About a week ago, this blog post was making the rounds. It’s written about quitting a job—the author was a minister—and beyond that, it’s a story about a person abandoning the career he had pursued for most of his life. I don’t know the writer, Alexander Lang, and I’m not very plugged in to the networks he travels, but the story he told was familiar. As Lang points out near the top of his post, the Barna Group recently conducted a survey that found that about 42% of pastors were considering leaving the ministry in early 2022. Some not-insignificant portion of that number have actually done so; I know some of them, and I hear stories about others. Lang’s post was a catalog of reasons for leaving, including the dynamics of having lots of people who feel like they possess the authority to tell you how to do your job (“1000 Bosses”), the dizzying array of skills that a minister is supposed to possess and deploy despite generally being paid a relatively low salary (“Unrealistic Expectations”), and what he calls “Unseen Damage,” the cumulative burden of burning through relationships because of conflict, people drifting away, and death. Although I resonate with all of these, and I have seen and heard others wrestle with all of them, it’s the last one, “Unseen Damage,” that feels the most urgent to me.
I wrote about this, in a way, over a year ago, in a post about ministry and moral stress. In that post, I focused on the experience of watching a church where I had once worked—that had up until recently been thriving and stable—fall into hard times and sell its building. In the year since, that community has carried on, meeting online and in other spaces like a funeral home chapel. I’m glad to see them sticking together and making a go of it. But when I drove by the building this summer, I felt a tinge of sadness to realize that the people I knew were no longer connected to the place we used to inhabit together.
Lang’s category of “Unseen Damage” holds a lot of different things, but it captures one of the things that I am finding hardest about living part of my life in the church world these days: the constant presence of loss and death. I started to feel this acutely about a dozen years ago, when a woman in our church died entirely too young of a tragic form of cancer. I remember thinking that I was too young to know people who were dying of things like cancer, although I have learned since that your 30s and 40s are the time when that does begin to happen. In the years since, I have also noticed the way every new death has added some weight to things. Some of the folks have died too young, with too much left to do—there are more of those than there ought to be in a just world—and some of them have died well into old age, satisfied with their lives and ready to go. But all of them have hit me hard, each one harder than the last.
My theory on this is that people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—the ages I have been while serving churches—typically don’t encounter grief on a large scale. There are exceptions to this of course, but most of the time, someone that age will know a few people who die, and not a great many. Older relatives pass away of course, and that is a natural part of most people’s lives, and sometimes a friend passes away tragically young. (My own high school class seems painfully susceptible to that, but that’s another post for another time). But I think it’s fairly rare for someone who’s relatively young to have so many friends in their 70s or 80s or 90s, and to have to watch them become ill and die. That’s what church does—it puts you into community with elderly folks who are not necessarily your relatives—and that’s a population that does not tend to live a long time. I really value the experience of being a minister in my 20s or 30s or 40s, and getting to know much older people through classes, chatting in the hallway, or becoming part of their lives through visits and in the midst of crises. But when some of those people become ill and die, as will inevitably happen, the weight of each person passing adds to the ones before, and it can become difficult to bear.
Sometimes, when talking shop with each other, ministers will use an informal metric to talk about their churches. “More funerals than baptisms,” they’ll say, or “more baptisms than funerals.” That first church is not growing or thriving, goes the most likely interpretation, and that second church is supposed to be the kind of place where it’s fun to work. It’s a rough metric, and of course church vitality is about far, far more than measures like baptism and funerals. But as much as it’s a commentary about vitality, it’s also a commentary about the burden of pastoring those two different churches. The one with lots of baptisms is energizing; it feels alive. The church with lots of funerals is spiritually and psychologically draining. It feels like…well…a lot of funerals.
I’ve never worked at a church with more baptisms than funerals. That points to something important that underlies Mainline Protestantism in this moment that often gets lost: that many of the struggles in that strand of Christianity have their roots in demographics, and not in any success or failure of theology or ecclesiology. The people who attend Mainline Protestant churches (especially White Mainline Protestant churches) simply are having fewer babies than they used to, and birth rate predicts the size of church participation. The same basic demographic problem is being faced by public schools, colleges and universities, and certain brands (a good example is Harley-Davidson); it’s not simply a church problem. No matter how successful (if “success” is even a metric that makes any theological sense) your Mainline Protestant church is right now, it probably won’t have more baptisms than funerals.
But I tried to do the math for my own career—tried to figure out how many friends I have made and lost in my 21 years of parish ministry—and I think the number must be something in the range of 300. 300 friends gone in these 21 years. Outside of some extraordinary tragic circumstance, it’s hard to think of too many people who are 45 years old who have lost 300 friends. It’s not a normal state of affairs. I was closer to some of those 300 people than others of course, but in a real sense, every one of them was, and is, a loss. I have gone to many of their funerals; I have officiated dozens of their memorials. Paradoxically, funerals are almost always a life-giving time, and it’s a privilege to be with a grieving family and help them put words to their grief. But it adds up.
Lang puts the toll of people’s deaths in the “Unseen Damage” category along with other forms of relational loss, like when people leave the church for some reason, or the pastor leaves, or conflict drives a wedge between people. Certainly I have experienced all of those things; a lot of water flows under the bridge in 21 years, and sometimes I find myself thinking about people who are still alive, but who I don’t see anymore. These are people with whom I used to be close, sharing a cabin at church camp, traveling together on a church trip, serving together on a committee, or simply saying hello once a week for years. Then something happens, and they are gone, often without any explanation. It happens strikingly often in ministry.
That Barna Group survey result that I mentioned earlier, the one that found that 42% of pastors were considering leaving ministry, likely has a number of causes and explanations. Lang’s post names some of those, and alludes to others. Certainly the pandemic has made things worse for many of the churches and ministers I know. Resources are becoming scarcer, communities are becoming smaller, and conflict rises in concert with anxiety. Pastors are cast as saviors, scapegoats, and lightning rods for whatever controversy is moving through the congregation. There are usually far, far more funerals than baptisms. There are times when it can feel like an impossible job. It’s not surprising to me that 42% of pastors are considering moving on from it.
I’ll close with a few reflections as part of the other 58%, the ones sticking with it for now. The ministers who are staying are probably staying for as many different reasons as the ones leaving have for leaving, but I would wager that in a survey, a few things would pop up. For starters, it’s a privilege to engage in work that matches your values, and churches can be a place where values show up strongly. That’s certainly true for me; I find it really fulfilling to work in environments where I can try to make the world better, even if very incrementally. And then there’s the community; the friendship and fellowship offered in churches, even if it is sometimes disrupted by death and conflict, can be really life-giving.
Parish ministry (or pastoral ministry) isn’t my main professional identity now, and it hasn’t been for ten years. I think that has helped me stick it out; it has helped to have other outlets and expressions for my work life, that balance the ups and downs of congregational life. As part-time clergy on a staff with multiple ministers, I’m not the main lightning rod for conflict, I’m not the only scapegoat when things fizzle out, I’m not expected to be the savior for anything, and I’m not the one officiating most of the funerals. The weight doesn’t fall heaviest on me, which might be why I have been able to bear it for a while. But I can still feel that unseen damage accumulating. I can still feel the edges of my enthusiasm and energy eroding away, and I can still feel what it might be like to be part of that 42% who think about quitting. Each time I get a text or a call that someone has died, that another friend is gone, it gets harder to stay. Every time I look around the sanctuary and see fewer and fewer faces, I feel the loss. The unseen damage builds over time. The question for me, and for other clergy, and for the church, is how long it can keep building.