Leaving Ministry: The
Changing Nature of Pastoral Vocation
By Paul Miller
Leaving Church
Every pastor, if he or she
is honest, thinks about leaving the ministry at one time or another.
Even if it never becomes a full-blown personal crisis, fatigue,
discouragement, conflict or lack of appreciation will sooner or
later put pastoral vocation to the test. That is one reason why
Barbara Brown Taylor’s 2006 book Leaving Church: A Memoir of
Faith has struck such a responsive chord with so many. Brown
Taylor chronicles her own decision to leave congregational ministry
with such honesty and eloquence that we can all identify with her.
Through her writings, she has been a source of encouragement and
inspiration to a generation of clergy. She has taught many to
believe once again in the efficacy of the preached word; and through
her passion and gift for language, she has shown us how significant
ministry can still be amidst the ruins of Christendom.
So why did it bother me so
much to read Leaving Church? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a
lot to like about this book. Brown Taylor has a keen eye for both
the humor and the pathos of ministry. Unlike many theoretical
descriptions of pastoral work that frankly fail to ring true you can
tell that this woman knows what it’s like from the inside. She’s
been in the trenches. She experienced first the frenzied pace of the
large urban corporate church; and then, after fleeing to the
supposed peace and quiet of the small town, she discovered the other
end of the spectrum -- the unique and bizarre stew of demands and
responsibilities that constitute the daily routine of the solo
pastor:
Day by day, I did what most clergy do. I proofread the mailed
bulletin, answered the telephone, chose the hymns for Sunday, and
changed the lightbulb in the bathroom. I sat with families in the
waiting room at the hospital and spooned applesauce into the mouths
of patients in the nursing home. I visited shut-ins at home as well
as a few at the county jail. I learned how to send money orders to
post bond. I gave the invocation at the Special Olympics held in the
high school football stadium and ate lunch at the Clarkesville Soup
Kitchen with some of the regulars. I taught Sunday School, counseled
couples, wrote annual reports, and led worship.
[1]
When she describes the
phenomenon of emotional transference – a pastoral minefield into
which most pastors have ventured but few have emerged unscathed –
well, you know she knows what she’s talking about.
In seminary I had read about the phenomenon of
transference, whereby human beings sometimes transfer the feelings
they have for one pivotal person in their lives to another pivotal
person in their lives, especially when they are feeling vulnerable
in a relationship. I had read about it, but I had never gotten a
full dose of what it meant until I was the sole pastor of a church.
Sometimes, when people were busy adoring me or despising me, I got
the distinct impression that it was not about me at all…. What did
surprise me was the depth of feeling I could evoke in people by
doing a small kindness on the one hand or botching a small detail on
the other.[2]
Barbara Brown Taylor
articulates a profound and expansive ecclesiology in terms that
ought to be illuminating to any pastor or congregation.
… church is not a stopping place but a starting
place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering
people a place where they may engage the steady practice of
listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church
can help people gain a feel for how God shows up – not only in Holy
Bibles and Holy Communion, but also in near neighbors, mysterious
strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they
leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them.[3]
There is so much of real
value in this book, not only for practitioners of ministry, but for
anyone who has a stake in and a heart for the church.
So, I repeat: Just what
is her problem? Here is a truly gifted woman, named by Baylor
University “one of the twelve most effective preachers in the
English-speaking world,” a natural extrovert with an intuitive grasp
of the human condition, who loves conversation and engagement,
fiercely intelligent, with the tool box chock full of skills – and
she ups and packs it in. There is something about this story that
just doesn’t sit right. It’s not that she chose to leave pastoral
ministry for a different career because there are many ways to
exercise ministry besides the traditional roles of preaching,
presiding and pastoring. And it’s not that she needed a fresh start,
because, God knows, the work can be draining. And it’s not even that
she questioned her vocation, because who doesn’t? But the book is
called Leaving Church and that’s what makes me
uncomfortable; because Brown Taylor tells her story in such a way
that the ultimate responsibility for her decision is shifted from
her to the church which she served. She gives us the impression that
she holds the church somehow accountable for failing to meet her
needs and that in order to become who she needed to become, she had
to get out. And that, I think, is profoundly unfair.
Leaving Church
raises basic questions about the nature of vocation and whether the
notion of life long calling really even makes sense any more. It’s
not a question of commitment. Indeed, it was precisely Brown
Taylor’s hyper-active sense of commitment drove her to the brink of
burn-out, if not break-down. But she seems to have looked to
ministry as a means of finding personal fulfillment, and in the end,
concluded that the church had failed her.
Brown Taylor wanted
ministry to satisfy her hunger for communion with God. She threw
herself into ministry, hoping that her quest for God would be
fulfilled; and she left ministry because those hopes were
frustrated.
Behind my
luminous images of Sunday mornings I saw the committee meetings, the
numbing routines, and the chronically difficult people who took up
such a large part of my time. Behind my heroic image of myself I saw
my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as
hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval. I saw the
unforgiving faces of my family, left behind every holiday for the
past fifteen years, while I went to conduct services for other
people and their families.
Above all, I saw that my desire to draw as near
to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for
hurt things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue. Drawn to a life
of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider. Drawn to marry
the Divine Presence, I had ended up estranged. Like the bluebirds
that sat on my windowsills at home, pecking at the reflections they
saw in the glass, I could not reach for the greenness for which my
soul longed. For years I had believed that if I just kept it up, the
glass would finally disappear. Now, for the first time, I wondered
if I had devoted myself to an illusion.
[4]
There is something
disingenuous in presenting this as somehow the church’s problem.
Many readers and reviewers have commented on the authenticity of her
writing; but I found it a highly calculated and carefully crafted
“authenticity.” Brown Taylor has selected from her experience that
which is useful for the image that she wishes to portray. This is
not a condemnation. We all choose what we are prepared to show to
the world. But Brown Taylor would have us believe that the incessant
demands that the work laid on her, and the sheer volume of
woundedness and pathology she encountered in the church sucked the
life out of her and made it impossible for her to express her true
humanity. In a 2006 interview, she said this:
The untenable nature of the experience [of
ministry] for me was being designated the holiest member of the
congregation, who could be in all places at all times and require no
time for sermon preparation. Those aren’t symptomatic of a mean
congregation; those are the normal expectations of 24/7
availability. I spent so many years learning to be holy that it took
me just as many years to learn to be human again. I suppose the book
[Leaving Church] traces the journey from one to the other,
and also announces my revelation that my humanity might be more
precious and useful to God than my holiness.
[5]
The cover of the first
edition of Leaving Church shows a bird cage with the door
ajar and a dove flying to freedom – a pictorial representation of
how she viewed her relationship to the church that demanded so much
of her and gave so little in return. But my question would be:
where did these expectations originate? Did her people really
expect her to be available every hour of every day, or to be “the
holiest member of the congregation”? Or was that more of a
projection onto the church of something unresolved within herself?
Vocational Crisis in Literature
Leaving Church is
an autobiographical memoir, yet the way in which she tells her story
resembles many fictional representations of “clerical life,” to use
George Eliot’s phrase. I found it helpful to compare Leaving
Church to other fictional depictions of ministry which explore
many of the themes which she presents as integral to her story.
There are novels that deal
with the beauty and grandeur of every day pastoral work. Georges
Bernanos’ classic Diary of a Country Priest[6]
springs to mind, as does Marilynne Robinson’s recent masterpiece
Gilead.[7]
These books describe the potential for pastors to be mediators
of grace and redemption. But a much more common literary theme is
that of the pastor who leaves the ministry; the pastor who
arrives at the agonizing decision that his or her vocation has grown
cold and he or she must leave. I think the reasons for this are
obvious. In part, this is art imitating life. Some studies suggest
that up to half of Protestant clergy leave the ministry within the
first five years.[8]
But it is also because vocational crises simply make more dramatic
stories than the day to day routine of ministry. As the novel has
evolved over the past hundred and fifty years, the inner struggles
of the individual pastor have played a larger role. According to
Irving Sussman, fictional clergy prior to the nineteenth century
tended to function as representative icons of vices or virtues.
Pre-modern writers “went on portraying their imaginary clergy as
characters strutting and fretting their roles upon the stage of
life.”[9]
From the late 18th century on, however, characterization
began to explore into the inner landscape of clergy as persons.
Consequently, “the very context of the clergyman’s action changed.
He no longer was seen as a politician or an ambitious seeker after
power over the society of man or as a tool of the politicians.”
Rather, the fictional minister was reborn with a new emphasis on the
tension between vocation and the integrated self; and the
destructive side of ministry was the context in which the self was
put to the test. The literary pastor was “envisioned as the man
[sic] singled out to hold up the ideal, to witness to the ‘divine
dream.’”[10]
Many novelists have created compelling narratives by juxtaposing
this ultimately unattainable ideal of ministry with the frustrations
and discouragements of reality. When vocation and the self are in
conflict, self-preservation demands that vocation be sacrificed.
“Leaving ministry” novels
can be categorized into several broad groupings. One centers on the
“crisis of faith” narrative. The pastor realizes that he or she no
longer believes in what he or she is doing. For example, the Rev.
Richard Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South[11]
was a conscientious but rather fussy vicar in an idyllic rural
parish in Victorian England. Suddenly he tells his daughter Margaret
that he has decided to resign his living and renounce his
ordination. He cannot, in good conscience, subscribe to the church’s
requirements. Being an earnest Victorian, he has no alternative but
to quit rather than live in an intolerable state of dishonesty. Hale
uproots his family and moves them to a northern industrial town
where he finds work as a private tutor. Richard Hale’s crisis of
clerical conscience propels the narrative of North and South.
It kick-starts the story, so to speak.
A more recent “crisis of
conscience” example is In the Beauty of the Lilies by John
Updike. The Rev. Clarence Wilmot realizes one day that he has lost
his faith. Like Richard Hale, he leaves the Presbyterian ministry
abruptly and tries to eke out a hand to mouth existence as an
encyclopedia salesman.[12]
In Updike’s hands, this becomes the precipitating event in a
multi-generational saga of a family’s loss and return to faith. Both
North and South and In the Beauty of the Lilies deal
with a pastor’s loss of faith; but the focus of this inner crisis is
the individual conscience of the pastor, not the nature of the
church. For example, when Richard Hale’s daughter pleads with
him to explain his actions, he takes the full burden of
responsibility on himself:
“Doubts, papa! Doubts as to religion?” asked
Margaret, more shocked than ever.
“No! not doubts as to religion; not the
slightest injury to that.”
He paused. Margaret sighed, as if standing on
the verge of some new horror. He began again, speaking rapidly, as
if to get over a set task:
“You could not
understand it all, if I told you – my anxiety, for years past, to
know whether I had any right to hold my living – my efforts to
quench my smouldering doubts by the authority of the Church. Oh!
Margaret, how I love the holy Church from which I am to be shut
out!”
Religious faith is one of
the casualties of modernity. Scientific knowledge has made
traditional beliefs untenable for many. Matthew Arnold wrote of the
“melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of once secure Christian
conviction, receding into the past like a wave into the sea. Faith
crises were rooted in personal honesty and integrity. There is an
aspect of the tragic hero in these clerical figures whose
consciences will not permit them assent to things in which they can
no longer accept. The crucial point in these example, however, is
that the individuals took responsibility for their own decisions.
A second category of
“leaving ministry” narratives is rooted in the theme of moral
failing. The spring which feeds this particular stream is Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. A Month of Sundays, for example,
is John Updike’s explicit attempt to recast Hawthorne’s tale in
modern terms. Updike presents Rev. Tom Marshfield, the sexually
promiscuous pastor as a present-day Arthur Dimmesdale.[13]
Another important American novel from the end of the nineteenth
century, The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic,
explores the interwoven themes of sexuality, faith and pastoral
ministry in a daringly provocative way. The book is set in New York
State in the 1880s at a time of great social and religious upheaval
when the center of American culture was shifting from farm and
frontier to the city. Theron Ware was a rising young star in the
Methodist firmament, a much sought-after preacher with a promising
career ahead of him. The annual Conference assigns him to the
backwater town of Octavius rather than to a more prestigious pulpit
and in here Ware encounters the darker side of “old time religion”
-- anti-Catholic bigotry, self-serving corruption,
anti-intellectualism and a taste for fire and brimstone preaching.
But Ware’s familiar world is shaken to its foundations not so much
by disillusionment with his church as by his acquaintance with
several characters. One is Father Forbes, the polymathic and
free-thinking priest of the local Catholic parish who explodes
Theron Ware’s prejudices about popery and introduces him to a world
of intellectual wonders that he had never before encountered. His
most fateful meeting, however, is with Celia Madden, the daughter of
Irish immigrants who represents the aesthetic side of life. Celia is
an accomplished musician and Theron Ware soon finds himself seduced
by her alluring beauty. In the evenings she captures his hear by
playing Chopin nocturnes by moonlight. His friendship with Father
Forbes and Celia Madden highlight the shabbiness and boorishness of
his own people and church and make him long for a more fulfilling
experience. Not only that, he becomes deeply dissatisfied with his
marriage and has soon fallen head over heels in love with Celia.
Love causes him to behave erratically and recklessly. He steals
money from his church in order to pursue Celia to New York City and
profess his love for her. He ends up humiliated, his career ruined,
his marriage imperiled and his self-esteem in tatters. He has a
complete emotional breakdown.
For help, he turns to
Brother and Sister Soulsby, a team of traveling evangelists who
specialize in using the latest emotional techniques to entice
congregations to give money. They had conducted a recent revival
meeting at his church and he ends up at their doorstep, broken and
destitute. They take him in, get him back on his feet and encourage
him to leave the area and start fresh. What is revealed at the end
of the novel, however, is that Theron Ware is really nothing more
than an empty shell of a person. His entire sense of self came from
the role and expectations created for him by the church. As long as
he lived within the boundaries of that role he functioned well; but
taken out of that context and left on his own to explore uncharted
emotional territory, his personality disintegrates until there is
nothing left. Having failed to gain the approval of his
congregation, of Father Forbes or Celia, he simply decides to take
up another superficial role, move to Seattle, and become a
politician:
“What Soulsby said about politics out there [in
Washington] interested me enormously …. I shouldn’t be surprised if
I found myself doing something in that line. I can speak, you know,
if I can’t do anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who
knows? I may turn up in Washington a full-blown senator before I’m
forty.”
[14]
The emerging modern world
required individuals to construct a sense of self apart from
socially conditioned roles. Theron Ware’s “damnation” was his
inability to achieve that stable sense of self apart from the
responses of others – in the language of family systems theory, to
be “self-differentiated.” In an earlier time, such
self-differentiation was not required so much of pastors.
Expectations were more clearly laid out and the pastor’s task was to
work within the context of that pre-assigned role. Once Theron Ware
moves out of that old secure world and into the new world of
personal self-discovery, he becomes lost at sea, unable to navigate
the unknown territory into which he has ventured.
As we move farther into
the twentieth century, the pastor’s personal need for intimacy,
affirmation and self-fulfillment come to the fore. Earlier works
tended to be suspicious of these desires, seeing them as a snare
leading to moral disaster. More contemporary works see the pastor’s
desire for self-actualization in a positive light. The search for
emotional fulfillment is less as a sign of moral failing than the
legitimate cry of the heart. Literature reflects a profound shift in
the self-understanding of pastors and their relationship to the
church. Ministry used to be regarded as an ascetic discipline which
demanded self-denial. Richard Baxter’s Puritan manual, The
Reformed Pastor is the classic statement of this view[15]
Pastors are shepherds and they must care for their flocks with
single minded devotion. Their work is literally a matter eternal
life or death. The salvation of their people’s souls is at stake. If
there is too much work for the pastor, that is no excuse to leave it
undone. He must hire an assistant – but pay for it out of his own
stipend. Self-care is not a big item for Richard Baxter. But times
have changed, and we no longer see Baxter’s vision of ministry as
healthy. Literature reflects this change in values. Novels focused
more and more on the pastor’s emotional, social, sexual and
spiritual needs and the way in which the church’s demands conflict
with those needs.
Robert Daley’s fine novel
A Priest and a Girl, published in 1969, is a case in point.
The main character is Father Frank McCabe, a priest in a large
parish in New York City. While on a trip to France, McCabe falls in
love with a flight attendant. He begins a sexual relationship with
her. He conceals it for as long as he can, but his position becomes
impossible. He has to choose between his vocation or his love for
Michelle – a she wines out. When he decides to leave the priesthood,
his entire world falls to pieces. Daley’s novel is set in that time
of transition from the old pre-Vatican II Catholic world in which
the lives of priests were completely governed by the church, to a
new world in which pastors’ personal needs came to the fore. Frank
McCabe’s ministry was still anchored in the old world and when he
left the church, he left everything behind. His family disowned him,
his friends in the priesthood turned their backs on him, he had no
job and no marketable skills. But what choice did he have, faced
with his need to give and receive love?
“’Love is everything, isn’t it?’
“’Yes.’
“’I mean,
it’s all meaningless without love.’
“Many times in the past he had said
words like this, but never before had they meant to him what they
meant now.
“’I mean, you can only love one or two
persons,’ he babbled. ‘You can’t love everybody, no matter how often
some people claim you can, claim you should, claim they themselves
do. And if you can’t find at least one person to love specifically,
then you can’t love at all. Not anyone. Not ever.’
“He held her. Her mouth was against his
neck, his fingers fumbled with his shirt, her voice murmured
endearments he could not grasp. He began to undo her dress,
determined to go through with this. Whatever it turned out to be.
“I’ve got to find someone to love,
whatever the law says.
“I’ve got to find someone to love to
save my soul.”[16]
“I’ve got to find someone
to love to save my soul.” Could there be a better expression of the
longing of the contemporary self? On one level, A Priest and a
Girl deals with what used to be classified as “moral failing”,
but it rejects that judgment. Frank McCabe had to leave the church
because the church denied him what he needed to actualize his full
humanity.
This theme is explored in
Jeff Berryman’s novel Leaving Ruin.[17]
It is the story of Rev. Cyrus Manning, pastor of the First
Church of Ruin, Texas. Things are beginning to unravel for Manning,
both professionally and personally. The intolerable stress of
ministry is at the root. His relationship with his wife is strained,
key members of his congregation are trying to get him dismissed,
but, worst of all, Manning is beginning to doubt that God is
speaking to him any longer. The novel is told in the first person
and the narrative is punctuated by heart-rending, Psalm-like prayers
that Christ will tear open the veil of silence and make himself
known. Manning is a minister on the verge of burn-out, exhausted by
the pettiness, neediness and mean-spiritedness of his people. He has
begun to explore his mystical side, hoping for an experience of
personal communion with the Beyond. He has developed a love of the
writings of Thomas Merton and a more personal and imaginative
approach to biblical interpretation which some of his Bible-belt
congregants find intolerable. He wonders if his call is simply
slipping away. And, like Barbara Brown Taylor, one day he finds
himself weeping uncontrollably:
… suddenly –
I’m sobbing.
It’s been happening a lot lately. Like a slow
leak, growing under pressure, my emotion presses on my chest, and
after years of steadiness, am I finally caving in, teetering on the
unknown brink of who know what? Last Wednesday, after my nursing
home visitation, and a long run, I locked myself in the bathroom,
turned on the shower, and wept until the hot water turned cold.[18]
Like Brown Taylor, Cyrus
Manning seeks places where he can feel human, where he can be
himself apart from the suffocating weight of expectations that have
been laid on him. He develops a friendship with Brother Collins,
pastor of the local African-American church, who prayed with him and
counseled him and “laughed a laugh like the shout of an angel… I
need to hear that laugh at least once a week just to remember the
power of freedom.”[19]
He drives to the next town where he sits alone in a bar, nursing a
soft drink. The atmosphere of the church has become so stultifying
that he has to find somewhere he can breathe again. Episodes like
these communicate the reality of grace breaking in from places
beyond his own milieu – not unlike Brown Taylor’s discovery of grace
outside the four walls of the church in the beauty of nature (79) or
through her husbands deep love of native spirituality (185). Both
Manning and Brown Taylor describe what every pastor must learn –
that ministry, for better or for worse, is about giving and that if
we give constantly and are not replenished we will run dry – and,
that the sources of replenishment must often be sought and found
outside the context of our own pastoral work.
I am arguing that
Leaving Church, even though it is a work of non-fiction, fits
into a literary tradition. It closely resembles novels about pastors
who leave their ministries. Both the fictional Cyrus Manning and the
very real Barbara Brown Taylor flee the church in order to find God.
They have deep spiritual needs that the institution not only cannot
meet, but actually undermine. “If I miss the mystery of God,”
Manning writes in his journal, “I will die.”[20]
“I had done everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart
of God as I could,” Brown Taylor confesses, “only to find myself out
of gas on a lonely road, filled with bitterness and self-pity.”[21]
At the root of the problem was the church and the demands of
ministry.
There’s something true
about these accounts. Often the institutional church does quench the
Spirit. Both the fictional Leaving Ruin and the
autobiographical Leaving Church testify to this. They also
testify to the power of grace to erupt in unexpected ways and places
outside the sanctioned bounds of the ministry; and to the joy and
satisfaction that comes from the privilege of being allowed into
people’s lives, even amidst the pain and frustration. What is
troubling, though, is the underlying assumption that there is
something about ministry which is inherently destructive of human
flourishing; and that the only real choice for a person who wants to
find true personal authenticity is to leave.
I keep coming back to my
original question. What’s is Barbara Brown Taylor’s problem? I can
understand why Jeff Berryman’s character Cyrus Manning left the
church. He was victimized by a mean-spirited and sick congregation.
That’s not just fiction. Every pastor knows that the church attracts
the walking wounded and we sometimes pay a heavy price to bear the
sins and sicknesses of our people. But this does not seem to
describe in any way the situation that Brown Taylor fled. As she
herself admits, “it was the best of parish ministry that did me in.”[22]
She was so effective that her congregation not only flourished, but
grew to the point of being unable to cope with their own success. In
a way, the church was forced to deal with the success of their
pastor. I have read that Brown Taylor’s celebrity status resulted in
visitors arriving at her tiny church by the bus load, filling the
sanctuary and crowding out the regular congregation. And here I
think we get close to the heart of her dilemma with ministry – her
own perfectionism.
Pastoral Perfectionism
Perfectionism is an
occupational hazard for clergy. Perfectionism is often thought to be
an obsession with detail, but that is only one of its
manifestations. Perfectionism is really the belief that things are
never good enough. Clergy are faced every day with the huge gulf
that separates the perfection of God from what we find in ourselves
and in the church, and sometimes we are simply unable deal with the
gap between ideal and reality.[23]
Perfectionists have a vision of perfection, but they are perpetually
frustrated and unhappy because things always fall short. Some
perfectionists respond by trying to be perfect. They drive
themselves to exhaustion in the pursuit of impossible standards.
Others succumb to despair. They know they will never succeed, so
they become despondent and depressed.
Brown Taylor’s memoir
describes her relentless longing for a sense of completeness – of
perfection – longing that was constantly frustrated by contact with
real life. She has a tremendous capacity for joy and appreciation
for beauty, but you get the feeling that it’s never enough. After
leaving Atlanta, she and her husband spent months searching for the
perfect place to live, a Walden-like refuge where she could find the
communion with nature that she craved so much. The same quest for
completion through an experience of God marked her ministry. I can
only think that it was this tendency, and not only the demands of
the work, that really exhausted her resources and led her to hold
the church accountable for her plight.
In her book Speaking of
Sin, Brown Taylor notes that contemporary preachers avoid the
topic of sin because people have come to associate the word with a
heavy load of guilt rained down on them from the pulpit. But
preachers need to take up this neglected theme, she argues, because
the presence of sin is so real and so debilitating in the lives of
individuals and communities. Her definition of sin is interesting,
though. Sin, she says, is a state of lost innocence resulting in
broken relationships. The task of the Christian life is a painful
process of reparation and healing that leads to some of that
innocence being restored. The fruit of an honest dealing with sin is
healed relationships.
… the choice to remain in a wrecked
relationship with God and other human beings is called sin. The
choice to enter into the process of repair is called repentance, an
often bitter medicine with the undisputed power to save lives.
[24]
The role of the pastor is
to guide people in this process.
The days are long gone when most preachers can
stand up in pulpits and name people’s sins for them. They do not
have that authority anymore. What they can do, I believe, is to
describe the experience of sin and its aftermath so vividly that
people can identify its presence in their own lives, not as a
chronic source of guilt, nor as a sure proof that they are
inherently bad, but as the part of their individual and corporate
lives that is crying out for change.[25]
And I would have to say
“Amen” to that. But the problem with her analysis of sin is that,
for a perfectionist, the drive towards personal change can never be
complete. The old (and much-maligned) definition of sin as the
unavoidable corruption of our nature certainly led to a lot of bad
theology and bad pastoral care over the years; but it had this going
for it, that it saved us the despair that sets in when realize how
limited our power to change ourselves really is. The old definition
of sin was the correlative of a definition of grace that was much
more expansive than our modern notions, simply by virtue of its
being truly unmerited. Knowing you are a sinner can make you feel
pretty depressed; but it can also liberate you from relentlessly
striving after perfection. The reason Augustine hated the works of
his opponent Pelagius was not because he was a morbid pessimist or
because he had never really gotten over his Manichean dualism. It
was because Augustine, with the pastor’s heart, knew the dangers of
any program of spiritual improvement that is grounded in our own
inherent goodness. At heart Pelagius was an elitist. His gospel was
for those who can help themselves. But for those who know they are
powerless to help themselves, his apparently high view of human
choice and freedom can be crushing. And this is the danger of
preaching that is rooted, however subtly, in perfectionism. Brown
Taylor is absolutely right in her diagnosis. Sin does destroy
relationships. But she has confused the symptom with the disease.
When she writes that sin is “deadly alienation from the source of
all life … the experience of being cut off from air, light,
sustenance, community, hope, meaning, life,[26]”
she is describing the consequence of sin, not its cause. We
do not become sinners because we have allowed ourselves to be
alienated from the source of life; we are alienated from the source
of life because we are sinners. And for that, we need help that is
beyond our own abilities. Because of this basic theological
confusion, Brown Taylor offers as a remedy that we should resolutely
flee situations that are not life-enhancing, which is precisely what
she did in leaving church. But the tragic truth is ideals are always
beyond our grasp.
Barbara Brown Taylor left
pastoral ministry not because she lost her faith but as part of a
quest for a more authentic and life-giving faith. Sin manifested
itself in her estrangement from God; but then occurs the subtle
theological shift in which the cause of her estrangement moves from
herself onto the situation in which she felt so trapped – ministry.
She does not see the root of her problem in her own basic sinfulness
and her need of salvation, but in the flaws of the church that
blocked her access to God. As Theron Ware embarked on his own quest
for fulfillment, he increasingly blamed his life situation – his
marriage and his congregation – for his problems. In a final,
devastating meeting with Celia Madden, she speaks words of bitter
truth:
You thought it would amuse and impress us to
hear you ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose
money supports you, and making a mock of the things they believe in,
and which you for your life wouldn’t dare let them know you didn’t
believe in.[27]
I am not suggesting that
Brown Taylor is so openly contemptuous of the church. She left the
parish well-loved, with a heavy heart and great sorrow. But one gets
the impression from her that the church is so inherently flawed that
it is really beyond repair. Fellow Episcopalian and author Garrett
Keizer writes approvingly of Leaving Church and one hears
strong echoes in Brown Taylor’s book of his assessment that North
American Christianity has “become … a trade show of pathologies and
fussy preferences, which any sane person with a will to survive must
eventually flee.”[28]
“All I can figure,” Brown Taylor herself writes,
is that any body of believers whose faith is
funded by a giving God will find their lives by giving too – not
reasonably, so that there is plenty left for sheet music and utility
bills, but lavishly, so that the survival of the institution is
always and blessedly in question. What I cannot figure is how
any church organized around the self-donation of Jesus can stay
invested in self-preservation.”[29]
I cannot think of a better
description of an unrealizable ideal. The fantasy of a church that
does not need to attend to its own preservation is nothing more than
a wish dream, a rhetorical flourish that can have no basis in
reality. The only way to maintain such a fantasy is to remove
yourself to a place where you no longer need to take responsibility
for what you say. A church that does not care about its own
institutional preservation on some level will not survive more than
a generation; nor will it have the capacity to support ministries in
the name of Jesus. Pitting “sheet music and utility bills” against
purer concepts of mission is simply a false dichotomy. The question
is not whether the church will be invested in self-preservation --
because it must if it is to endure; the question is the ends towards
which that self-preservation is directed. If institutional
self-preservation does become an end in itself, the sole reason for
the church’s existence, then of course, the church’s mission is
imperiled. But let’s be honest, if the church did not care about its
own well being as an institution, many very precious and important
things would be lost, and one consequence is that there would be no
pastors to buy Barbara Brown Taylor’s books.
The pastor’s
responsibility to criticize the church, especially in its North
American form, is not in question. Prophetic critique is genuinely
needed and generously warranted. Mainline Christianity is in a very
bad way these days. But has it ever been any different? When has the
church not failed to reflect faithfully the “self-donation of
Jesus”? When have the disciples not fallen miserably short of the
Master’s example? There seems to be this view that the church has
only recently lost its way. If that is so, why did we need Francis
of Assisi? Martin Luther? Or John Wesley? The great ecclesiological
insight of the Reformation is that the church is semper
reformanda – always in need of reform. We are simply living out
the most recent chapter in this ongoing story. People seem to think
that the church has only just gone off the rails and departed from
its ideals. This frustrated idealism affects not only one’s view of
the church but of the ministry. There is the intimation that once
upon a time, ministry provided needy pastors with a clear sense of
the voice of God, spiritually fulfilling work and the affirmation of
one’s authentic humanity. But I doubt that ministry has ever been
about these things; and the dis-ease that Theron Ware, Cyrus Manning
– and Barbara Brown Taylor – experience has more to do with a change
in expectations than with the nature of the church. The church has
always been a source of perplexity to its own leaders and prophets.
There has been no fall from some previously realized ideal to its
present sorry state. In fact, at many times in history, the church
has been in much worse shape than it is today. What is new is the
assumption that it is the church’s job to meet the personal needs of
pastors.
In some ways, we do not
take vocation nearly as seriously as we used to. For many, ministry
is a temporary career option, something to do for a while till the
next thing comes along. In my own denomination, the United Church of
Canada, most newly ordained clergy are simply not willing to go
where the church needs them most. They want to stay where they are
settled and comfortable and expect the church to accommodate their
needs. In another sense, though, the expectations placed on ministry
have expanded. It’s somewhat analogous to marriage. While the sexual
revolution has brought an easy-come-easy-go attitude towards marital
fidelity, many couples now expect their marriages to bear the total
weight of their emotional, personal and social needs, and if they
fall short of this romantic ideal, the marriage is considered a
failure. It was not always like that. Marriage provided many things,
but not everything. Similarly, pastors now expect their pastoral
work to give them not only a God-given vocation, but a satisfying
experience of God. But just as marriage is not meant to furnish an
all-encompassing world of meaning and significance for husbands and
wives, so pastoral ministry cannot carry all the pastor’s need for
spiritual self-actualization. I simply do not believe that most
congregations demand “24/7 availability.” If the pastor thinks this,
he or she is being complicit and projecting onto the church his or
her own need to be needed. And one of the major steps towards
personal and pastoral maturity is to have that projected illusion
shattered.[30]
Furthermore, I would
dispute the claim that the church owes the pastor an uplifting
encounter with God. Not that such encounters are not vital to the
Christian life; but they are not one of the essential functions of
ministry. To encounter God is a need common to all God’s people, not
just to clergy; and pastors must do the same things to cultivate
these encounters as everyone else. They must nurture their own
prayer life, they must meditate on Scripture apart from sermon
preparation, they must seek out their own times of restoration, they
must turn to mentors and friends to whom they are accountable and
from whom they can receive care, they must repent and seek
forgiveness. They must do this within the unique framework of
demands and responsibilities that are part of their job, just like
teachers and office workers and plumbers and bank tellers. But to
expect pastoral work per se to provide a fulfilling experience of
God is a quest doomed to failure. The impossibly inflated
expectations of ministry that are evident in Leaving Church
arise from unattended pastoral perfectionism more than they do from
the state of the church.
Niebuhr on Idealism and Sin
In closing, I want to
return to the theme of sin which I think is at the heart of this
discussion. For my money, the best and most helpful analysis of sin
comes from a neglected source, the theological works of Reinhold
Niebuhr. Niebuhr was part of the movement known rather unfortunately
as “neo-orthodoxy” which sought to correct the theological
imbalances of Protestant liberalism in the twentieth century. At the
risk of caricaturing a complex religious tradition, I think it’s
safe to say that liberalism begins with the assumption that human
nature is basically good, and that sin is the failure to actualize
that goodness. But this is a flawed and trivial account, according
to Niebuhr, because sin is really enmeshed in our nature as human
beings. It is the consequence of the fundamental dilemma of
humanity. Human beings live a kind of dual existence, according to
Niebuhr. We have a foot in two worlds. On the one hand, we are
finite and cannot escape the limits of time and space. But on the
other hand, we have the ability to transcend our finitude through
reason, will, imagination and faith. We can anticipate the future.
We can conceive of the world being different than it is. We can
formulate ideals towards which we strive. In the midst of the way
things are, we can hope and work for the way things ought to be. But
herein lies the danger. Because we are able to transcend our
limitations rationally and spiritually, it is easy to forget that
those limitations are still real. We can so easily begin to believe
that ultimate norms and perfect ideals can be realized in history.
And this, Niebuhr argues, is the root of sin and of all the sources
of oppression and triumphalism and corruption that have bedeviled
human existence. Sin is not a failure to be our best, but the pride
of thinking that we can be “like God.” It is “the error of regarding
the transcendent norm as a simple possibility.”[31]
The weakness of Christianity in its liberal form is that it has too
naïve a belief that the Kingdom can be realized on earth through
good intentions and hard work, and too little awareness of the
constraints and limitations of the human condition. Liberalism sees
the church’s task as bringing about the ideal of the Kingdom within
history, either by recreating an original perfection (romanticism),
by reaching the end of an evolutionary process (progressivism) or by
achieving the perfect contemplation of eternity within time
(mysticism.)[32]
All of these attempts, Niebuhr argues, are idolatrous. Sin is not so
much the failure to attain our ideals, as liberalism would have it,
but the hubris of thinking that we can reach them by our own
efforts. To believe this is to repudiate the radical nature of
grace, by which means alone we can be saved. And grace, Niebuhr
argues, comes into history from beyond history, from a transcendent
dimension that we cannot manipulate or control.[33]
For that reason, Niebuhr
argued, Christians must be “realistic.” They must work for and value
the partial, provision, limited and imperfect manifestations of love
and justice that are possible within history, and not live in
perpetual frustration and bitterness because reality fails to
conform to perfection. This is the most criticized aspect of
Niebuhr’s theology. Others, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas,
for example, regard Niebuhr’s realism as a cop-out, a failure to
take seriously the transforming power of the Gospel. Yoder in
particular has argued that Jesus’ hard teachings in the Sermon on
the Mount ought not to be interpreted as an impossible ideal that
exposes our impotence, but as a practically attainable blueprint for
an alternative community of holiness and justice.[34]
Yoder’s theology certainly challenges the church to not take refuge
in an easy accommodation with the world by claiming that Jesus did
not really mean what he said. But I find that Niebuhr has given us a
more searching and compelling analysis of sin because lays bare the
truth that our sinfulness is not so much found in our failures as in
our successes, in our weaknesses as in our strengths, in our
rationalizations as in our idealism. When Brown Taylor says that “it
is the best of pastoral ministry that did me in,” I think she is
saying more than she realizes. Pastors – indeed, all Christians –
are most prone to what the Bible means by sin when they are at their
best; when souls are being saved and the pews are overflowing, when
people say “Amen” to their sermons and fall in step behind their
leadership. From a Niebuhrian perspective, that is the point of
greatest spiritual vulnerability. That is the time when we need to
be most attentive to our sinful duplicity. Conversely, it could be
that the church in its brokenness and travail might be in a
favorable position to actually embody the Gospel of grace.[35]
The church is what it has
always been – a collection of sinners who differ from those outside
the church only in that they have heard of their need for grace. The
purpose of the church’s ministry is to pastor – to shepherd – this
unruly flock, making sure that they hear the word by which faith is
awakened and constitute the community in which Christ can be
mysteriously present in spite of our sins and imperfections. What
must never be forgotten is that Christ’s presence is not the
function of the church’s faithfulness or perfection, but of the
power of God by which the wisdom of the world is made foolish. As
the church declines in influence and its flaws become more exposed,
as the stresses and demands on the church’s leaders intensify,
especially among the ruins of modernity where memories of a greener
time are still fresh, this is the time and place when God may be
found in the church if we will only have eyes to see. God must be
found in the church. It is God’s church.
It is neither surprising
nor wrong that some pastors conclude that the time has come to
exercise their vocations in a different way and a different place.
Barbara Brown Taylor’s instinct that she could better serve outside
the church is probably correct. She has gifts of communication and
leadership that are probably too constrained in a parish setting.
She is also correct that more and more of the church’s ministry will
be carried out in places apart from the conventional round of
services and programs that have defined the church for the past
century and a half.
But if any of us do leave
the church, let’s at least be honest about the reasons. It is
because God has called us to a different place, not because the
church has failed to meet our needs or manifest our ideals. If the
church appears to have failed in that regard, the problem is not
really the church’s problem.
Notes
[1] Barbara Brown
Taylor, Leaving Church:A Memoir of Faith ,(San Francisco:
Harper Collins, 2006), 72.
[5] Publisher’s
Weekly, 2 February, 2006.
[6] Georges
Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, Pamela Morris,
trans. (London: Fontana Books, 1956).
[7] Marilynne
Robinson, Gilead (San Francisco: Harper Perennial, 2004).
[8] Stephen Muse,
“Clergy in Crisis: When Human Power Isn’t Enough,” The
Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling 61:3 (Fall, 2007)
183.
[9] Irving Sussman,
As Others See Us: A Look at the Rabbi, Priest and Minister
Through the Eyes of Literature, (New York: Sheed and Ward,
1971), 74.
[11] Elizabeth
Gaskell, North and South (1854-1855) (Harmondworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), 66-67.
[12] John Updike,
In the Beauty of the Lilies, (New York: Random House,
1997)
[13] James A.
Schiff, Updike’s Version: Rewriting the Scarlet Letter,
(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992)
[14] The
Damnation of Theron Ware, (New York: Penguin Books U.S.A.,
1986), 344.
[15] Richard
Baxter, The Reformed Pastor(1656) (Whitefish, MT:
Kessinger Publishing, 2006)
[16] Robert Daley,
A Priest and a Girl, (New York and Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company, 1969), 116.
[17] Jeff Berryman,
Leaving Ruin, (Orange, CA: New Leaf Books, 2002)
[21] Leaving
Church, 122.
[23] Martin M.
Anthony and Richard P. Swinston, When Perfect Isn’t Good
Enough: Strategies for Coping with Perfectionism, (Oakland,
Ca.: New Harbinger Publications, 1998.)
[24] Speaking of
Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cambridge and Boston,
Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2000), 58
[27] Damnation
of Theron Ware, 322.
[28] Garrett
Keizer, review of Leaving Church in Christianity Today
12:3 (May/June, 2006), 41.
[29] “The
Poured-Out Church,” Christian Century, May 29, 2007.
[30] In an
important article, Frank J. Stalfa argues that vocational choice
is often rooted in unresolved family of origin issues. Many
clergy and members of other so-called “helping professions”
enter their chosen field as a way of finding self-healing
through the experience of being needed by others. Effectiveness
in ministry, however, demands that this quest for personal
fulfillment through one’s work must fail. Stalfa calls it a
process of “manageable disillusion” in which the pastor is
disabused of the idealized notion that his or her work can meet
all of his or her personal needs. “Vocation as Autobiography:
Family of Origin Influences on the Caregiving Role in Ministry,”
The Journal of Pastoral Care, 48:4 (Winter, 1994),
370-380.
[31] Reinhold
Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian
Interpretation (1941) (Louisville, London: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1996) 1:86.
[34] John Howard
Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Behold the Man! Our Victorious
Lamb (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972); Body
Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the
Watching World, (Scottdale, PA., Waterloo, ON: Herald Press,
2001)
[35] A much
different portrayal of pastoral vocation can be found in Heidi
Neumark’s beautiful account of her ministry among the poor in
New York City, Breathing Spaces: A Spiritual Journey in the
South Bronx, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). Neumark
discovered the presence of God by entering more deeply into the
running of her church, not by escaping from it.
