THE EXIT Part -3-

A second issue is the authors’ assumption that collegiality among pastors, though important, is inherently limited because “ministers feel unavoidable competition with each other, which gets in the way of forming healthy support groups.” But is such competitiveness inevitable? Or is it possible for denominations and judicatories to create conditions under which competitiveness becomes less likely and strong collegiality more common?

By conceiving of collegiality in terms of “support groups,” the authors fail to appreciate the potential for strong forms of collegiality that have the character of friendship, in which fellow pastors share each other’s lives and help shape each other’s character. Friendship sustains pastors over time and not simply during crises—it is the kind of collegiality that is crucial to the cultivation of self-knowledge, relational intelligence, the capacity to remain dynamically engaged with one’s work and the ability to identify and negotiate conflict, all of which are relevant to preventing the dynamics that cause clergy to leave pastoral ministry.

In his book on the experiences of Roman Catholic clergy, The First Five Years of the Priesthood, Hoge claimed that one of the most important findings of his research was that priests left the ministry because they “felt lonely and unappreciated.” Loneliness was the one factor always present among the various reasons priests resigned in their early years of ministry. Hoge claims that when loneliness “is absent, resignation from the priesthood is unlikely. Whether a priest is heterosexual or homosexual, in love or not, it will not drive him to resign unless at the same time he feels lonely or unappreciated.”

This same dynamic appears to be present among Protestant clergy. The indication of loneliness and isolation among pastors who leave parish ministry warrants a more positive view of pastors’ potential for collegiality and calls for a vigorous exploration of the conditions that encourage noncompetitive relationships between clergy.

Precisely because this book succeeds in providing us with an unprecedented, multidenominational reading of why pastors depart from ministry, it is bound to leave readers asking for an equally in-depth discussion of why pastors stay and how they thrive.