After services today, my pastor let us have it for the poor showing at last week's Transfiguration liturgy, which occurred on a weekday. He was kind but he was firm -- very firm -- about why that sort of thing is a failure on our parts, and an important failure. What does it say about our commitment to Christ if we can't be bothered to show up on one of the 12 major feasts of the Church? What about our children? What will they learn from their parents blowing off church on an important feast day? I was one of those parents who didn't shlep out to the parish on Transfiguration -- it's about 45 minutes one way, it was a weekday night, etc., etc. Nothing but excuse-making. I needed Father's reprimand today. I've spent some of this afternoon reading forthcoming social science data about religious trends in American life, and let me tell you, there is no room for parents who wish to raise their kids as orthodox Christians (big-O or small-o) to slack. (More on this in the weeks to come). I really appreciated Father's leadership, even though it made me squirm. No, I really appreciated Father's leadership because it made me squirm.
I came home from church, opened the New York Times, and read this essay by Massachusetts clergyman G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who writes:
The American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it's true. But there's a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one's highest calling.
The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It's apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.
As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants' daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.
What do you think? If you're in the ministry, do you think he has a point? If you're a layperson, do you sense that this might be a reason for pastor burnout? There is no question that there has never been less loyalty among American Christians to particular churches or religious traditions. People really will up and go somewhere else. I am one of the 44 percent of American adults who have left either the church or the faith into which they were born. That I have generally been in search of a religious community and leadership that is more demanding of me, the fact is that a pastor who tries harder to please people like me will alienate others ... and vice versa. Anyway, I thanked my pastor publicly for his hard words of leadership today, and I am going to repay his care for my spiritual warfare by increasing my commitment to parish life.
Do pastors pastor anymore? If the sheep are not guided (like your pastor's admonition) the flock will never grow individually or collectively.
I think that this is undoubtedly true, even in church settings that are more structured and liturgical. It's a function of culture. People have come to think of church less as something woven into the fabric of community life and more as a service provider. A colleague in a parish that struggles to pay its clergy despite having incredibly wealthy parishioners once said to me, "People want their church the same way they want their electricity: cheap and always on."
But all of this can only last so long. There is a deep and awakening hunger for spiritual renewal in our culture, but it is lost under the weight of so much cultural pressure to make everything about performance, to turn parishioners into customers or consumers of religion. And the pressure is very real on a clergyman because you're job is at stake. The answer, it seems to me, is for clergy to be formed in preparation to withstand this sort of pressure. It has to begin at the level of the seminary and continue with strong, structures clergy support networks once a person is out in the parish. All of which is to say, we need a model of training and sustaining clergy in this country that inculcates them with the sense that their primary work is missionary and that they are ministering in an alien culture.
Rod,
That 44% statistic is interesting (though I'd heard closer to 50%). I wonder if it would include me....I was 'raised' nonreligious, if that counts.
I went to a really nice Transfiguration service in the Anglican/Episcopal cathedral in Pittsburgh (I was visiting for the week). It was sparsely attended, but I liked the homily- the priest talked frankly about how there's no way to take this as a myth, a metaphor, or a pretty story. St. Peter recounted this story as an eyewitness (in his Second Epistle), and as Christians we are bound to believe that the miracle really happened. I feel there's too much of a tendency nowadays to explain away miracles and the supernatural, to make everything nice and rational, and it was nice to have a rousing sermon that counteracted that tendency.
I'd add that I really detest the tendency of some parishes to 'reschedule' feast days to the nearest Sunday or whatever for reasons of convenience. Give me a break. If you're going to 'move' the Feast of the Ascension to the nearest Sunday, you might as well not celebrate it at all.
The reason we succumb to confirmation bias, why we are blind to counterexamples, and why we fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways is that these lapses have a purpose.
Rod Dreher sees the web enabling an informed populace. An active one? Not so much. http://ow.ly/2m25w
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