Mounting pressures: Can pastors survive the strain of change?

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Mounting pressures: Can pastors survive the strain of change?

By Diane Reynolds, Times Staff Writer Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Church consultant Sally Morgenthaler of Littleton, Colo., paints a grim picture of contemporary pastoring.

As she sees it, the pressures bearing down on pastors are heading to a breaking point.

She predicts more scandals in the church.

"Our Western religion is not comfortable with [pastors] being human ... we're not comfortable with complexity," she said.

On top of a historic expectation that pastors live up to an impossible standard, new U.S. realities have piled on: the megachurch ideal coupled with a celebrity culture, the increasing failure of small mainline Protestant churches and the decline of Christianity in the religious marketplace.

But several local pastors argue that all is not lost.

Big and famous

Up until the 1980s, Morgenthaler said, a pastor could aspire to organizing a better church supper and keeping a congregation of 200 reasonably happy.

Then came the megachurch movement.

Suddenly the ante was up - big time. Pastors built churches of 10,000 members and became personally famous, not to mention raking in six-digit salaries.

These pastors behaved more like powerful CEOs on the pinnacle of a corporate pyramid than the humble parish priests of days gone by who knew their parishioners by name.

Many young pastors aspired to build megachurches, Morgenthaler said.

And they justified it with the belief that the money, power and prestige of a celebrity megachurch offered an unprecedented platform to preach the good news.

Yet being a remote leader at the top of a megachurch hierarchy increased the dangers to pastors that were already inherent in a historic expectation that a pastor be perfect.

A sense of entitlement accompanied the advent of the CEO model. The resulting distance from parishioners, coupled with an increasing lack of accountability and an emphasis on image, opened the door to what Morgenthaler calls the double-life pastor.

Pastors under constant pressure to appear perfect, pastors who think they are special and pastors who serve to the point of burnout are all more likely to feel justified in pursuing unhealthy addictions, she said.

She pointed to the Roman Catholic priest scandal and the recent scandal in which the Rev. Ted Haggard, former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., visited a male prostitute as examples.

And, she said, pastors don't need to lead megachurches to acquire the wrong attitude. They only have to aspire to be celebrity pastors and behave as such, even with small congregations.

The Rev. Joe Duke, senior pastor of the 1,500 member LifePoint Church in Reisterstown, said he works hard to resist being seen as bigger than life.

To keep a level head and avoid burnout, he said, he realized from the outset he couldn't pastor a large church and be everyone's friend. He also can't function as chaplain to his congregation, visiting every sick member in the hospital or being available to everyone with a problem.

Instead, his church is organized into small cells that provide decentralized care and offer people the opportunity to use their spiritual gifts.

He sees his chief roles as providing vision and as primary teacher or communicator on Sunday mornings.

He's aware, he said, that Ted Haggard situations develop gradually as cracks in accountability grow.

A common temptation in Christian leadership is to fake being better than you are, he said.

"You have to be alert to the slippery slope of the disintegration of your inner world," Duke said.

The six other elders on his church staff help keep him accountable, he said, as does his church's emphasis on authenticity.

The caution with elders, Morgenthaler said, is to make sure they are independent enough of the senior pastor not to simply rubberstamp his actions.

Dying churches

Because of their openness to advances in psychology and therapy, the mainline Protestant churches are doing fairly well at treating pastors as humans, Morgenthaler said, but these churches are dying out.

"The little traditional churches are going," she said. In countries such as New Zealand and Australia, she said, these churches are turning into private residences, museums, art galleries and gift shops. The United States, she said, is not that far behind.

In part, this is because people are joining megachurches that appeal to many with their shopping-mall array of services and conservative theology. But the biggest decline comes from a shift in the culture away from church attendance and toward the growth of other religions and spiritual expressions.

Morgenthaler foresees a bleak future, in which consumer-driven megachurches will increasingly be the primary option for Protestants - putting more pressure both on megachurch pastors and others to build large congregations.

But the Rev. Robert Rock, retired pastor of Manchester United Church of Christ, believes there will always be a place for smaller churches.

Some people want the intimacy of a church with only several hundred members, he said. These churches can survive if they reach out to their local communities, he said, and if they get robust support from their present membership.

The emphasis in church culture has been on growth, he agreed, a trend that started when mainline denominations started losing membership in the 1960s.

But unlike the megachurch push, he never felt pressured to grow his churches, only to replace members who moved or died.

A counter-trend to big and bigger, Morgenthaler said, is the house church movement, a growing phenomenon in which people are increasingly opting out of church for at home or café-type worship joined with service in the community.

"A move outside of church buildings, whether in house, coffee houses or community centers, could be one of the best things that could happen," she said.

Pastors behaving with integrity would be another answer, she said, by resigning when they realize they are in trouble.

But such actions are difficult, she said, as few pastors have other careers to fall back on.

In Carroll County

Except for its Catholic parishes that number in the thousands and the fast-growing LifePoint Church, Carroll remains largely a community of small churches.

Self-aware pastors could save the local church community from a scandalous future.

Three pastors- the Rev. Don Holman of Reisterstown Bible Church, the Rev. Jen Walters of Benjamin's Kriders United Church of Christ in Westminster and the Rev. Ellin Dize of Stone Chapel United Methodist Church - all strive for a strong sense of the work of grace in their own lives and little sense of personal grandiosity.

"I was very forthright with them about my past," the twice-divorced Walters said of her interview process with Benjamin's Kriders. "They showed a lot of grace and compassion."

In her experience, she said, parishioners are willing to question pastoral authority.

"I see that as a very positive thing," she said.

Mainline denominations use psychological assessments and extensive reviews to try to weed out poor candidates.

In the United Methodist Church, said MaryAnn Moman, associate general secretary with the general board of higher education and ministry of the denomination in Nashville, Tenn., the local conference will review candidates and want answers to any questionable issues in a person's profile.

However, anyone can start a nondenominational church without scrutiny.

Rock said small church pastors can face the same burnout pressure as those who pastor big churches.

The key, he said, is to realize you can't do everything and please everybody.

"I bleed, I swear, I lose my temper," he said.For local pastors, self-awareness, fueled by conversation, helps keep their self-perception in line with reality.

"Most clergy have some kind of peer group to which they relate," said Moman.

Walters spoke of conversations with other pastors about the dangers of being put on a pedestal.

And Holman tries not to forget he's only human.

"If I let my guard down, I'll get tempted, I guarantee you," Holman said. "God will expose me."

His congregation also keeps him off a pedestal, Holman said.

All he has to do is preach a few times and parishioners realize he's human, he said.

"They know that I'm not special," he said.

Reach staff writer Diane Reynolds at 410-857-7873 or reynoldsd@lcniofmd.com.

CHURCH STATISTICS

Church membership rates for major denominations per 1,000 of population:

Mainline Protestant

United Methodist Church: 1925: 66; 2000: 30
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): 1925: 21; 2000: 9
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: 1925: 15; 2000: 18
United Church of Christ: 1925: 14; 2000: 5
The Episcopal Church: 1925: 10; 2000: 8

Evangelical Protestant

Southern Baptist Convention: 1925: 31; 2000: 57
The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod: 1925: 5; 2000: 9
Assemblies of God: 1925: .4; 2000: 5
Church of God: 1925: .2; 2000: 3
Pentecostal: 1925: 06; 1998: 5

Percent changes in denominations in Carroll County and in the U.S. 1990-2000

Roman Catholic: +57.2; nation: +16.2
Church of the Brethren: -23; nation: -8.2
Episcopal Church: -10.9; nation: -5.3
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: +10.7; nation: -2.2
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): +18.6, U.S., -11.6
United Church of Christ: -6.6, nation: -14.8
United Methodist Church: +6.5, nation: -6.7

Sources: Roger Finke: "Church Membership in America, trends and explanations" and Association of Religion Data Archives