I initially avoided picking up a copy of Carol Howard and James Fenimore’s Wounded Pastors because I was not entirely sure it applied to me. I am a progressive pastor happily serving in a radically progressive congregation, and I can honestly say I rarely if ever experience the micro- or macro-aggressions described in their book.
I know such stories are real, because I’ve heard them from many of my colleagues. But I basically never experience them.
Unlike Carol Howard, who has specialized in Healing Spiritual Wounds (the title of her previous book), I have lived for quite a while now at considerable distance from such conflict and wounding. I couldn’t even at present identify for you a single “antagonist” in our church, or even someone actively trying to undermine or work against my or the church leadership’s vision.
Nevertheless I do hurt. Lately I’ve been noticing there are some wounds I need to address. I veer strongly some days between “I’m full on busy with this and it’s a blast” all the way over to “I want to quit so hard.”
The realization that I hurt, but don’t identify with the typical types of wounding outlined in Wounded Pastors, is actually kind of isolating. Unlike the majority of pastors I know personally who are progressive but serve moderate to right-leaning churches, my own perspective (even including politics) aligns with my church as a whole. I like to joke the only purple in our church is between the Democrats and the Socialists (whereas at least for a long stretch the purple in churches was between the Democrats and Republicans).
If you feel like a unicorn (a progressive Christian pastor in the South), it isn’t always helpful to find out you’re even more of a unicorn. So I resisted reading the book.
Nevertheless, I thought to myself, Why not read it? You’re hurting so maybe read the book and see what you can glean? If nothing else it may help you understand your colleagues better.
Even though my own church is not currently wounding me, I would be less than truthful if I didn’t admit the sub-title, “Navigating Burnout, Finding Healing, and Discerning the Future of Your Ministry” resonated. So I dove in.
From The Pandemic
Here’s what I can tell you about my wounds right now: the most prominent are related to the pandemic, and there are at least three parts to this wounding.
First, some of my own collegial relationships and friendships atrophied during the pandemic and haven’t recovered. On this point, I found the book’s early chapter “Finding Our People” especially inspiring. I need guidance and inspiration on regaining and strengthening friendships. The book’s reflection prompts to take a friendship inventory, make or deepen friendships, and to consider friendship as a kind of calling, are all now actively getting incorporated into my life.
Second, the pandemic was a mixed blessing because it was a mission-clarifying crisis. A crisis can help us focus, make it clear what needs to be done. Post-crisis, I sometimes hearken back to the “good old days” when it was fairly easy to make decisions because they were crisis assignments. When the house is burning you call the fire department. When there’s a pandemic you work to keep each other healthy and safe.
Post-pandemic some days it feels like there are twenty or thirty potentially good things to do next, but it’s not easy to know which ones are the right ones to focus on. And the echo of the pandemic these two years later makes the present moment just a bit more confusing and conflicted. I’m not entirely comfortable with nostalgia for a plague.
Third, and this is the hardest one to confess: I truly grieve the numeric diminishment of the church through the pandemic. Many people connected to church in new ways during the pandemic, but this was short-lived. After the pandemic, there just aren’t as many people as there were before.
The national statistics are pretty stark, with the median Sunday worship dropping from 140 in 2000 to 65 today.
Our local church has been impacted also. It’s not just one thing, and a lot of it are out-sized external forces related to socio-economics. Everyone is working harder than ever, is busier than ever. No one has time.
Meanwhile the skills we picked up as a church during the pandemic have served us well in expanding our impact. We are sheltering people and serving vulnerable communities and serving as a community center and advocating for the poor, all of which are clear net gains, but the aspect of church life that I was trained to measure as a marker of overall vitality (worship attendance) has seen a decline, and part of my wounding is a simple sense of abandonment or failure. I don’t really want to feel this way, but I do often ask myself, “Where is everyone?”
I recognize this is irrational. There are many ways to measure success in ministry, not to mention measure vitality scaled to national trends (and also, practicing progressive church among a community for whom past religious trauma is salient and extensive).
But there it is. It hurts to serve in the church in an era of numerical decline.
From the Split
There was about a two-year period in our church life when I did experience the active wounding. I had presided at a couple of same-gender weddings the spring Arkansas legalized it for three days (prior to Obergfell) and the fall-out of that stance was huge. Although the church had known I was LGBTQIA+-affirming long before I arrived, some were surprised at the church being directly involved in affirming acts.
By that December a group had organized a coup, attempting to remove me from my call. After an organized review of my pastoral leadership by the synod, and their recommendation that we seek out a consultant to work through reconciliation, a large and organized segment of the church attempted to vote me out. But… it failed, because a larger group voted for me to remain.
We actually did work on reconciliation, but most of the folks who led the attempted coup exited and started their own Lutheran church down the street, so it was left to us who remained to work through the pain of the split on our own.
Which was fine, and we all learned some things, and the congregation flourished in the new independence we experienced not having to try to hold incommensurable views together in one organization.
There’s just one unusual thing, and another aspect of my woundedness I think is still present: I stayed. After the split, I worked through our synod and denomination to try and find even just one or two pastors who had stayed after a split, and I couldn’t find any. Apparently, in church systems when conflict hits this level, the pastor always resigns or is moved. But I stayed.
I’ve always been glad I stayed. Incredibly glad, because I’ve been free in ways I never imagined, and incredible ministries have been born out of this church since the split. I’ve had repeated opportunity to make meaning out of suffering. It’s been a ride.
As Howard and Fenimore point out in chapters on story-telling and context, ever since that split part of the spiritual work of healing has been telling the story and identifying the context. But what I have sometimes lacked is the resource for sufficient distance, and also a way to analyze how new homeostasis patterns emerge in a church post-split. I could get better distance on it if I could ever find a peer to talk through post-split emergence who has also been there, and perhaps if I could find a wider set of churches like ours to network with. I think that’s what I need. Still working on it.
Moving Toward Health
I’m not even entirely sure I could tell you how I define a healthy church, but I can tell you I experience our church as healthy. We talk things out. We trust each other. We work from a center of mutuality and agreement around mission and values. Not everything’s perfect, we’re not growing by leaps and bounds and we could all be closer to one another, but overall I get to go to a church I love every day and work among caring people.
Because we model mutuality in our church life, I’m rather free to be vulnerable among our leadership, and share my struggles. I’m doing that in this blog post. I’m sure some of our leadership will read it. I appreciate the insights in the final section of Wounded Pastors related to these practices of vulnerability because it invites me to work on some of the aspects of my woundedness that I can more readily identify and may benefit us even in the context of healthy church life.
Here are some examples:
Reactions and Over-Functioning: After our church split, and then again during the pandemic, I had an excuse to over-function. The split had hyper-focused attention on the role of the pastor. During the pandemic there were sometimes it was literally just me with a camera in the sanctuary streaming worship. However, I’ve also frequently championed an egalitarian and truly mutual practice in church life. I do not have a “high” view of the pastor. The invitation in Wounded Pastors to evaluate my reactivity in various situations in terms of over or under-functioning is tremendously clarifying. It’s no wonder when I’m hurt I either want to lean in hard or drop out. I’m reacting.
Boundaries: Howard and Fenimore have a perception of church-goers with which I do not resonate, exemplified in this short quote from the last chapter…“Church members will take as much of your energy, time, and work as they can.” I just don’t see this. Our church members are almost the opposite, always careful of how they access and use my (and staff) time. On this particular point, I think the long-term practice of healthy boundaries (I have been here 14 years) has been really helpful.
Forgiving our antagonists: I’m working on this one. Some of the people who led the church split acted really trashy and remain self-righteous. I’m having to come to terms with how to forgive them for my own sake, for my own health. Howard and Fenimore call this “Giving yourself a gift of forgiveness.” I can see that. Similarly, it’s my honest feeling that my synod (and in a different way the denomination) really let me and us down during the split, leaving us high and dry and largely alone out on the margins. We remain there. I do not know how forgiveness of systems works, but I can tell it would help me.
Walking Wounded: The last chapter of the book shares the story of a pastor who showed up at a meeting of clergy and made himself vulnerable. These clergy had generally been strong and guarded with each other, working at a surface level, but once one pastor was vulnerable, the dam broke. Stories emerged, and the colleagues coalesced as friends. Recently, I reached out to a colleague friend from another state and told him I was struggling with some vocational stuff. He said, “In my mind you are the perfect pastor in the perfect church” and it made me realize maybe I’ve been throwing off a well-curated persona that isn’t entirely the “me on the inside.” I’m gonna walk more wounded and see if it helps, both me and others.
As you can tell, this isn’t a traditional book review. I have made use of it more as an auto-biographical tool to work on some of my own wounds and healing. I tend to do that kind of thing through blogging. Mileage for readers may vary. But I hope sharing some of this may be beneficial for colleagues wrestling with similar issues, and readers of all types trying to evaluate the extent to which various wounds are influencing how we live today. As a tool for such work, I recommend Howard and Fenimore’s books whole-heartedly.
Thank you so much for articulating all of this for us. As a very progressive person living in the Atlanta suburbs, former church staff (non-clergy worship leader and accompanist), and leader and member of an ELCA congregation for 20 years, all of this resonated with me as a lay person. We left this congregation last year after much hand wringing, because of pastoral leadership and an extreme inward focus following Covid shutdown. So much of what you detail from the clergy-pastor perspective also feels relevant to our family. The loss of proximity that exposed many of our deep friendships as…not that deep. The political and ideological divide that didn’t seem to be there until we left. The harm that is currently taking place (imo) because it’s a Reconciling in Christ congregation in name only now. I will be reading this book now for more guidance on how to heal and move forward. Thank you again for sharing your story.
After reading your article I felt the need to support the work you have done to make GSLC an inclusive church. As one who grew up Missouri Synod Lutheran but changed to ELCA for a less rigid church, then moving here and joining your church has been uplifting to see enthusiastic children and families. Each Sunday I too wonder where are all the people? Too many folks missing a great sermon that gives one much to think about in the week ahead. Keep up the good work and glad you are committed to feeding your flock and take care of yourself we need you.