Go out into the world...

I will be away for a couple of weeks but I leave whoever is reading this a song composed by my friend, Bryan McFarland for our Pastor’s Appreciation banquet. It can be sung to many tunes in the 8787D meter. Two of the more familiar ones are “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore you.”

Have a most blessed Christmas.

What A Task To Be a Pastor
Text: Bryan Field McFarland 2009
commissioned for October 2009 Celebration of Clergy event in W/S, NC
Meter: 8787D Tune: Joyful, Joyful

1. What a task to be a pastor / All those grins & sheaves to bear
What a load it is to carry / What’s expected of us there
How we’d love just once to savor / Sunday morning sleeping in
Read the New York Times with coffee / Can I get me an AMEN?

2. We’ve got trials and temptations / There is trouble EVERYWHERE!
Like the man in Oz who said it / Gifts we seek were always there
Jesus knew this and he lived it / The example for us all
Teaching others how to find it / When our back’s against the wall.

3. We get weak & heavy laden / Cumbered with the church’s cares
Oh and sometimes if we’re honest / We’re mad at the One “upstairs”
Friends will sometimes walk around us / Solace sought is seldom found
Keep our balance and be careful / Lest, like a ball, we’re kicked around

4. Tales from members grow like flowers / opening up the more we climb
Melt away those precious moments / Pastor’s too need quitting time
God’s the giver of our gladness / A standup comic is all we are
Joyful, joyful we implore thee / Christ, the only Superstar

5. Though our striving might be holy? It defines us partially
Stars and angels sing around God / Don’t take self so seriously
God is giving and forgiving / We do well to imitate
We who follow must be leaders / None too soon. Pray not too late.
6. Join the chorus, wise & mighty / Morning stars began it all
It’s not about us for a moment / It’s all about the One who calls
May we learn to point out music / Genres each can lead through strife
Ever caring for each other / On this journey we call LIFE

There is a real issue of post-Christmas blues that can set in for church staff as well as members. It is not unusual for the first Sunday after celebrating the greatest gift that God has ever given humanity for there to be a very low attendance at the worship of God. For pastors who have expended immense amounts of energy both in coordinating a multitude of activities but also in conducting multiple worship services, there is bound to be the feeling of exhaustion. That can be exacerbated if there were some things that didn’t go so well during the advent/Christmas season. I remember having put a lot of effort into creating a Christmas drama using multiple verses of Christmas carols sung by the amateur actors of the church for a Christmas Eve event. Not many days after that one of the leading members came to my office and told me how horrible it was. I already knew that for several reasons it had not gone well, but his blunt assessment was like being hit while I was already down.

All of this leads to the suggestion that you need to be ready for a feeling of let down following Christmas. For pastors, it is made even worse when Easter is early and you immediately need to be preparing for Lenten activities. It is important that you give yourself permission to feel blue and find a spiritual director or another clergy friend who would understand with whom you can process your feelings. You are not a bad pastor because you feel depressed or even angry following having exhausted yourself serving your people, some of whom are not even appreciative.

It would be best to find someone with whom you can talk, but a second strategy that could also be helpful would be to give yourself permission to spend an hour honestly writing about how you are feeling. If you did that on a computer and saved it in a very private location, it would probably benefit you to recognize how your feelings repeat themselves in various forms year after year.

The statistics on the health of pastors is growing increasingly disturbing. There are some actions that a Presbytery or even a community of churches could take to address that problem. A major action would be to help arrange a health fair strictly for pastors in a contiguous community. You might do this in sections of a presbytery but you also could make a positive witness to the community if executives from the various denominations in an area coordinated such an activity.

The first step would be to approach a local hospital and talk with them about providing health personnel for such an event. At the event you would be offering to check blood pressure, sugar in the blood, cholesterol count, weight, etc. They may even have portable sonogram machines or other machines to check other health issues.

In addition you would want health personnel to provide tables with literature and advice on signs to look for with respect to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, etc. An additional advantage for the pastor is that s/he would be better informed about what to do if a member of the congregation showed such symptoms. There could also be a demonstration of mouth to mouth resuscitation, use of a defibrillator, etc.

If you are near an educational medical center, they probably have a division that would be glad to work with you on designing such an event. You might even get someone to include some brief seminars on healthy cooking, home exercise programs, stress reduction programs, etc. It would be worth checking with the local branch of a large health insurance industry like Blue Cross to see if they would help sponsor such an event.

If you did it ecumenically, you could have sufficient numbers to not have anyone drive too far. Plus you probably could get some good media coverage for a positive cooperative event among the churches.

Because it is focused on pastors and professional church staff, it would be good to have some elements built into the design that address the unique aspects of working in a church and the resultant pressures of such a profession.

How does a congregation support the physical health of their pastor? Let’s say that you recognize that your pastor is gaining too much weight, how do you raise the question of your concern without feeling as if you are invading his or her personal space? Later in the week I will share with you some of the statistics developed by a massive study of Methodist clergy in North Carolina, but the disturbing results suggest that clergy have a higher percentage of health problems than the average population. I want to suggest one approach that any congregation could take that would engage the pastor in that conversation but also the entire leadership of the church.

Recognizing that the elders or deacons of a congregation are also part of the spiritual leadership of the congregation, I would suggest that one begins by having the health conversation with the whole board. On the agenda set aside some time to reflect on the health challenges facing the leadership of the congregation. Ask all the individuals to simply talk about the general challenges facing members in general within their congregation. You make a list as they are identified. For example, people are overweight, some don’t exercise enough, they don’t get enough sleep, they drink too much, etc. The conversation alone raises the consciousness of the subject.

Next, engage in a brief reflection on the faith issues that speak to our care of our physical bodies. Explore the connection between our religious journey and our health journey. What is it in our faith that speaks to our care of our bodies. Develop a brief confession with respect to the connection between physical health and faithfulness.

Then pass out some blank 4 X 6 cards. Tell all the members that you are going to have a time of silent prayer in which each is asked to reflect on and identify an action that they think if they did it regularly would contribute to their personal health. At the end of the prayer time, they are to write down on both halves of the card the action they identified but without placing their names on the cards. They then tear the card in half, keeping one half and turning the other in.

The cards will be compiled into a list to be shared at the next meeting. At that next meeting, each member is asked to place the number from the list that identifies their action on the card and then using a scale of 1 – 10 with 10 representing complete success, rating how they have done this past month in taking the action that would contribute to their health.

Each month, at their regular meeting for a year, the same procedure is followed and a graph of success in each area is recorded. After each time of sharing, there is a time of prayer in which the person rededicates him or herself to practicing their designated action for the year. The church staff as well as the leadership are included in this communal effort to address the physical health of our journey of faith.

Recently I have heard about a course that is making the rounds of churches that focuses on helping members reflect on their finances from a faith perspective. I don’t know whether the course is any good or not. What it did make me think of was the importance of financial literacy for our clergy. The majority of clergy do not receive a generous salary and I would guess that most of them also are not skilled in managing what they do receive. Add to that that their spouse often lacks good financial literacy as well and you have the formula for marital tension.

I would suggest that the Presbytery could make a major contribution to the health of their pastors by offering some financial literacy seminars. They could acquire some good resources from the Board of Pensions. However, I would not stop there. There are some lay people in the presbytery who would be honored to work with people who know the particularities of pastoral expenses in designing such seminars. I mention the partnership because there are some unique aspects to pastoral finances that need to be part of such seminars. What you are doing is providing an opportunity for some people to use their gifts for the up building of the community. My guess is that an additional benefit from finding some of those talents among some of the lay people of the Presbytery is that those very people will also gain a new appreciation for the larger church and may make other valuable contributions as well.

There are several parts to such seminars that should be addressed over time. A first would be some basic budget techniques and financial management suggestions. Included in that would be a thorough exploration of what can be done with “pre-tax” dollars that will benefit the clergy while not costing the church any additional money.

Second, there should be a session on wise investment, explaining the various options and their risks and possibilities. Included in that should be the whole field of ethical investment and the various types of funds that focus on that. Most clergy have never lived in an atmosphere where they learned about how to invest and what are wise and foolish moves to make.

Third, there should be a thorough session on wills and such issues as insurance and long time care. I would suggest finding someone who could provide a form that people could fill out that would provide the basic information for completing a will and then have a follow up where they could meet with some willing lawyers to complete the process.

In all these areas, the spouse should also be invited.