Search, a book about why there's a pastor shortage

A couple weeks ago I finished my first book of 2024, Search by Michelle Huneven. It was funny, well-written, and insightful. And it was complicated. The more I reflected, the clearer I could see how Huneven relays, without her knowing, insight into the crisis of clergy shortage we’re facing. If her book is any indication of the wider pattern, the future is dim.

Huneven’s book is auto-fiction (a fictionalized but apparently not that fictionalized), a reinterpretation of her own experience sitting on the search committee for the pastor of her Unitarian Universalist church in Northern California. She’s upfront that she went into the committee thinking she would write a book about her experience.

Even though she talks about her struggle to feel like that was appropriate, as a writer I was uncomfortable. My ethics around storytelling are high – if it happened to you, I’m going to ask if I can talk about it and show you a copy of the story for your approval before it goes to print. But I don’t write fiction, so who knows, maybe I’m anxious over nothing?

But the other complication was reading this from the vantage point of a pastor. This was a stressful read, and my colleagues have mentioned the same. Most of us ended up in our jobs because of a search committee. All of us ended up in our jobs because someone scrutinized, picked, prodded, and vetted us for the role we’re in now. That vetting is personal, subjective, and painful. Sometimes it’s sexist and racist.

The story is told in first-person and this is what I think we’re supposed to take away: a thoughtful but discontent church person joins a search committee to help bring her church towards the fullness of its self and her own experience of spiritual fulfillment. In the end, she’s thwarted by a faction of young people who go for the glitz and glitter of a fellow young person woman pastor, eschewing the wisdom and experience of a seasoned woman pastor who showed depth and wisdom. Shallowness and celebrity win the day. Dana accepts this defeat and leaves the church, a causality of attrition, because she can no longer sees herself growing in the church she loved.

Here's another narration: an older church woman whose attendance is sparse is inexplicably asked to join the search committee for her church’s new pastor. During the process she decides the younger members are working up a plot to thwart all but their favored candidate even as Dana attempts to gather others around her own preferred candidate. When a younger woman with years of experience as an associate becomes a finalist, Dana dismisses her as unexperienced and judges her based on her wardrobe and her use of powerpoint in her sermon. When this candidate wins over even her co-conspirators, she is upset and refuses to make a case for the younger woman pastor in front of the congregation. Despite this, the new pastor is hired and then reaches out and explicitly says “give me a chance.” Instead, the author leaves the congregation.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, a mix of both and depending on whom you ask.

I had Search on my mind a couple weeks later when I was the speaker at an event for pastors and other church leaders. In one breakout session one of the older pastors in the group posed a question: “what are we going to do about all the pastoral openings? People like me are retiring. And there isn’t a lot of people coming up to take our places. What’s the plan?”

He's right. We are, indeed, in a difficult time finding people, especially younger people, to be pastors. Most of the women I know are leaving church ministry for chaplaincy and other parachurch work. Many of the women I know in seminary are bypassing this step all together and intend to work in hospitals and on college campuses. Why? Because church can be a place of deep and intense wounding of pastors.

Dana relays some of this even as she is unaware of her own contribution to the problem. At one point she’s talking to Tom Fox, the current pastor the people who are on the search committee. He mentions his pastoral relationship with a parishoner Charlotte is rocky. “We used to be close, but about a month ago she really let me have it, regaled me with a laundry list of my shortcomings. My sermons are thin, her wife hates being told to say things to people. I’m not in my office enough.”

All of those things may be true. And you know what it changes to lay out all the things you don’t like a pastor to him? Nothing. Fox shares with Charlotte that a greeting to each other helps people connect, especially newcomers. “She seemed to get it; I thought we parted on good terms. But I’ve asked her to lunch twice and both time she wrote, ‘Thanks, no.’ Did she think I’d change my liturgy just for her?”

I’ve watched my colleagues whittled down by complaints about their preaching (see Search!), their administrative abilities, their lack of supervision skills, that they aren’t doing enough pastoral care, that they are too gentle, too firm, too abrasive, get walked over, are too confident, not confident enough. I know a woman who received so many complaints about her voice that she eventually couldn’t take it anymore and left ministry. Here are a few real-life events that led younger pastors I know not only to leave their church ministry:

·      A church that claimed to be LGBTQ affirming was anything but when their welcome was put to the test

·      A pastor’s marriage ended under complicated but ethical circumstances. The pastor was brought for discipline before their church board

·      A church backtracked on its abuse policy when it was finally time to apply that policy to someone in the church. I know two people who left their churches because of this.

·      A member of a church coalesced power around him and, when the pastor refused to do his bidding, he made her life miserable until she finally quit

·      A pastor is pestered relentlessly by anonymous feedback, picking on sermons, whispering in cliques until it becomes unbearable

·      An associate pastor receives relentless criticism and undermining by his senior pastor. No one steps in to stop the behavior

The number of resources that exist to help stem the flow of pastoral quitting is staggering. We are offered fully funded grant programs, seminars, retreats, and coaching. Books and books and books – all of them good and useful and helpful (I started reading Carol Howard and James Fenimore’s Wounded Pastors, which is quite good and practical).

But resilience can only get you so far. We also need healthy ecosystems in churches. We need reasonable expectations. We need church members to hold each other accountable when they see toxic behavior. We need boundaries that are respected and held up by the church.

I have a lot of compassion for churches that develop unhealthy systems. They are almost always the result of a couple people, and it’s likely those couple people are wounded themselves. They may be retirees or empty-nesters who shift their meaning and purpose to church life and then find that their unnamed grief is poured out on the church in unhealthy ways. I’ve seen systems where a past conflict makes it scary to tell other people the truth about their behavior for fear that this will further damage the church. I’ve watched my colleagues’ churches find ways to pick and prod because they are scared about the future of the church they love and the only way they can imagine health and wholeness is in the model of an idealized past that may or may not have actually existed. I know church members who are terminally discontent, who go from church to church, waiting to be disappointed, looking for reasons to move on to the next experience. That is a very painful way to live but the causality is almost always the pastor who is in their crosshairs.

I could feel this for Dana, a woman who completed some seminary and felt a call to the preaching vocation. The popularity of one of her books sent her back to writing full time. I could see how wanting someone who had a particular call to preaching, someone around her age, someone who would approximate this call for her would be attractive.

I can also admit that I’m often miffed by idealistic, young pastors who complain a lot and specifically about their churches (pro tip never ever publicly complain about your church), especially when they’re being paid really well and seem to be out of sync with the work of nurturing a church in steadfast and faithful discipleship. (I once had an intern who gave me a laundry list of his ideal church traits: he preferred the ecclesiology of the Catholics, the Eucharist of the Anglicans, the spirituality of the Methodists, the justice work of the Mennonites, etc. A disaster of idealism, he didn’t make it in ministry.) Our jobs aren’t harder than any other jobs. They’re just hard in different ways. And our jobs are also awesome. I’m grateful for mine at least once a day….usually.

Both are true. Pastors need to figure out how to live in the church as it is even as we lead towards new ways of wholeness. We need to be responsible to cultivate communities and resources to be sure we can do that well (I have a mentor, a clergy coach, and a therapist I see every week, along with my conference minister on speed dial).

And churches need healthy systems to support their pastors. If churches don’t do that work, that’s fine but not many people are going to want to pastor your church. Most younger adults aren’t willing to work in churches that hurt them, that don’t live up to the basic calling to hold abusers accountable, that turn pastor’s personal lives into nightmares, that double down on sexist and racist microaggressions, where they are bullied and shamed.

Good for them.