Friday, September 25, 2020

NEW CULTURE MEANS NEW MINISTRY

This material below was linked via Twitter, a post by a Montana journalist who values the writer named Anne Helen Petersonhttps://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-contours-of-clergy-burnout  It’s interesting and valid but doesn’t seem to realize that it is about only ONE culture, that of the mainline white denominations that belong to the LEARNED culture.  That is, who expect college degrees from themselves and their clergy.  It’s not surprising that the author is describing the culture of Missoula, a self-conscious university town.

In America we have two streams of clergy, one of which is this kind of trained pastor and the other is the “inspired” minister authorized by God and by the community or congregation that he or she serves.  No education at all is required.  This culture came out of Protestantism when the church separated from the state and insisted on a direct relationship to God without institutional interpretation, though it kept the Bible and the congregation.

For a decade I served the Unitarian Universalist Association which is open to ideas both secular and religious, several kinds of religious and even anti-religious or anarchical notions — but anchored in principles revered by academics.  There is no UU church in Valier.  

My next door neighbor is a Southern Baptist church where the pastor is not religiously educated but acting according to the Bible on 19th century terms, sometimes more Old Testament than Gospel.  We are tolerant except for the cottonwood tree growing on the line between our two lots.  He wants it to conform to them; I want to conform to the tree’s nature.  
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About Culture Study: The name “Culture Study” is a modification of “Cultural Studies,” a term used to describe an academic field — and general posture — towards the culture that surrounds us. ... Politics can be culture, celebrity can be culture, tourism and feminism and consumerism and work practices — all culture.

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Burnout is a symptom of working within contemporary, largely unregulated capitalism — and religious organizations, whether they want to or not, operate within that system. Not because they’re money-making enterprises (apart from the celebrity pastor cool Christian franchise cases in which they most certainly are) but because they have to function within society created by that system. When the cost of schooling goes up, and student debt goes up along with it, so too does the amount of student debt (many) pastors have to take on. When health care costs go up for everyone, they can also become too much for a congregation to bear for its leader.


Many religious leaders are working 21st century jobs with 20th century skills. We’re still getting trained and formed for a version of church/life that doesn’t exist anymore.


The savior complex is rampant in this field, and there’s almost no counter-narrative to that way of doing this work. 


If I were to describe a profession to you where 59% of the members don't have family health insurance, where the average student loan debt is $54k, where 25% are currently thinking of resigning....you probably wouldn't guess I was talking about pastors


(This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen.)

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I didn’t leave the ministry because I burned out.  I left because my personal “culture” shifted.  Not my “material” culture.  Some of my furniture was bought by my parents when they first married.  Some of my books belonged to my grandparents.  This is a very humble house — rather chilly at the moment since I had to remove my gas water heater and furnace because their venting failed.  Remedies are in the works but the pandemic’s blows to material culture mean a major shrinkage of manufacturing and even more delay with shipping.  

This shortfall of material culture is a kind of hubris, really, a bit of the pride-in-poverty that used to be part of being religious.  Is there such a thing as “spiritual culture”?  Of course, there is.

So I left congregational ministry but not high principles that serve others some way.  I call myself, when necessary, a “public intellectual” because I’m not “religious” in any cultural terms.  In fact, I turn away from the idea of “religion” as an outmoded term stuffed with cultural conceits.  The revelations of science have demanded a new understanding, a new kind of direct relationship to the world and what is holy.  And now it includes again the whole body instead of the worship of the brain.

I recognize and once participated in Peterson’s culture.  I witness the tension with ministry.  I finally paid off my seminary tuition loan with part of my mother’s estate.  The pastor who used to serve the Lutheran church across the street was a young man who explained to me before he left that he wanted a wife and family, but this village was so small that there were no viable bridal prospects.  He went to a bigger place.  The Methodist minister who was here when I came was older, but he yearned for a place with really good coffee.  It just came fifteen years too late.  (Not Starbucks,  but “Folklore”)  Coffee communion is cross-cultural.

So what is it like to be an unmoored and independent minister?  I write the equivalent of a sermon a day every day — 1,000 words which is about as much as I can compose and revise in a morning.  But I think about the subject and do a bit of research all the time — I don’t do anything else but domestic maintenance and not much of that.  Instead of delivering audibly, I publish through my blog.  I was a manuscript preacher.

Rather than staying in the context of the 20th century culture, I am way out there on the front edge of the 21st century in a way not possible through books or even journals.  My readers are worldwide and vary day by day in number from a few hundred to a few thousand.  This is the internet access to a global idea of “congregation.”  There’s no money in it.  I live on SSI and a small pension.

The Catholics, Methodists and Lutherans preserve the idea of hierarchy, discipline monitored by more superior, non-congregational sources.  Hierarchy is a cultural value and vulnerable to corruption through power, but at the other end of the spectrum is careening emotional group insanity and we see that on television.  Koolaide communion.  Jonestown happened while I was in seminary.

The circumstances have prevented in-the-flesh congregations with their sitting together, their group singing, their potlucks, their hand-shaking.  That’s clear, but we haven’t been aware of a new demand for a change in the nature of ministry.  Because this is still a culture based on materialism and profit that defines the church as a business. 

In terms of “religious” material culture symbols, mine are “found”:  small bones and fossils and an old porcelain doorknob that gleamed at me from the wreckage of a destroyed house.  Survival symbols.  What else counts?  My thinking has expanded far beyond humans.  I’m about the bears, bees and trees and how they all fit together.  The new conditions changing our culture still let me tell you about that.

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