Parson's Progress

ANONYMOUS

I

HAVING my full share of curiosity concerning my fellows, I have always been interested in knowing where life bears hard on men in different callings, where the points of tension come, and what are the sources of durable satisfaction. Perhaps some have a similar curiosity concerning a parish minister.

A minister’s working life covers about forty years. He is normally in his late twenties when he completes his training and is ordained; he usually retires or is retired in his late sixties. I am forty-five and have been in the work twenty years. I wish to signalize arrival at this midpoint in my career by setting down as candidly as I can my opinion of the task in which I am engaged. I have had an all-round experience. On graduating from the seminary, I became pastor of a church in a small town which served as county seat and trading centre for the farm country surrounding it. From there I went to a church in a large industrial suburb, where my people were drawn from both the white-collar and the artisan classes — minor executives, foremen, young engineers and professional men, the more highly skilled machine operators, and members of the building crafts. There was a Sunday School of a thousand members.

From there I went to a downtown church of the institutional type in a large industrial city, whose membership comprised a cross section of the city’s population from élite to slums, a sevenday church which served as club and home to a large group of underprivileged employed people, where the Saturday night dance in the gymnasium sometimes threatened to overshadow the worship services in the sanctuary next day. From there I came to my present charge, a church in a favored residential community, whose constituency is made up largely of the employer and professional classes. I have, then, had experience with each of the most numerous types of Protestant church. In addition, I served for a year and a half as a navy chaplain during the war.

The career of many ministers approximates this pattern. Some, on graduating from the seminary, elect to serve their apprenticeship as assistant in a large church, where they may study the preaching, pastoral, and administrative methods of their chief, rather than to ‘launch out into the deep’ as minister of a small church of their own. A few precocious and highly gifted men are catapulted straight from the seminary into a large church. But most climb Zion’s hill more slowly and one step at a time, deeming themselves fortunate if their early forties find them in a church where they can gladly remain — for, unless a man is of outstanding ability, ‘calls’ after forty-five are hard to come by. The pulpit committees of most vacant churches are looking for a man between thirty-five and forty — old enough to have had some experience and demonstrated his ability, young enough so that he has not yet begun to slow down. I am one of the lucky ones: at thirty-nine I was called to a church which, if it will let me, I shall be glad to serve for the ‘rest-of-my-life’ pastorate.

My career has been typical, and throughout it I have had a moderate though not a spectacular success. I have never known the thrilling but soul-imperiling experience of having throngs attend my ministry, yet my ministry has been well-supported. It has been the ‘open sesame’ to a wealth of friendships with people of every age and condition. I have been the recipient of a loyalty and generosity beyond my desert. I have been as happy as one can reasonably expect to be in this sadly imperfect world. I like to think that if I should come into possession of independent means I should go on doing freely what now I am paid to do. I am the more persuaded to this because the ex-ministers of my acquaintance who have married rich women or gone into other lines of work (where not all, mirabile dictu, are failures) are the most forlorn group of men I know. As one said to me, ‘I miss the sustaining motive that the ministry provides.’

This article, then, is not the wail of an embittered soul, nor is it the pæan of one who has found the ministry all cakes and ale. It is, I repeat, the putting down as truthfully as I can of what I have found in the ministry.

II

One of the difficulties of the ministry is that of taking over the following of one’s predecessor. I do not complain of this. I sympathize with the problem of church people in transferring their affection from a man whom through the years they have learned to love and trust, who has married them, baptized their children, and buried their dead, to another man whom they do not know at all. In two of the churches I have served I followed men of unusually strong and winsome personality, whose preaching gifts had won them a considerable following. In neither case was I able to hold all of the following they had attracted. It affords me no satisfaction to reflect that my successors have experienced similar difficulty in retaining the loyalty of the following I built up. The inner nucleus carries over from one pastorate to another, the faithful souls who are committed to the cause, who love the church, who are ‘institutionminded’; but on the periphery are many who have joined the minister rather than the church. When he departs, they scatter.

This, in my judgment, is one of the cardinal weaknesses of Protestantism. Roman Catholicism is largely immune from it, partly because its parishes (theoretically at least) embrace all the Catholics in a given area, so that a Catholic cannot flit from one church to another without changing his residence; partly because the Roman Catholic Church does not foster the ‘star system’ in its priesthood. Episcopalianism, especially in its HighChurch wing, feels this difficulty less than other Protestant bodies (I crave the pardon of my Anglo-Catholic friends for suggesting that they are Protestants — but the Pope so regards them) because it places less emphasis on the sermon, more on the service, and especially on the Sacrament. Liberal Judaism shares it: like the freechurch bodies, it magnifies the preaching office; when a popular rabbi leaves, his followers disperse among other synagogues of their choice.

It is safe to say that the phase of his work which the ordinary minister finds most irksome is the administrative. He is usually not an administrator by temperament or aptitude; if he were, he would have gone into some line of work where the need for organizing ability is more obvious. Moreover, he is untrained for it. His seminary training embraces preaching and pastoral work, but church administration is neglected or touched upon in the most sketchy fashion. In my own seminary course, I had twelve semester hours each in church history, systematic theology, Old and New Testament exegesis. But the only course offered in church administration was a onehour course of one semester’s duration. Perhaps the seminaries have rectified this imbalance since my time. I am grateful for the thorough grounding my seminary gave me in the classic disciplines of the theological curriculum, but, as one of my classmates observed in our first ‘round robin,’ ‘I would give all I remember of Hebrew and Greek to know how to run a firstclass every-member canvass.’

Thus scantily prepared, the minister is set down in a parish where he finds himself in effect the general manager of an organization which schedules from three to thirty events a week (one of the churches I served had twentyfour organizations, plus three basketball teams, a baseball and a bowling team); which requires for its proper functioning a large number of committees, most of whose meetings the minister must attend and for which he must prepare the docket; which has a physical plant for whose maintenance and repair he is ultimately responsible; which is constantly receiving and disbursing funds (the church I serve now has a thousand contributors and twelve on its payroll — churches like the Madison Avenue Presbyterian in New York or the Fourth Presbyterian of Chicago have many more); which has scores, perhaps hundreds, of volunteer workers who must be supervised, encouraged, and kept from treading on each other’s toes. In addition, the parish minister is expected to act as promoter for community, charitable, and denominational enterprises and to open the pocketbooks of his people to them.

Dr. Gaius Glenn Atkins says that all the problems of the modern church are at bottom financial problems. This is an overstatement, though it comes from a careful thinker. But it is not an overstatement to say that there is no painless way of providing regular and adequate financial support for any institution which is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions. The raising of the church budget is the nightmare of many a minister. He must either cajole his trustees (who often assume that they serve in an honorary capacity, simply lending the church the lustre of their names) into carrying through the annual budget campaign or he must do it himself, which is usually easier and more effective. If he is skillful, he plans it himself but works from the background. If a minister shows too much interest in the finances of his church, he is suspected of being mercenary. If he lets them slide and a deficit ensues, it is felt that he is losing his grip.

Here again I am not complaining. I never cease from grateful wonder that year after year our church can rally a hundred men who are willing to go to the homes of their fellow members and ask for their pledges. I sometimes ask myself if I would do it, or if I would find some pretext for avoiding it. Certainly I should not enjoy it, for what soliciting I do is distasteful to me, no matter how enthusiastic I am about the object of my solicitation. I merely submit that there are few other callings which expect a man both to earn his salary and to raise it!

For years I begrudged the time and energy I consumed in running and especially in financing the institution which employed me. If I did not have to do it, I lamented, I should be released for the creative work for which I was trained and on which my heart was set: studying, teaching, preaching, working with individuals. But finally I made a good adjustment. It is not merely ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ nor the reflection that many lines of work (homemaking above all) have a large amount of inescapable routine, but simply the realization that in and through the humdrum of parish work a congregation can be welded together into a brotherhood as in no other way. Emerson has a sour saying, ‘Men descend that they may meet: they meet on the basis of their common indulgences.’ But men never form such firm friendships as when they come together in a common cause. And there is a touch of idealism about church work — even such mundane features of it as raising the budget and seeing that the roof and furnace are kept in repair — which redeems it from utter drudgery. There is the sense of building oneself into an organism which has come down from the long past and will endure long after those who serve it now are gathered to their fathers. When a man of light and leading, sportsman, clubman, leader in civic affairs, says to me, ‘The closest and most lasting friendships I have formed have been in the work of the church,’ I am persuaded that time thus spent is not wholly wasted. And I make a game out of doing it as well as I can.

Ill

The only authority a Protestant minister has to-day is what he can get. The Catholic priest has behind him an infallible Church, the old-time Protestant minister had behind him an infallible Bible, but the liberal Protestant minister of to-day has no more authority than he can command through his people’s belief in his sincerity and good sense. I am quite content to have it so. I had rather rely on persuasion to get people to do what needs to be done than on the power of command as I saw it in the navy, even though it takes more time and patience. But the necessity of relying on persuasion puts a premium on the cultivation of friendships. People will do things for you — serve on boards, teach classes, lead groups — if they like you, and the minister has to trade on this fact.

This does not mean that there is not much genuine devotion among the membership of Protestant churches. There is, and it was never better demonstrated than during the depression. In a time when the mortality rate among clubs, banks, and businesses was high, few churches closed their doors. They substituted volunteer choirs for paid choirs, used mimeographed orders of worship instead of printed, but they carried on. In many a church, unemployed craftsmen made repairs and improvements as their contribution. What church women have done to keep their churches running and their missionary quotas paid is a tale of unheralded devotion which needs the eloquence of a Paul to do it justice. And, with all its shortcomings, what other institution commands the amount or the quality of volunteer service given to the Sunday School?

But this devotion needs to be supplemented by a personal relationship to become most effective. People love the church and the Lord whom it exalts, but they serve both most cheerfully when they know and like the minister. Recruiting workers, persuading people to do what needs to be done, is an important part of a minister’s task. By his success or failure here, he stands or falls. Does not this introduce an element of mercenariness, an ulterior motive, into a minister’s personal relationships? I sometimes fear it does, tempting him to cultivate people not for their own sakes but for what they may be induced to do for the church. This is a grave danger, for the fundamental immorality is to use people as pawns in one’s game; and the ethic ‘The end justifies the means’ does not commend itself to a sensitive conscience.

Akin to this danger is that of allowing a subtle egotism to steal on one unawares. The parish is a small world, but the minister is the centre of it. It is a tiny kingdom, but in it he reigns as king. In Puritan days he was called ‘ the parson ’ — the person of the community. If to-day his stature in the community has shrunk and men in other walks overshadow him, within his own group he is still supreme. Nothing starts till he gets there. Wherever he sits is the head of the table. He calls the meeting to order. He determines what hymns shall be sung. He is consulted and quoted at every point. And while the deference and flattery accorded him are a bit hollow, they will unman him unless he has a saving sense of humor or a wife whom love has not made blind.

IV

Matthew Arnold declared that the American’s favorite book was the Book of Numbers. And the cult of bigness which rejoices in population growth (as though our cities were not already unwieldy) and eighty-story office buildings (which are unjustified by land values and the cause of unnecessary traffic congestion) has not stopped at the doors of the church. There are churches of three, four, six thousand members; churches which boast of being ‘the biggest in the city’ or ‘ the second largest in the denomination.’ My opinion is that a church of six hundred members is or should be the church of maximum efficiency. Such a church can be served by a minister and a trained woman worker who combines the functions of church secretary, director of religious education, and Sunday School visitor. A church of this size is large enough to contain plenty of talent to run it and to have the enthusiasm engendered by a good-sized group. It is small enough so that it is possible for any member to know all of his fellow members and so that the individual is not lost in the mass. Even the humble member can feel that he is needed and that his absence will be noted. The minister can know all of his people and visit them at least once a year in their homes. (It is still true that ‘a housegoing pastor means a church-going people.’) I have watched churches grow from one numerical bracket to another, and my observation is that the percentage of attendance, contributors, and active workers in relation to membership declines when a church grows much beyond the six-hundred mark.

Unhappily, however, a church of six hundred cannot support the quality and variety of programme which are demanded of an urban church. A church of fifteen hundred can, and this I should regard as the high limit. Above this, as another has said, it is impossible for the shepherd to know his sheep by name: he can know them only by number. The church is no longer a family, a ‘household of faith’; it is a crowd. When a church exceeds a thousand members, it requires a multiple ministry; and in a Protestant church this presents problems. For a minister, like a doctor, finds it difficult to deputize his work. When I am sick, I do not want my overworked doctor to send his assistant. I want him. There was one week last winter when I had five funerals in three days. Had I sent my colleague to conduct any of them, the family would have been affronted. Yet five funerals in a week consume not only a lot of time but a lot of nervous energy, especially where one’s sympathy is strongly involved. How the minister of a church of six thousand copes with this problem I do not know.

V

With experience, preaching on the whole grows easier, though, alas, not always better. As a man masters the technique of his craft and finds his own method of expression, he makes fewer false starts, wastes less time in finding proper themes and breaking into them. But it is hard to keep the freshness and spontaneity he knew when first the great conceptions of religion captured his imagination and stimulated his mind. Still, there is enough of the artistic element in preaching to impel a man to try (as every true artist tries) ever to excel himself, to improve on his previous best. A mind disciplined by study and subdued by experience — his own and the experiences of others into which he enters vicariously through the privilege the pastoral office confers — brings forth a mature wisdom which is better than the raw, heady wine of youth. As I grow older, I care less and less for oratory, more and more I crave the ability to speak to men’s need. Less and less do I think of myself as a propagandist, more and more as an interpreter of life from the Christian point of view.

One thing may be said for the liberal Protestant pulpit: it is the freest place on earth. The editor may need to exercise care lest his editorial offend his advertisers, the political officeholder has the spectre of election day always in his mind, but the preacher can ‘hew to the line . . . let the chips fly where they may,’ for that is precisely what the people who sit in his pews and pay his salary want and expect him to do. He occupies somewhat the position once held by the court fool. The fool was permitted to tell the king hard truths which none of his courtiers would dare to mention. It is generally understood among church people that a preacher must be accorded complete ‘liberty of prophesying,’ even at the risk of his abusing it; and they are as jealous to maintain that liberty as is he.

A minister’s hardest problem is himself. If he is going to influence others, he must live the life himself — lest, in Emerson’s phrase, what he is speaks so loud men can’t hear what he says. One of his disabilities as he grows older is likely to be a loss of confidence in others’ ability to make themselves over, to reshape their personalities — a loss of confidence due to the fact that his progress in making himself over has been so painful and so slow. His pastoral work requires a high degree of self-detachment,— the ‘heart at leisure from itself,’ of which Anna Waring sings, — and as with accumulated years accumulated cares beset him, this self-detachment is not always easy to attain. Worst of all, he is beset by the demon of unreality: as he constantly handles the symbols of religion and repeats its formulas, the reality for which they stand is likely to elude him. Holy things tend to become commonplace. Ironically enough, he may be so engrossed in leading worship that he himself fails to worship. Even the Communion service may become a matter of rote. None more than he needs Dr. Johnson’s admonition, ‘Clear your mind of cant!’

When asked the secret of a successful ministry, a minister who had stayed for forty years in one church, revered by three generations, replied: ‘Keep the evangelic note in your preaching; be constantly doing unobtrusive kindnesses.’ These two things I have steadily sought to do. I wish I were always as sure of God and His kingdom of love as I am sometimes. I count not myself yet to have laid hold. But I press on.