Ministers Are Leaving

What does that mean, and what has to change?

I lift up my eyes to the hills —
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth. - Psalm 121

If you look up the psalm above in your Bible, you’ll find a superscription that reads, “A Song of Ascents,” which means it functioned to its early singers as a fight song. Pilgrims making their way to holy sites sang it to stay motivated to continue onward on steep and rocky terrain when they were hungry and tired. The song reminded them not to look down at their trudging feet, but rather to look up to the hills, reorienting them to the bigger objective for which they were striving: getting there, and getting there together.

This psalm came to mind as I’ve thought about what might be a disturbing coincidence, but might also prove a statistically significant trend when the data come together: it feels to me like a lot of ministers are leaving their positions. As the dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, I often hear from congregational leaders wondering if we have candidates to recommend to their ministerial search committees. Those calls are coming faster, and more furiously when it comes to stress levels.

Andover Newton was until recently located in the Greater Boston Area. With one or two exceptions, the biggest churches in a five-mile radius of our old campus in Newton, MA have received the resignations of their pastors in the past six months. Coincidence? Perhaps, and perhaps not. On the one hand, this is good news for the graduates we are launching into ministry — more opportunities for them means more flexibility to say yes and no as God calls them — but the pattern is disturbing, too. Why are they leaving? Why now? We want to help our alums break through glass ceilings but do not want to place them on glass cliffs.

When it comes to evidence to back up my impressions of mass exodus, the results for Christian ministry aren’t yet in-hand. For the time being, we have to look to analogous fields where research is already underway about job market trends. Ministry is unique in some ways — i.e. that pesky “call” thing, where entering the ministry doesn’t necessarily feel like a choice — but in other ways it’s similar to other mission-oriented professions.

A recent study of established college professors reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicated that 55% are actively planning for retirement, a much higher proportion than average age and years of service would indicate. In a special report on the public radio program “Here and Now,” we hear that K-12 teachers are not just leaving their positions; they are leaving teaching altogether. Whereas a shortage of PPE plagued hospitals early in the Covid-19 pandemic, staffing shortages are the new limiting factor when it comes to how much care can be made available to patients in-need.

So, what might explain a higher-than-usual rate of departure from ministry?

• Burnout. The past couple of years have been, to state the obvious, really tough on clergy. Burnout doesn’t result from working too hard, but rather from laboring under unrealistic expectations. Closing churches down during the pandemic was difficult, and some are finding reopening is even moreso. Inventing new delivery systems for every dimension of ministry, using technologies previously rejected and scorned, only to hear congregants grumble like Israelites complaining they don’t like the taste or texture of manna? Yeah, that would burn anybody out.
• Finances. The last time we experienced a global crisis, which now seems like a walk in the park by comparison, was the 2008 financial crash. Then, those who wanted to retire because they were burned out often couldn’t, as the markets were a mess, and their retirement accounts were radioactive: don’t touch them! Now the markets are weirdly strong, so why not?
• Disillusionment. When we work for a mission, we need to feel like that mission is worthwhile, even when it doesn’t feel attainable. The church as a delivery system for what people need by way of finding meaning and purpose in their lives has been exposed during this pandemic as inherently flawed. Don’t get me wrong: guiding the church into a new incarnation through preparing leaders is my life’s calling. I will not give up! But when I hear about colleagues who preach about Jesus’ love and justice, only to get shouted down by political partisans who come to church ready to find fault in what could only be called a basic interpretation of the Gospel, disillusionment makes sense to me.

In his book, The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek describes two types of organizations. Finite-minded institutions strive to meet a goal; infinite-minded ones have a purpose that cannot ever be fully accomplished. The motivator of the infinite-minded is to stay in the game. Sinek uses Apple and Microsoft as key examples. Apple’s mission in its early 21st Century reincarnation was to change people’s lives through connecting them in new ways. Microsoft’s mission was to beat Apple. The results as relate to creativity and cultural impact go without saying: did you ever own a Zune? Do you even know what one was? (Answer: Microsoft’s answer to the iPod… evidently it was impressive, except for the fact it interfaced with exactly nothing).

If ministry is going to be a field where we can succeed, we need to make some adjustments to where ministers to turn their eyes. They need to have their eyes on the hills, from whence their help might come, for the church is not finite — where “winning” is even an option — but infinite. That change of perspective has to happen on two levels: first, ministers need to remember that even the most local of local churches is an infinite game. The church itself is a response. Its very existence is a response to God’s call, and God’s call changes over time. Ministers’ role is to guide a community in interpreting God’s imagination for creation’s future. This means there is no “normal” to get back to. We can only move forward.

Second, local church communities need to learn and then understand the church in the same infinite way. Sometimes — oftentimes? — ministers leave because they are the symptom bearers of confused and negative communal energies. To be a healthy setting for continued ministry, the system needs to change, reorienting away from conventional definitions of worldly success and toward faithfulness to God’s call.

Everyone, turn your eyes to the hills, not to the paths behind you! Your minister can help you guide a congregation in a new direction, but you have to do the walking. God didn’t call people to go on pilgrimage to their home towns, as we can’t go home again. We’re being called to go somewhere new, and we all have a job to do in following the Holy Spirit into that new stretch on the path of where God is asking the church to go.