Hindrance....

Len Hjalmarson notes six out of seven ways in which growth and expansion in church life can be inhibited. He's taken these from Roland Allen's 1920s book, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and the causes that hinder it.

1. when the church is dependent on paid leadership;

2. when the spread of the gospel is controlled out of fear of error, and both error and godly zeal are suppressed;

3.when it is believed that the church is to be founded , educated, equipped, and established in the doctrine, ethics and organization before it is to expand;

4. when emerging leaders are restricted from ministering until they are fully trained and so learn the lesson of inactivity and dependency;

5. when conversion is seen as the result of clever argument rather than the power of Christ;

6. when professional clergy control the ministry and discourage the spontaneous zeal of non-professionals. They may protect the new believers from charlatans (Acts 8:9-24) but they also block unconventional leaders like Peter the fisherman.

Allen's views are counter-cultural to the approach still taken by most seminaries and denominations. In other words, this prophetic voice is still not getting through to the majority of church organisations, or, if it's making any impact, it's v....e....r....y slow.

However, in the emerging church scene, this approach is certainly more common.

Changes in marriage

One of the blogs I now read regularly is GetReligion, where several different writers analyze the (mostly American) news reports, looking at how the journalists deal with aspects of faith and religion. Some journalists do very well; many don't have much idea about the faith aspects of their stories and either ignore them, or slide past them, or make a hash of them.

In one of the most recent posts, Mollie [Hemingway, I think] discusses a recent spate of articles on the lack of marriage in middle America and the stability (mostly) of marriage in educated America. (You need to read the piece to understand these classifications.)

She ends her post this way:

There are so many more interesting angles to explore. What does this data mean for houses of worship? How are local congregations dealing with the institutional decline of marriage? How can congregations most help their communities as families struggle around them? What other stories are the mainstream media missing while they devote so many pages and stories to encouraging changes in marriage laws to include same-sex partners?

The first few questions in that paragraph caused me to prick up my (blogging) ears: these are the questions that New Zealand churches should (or must already) be asking too - the increase in the number of children born in de facto marriages here is substantial, and no doubt there are families in some churches in this situation. Twenty/thirty years ago it would have been possible to encourage the parents to get married relatively easily. Now things are considerably more difficult. Should ministers encourage parents to get married? Do the parents see a need to get married?

No doubt there are clergy already dealing with these issues. What are your approaches?

Richard Floyd on Burnout, work, and more

In a provocative yet wise blog post, Richard Floyd writes: 

I think the whole category of “burnout,” although quite real, is also a bit of a red herring. All the articles agree that clergy are overworked. And when cast in terms of “work” that is undoubtedly true.

My question is simple: “Should clergy really be working?” Or to put it another way, “When did what clergy do come to be understood as work?” Clergy have always been busy doing what clergy do, visiting the sick, attending to the dying, preaching and administering the sacraments and the scholarly preparation for same. The “work” clergy are now expected to do is a category drawn from the industrial and post industrial West, and seen in terms of their terms of efficiency, productivity, and professionalism.

Further down the page he writes:

Years ago one of my GE manager types got on my oversight board and hounded me into doing detailed hourly logs of what I do as part of a compensation review (I know this sounds like Dante, but it really happened.) I was insecure enough to hold my doubts and my tongue, and dutifully filled them out, but a good deal of the time I found myself in comic reflection. For example, when I was thinking about whether Paul’s radical theology of justification in Romans led to antinomianism while soaping up in the shower, was I “working?” Or am I working right now while I ruminate, for I have no position and am not being compensated for it?

and....

We....have guidelines for how many hours (divided into parts of days called “units”) that pastors should be “working.” Like so many things in our churches these suggestions are right-minded but wrongheaded. Because ministry can’t be cut into tranches like pate.

The category of burnout is a symptom of what happens when you take on these models. If your criteria for “success” is efficiency and productivity you will always fall short, because ministry is neither efficient nor productive in the terms of the world.

Read the whole post.   Whether you agree with his analysis or not, it's worth reflecting on, and may assist in your own avoidance of burnout....

Clergy Self-Care?

I do not think clergy need more lectures about self-care.

It seems that at every ordination or installation service I attend there is a charge given about clergy self care. One minister stands up and tells another minister that they know they are about to work themselves to death, so resist the temptation. “Take your day off…set boundaries…don’t try to be all things to all people.” All this is done in front of an audience of lay people who are supposed to be impressed that we clergy would need such a lecture. It has become a cliché, and seems to have trumped prophecy, theology and the love of Jesus.

Lillian Daniel begins a short post on clergy self-care in the above fashion. Is she right about what she's saying: do clergy make more noise about self-care than they do about actually achieving anything in this area? Are clergy worse off than the average working person? Do you think her answers to the question are the right ones? Read the post and let me know.

Cracked Pots

While trying to track down a book called The Cracked Pot, the state of today’s Anglican parish clergy, by Yvonne Warren, I came across an article from 2007 on the Church Times archives, called What Price Priesthood? by Rachel Harden.

It discusses clergy burnout, stress, the difficulties of being ill and then having to recover within the parish, long hours with little time off, and other problems of ministry. Yvonne Warren, herself the wife of a clergyman for 40 years, notes that the Church in the 21st century is experiencing a cataclysmic time of change, with huge implications, and says, “This has affected patterns of ministry more than most, and many clergy are feeling the impact of this, not just in terms of workload, but in their sense of frustration and feeling of increasing irrelevance in a largely secularised society.”

Another book is mentioned in the article: Clergy Burnout: Recovering from the 70-hour work week. . . and other self-defeating practices by Fred Lehr. Lehr had a terrible time saying “no”, and loved feeling needed. “In reality it exhausted me, and I hated constantly being caught between my family and my congregation. I found myself helplessly falling in what we call burnout.” He sought help, and used his experience to work on a specialised treatment programme.

The Society of Martha and Mary produced a report in 2002 called, Affirmation and Accountability. In it they called on dioceses and other church structures to provide more constructive solutions for clergy who were on stress-related sick leave.

The article is fairly long, but well worth checking out. There are several personal statements at the end from people who have been through burnout and similar struggles.

Unfortunately, The Cracked Pot is now out of print, and only available through Print on Demand at the publishers, Kevin Mayhew. Affirmation and Accountability is also hard to get hold of in NZ (there is one copy, at the Kinder Library). Clergy Burnout is more readily available.

Reading the Numbers Rightly

On the Albran Rountable blog, Wayne Floyd writes: Americans are notorious for trying to quantify everything; we take our numbers very religiously. [I think, New Zealanders are not much different]

“Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey” is one recent and provocative encyclopedia of statistics profiling the ordained leadership of current Mainline Protestants. A colleague just plopped the hefty 45 page report on my desk, and I’ll resist commenting on it until I’ve actually read it!

Even then, it’s not easy to decide the significance of the quantitative ‘facts’ we’ve read.

Floyd then goes on to look at the problems with numbers - and how we read them. For example, did the United Church of Christ really triple in size between 1990 and 2001, and then halve again before 2008 - or were the questions asked to learn these figures completely different?

Trueblood on ministry of the laity

Simon Holt notes, in a recent post:
[Elton] Trueblood was especially critical of the diminishment of the ‘ministry of the laity’ to (i) giving support to the structures and programmes of the institution, and (ii) helping the pastor with the chores around the church buildings. Trueblood argued that "the only kind of lay ministry worth encouraging is that which makes a radical difference to the entire Christian enterprise." In other words, lay ministry is not some second rate auxiliary to the real thing. It is the real thing—men and women engaged at the very forefront of everyday life as ministers of liberation and redemption: "If Christianity is to be understood not as a retreat from life in the world but as an effort to transfigure life itself, if follows that the Church needs the service of men and women at the point where they are most exposed to the problems of our political and economic order." And that’s not in church on Sunday…”

Holt (who writes on the blog, Simply Simon) says more before and after this extract.

Ministering in Rural Areas

Muriel Mellow has been running a series of articles on the Canadian Church Rural Network site. The latest (and last) is now available. (Previous ones are in the Archives section.)

The articles have been based on her book, Defining Work: Gender Professional Work and the Case of Rural Clergy. The most recent article in the series is entitled: Professional Demands and Personal Lives, and looks at how rural clergy manage the relationship between professional and private life, and the different challenges for women and men in this regard. What's presented in the article is a much condensed version of what she has to say in the book.

Here's what the publisher's blurb has to say about the book: For rural clergy, the lines between private life and professional life can blur. Their offices are often in their homes, parishioners are also neighbours, and professional duties are intertwined with emotional caregiving and volunteer activity. In a society that defines work as paid, public, and intellectual the ambiguity inherent in the life of the rural clergy poses unique challenges. Muriel Mellow considers how men and women in this occupational group conceptualize "work" in the context of their unique circumstances and shows how their experience raises questions for feminist theories of work. Based on interviews with forty rural Protestant clergy, Mellow argues that male and female clergy challenge gendered definitions of work by focusing on obligation, context, visibility, and time. She also considers how clergys work is shaped by the rural setting, arguing that we must consider how work is "placed" as well as gendered.

The book was published in 2006.