Gnaw on this 1.2 – Paid Clergy?

Wendell Berry’s essay, “God and Country,” in his collection entitled “What are People For,” has to be one of the most profound for me as a clergy person. Its painful, convicting, and crisis-of-conscious forming. It also prompts me to imagine an alternative way.

His basic premise in the essay (which you should read for yourself) exclaims that Christianity as it is practiced in the west is predisposed to ecological conflict because of the way it has, “made peace with ‘the economy.’”

He writes:

“The organized church comes immediately under a compulsion to think of itself, and identify itself to the world, not as an institution synonymous with its truth and its membership, but as a hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects, and offices, all urgently requiring economic support.”

“Like any other public institution so organize, the organized church is dependent upon, ‘the economy.’”

As he levels his critique, Berry places his finger on how the tool of disembodied spiritualization actually maintains this economic alliance. He writes:

“No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to ’spiritual’ subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.”

Berry’s indictment is shared by many participants in emergence Christianity. The atonement was not only for individual human souls, but for all things. As long as its for individual human souls only, bodies, ecosystems, plants, and animals become accessories or distractions.

Berry then goes on to critique two “manifestations” that maintain the organized church’s alliance with the economy. For this post, I’ll focus on one, which is the first one he addresses in the essay. He writes:

“The first is the phrase ‘full-time Christian service,’ which the churches of my experience have used exclusively to refer to the ministry, thereby at once making of the devoted life a religious specialty or career and removing the possibility of devotion from other callings”

“The churches in this way excerpt sanctity from the human economy and its work just as Cartesian science has excerpted it from the material creation. And its easy to see the interdependence of these two desecrations: the desecration of nature would have been impossible without the desecration of work, and vice versa.”

Emergents have been picking at this scab for a while. I’ve had conversations about this and other conflicts related to being a professional Christian. Berry’s critique deals with the devaluation of work for the general public by the spiritual and financial valuation of full time ministry. There are other problems created by a paid clergy structure as well; from the silencing of prophetic proclamation, to the creation of congregational codependency upon staff.

What do you think? Should the structures that maintain a class of professional ministers be dismantled or evacuated? Can they be redeemed?

Pastoring as Friend: an emerging struggle.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the source of tension within my vocation as a church staff person, i.e. professional minister. There are a lot of annoyances in church work, just as there are in any job. However, as a fundamentally relational being in the most relational of vocations, the greatest struggle for emerging clergy is the nature of church relationships. Here’s what I mean.

Within the church of the modern era there emerged a relational matrix. Largely guided by modern theological and social assumptions. Assumptions like, “The pastor is the spiritual shepherd of the flock,” or “The pastor is the visionary leader of the congregation.” (Basically the same assumption as it has adapted its language from the mid 20th century into the 90’s) In other words, Pastors and ministers are autonomous individual leaders (mostly men) who existed above the community. What’s more, there developed an assumption that a certain measure of distance between clergy and laity be maintained. I remember being told in seminary never to develop close friendships with church members.

The proof of such base assumptions on the part of traditional or established churches is in the structure of staff job descriptions. To be blunt, they keep you so busy you don’t have time to get to know anyone; especially anyone outside of the church or outside of the faith. What’s more, members will all too frequently complain about a minister who appears aloof or impersonal. All the while ignoring the fact that structurally most pastoral staff are precluded from making real connections with people. To emerging clergy who are inherently relational in their approach to the vocation of ministry, this is frustrating if not altogether toxic.

In a lot of ways, this dynamic reflects modern theological assumptions about God; distant, all powerful, authoritative, in control, approachable but only on “his” terms.

As a pomo-kid I really didn’t buy into that vision of church leadership (or of God). I still haven’t, and therein is the rub. For those of us in traditional church contexts the modern matrix of church leadership still holds sway. For the most part, established churches want visionary individuals who will bring numerical success at a safe distance. Meanwhile, many of us emerging ministers long for nothing less than authentic friendship with the people to whom we are called. To know and be known together in the presence of God and to walk with on another in a life-giving exchange of stories, prayers, practices, and projects.

Perhaps emergence for established churches begins by creating space for emerging clergy to pastor as friends.