A friend of mine once said that if you're in the ordained ministry and have never once thought of leaving it, you're in serious denial. Quite honestly, I thought about leaving it many, many times from the very beginning. It was in the last two years that it became more and more imperative, and unavoidably clear to me that I would not retire from the United Methodist ordained ministry. A lot of things happened. 2007 was a year of many, many deaths in my church. Not that I hadn't had that many funerals in one year before, but in 2007 there were deaths that were sudden and very unexpected. The year started off with a man in his forties dying of blood clots moving from his legs to his heart. A man I'd come to feel close to in about six weeks of pastoral visits to the hospital. He was an outsider, but he embraced me as his pastor, his confidante. He made me feel like what I did mattered. After that, we lost some dear pillars of the church, again, suddenly. There were accidents, a suicide, and cancer.
Death and grief have a way of stripping away all pretenses from your eyes, like scales falling away. Maybe it's like cataract surgery. Honesty becomes essential.
A pastor has no job description, no contract that we sign agreeing to certain hours and duties. It is wide open, and therefore, you have as many supervisors as you have members of your church. All with different agendas, different needs, and therefore different images of what a pastor should do. A pastor is expected to be an exceptional preacher, inspiring worship leader, a crisis counselor, grief counselor, Bible scholar, administrator, conflict resolution expert, and mind reader. A pastor is expected to know when people need a phone call or a visit, without anyone telling them. A pastor is expected to relate to little kids, youth, young adults and old people all equally well, and to know how to reach all of them in their interests and entertain them. They are on call 24/7. They are supposed to be always available, day or night. They are expected to be calm in every situation. They are expected to inspire new members to call on them at any time, particularly young families, but do that without upsetting the older people.
The pastor's family is always on display. They are not supposed to have any problems, and when I was growing up, the pastor's wife was supposed to be fulltime assistant to her husband without pay. It's preferable if she plays the piano, is willing to be president of the UMW, keep an immaculate house just in case a parishioner shows up unannounced, lead Bible Studies at the church, and be the perfect mother. She is expected to make the pastor look good.
But the pastor is not allowed to have friends, unless they are other clergy. If the pastor has friends in the congregation, they are accused of having favorites, and the pastor is expected to love everyone equally. They are supposed to attend all the sports games at the school, all the musical programs, and still visit everyone in the nursing home. They are not supposed to ever get angry or depressed. People rarely ask the pastor how they're doing and really want to know, but everyone is surprised when a pastor gets sick or suffers a crisis that makes the incapable of doing their job. Pastors don't trust other pastors, especially in the UMC, because they could one day be their D.S. And if a D.S. knows some weakness of yours, they can send you to a backwoods church where no one else wants to go.
A pastor, when they are ordained in the UMC, agrees to go wherever they are sent "without reservation." Which means that a pastor cannot ever choose where they want to live, how much money they want to make, or what schools their children will attend. They cannot choose what house they will live in. When you live in a parsonage, you cannot make decisions about the house you live in. You have to humbly make your requests to a committee of people that generally think that a pastor should live in poverty, it's part of the call. The general value of the pastor him or herself is called into question. Is she worth a new carpet? Does she really need pipes that don't leak? Can't we just patch that linoleum in the kitchen that was put down in 1960? Back East, the church even furnished the parsonage, you didn't have your own. And the parsonages were usually furnished with pieces from parishioner's basements-- the furniture that was not good enough for their houses was somehow fine for the pastor's house. It's that poverty thing again. Besides, a pastor should not be concerned with such worldly things as furniture that matches.
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