Bullying, Abusive Congregations

I was alerted to this blog post on abusive congregations yesterday by a tweet from a friend on Twitter. So I'm passing it along. The post itself is fairly moderate, but the several comments that follow show an appalling problem within the church - an appalling lack of Christian behaviour from people in some congregations towards their ministers. You have to wonder if they ever pray, read their Bibles, think about Christian discipleship.

I've heard of such things with other colleagues, and experienced it myself in a somewhat less severe way when I was filling in as pastor at a former church, so it's by no means an American problem.

The post itself refers to research on the topic from the Clergy Health Initiative, and one of the people commenting adds several useful links which anyone suffering this kind of abuse should follow up.

One of the other awful things from the comments is how many of them talk about the way in which the ministers' spouses were also abused. As Paul says, if I remember rightly, Brothers (Sisters), these things should not be!

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.