Death by a Thousand Cuts (3 of 5)

Associates in Advocacy

Justice Always,

Reconciliation and Restoration Where Possible

http://www.aiateam.org/

Dear Bishop,

This series of letters is entitled “Death by a Thousand Cuts.”  I’ve asserted that many good people left the church because of poor handling of complaints.  It is a part of the outflow that ranges from demographics to theological differences to pastoral misconduct.  For the blame to be laid only on pastors’ alleged incompetence is foolish. 

Worse, it is part of a pattern born in the late 1970s which led to the decision by the 1980 General Conference to change the role of superintendents and bishops to being the complaint handlers.  That change killed rapport between pastors and the ones who were supposed to be their pastors, mentors, and outside help in times of trouble.  This happened at a time when bishops were choosing superintendents not from the pool of older experienced pastors but of younger more ambitious ones who knew how to be“team players.”  These younger pastors could use the Cabinet to be stepping stones to large churches and to the episcopacy.  Helping pastors was not their goal.    

That breakdown in collegiality led to the ministry in our denomination becoming one of the worst workplaces imaginable.  Pastors ended up with no support.  The morale among clergy dropped precipitously.  Without any assurance of back-up in an increasingly antagonistic environment, good pastors lost heart and average pastors found no help to improve.  Blaming pastors for incompetence only further worsens the atmosphere.  As I suggested earlier this year, check out the ones coming out of seminary.  They are no longer the very best students.  Those “brightest and best” are earning MDivs and applying them outside the church.  The most talented don’t want any part of the “organized church.”  The bishops have set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Please help end this foolish drive to presume pastors are incompetent.  Pastors are unable to get away from criticism.  Cabinets, particularly bishops, can slough off criticism and ignore it without any consequences.  Pastors cannot.

If I have brought insight to the true problems of the denomination, you have already begun to see ways to ameliorate the situation.  More tomorrow.

In the covenant of the clergy,

                 Jerry

Rev Jerry Eckert, AIA contact person

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

AIA letter for January

Associates in Advocacy
http://www.aiateam.org
January 6, 2009

Dear Bishop,

At the end of my first year at Perkins (1959), I visited the North Texas Annual Conference to see how they operated. Despite the thousand delegates present, the bishop granted the floor to only ten people during the plenaries I observed. Albert Outler, of course, four big church pastors, and five DSs. No laity. No other clergy.

The June before I left for Perkins (1958), I was ordained Deacon at the Wisconsin Conference whose delegates numbered about 500. I spent a day observing there before the ordination. During the course of business, a friend who had been ordained Deacon the year before was recognized and rose to speak to the matter on the floor. A few minutes later, following a report by one of the DSs, a minister rose and in a diplomatic manner, severely criticized the report while the DS was still at the podium. I saw the two men laughing over lunch together an hour later.

Rev. William Blake, my pastor during high school and college, was conference historian and I asked him about the difference between the two conferences.

“I can’t tell you how that Texas conference operated during the 1930s. But let me tell you what we did during the Great Depression. Even before President Roosevelt took office, things were very bad in the rural and small town areas of our conference. The churches serving those areas were really struggling to pay their bills and to pay their pastors. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be serving churches whose incomes were still fairly strong set up a fund which was then distributed to help pay the salaries of the pastors in the struggling churches.

“The best thing about that was the collegiality that developed in our conference among the ministers. The relationships between the older better-off pastors and the younger struggling ones continued as some of those younger ones received more financially solid appointments. They continued the sharing with the new pastors who joined late in that decade.

“That program ended in 1945 as the war economy improved everyone’s lot. But those last ones who benefited never forgot and passed along the collegiality to this day.”

My conversation with Rev. Blake was in the early 1960s.

By 1980, nearly all those pastors were retired and with them went that memory of the close bonds they had experienced because of the grace shown among clergy during the Depression. That memory’s impact lasted fifty years.

In the covenant of the clergy,

Jerry