The Jobs Young People Don't Want

Full-time employment, as we well know now in our duct-tape kludged economy, ain't an easy thing to come by.  It's particularly, brutishly so for twenty and thirty somethings, who often cobble together their lives with part-time employment here and there.

Which is why an article in yesterday's Washington Post struck me.  Though young folks might be struggling, what they aren't particularly interested in are Federal government jobs.  There are a range of reasons for this.

Among them are the culturally reinforced sense that the gummint ain't to be trusted, that it's ineffectual, that it's a sprawling, soul-crushing bureaucratic nightmare, an endless morass of silos and turf wars and dizzying, Byzantine requirements.

This isn't entirely true, but neither is it entirely untrue.  Layered on top of that comes the financial uncertainty of an institution in decline, as positions fall and fade away, with those who remain clinging doggedly to their jobs.

Layered on top of this, in order to enter this Fun Land of Big Joy and Happiness in the first place you have to negotiate a hire process that is so opaque, clumsy and slow as to render it almost inert.

I have often noted that while contemporary nondenominational Christianity has embraced the values of the marketplace, we old-liners still mostly emulate the structures and dynamics of government.

So when it comes to bringing new voices into the mix, it occurs to me that we have precisely the same problems as government, for the same reasons.  Having been through the Presbyterian process, I can say without question that it is not the sort of thing that resonates with the kids these days.  They're just not hip to it.  It's not groovy, man.  It's, like, totally gnarly, dude.  OMG.

Which is why, though I'm forty-five years old and there's white in my beard, I look around at meetings and note that I'm still one of the "young ones."

This is not a good sign.

Oh, I was young when I started.  I was twenty eight, which didn't feel young at the time.  By the time I was done, I was halfway through my thirties.  Having committed myself to avoiding the call-sucking siren song of debt-financed education, it took me seven years to negotiate the process.  Those years were good, and many of the relationships and conversations I had with those charged with walking me through that process were positive, both testing and affirming my call.

But those years were also layered with duplicative toils, sudden snares, and dangerous oversights.  A few examples:

Toils: On the one hand, we Presbyterians are obligated to have a seminary degree, with tests and exams and the like, administered by professors at accredited institutions.  On the other, we're required to take Ordination exams that mirror the contents of that education.  I never understood the logic of this.  If I've successfully completed biblical coursework from an accredited institution, why take yet another exam?  I know the counterarguments: that seminaries are inadequate, that Ords provide uniformity.  But then why require seminary, if we're so convinced it is inadequate?  And why pretend that the Ords--graded by laity and pastors--are more "uniform?"  They are, in my experience, just as subjective.

Snares: Five years in, my committee--whose membership had rotated several times--suddenly informed me that I needed to get forty hours of clinical pastoral education.  Was it required by the denomination?  No.  Was it a presbytery requirement?  No.  Had it been discussed, ever, up until that point?  No.  Was I pursuing a call to be a hospital, military, or hospice chaplain?  No.  I was working, and in seminary, and had two young children, and was interning in a congregation.  I could see no clear connection between this requirement and the realities of congregational leadership, so I demurred.  If this was to be a requirement, I could not fulfill it.  Had the issue been pressed, I would have removed myself from the process.  It was not, thank the Maker.  This happens often, not out of malice, but from the clinical remove a committee often has from the reality of those they are shepherding and testing.

Dangers: In the seven years it took me to negotiate the call process, I was never required to show my capacity as a preacher or a spiritual leader of people.  I never preached.  I never demonstrated that I could teach or lead a gathering.  Not once.  There were a lot of papers and essays and forms and meetings.  But not nearly enough of it directly spoke to the skills required to preach and teach the Gospel and energize a community.  This is dangerous, because it sets up an expectation on the part of a candidate that they've got the skill set that resonates with a congregation...when in fact, they have not.

More dangerous still, our processes bear little resemblance to the shattering, transformative experience of call itself.  You know, call?  When God shows up in your life and demands it?  That's the stuff of dreams and visions, of the fire that gnaws at your bones.  If we confuse test taking and process management skills with call, we set up a dangerously inaccurate misunderstanding, both for our churches and for those testing their call.

Years of requirements, many of which have no meaningful connection to the spiritual and material demands of our vocation.  Thickets of uncertainty.  A debt financed education.  And ultimately?  Once you've gotten through that?

It begins again, with the wildly clumsy and uncertain process of seeking a call.

And we wonder why younger folks steer away.

Power Supply

Yesterday morning, I motored my way from my home in Annandale, Virginia out to the congregation I'll soon be serving part-time in Poolesville, Maryland.  I had an 11:00 AM meeting scheduled with the clerk of session of the wee kirk there, to sign my first contract and talk about how things at Poolesville Presbyterian work.

I left early, concerned that the ever unpredictable steel and asphalt maelstrom on the Capital Beltway might slow things down on a rainy morning.  There were storms all about, deep rumbling clouds fat with rain, which made my ride out there on the bike just a tiny bit on the damp side.  Only a tiny bit, though.  The 'Zook acquitted itself admirably protecting me from the elements, although I noticed an odd side effect of the aerodynamic bubble behind my extended GIVI screen.  In really heavy rain, the vacuum behind the windscreen creates swirling back pressure.  The water beading on my helmet visor leaps forward into that vacuum in bright shining droplets, like I'm casting diamonds and pearls at the road from my face as I ride.   Rather pretty, although a bit distracting.  Not nearly as distracting as it might be if it happened in meetings, but so it goes.

Whichever way, I made it to my meeting on time, and the contract was signed, and badda boom, badda bing, I'm the pastor at Poolesville.  And, well, that's an unusual thing for a Presbyterian.  In fact, it's a huge thing, or would be if folks in my denomination thought about it.

Understand this, O my Presbyterian Brothers and Sisters:  In June of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, a PC(USA) congregation said a fond farewell to a long-term and well-liked pastor. 

Within three months, they had lined up a new pastor.  

July.  August.  September.  And lo and behold, that's their transition.  That's the total amount of limbo and liminal time they'll have to endure.  Three.  Months.  How does this compare to your last transition? 

This is not an unusual occurrence in smaller congregations, congregations that are used to having temporary supply pastors, which is what I'm going to become starting October 1.   That means, in PresbyParlance, that I'm not "called and installed."  I'm just under contract on an annual basis.  That means every year, I need to sign a new contract to reaffirm my relationship with the congregation.  If things are working, then we're copacetic.  If either party is ready to move on, well, then it's time to go.  Have robe, will travel, as they say.

Called pastors, well, they're there as long as they want to be.  Of course, they renegotiate their "terms of call" on an annual basis.  And if either party wants to move on, well, then it's time to go.  

It's the same thing, kids.

Functionally, there is no difference between being a called and installed pastor and a temporary supply pastor.  You preach.  You teach.  You meet.  You greet.  You pray.  You care.   And honey child?  Both positions are temporary.   There ain't no such thing as a permanent pastor, unless you attend the First Presbyterian Church of Transylvania, and Pastor Edward has only been there 350 years.  Not like Pastor Vlad, who was there 735 years, and left only after that well intentioned but poorly thought out sunrise service.

And yet most congregations that aren't teeny tiny don't call supply pastors.  Supply pastors are for little bitty bucolic family churches out in rolling fields, or for struggling churches that can't afford competitive salaries.  To which I ask:  Why?  Is it just congregational ego? 

Why couldn't a 200+ member, thriving, successful Presbyterian congregation choose to sidestep our agonizingly slow and convoluted call process?  Don't complain about it.  Don't fret about it.  Just go supply, and simply write a position description, advertise for and locate a qualified pastor who would then pick up and carry on.  You'd have a trained, ordained, tested, and proven Presbyterian pastor.  As a "temporary supply."  With contracts to be signed on an annual basis. 

Not just why "couldn't."  Why "wouldn't?" 

Given the choice, why would you inflict the call process on yourself if you didn't have to?  The way we connect pastors with churches now is institutional quicksand, a source of frustration and anxiety for both pastors and pastor nominating committees alike.  If the results were demonstrably better than any other system, it might be justifiable.  But the results are not.   Instead, it means that those charged with calling pastors approach the task with fear and trembling, but for all the wrong reasons. 

Our process as it stands now is orderly, but indecent.  A congregation's energies would be better spent on outreach, or service ministry, or ministries of justice, or on just about anything so long as it got us out in our communities living and spreading the Good News.  Instead, we pour our energies inward, into processes that make us feel like we're doing something but that come perilously close to institutional onanism. 

So to you pastors contemplating a move?  Perhaps you should suggest going supply to your big steeple church.  You elders who have suddenly found yourselves chairing the PNC?  Maybe it's time to think outside the box a bit, and to make that known to your General Presbyter.

Why should little churches be the only ones getting it right?

Transitions and Process

As I've opened up to my congregation about the need for them to 1) seek new pastoral leadership, and 2) my willingness to have them seek another pastor while I work with them to help ease the transition, I anticipated that such a process wouldn't necessarily fly well.

Non-standard approaches don't tend to set well within the structures of the Presbyterian church.  They can, but getting to the point at which the broader church is willing to accept them takes some significant effort.  You have to be willing to engage in all manner of assessments and reviews and evaluations, all of which take time.  We're willing to take risks, sure.  But leaps of faith for Presbyterians tend to happen after we've carefully plotted out our trajectory, then replotted it, then done a meta-analysis of the cross-cultural literature on leaps of faith, and engaged the services of a certified leaping consultant.  This is, of course, the decent and orderly way to proceed, assuming you have all the time in the world.

Having been through that at the front end of this ministry, I'm now encountering it as I try to bring my time here to a close.  Though I'd hoped to be able to transition from my current designated status (meaning I'm here on a time-limited contract) to interim status (also time limited, but with my primary function being to help prepare the congregation for a new pastor), it looks like there is little chance of that occurring.

Both my request for a transition of status and my congregation's request to start the process of calling a new pastor were gently denied by Presbytery this last week.

I understand the intent behind this, and it's not malicious.  Heck, it's not even unwise.  This church faces some really significant hurdles, and has a pretty defined point (four years away now) when it's going to run right into a financial brick wall.  Blam.  Game over.  For Trinity, growth isn't just this thing we feel compelled to do 'cause our culture fetishizes it.  It must happen.  And lately, it isn't.  That's why I need to step aside.  Having taken a hard look at our situation, I know where Presbytery is coming from.  Some time to reflect on why things are stalled out would be very useful.

But so much of revitalization lies in energy, enthusiasm, and a sense of Christ's purpose.  I watched some of the new young leaders of the church...well...just sort of deflate...at this weekend's realization that while things are urgent, nothing is going to happen in the near term future.

They may be young, but after a very constructive series of visioning retreats and open discussions, they're not ignorant of how urgent things are.  Even though I'd alerted them to the possibility that Presbytery might seek more reflective time, they're feeling disempowered and discouraged.   Having worked for five years to empower and encourage, it's hard hearing a new session member in his late 20s shrug his shoulders and say that he can see he "doesn't have much say and that Presbytery is in control of his fate."  Or another new session member lament that he's never experienced an organization that moved so slowly.  I'm sure it feels a bit like stonewalling.

That's not the intent, of course, as I will endeavor to remind folks.  Presbytery is just trying to do its job.  This process could be really useful, if it's embraced as an opportunity to grow in understanding and strengthen the church.

Transitions and Light

Yesterday felt good. It wasn't that the congregation was large. But our contemporary worship was cranking and heartfelt. When I preached, my blending of the Gospel and an indictment of compulsive American indebtedness seemed to catch the attention of my flock. Bible study was stronger than usual, meaning the dozen who gathered asked questions. They struggled with the texts. When things didn't make sense, they were willing to say so, and to engage. It felt good.

But the sands, as they say, are running low in the hourglass. At a recent retreat with my session, I confirmed that I would hold myself to my promise of a year ago. In the absence of growth against the metrics I set for the congregation, my departure is now certain. I can't stay at my church long term, because I'm aware that I've finished what I was called there to do. The community is now wholly and completely changed. The congregation that originally called me no longer exists. With a unique congregational character and a new cadre of members passionately commited to growing it, the church has a fighting chance at viability. To do that, it needs to call its own pastor, one who reflects its new identity. So I need to let go, and let it move onward and upward. The question, of course, is how.

The textbook Presbyterian pastoral transition has always felt very odd to me spiritually. Pastors seeking new churches in my denomination do so behind a veil of secrecy and confidentiality. No one can know you're looking, because that could cause all manner of problems. There would be whispering. There would be issues and hurt feelings and draaahmaaah. It's just like looking for a new job in the secular world, quite frankly. You sneak out for "appointments." You make sure your boss doesn't know, unless the whole process is just a way of leveraging a raise, in which case you make sure they do know. That's just the way that the world works. But still.

A few years back, I considered a call at a really wonderful church. They ultimately called someone else...the right person, honestly...but what was hardest on me about that whole process was not the fact that I didn't get the call. What was hardest was all the tiptoeing around. Here I am, sneaking off to preach to someone else, making sure to cover my tracks with a carefully concocted cover story so that my congregation won't find out. Yeah, it was a neutral pulpit, but it felt like a Motel 6 off on some barely used byway. The whole thing felt furtive and a teensy bit adulterous.

Pastoral Nominating Committees also operate inside a Cone of Silence, communicating only with one another, not even sharing the details with their spouses, under penalty of being forced to serve on the committee again the next time a pastor leaves.

If ending a pastoral relationship is about call and not about career, and if as a follower of Jesus Christ you love the sisters and brothers you've been serving, then this whole approach seems off. It doesn't feel like the way children of light should operate. It doesn't feel spiritually healthy. I see no reason my congregation can't look for another pastor while I intentionally help them with that transition. I see no reason why I can't let them know that I'm listening for a call somewhere else, while I pray for and materially support their search for someone who feels God's call to lead them. So far, this totally nonstandard approach seems to have energized my church. Several members, both of old guard and new, have expressed appreciative bafflement. "We've never had a pastor do this for us before."

It will be interesting to see how my Presbytery's Committee on Ministry responds as I request a formal shift to interim status, and they request permission to begin calling a new pastor, even though their old pastor hasn't actually left.

The Call

One of the oddest things about the way the Good Lord lines up pastors with communities is that it works so very differently than we tend to expect.

My denomination has a "call process," which appears to be most closely modeled on the federal government's approach to hiring. It's an endless cycle of committees and requirements and measures that, taken individually, make sense. There's a good solid reason behind everything we do, and it all seems very official and circumspect. What it results in, though, is frustration for everyone involved...and not sufficiently better results than if folks just looked at a few resumes and made a decision. Call does not work the way we force it to work. It can work through the process, sure. But the two things are not the same.

It also doesn't work in the same way church shopping works. Pastors often ask themselves this key question: Would I attend the church I am serving? The idea behind this is simple. A pastor needs to be excited about their congregation. They need to instantly love it, and be filled with joy at the prospect of it growing and flourishing. If the community isn't a match for them, and they feel out of place or in some way distant, then they're going to stagnate or grow frustrated or be less vested in it's flourishing.

For that love to take place, the argument is simple: The pastor needs to feel that this church is their church. It's the place where they go for spiritual sustenance and fellowship with People Like Them, the place where folks are always glad they came and people are all the same and everybody knows their name.

That does not even come close to describing my church. When I started, my congregation was a tiny struggling group of elderly Anglos. The church was riven with conflict-echoes and despair after a particularly ugly break with the previous pastor. If I'd shown up on a Sunday looking...as a lay person...for a vibrant progressive community, one with a heart for Christ and for neighbor, I'd not have sensed it. I'd have felt mostly the aching pain of loss and desperation. As a church product for the savvy consumer, it had little to offer.

Now, my church is bigger, but not by much. Coming in this Sunday, I'd walk in the door...as folks do about once a month...and instantly see that with the exception of the anomalous White Guy up front, it was Not Me. Though it aspires to be multiethnic, it is almost entirely Korean. It is also very, very young...bordering on feeling like a youth group, even though it most certainly ain't. The worship is mostly contemporary, meaning heavy on the Chris Tomlin and Hillsong. It's still a little church rattling around in a big sanctuary. As a shopper for churches, I'd have sniffed it, found the scent unfamiliar, and moved on swiftly, as dozens and dozens have...sometimes before the service is even half over.

But being called to serve a congregation does not work that way. It just doesn't. Nowhere in the great story that runs from Torah through the Epistles can I find any evidence of that. Not a single call...at least, none that mattered...worked that way. Not Abraham or Moses or Jacob, not Isaiah or Jeremiah, not Paul, and most certainly not Christ.

The "process" is not like something an HR department does. It's also not like the market process by which we select consumer products. Call is more...heck...mystic than that. More God-related. It's a work of the Holy Spirit. It's an urging. It's a hunger. It's a strange compulsion driven by dreams and obscure theophanies.

And where that compulsion takes us is to places where everyone is not Just Like Us. Where things are difficult. Where we are forced to grow, and struggle, and grow some more. Where exposure to the Other and the Different makes us realize that what is not familiar is not automatically evil, and that we can come to care deeply and passionately for those who are not already neatly part of our marketing demographic.

As, over the last six years, I have.