ministers

When to contact your minister

“You didn’t visit Susan* in the hospital. You’re not doing your job. You’re not being a good pastor.”

Those words hung in the air for a few moments before I explained on the phone that Susan nor her family told me that she was in the hospital. It didn’t matter. The caller didn’t care. In the caller’s mind, I was responsible for information that I didn’t know about. It was very painful to be accused of not doing my “job”.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times in the years that have passed. So, I worked more hours and harder at being omnipresent. Continue Reading…

Associate Pastor

The untraditional associate pastor

It’s been a little over four years since I wrote, The Work of the Associate Pastor (Judson Press) and a lot has changed. As church budgets get smaller and the pews reveal increasingly empty space, many church leaders cannot fathom having an associate pastor on a church staff. A Hartford Institute for Religion Research study found that from 2010 to 2015, part-time clergy jumped from 29% to 38%. If it’s hard enough to staff one pastoral position, how could a church even think about two?

The answer is: it’s time to consider another model of associate pastor. Continue Reading…

Leadership

The future of ministry is not in seminary

That’s right. The future of ministry is not going to be found in the traditional 90 credit seminary degree but in modified virtual centers of learning.

Why?

As I explained in my book, The Work of the Associate Pastor, churches must find alternative avenues for finding ministers other than the traditional college and seminary educated pastor. The full-time professional clergy person is becoming a difficult sustainable goal to achieve for many churches. The Atlantic highlighted the state of middle class clergy carrying a seminary degree: high debt, low wages, vanishing churches, and part-time pastor positions.

The traditional mainline church track for full-time pastors followed like this: 4-years of college, 3-years of graduate seminary education, and ordination. This process launched a generation of pastors into their ministry in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s. The traditional 90-credit seminary degree, the master of divinity, became the mark of an intellectual, professional, and full-time pastor. Churches had the people and money to support such a model. The pastor typical could raise a family and even buy a house (if one was not provided).

Those days are gone.

Now, because of cost of graduate education, seminary graduates are saddled with debt. In the $40,000 to $60,000 range (on top of college debt). The pace of the rise of the cost of education has exceeded the rate of inflation: to the tune of 500% since 1985. Usually, when a professional incurs such a debt, their boss gives them a raise because of their higher degree. Not the case with pastors. Many pastors have the same credit hours as school administrators, but paid much less.

With this current reality of shrinking churches, downsized church budgets, less full-time pastor positions, and need for a generation of clergy to lead churches into a new culture, a shorter more focused distance modified seminary degree is needed. A distance modified 45-credit degree could shake up this bleak future for pastors and churches. Seminaries like Northern and Palmer are introducing these types of programs.

Here’s what the 45-credit “seminary” degree could look like:

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Why pastors need pastors

Much of what we pastors do is to minister, care, support, and uplift the people in our congregations and community. We go through college and graduate school (seminary) and learn the basics of sociology, psychology, and therapy. We pastors walk with people through depression, grief, and death.

Through all those hours, days, weeks, and years of care-giving, what happens when we pastors need a pastor? Who will be the care-giver to the care-giver? Who will be the pastor to a pastor?

I recently posted an Baptist News Global article, written by Jeff Brumbly, on Facebook with some startling statistics for pastors:

Church Leadership

Do you have church money anxiety?

In congregational life, there are always those who give more /worry more/spend more time on the money than others. In systems theory this is called overfunctioning. Members who are overfunctioning with financial aspects of the church always think if others gave more or were more responsible, the church wouldn’t have this problem.

Yet there’s a balance between those who overfunction and those who underfunction in terms of financial responsibility. It takes both to keep this dynamic going. Often key church leaders carry the anxiety for church finances.

Who is staying awake at night? Typically, it’s the pastor, although sometimes lay leaders are more worried than the clergy. I talked recently with a church treasurer who was losing sleep night after night over whether there would be enough church money in the account to pay the bills. In this situation, the potential shortfall did not belong to the treasurer but to the church. It wasn’t his responsibility—or not his alone. Yet he was the one who was holding all the anxiety for it.

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The beards of ministry

Being a goatee pastor, I found this beards of ministry hilarious. Which beards of ministry do you have?

When to contact your minister

The untraditional associate pastor

The future of ministry is not in seminary

Why pastors need pastors

Do you have church money anxiety?

The beards of ministry

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