Ministry and Moral Stress

On Faithfulness in Decline

When the church hired me, I was 24 years old, unemployed and mildly over-educated, struggling to find work in the midst of a national recession. It was the fall of 2002, and we had just moved to Johnson City Tennessee, where Jessa was beginning her MFA in ceramics. It was my turn to earn money while she went to school, but it wasn’t going well. I had applied everywhere: summer camps and conference centers, nonprofits, and schools, but also Taco Bell, Sears, Home Depot, and Target. Nobody was hiring. The lingering economic shock of 9/11 had everyone feeling cautious, and I couldn’t get so much as an interview, even after months of trying. I eventually started doing the one thing I said I wouldn’t do after getting my seminary degree: I started applying to jobs at churches. A few possibilities started to bubble up; the local Methodist district superintendent offered me a couple of small appointments (which I was wise enough to decline, as I was ill-suited and poorly trained for that kind of position then), and an Episcopal church had an administrative job that might have paid some of the bills. But out of nowhere I applied to a job in the next state over, an hour-long commute away in Asheville, at a United Methodist church. It was a youth director job, and when I interviewed they decided that I wasn’t right for that job, but they created another one for me. I was hired as the ¾ time Director of Adult Education and Outreach. I still marvel, all these years later, at how prescient and perceptive they were, to recognize exactly what I would be interested in doing and what I could contribute. So I began my work in that church and in the Church—work that is still ongoing, 20 years later, in different forms.

This coming Sunday, August 21st, that church is holding its last service in the building it has occupied for generations. It’s a lovely building, red brick, Methodist in that two-steps-removed-from-Anglican kind of way, sitting up on a hill nestled against the spot where the highway and a busy road cross over each other. I worked there for five years, enjoying every minute of it. I found my calling there, made many lasting friendships, preached my first sermons, and was ordained in that sanctuary. There’s a sadness in the knowledge that the church is leaving that building, though it’s undoubtedly the right thing to do. Another congregation has purchased it, and I’m sure a lot of good will continue to come from that place. And the church will continue its good work from another place. But it’s the end of something that meant a lot to me.

It's a common story these days. In my work in both church and seminary contexts, I encounter and know a lot of churches in the Protestant Mainline (and especially in the predominantly white corners of the Protestant Mainline), and I struggle to think of a single one of them that isn’t some version of the same question: how do we keep going? When I began working in churches twenty years ago, it was the smaller or more conflict-ridden congregations that faced existential questions; these days, many or even most congregations are facing some kind of watershed moment about attendance, programming, or finances. Congregations that might have thought of themselves as immune or too-big-to-fail a generation ago are suddenly asking how to make ends meet. Buildings are going up for sale or falling into disrepair, Sunday crowds are diminishing, and budgets are stretched to the breaking point. I see it everywhere from church youth retreat attendance to seminary enrollments to eroding outreach capabilities at the denominational level. The signs are everywhere, and they remind me of that video that circulated a few months ago, of a house on the beach on the North Carolina coast, crumbling into the waters, being claimed by the sea. The church landscape these days feels like the landscape of inexorably rising seas, water closing in, slow erosion suddenly cascading into dramatic failures until it all tumbles into the ocean.

When I think about this, I think about a pair of phrases I’ve learned from my friends and colleagues in pastoral theology: moral stress and moral injury. The two phrases are related. Moral stress describes the feeling you get when you have to take actions that are in conflict with your sense of right and wrong, and moral injury describes the damage that can be done by that conflict. My friend and former colleague Larry Kent Graham, in his last book before his death, writes that “Moral injury is the erosive diminishment of our souls because our moral actions and the actions of others sometimes have harmful outcomes. It rises from our attempts to do the right thing as individuals and communities…We all bear the costs of attempted goodness” (Graham, Moral Injury, xi). My friend Zachary Moon, my current colleague Carrie Doehring, and others write about this too, often in the context of military service (where people are often forced to carry out actions that they might otherwise think are wrong), health care industries, or other highly-charged moral arenas. But lately I’ve been thinking about moral stress and moral injury in the context of church, and especially in the context of the practice of ministry.

It is a profoundly stressful time to be a minister. I don’t know too many ministers who aren’t close to some kind of inflection point or even breaking point; one study undertaken during the pandemic suggests that 40% of pastors have considered leaving their positions in the past year. I’m no sociologist, but anecdotally, that checks out with what I have heard. I know people who have left the ministry altogether—folks on the conservative and the liberal ends of things alike, and in the middle too. I know many more who would quit if they could afford to, who aren’t sure they will be able to continue to find work, or whose mental health is demanding that they do something else with their lives. The pandemic didn’t help matters, with its intense politics around masking and gathering indoors and the financial turbulence it introduced, but the trend was underway well before that. Nearly every pastor I know—and I know a lot of them—is feeling some level of exhaustion and burnout.

I wonder whether this is a form of moral stress? There is a tension between the task of leading a group of people to live up to a high calling and to live out high ideals, and the reality on the ground. It’s hard to articulate a vision for the future when the future is so uncertain. It’s increasingly fraught to hold a community together across differences when there is so much stress in the system around money. Not every church faces this, and not every pastor has to contend with it, but in so many places there are shrinking budgets, decaying buildings, and increasing conflict. Ministers are expected to lead through this, to stand up and proclaim hopeful and meaningful things each Sunday morning, but this is an act that is increasingly marked by moral stress and moral injury. It can feel like you’ve been hired to put a fresh coat of paint on that house that’s on the verge of tumbling into the sea.

Some might cheer the decline of organized religion. On one level, I do too! When someone makes an argument to me about all the harm that churches (and the Church) have done, I readily agree. Who can deny the cumulative destruction wrought by Christianity? From denial of science to colonialism to racism to homophobia and garden-variety moralism, Christians and churches have done a lot of harm in the world. Less of that kind of thing is good for the world; the less harmful theology that’s out there, the better. At the same time, churches and faith have given a lot of life to the world. Many of us (but no means all) have been nurtured and cared for by communities of faith. An old hymn still says something to us about what we think is true, and we can still find something good for the structuring of our lives among the scriptures and doctrines that have piled up over the years. We see true friendship smiling at us from the pews. It’s not all good, but it’s not all bad either, at least for some of us.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how to revitalize church, how to reinvent it to make it more relevant. I get it, but I also have my doubts about the possibilities of success, or whether it would be a good thing even if it could be done. But more than that, it’s exhausting. Most of the clergy of my generation have spent their whole careers doing some version of that, wrangling over music styles, fonts on the church sign, how to invite people in, and the like. The other night, I was in a conversation with a church committee about whether to change the name of one of our programs, and I found myself arguing that we might as well leave it as it is, because none of the name changes I’ve ever seen done have ever made the slightest difference. Churches have deployed a lot of rebranding and marketing in the service of trying to make clear just what is valuable, and to convince others to come along too, to put new paint on the house. I have done a lot of that too—so, so much paint. I’m tired, and I know a lot of other folks who are too. At the heart of it lies that conundrum of moral stress: sometimes our actions are in conflict with our beliefs, because we don’t have the freedom to choose what we think is right, or what we think is right is at odds with the actual circumstances of the world, or the outcomes of our actions don’t align with what we think is good. This moral stress adds up over time, accumulating inside of us, wounding something that can’t quite be named. I don’t know for sure, because again, I’m no sociologist, but when I hear that 40% of pastors are thinking of leaving the ministry, it does not surprise me at all. When I hear of a pastor resigning or leaving the ministry, I rarely have to ask why.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to work in a flourishing industry, with enough resources and energy to go around. What would it be like to build something, instead of managing decline until there’s nothing left? There are flashes of that in the church world—entrepreneurial spirits who make something out of nothing and cultivate a sense of wide-open horizons. I see those things from afar, those communities and projects, and I envy them and the creative energy it takes to carry them out. There’s a line in a Patty Griffin song that always catches me short: “Everywhere you look the world is changing. Everywhere the water’s closing in. Something deeper still is always rearranging. Something’s lost, something new begins.” It describes a lot of how it feels to live in the world right now, and how it feels to labor in the church.

This is a pessimistic view, perhaps overly pessimistic. If I’m self-diagnosing, my pessimism comes out of my own moral injury from working in churches, my own burnout (pandemic-era and otherwise), and my own sense of frustration at the distance between what I think is true and good and how the world actually is. I take comfort and inspiration from my students, many of whom are preparing for ministry, who as a rule are brilliant and energetic and far more creative than I am. And I take comfort and inspiration from all the devoted folk who refuse to give up, clergy and otherwise, who dig in and work as hard as they can to make things happen. As the song lyric says, something new begins. I think of that congregation in Asheville, preparing to strike out into the unknown, to leave its building in an attempt to be faithful in new places and toward new horizons. It’s beautiful, and it’s also tiring to contemplate, tinged with a sense of loss.

What would it look like to acknowledge and speak to this sense of moral stress and moral injury? What would happen if we paid attention to it? Moral injury is, by its nature, usually hidden. It’s not obvious to anyone from the outside, and it’s not always obvious from the inside either. What could we do to make it apparent, and to address it? What if we took account of the cost of doing this work in this time, and spoke honestly about it? I don’t know if it would change the circumstances, if it could keep the house from tumbling into the sea, or if that’s even possible or desirable. But it might make the work more bearable. Being honest about the weight of this moment might help make the work more rewarding, and acknowledging the difficulty might make the load lighter. And that might be enough.