepared as a team and I can handle things better too.

I have known the ministry to be quite hard on pastors and their wives - or ministers of any type.

I pray that my husband is not called to be a senior pastor because I am NOT called to be a pastor’s wife.

Marion asked me some questions about the appropriate kind of questions for interviewing from an HR perspective.  It is difficult to make parallel comparisons, because many of the things appropriately discussed in a ministry / pastoral interview are not only inappropriate in the secular world, but also illegal.  Basically, any question or discussion not directly related to a job is an illegal question.  These include age, religion, marital status, family, etc.  In the church, I certainly do think it is “job related” for a search committee and interviewing group to explore these areas with a candidate.  However, I also think that many church hiring processes take much more liberty asking questions, especially about marriage and family relationships, than is appropriate. 

On the other hand . . .

I am in a very non-traditional situation where I am the one in vocational ministry and my husband is not.  At a previous church, the board when interviewing me didn’t even ask to meet or talk with my husband (which would never have happened for a male pastoral candidate).  They simply asked me if my husband was supportive, and I said “of course.” Later, when I began to sometimes attend events or meetings without him (he didn’t have the responsibility as I did to be there every time the doors were open) or if I attended a different worship service than him, people began to complain (although no one kept track of the couples where the staff member was male).  It became quite a big issue, the perception was that ours was not a healthy ministry partnership (which, as it turned out, was more of a “women in leadership issue.”)

That story to say that, although I might have been offended my some more probing and even inappropriate questions, if such questions had been asked I might have gotten a better sense of what I (we) were in for.

At the end of the day, whether in the church or marketplace, a job seeker must decide what to do with inappropriate questioning.  My advice, if wrong questions are asked innocently or with what appears to be honorable motives, then take it in stride.  If you have some caution about why a line of questions is being asked, then respond with “I’m curious why you are wondering about . . . . “ But I would be grateful for even completely offensive questions, because every interview is two way.  We are interviewing a church or organization just as much as they are interviewing us.  As my story illustrates, both parties need to know as much about one another as possible during the courtship and before walking down the isle. 

Mismatches in vision, mission, ministry emphasis, methodology, etc. are deadly to sustainability (as Marion’s story illustrates), and probably often the real reason pastors leave the ministry.  A couple of misfires and one begins to think matching up the vision of a pastor with the vision a church is unlikely (unless one plants a church).  We should be grateful for everything and anything that would give clues to a possible mismatch.

Wendi