01-Sep-2007
We have clergy much in the news these days so I thought I’d offer my own take on that scene – sans lurid stories involving little boys or little girls.
As a recruiter one time for a Protestant seminary in Maine, I discovered that all was not well with the modern ministry. My job, by the way, was marketing. I was not, nor was I to pretend to be, clergy, but I did function as something of a lay preacher.
Since one of my tasks was to travel throughout New England visiting all of the churches that were part of the United Church of Christ (formerly Congregational), I had the chance to talk to preachers young and old, male and female, affected and disaffected. It was a fun job in many respects, and I became familiar with New England in ways no tourists ever could and no natives ever would.
One of my first visits was to a church about forty miles west of Rochester, New Hampshire. It was an old church and very typical with white clapboard siding and a tall steeple. The pastor was friendly enough – a man in his late thirties or early forties, dressed in jeans, a shirt, and boots. We climbed a steep, narrow set of stairs in order to reach his office. It was a bookish room and very cold.
Patiently, he listened to my spiel, which was mostly a paean to the seminary’s being open and available not only to any of his parishioners who might be feeling a call to serve the church, but also to him, since we had just begun a new Doctor of Ministry program for the working pastorate.
In friendly fashion, but quite firmly, he laid my naiveté out on the table and proceeded to chop it up. There’d been a schism in the church, he said, involving the United Church of Christ. Some parishes had opted to go with that new union, others had remained with the old ways. My seminary, he said, was not considered congenial turf. My message, thus, was just a little insulting.
Wounds can be licked, so I licked them and moved on.
On another day I made my way down a snow-packed road near Mount Monadnock until I was not only thoroughly lost but also dead-ended on a small cliff that would have delighted a photographer for National Geographic.
Frazzled, thus, and found finally, I made my way to another parsonage, the reverend at this one a woman, a most discouraged woman living in a house that needed a lot of work. I sensed a marriage that had gone bad, but we didn’t talk about that, nor did we talk about the many opportunities available at my very old and very respected seminary.
We talked about being a woman and about being disliked. We talked about children who no longer cared for her, and a parish that could not accept the idea of a woman pastor. We talked about old-timers who would shoot down her every idea, and about supporters whose chief support lay in urging her to move on to a more congenial parish. We also talked about her being able to draw only a portion of her salary.
Thus did the recruiter venture into pastoral counseling in its most literal sense. She said at one point she had even considered suicide. Then she smiled.
There were high points, however.
One year, the student chosen to arrange the Good Friday through Easter Sunday services (an in-house affair, though the public was always welcome at seminary services) was a charming, delightful woman in her early twenties. I’ll call her Carol.
Carol had red hair and was very thin. I’d gotten to know her well during the talks we’d had when she was considering applying for admission to the school. She was from a coastal town not far from Bangor, which meant she had known struggle and hard times. Unlike many of our older students who came to the ministry out of lives that had exhausted nearly every avenue of failure, Carol was looking at a pastorate as a way of bringing a much-praised youthful intelligence and a sincere youthful piety together in order to serve humanity.
Carol was also extremely well-liked by the other students and, thus, was able to arrange a program of worship for that Easter weekend that was inspired and inspiring even for someone like myself whose churchgoing had always been sporadic. She earned a great deal of praise from both her fellow students and her professors. It was also easy to see how fortunate would be the parish that obtained her services.
About a week after her Easter triumph (my words; such an expression would have been unseemly coming from clergy), Carol came to my office and we had a long talk.
She was resigning from the seminary, she said, with plans to go into elementary school teaching. Naturally enough, mine was not the only counsel she sought, but I found it fascinating how difficult it was to come up with any points of dissuasion. Her gifts, and there were many, would be wasted on the young? Hardly. The struggling rural parishes of Maine needed her more than children just beginning their struggles with the world? I don’t think so.
Her decision was not based on a complaint, though she did have a few comments about her studies not being very demanding, and about how her fellow students just didn’t seem to be very smart. That’s not an unusual comment coming from a good student, and since it generally represents just a feeling, there’s little you can say to rebut it.
We said goodbye then, and I never saw her again. Somewhere in Maine, though, a church is hurting, and somewhere an elementary school has been enriched.
G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photoillustration by the author
