c. 2005 Religion News Service

AUSTIN, Texas _ “How can we get better leadership in our churches?” asked a listener at a recent talk. In this instance, she meant clergy leadership, and she was speaking from painful experience.

I had two immediate answers: We need to stop beating up on clergy, and we need to work harder to recruit the right people for seminary training.

Even though my talk was on a different topic, listeners saw leadership as a critical problem standing in the way of their larger concerns, namely, faith, life purpose and suffering. I decided to be as honest as I could be.

I said clergy tenures are too short, largely because of leadership conflicts and dissatisfaction among clergy. How much can a pastor accomplish in 18 to 36 months? At the same time, many clergy are staying too long, because they fear the predictable agonies that occur in starting a new pastorate.

One size doesn’t fit all. A pastor can succeed in one place but not another. When a mismatch occurs, we need to name it, accept mutual accountability for enabling it to happen, and refrain from declaring war on each other. In ministry, as elsewhere in life, our best teacher is failure, not success.

How do we avoid mismatches? We need to stop relying on volunteer search committees, who want more than anything to fall in love and move too slowly for fear of failure. We should turn instead to human resources professionals and keep interims short. The love-and-marriage paradigm for hiring clergy is destructive. Ministry is a context-driven job requiring certain skills, not a love affair.

We need to get beyond control issues. The search committee talks nice, then a lay council lowers the boom, using compensation and expectations to inform the new pastor who’s in charge. A more professional start to a ministry could minimize the control struggles that tend to plague parish ministries.

We need to be proactive in recruiting future clergy, not passively wait for people to present themselves. Specifically, we need younger men and women in seminary, because they will have time to learn the trade. Whether young or middle-aged when they start seminary, we need new clergy who can enter into apprenticeships with seasoned senior pastors and learn from their inevitable mistakes.

We need to examine why potential recruits for ministry have been choosing law and business over an ordination track perceived as conflictual and unrewarding.

The interest of this audience in leadership issues was so high that I set aside my prepared remarks. I didn’t hear anger or blaming, as much as puzzlement that, after all this time, the basic relationships between pastor and flock, especially between pastor and lay council, should be so difficult. I decided not to theorize about our addiction to control, but to offer specific counsel.

I suggested clergy be freed from meetings and encouraged to make calls on members. How can you serve people if you don’t know them? I suggested higher pay and more professional respect. I suggested that lay boards delegate the easy work to others, namely, budgets and buildings, and devote themselves to the harder work of spiritual formation and forging partnerships with their clergy.

I noted fear among seminarians at the prospect of serving denominations and congregations that are polarized over second-order concerns like sexuality. Who wants to engage in church leadership when our common life is dominated by a few doctrinal warriors who cannot move on from stale issues? At some point, the people will need to take back their churches from the sexuality samurai.

These were my answers, based on what I am seeing. Others will see it differently. The larger point is that we talk openly about leadership issues. Clergy are a small but critical piece of the religion puzzle. People are hungry for faith. Confident and capable clergy will be needed to lead hungry pilgrims forward.

MO/JL RNS END

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. His forthcoming book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” will be published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)