The phone rings again - or it pings with another social media message.
Another friend is reaching out - clergy or lay, working for the mainline church or a member of a congregation.
They’ve just been fired, or they work with someone who should be fired - but won’t be.
They’re running the church all by themselves because no one else shows up.
They have no idea what they’re doing but they’re afraid of being found out, and losing their job.
They’re asked to do things (fire others, close churches) that they don’t want to do, but they can’t say no.
They know the budget can’t last another year, but everyone keeps going ahead like everything is ok.
It’s a mess. They’re stressed, they’re frustrated, they’re mad. Most of them, somewhere in the conversation say this:
‘I’m never going back to that church/denomination/diocese again.’
These calls are becoming more and more frequent. Maybe it’s because of what I do, or my experience in the church. But it’s becoming alarming.
People aren’t calling about what we think of as classic misbehavior - no one is stealing money or having inappropriate relationships (at least, they’re not telling me about it if they are!).
The alarming things are much more mundane:
Power dynamics
Entrenchment
People in jobs they’re not qualified for (but won’t leave)
Politics (all sides - people who embrace certain politics, people who won’t embrace politics, etc).
Conflict
I was worried that if I published this, people would see themselves in my story and feel exposed.
But I guarantee that these area) composites and
b) a drop in the bucket of the things I’ve heard lately.
I tell them all I really can’t help them beyond being a listening supporter. I have no ecclesiastical standing or authority to be involved in their situation.
But I can tell them this:
They are not alone (by a long shot)
This is what institutional collapse looks like
And it’s hard to see the big picture when you’re putting out fires every day.
It’s hard to see the system shifting when it all feels so personal.
My ministry has always been about helping people re-imagine church.
This is why so many people are calling me when things feel intolerable in their ministry. They definitely want to imagine better ways of serving God and their neighbor!
What I see is that before we get to the point of building something new, we need to see how it’s not a choice anymore.
The church of the mid-20th century is not working now that we are well into the 21st.
And the fires we’re putting out - that feel like unique, isolated situations - are signs of the futility of doing the same thing again and again, and hoping for different results.
But it all starts with seeing the places we are stuck - and how we use those pain parts to start building something new.
It may feel like you’re too stressed, too busy, too caught up in what your ministry looks like now to think about the big picture.
But I’m convinced that the walls we keep banging our heads against are exactly the places that God is calling us to turn around and find new paths for sharing Good News.
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At the risk of over posting, something brief. In the last 42 years of ordained ministry, I have gotten caught a few times in the church bureaucratic machinery, and in different church bodies. I should add I am a non-stipendiary priest, always serving alongside a "day job" of university teaching. None of the incidents involved any infraction on my part that deserved punishment. For the most part it was either breakdown of diocesan process or being on the wrong side of a personality in power. Nevertheless, when months go by with no action, when the rules are being used for other purposes, it has been painful for me to fit this with the Gospel, with the work of Jesus of Nazareth. But the church institutional structure's no different than the university or government or corporations--full of humans who sometimes behave badly or ineptly.
That some of this machinery becomes an end in itself, thinks it knows better than people and parish priests, is blindly clinging to process in the face of change--here's where we have real dilemmas, as you suggest.
At the bottom, Christ remains, and Christ's body.
Spot on essay. A colleague friend who works in demographics says that mainline churches are facing massive losses in membership due to the old age of our members. And, as they die off, the churches lose their most generous donors. There’s no time like the present to explore change in our models of church.