Curiously enough, around the time that I began realizing that I needed a new kind of faith (a way to be a Christian without constantly saturating myself and others in self-centering, thought-stopping, soul-exhausting fear)--around that time my parents were going through a similar sort of crisis-of-faith.
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
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