"New wine must be put into fresh wineskins." - Luke 5:38
A Reflection at the End of Clergy Appreciation Month, 2024
From 2005 to 2014, I had the immense blessing of serving as the pastor of Crozet United Methodist Church. Crozet is situated in Albemarle County, about a dozen miles from the grounds of the University of Virginia.
One of the wonderful things about serving in that particular community was its connection to UVA. In fact, I quickly realized that if I could schedule my pastoral visitation just right, I would see most of the men's ACC basketball tournament in March. In every home and hospital room, the games were on the television and at some point, they would inevitably become part of the conversation.
And to be clear, no one ever turned off these games simply because the pastor was in the room.
In March of 2009, the Cavaliers received a new head coach, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Tony Bennett. His previous position had been as the head coach of the men's basketball program at Washington State University. He was humble and kind with a magnetic personality that immediately brought out the best in everyone around him, attributes that would quickly win over the notoriously hard-to-please UVA faithful. He would need this support as he took this position. The last time the Cavaliers had a men's basketball team as bad as the one he inherited was two years before he was born.
"He's too good," a parishioner told me one afternoon. "We will never be able to keep him."
Yet keep him they did. Bennett coached at Virginia for fifteen years, winning just under 73% of the 500 games his team played during that time. He coached the Cavaliers through the humiliation of becoming the first number one seed to lose to a lowest-ranked number sixteen seed in the men's NCAA tournament in 2018, and he coached them to redemption as they won the national championship the following year.
I remember his first words when he was interviewed immediately after that victory in 2019. With confetti still falling from the rafters, Bennett leaned into the microphone and said, "Coaches tend to receive too much blame when teams lose and too much credit when they win."
Humble and kind, bringing out the best in everyone around him.
And now it is all over.
On Friday, October 18, Tony Bennett retired from coaching, and not just coaching UVA, but college sports entirely. He is fifty-five years old.
For Bennett, college athletics had become something he no longer recognized, a world much different than the one in which he began his coaching career in 2006 when he succeeded his father as head coach at Washington State, and certainly different from the world in which he played there from 1988 to 1992.
While he left coaching with characteristic humility and grace, his departure is an indictment of what college athletics has become, and in so many ways, all college sports are now poorer because he is gone.
What is interesting to me is how, in the wake of the news of Bennett's sudden departure, my social media feed quickly filled with posts by clergy, especially recently retired clergy who could resonate with Bennett's sentiments so deeply. The sentiment of the retirees boiled down to "this is why I left local church ministry. It has become something so different than it was when I began and is in many ways devoid of what originally made me want to become a pastor in the United Methodist Church."
Incidentally, I have heard basically the same thing from numerous public school teachers over the course of the twenty-six years I have been married to one.
The trust of Americans in institutions has never been lower, a fact evident in everything from how we both regard and treat our local elected officials, school teachers, educational systems, and numerous organizations originally designed to help a common good such as religious institutions and denominations. Just think for a moment about how nurses were treated during the Covid-19 pandemic and you will know what I mean.
In our nation, we have become a body politic who no longer believe in the body itself, much less concepts like self-sacrifice for a common good. What were once our core principles have now become, at best, aspirations, and no one has experienced this in a more visceral way then clergy serving local congregations in the United States.
Let me tell you about the pastor who was run out of his local church because he preached a sermon on the responsibility of the faithful towards immigrants and aliens, a topic that is one of the most prevalent themes in scripture. When this occurred, he had been serving them for a decade, but even his long tenure was not enough to save his ministry there.
Let me tell you about the congregation who refused to support a pastor until he finally left, who sabotaged their own congregation's life and witness, not for anything he ever said or did, but simply because they knew of a belief he held that they found objectionable.
I once received a phone call at the parsonage of the church I was then serving early on a Monday morning from a first-time visitor who had been in worship the previous day, excoriating me for endorsing "socialism" from the pulpit.
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Those things you said about everyone selling what they had and giving it to one another." How dare you support that socialist agenda!"
"I did not write that." I told him. "Those words were from Acts chapter two, in the Bible. Your issue is not with me. It is with Saint Luke."
That is when he hung up on me.
I know of clergy suffering withering criticism for proclaiming a "woke" message when all they did was read the words of Christ found in the Sermon on the Mount.
It is becoming ever more common for clergy to become lightning rods and punching bags when they arrived in communities to which they were sent with no other desire than to be servants to and witnesses for Christ, witnesses who would lead their congregations in new and exciting ways to be outposts of the Kingdom of God in their communities. Sometimes, those communities are even on the other side of the world from the community in which these clergy leaders were born and raised. And still they went, obediently following a calling that world does not understand and so readily scorns.
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There was a time in this country when the health and life expectancy for Christian clergy was better than the national average. Now, it is considerably worse and has been worsening for at least the last ten years. According to a study by Wespath, who manages health and retirement plans for the denomination and who studies these things, 10% of clergy suffer from depression, 35% report functional difficulties from depressive symptoms, and 50.9% sought professional mental health treatment.
In the Virginia Conference, we are seeing increased medical leave requests due to mental health crises as well as seeing more of our younger clergy requesting medical leave and personal leave due to burnout. In addition to this, 33% of clergy feel lonely and isolated at work and feel they have too many demands from the congregation.
Why is this?
According to a study conducted in 2007 by Richard DeShon and Abigail Quinn), it requires 64 competencies to be an effective United Methodist pastor. According to the Flourishing Ministry Project at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, "The role of a local church clergy seems to require an expert-generalist, someone who is highly skilled at performing an extraordinarily wide range of tasks and activities."
Furthermore, according to research done by the Religious Workforce Project, clergy across denominations are finding themselves regularly expected to demonstrate competencies for which they were not trained in their theological education including administration and management, technology skills, soft skills for leadership, counseling and pastoral care, and staff and facilities management.
So, what can be done?
Last October, I partnered with John Fuller, the director of VUMPI, the pensions and benefits arm of the Virginia Conference to assemble a list of locally available resources for clergy health and wellbeing. You can find that document here.
Beyond that, what follows is a collection of best practices for local churches of all sizes and contexts to make your relationship with your pastor one that is a true partnership, and a healthy one at that.
As the United Methodist Church moves into a new season of being beyond the years of pandemic and disaffiliation while continuing to serve in a culture of secularism, and political division, it is so very important for local churches and denominational leadership to understand that clergy today are living through one of the most difficult seasons of ministry the church has known since the Civil War.
Be kind to your pastors. Partner with them. These are unprecedented times in which to live and practice ministry. All clergy, including your appointed pastor, as well as all of the pastors who will serve you in the future are learning to design and craft new wineskins, and they are doing so without any pattern or template. As such, they need your support and encouragement in ways quite unlike anything any of us have ever seen before.
Earlier this year, I was asked to speak at a conference provisional event for clergy who are moving through our very rigorous process for ordination, and I shared with them my dark night of the soul, about how close I came to walking away from church ministry entirely and how, by the grace of God, I was led by the Spirit back to my first love serving Christ for the benefit of local churches.
"Nothing can break your heart like ministry," I told them, "But when it is good, there is simply nothing better."
I meant it then, and I mean it now, remembering that the fact of the matter is that so very much of how much this will be the case resides in the laity of local congregations inhabiting their respective callings to be visible witnesses for Christ in and through and especially outside the walls of your churches. You have more holy, divine power residing in each of you than you might think, as well as more ability to affect change in your congregation, community, and world than you may believe.
In the end, clergy give ourselves to this life because we can do no other, and it is true now and forever that when we work as partners as clergy and laity together, we are able to live as visible witnesses to the Christ who has chosen to uniquely reside within and among his church for nothing less than the salvation of the world.
Grace and peace,
Doug
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References
Bloom Matt, "Flourishing in Ministry: Emerging Resource Insights on the Well -Being of Pastors." 2013. Cited online: https://ntcumc.org/Flourishing_in_Ministry.pdf
DeShon, Richard & Quinn, Abigail. "Job Analysis Generalizability Study for the Position of United Methodist Local Pastor: Focus Group Results." December 15, 2007. Cited online: https://ministerscouncil.com/resources/effective/clergy_effectiveness_UMC.pdf
Wespath 2023 Clergy Well -Being Survey Highlights. Cited online: https://www.wespath.org/assets/1/7/5991.pdf
The Religious Workforce Project, found at https://religiousworkforce.com/reports