This
is my opinion and reflection on something that I made a commitment
to. In May of 2002, I stood before the Bishop of the Oklahoma Annual
Conference and the gathered members and family. In that particular
worship service, I made a vow to uphold the itinerant system. As part
of our polity and discipline, I understood that being an Elder in the
United Methodist Church meant I would make myself available to the
system of providing pastoral leadership and support to local
churches. That came with the understanding that I would move
throughout my career at the call of the Bishop through the District
Superintendent. It also meant that my life and choice were somewhat
limited to the desires of others.
16
years later (my 20th year of ministry), I am reflecting
upon my current position within that system I vowed to uphold. It has
been a bumpy ride from a personal point of view. I have had
circumstances that were directly related to my appointments that have
changed my feelings and opinion about the itinerant system.
When
I began, the itinerant system was something that I supported without
question. I put my life, and that of my family, in the hands of
District Superintendents that I felt had my and the churches best
interests at heart. I believed in the system and trusted that the
“will of God” worked through the decisions that led to
appointments.
20
years has changed a lot of that.
Now
I feel that the system of how appointments are made has more of
humanity about it than the will of God. I have been
comforted/consoled by friends and colleagues that I should trust God
to make the best of the appointments where I am sent. My opinion of
the itinerant system is that it is broken and my feelings are not all
positive about its impact on my life as a pastor.
Here,
I wish to express my viewpoint on where I see it is broken. This will
not be fair. I have a limited, small point of view. I can only
develop my viewpoint from the narrow window of my experience. This is
not the experience of everyone in the United Methodist Church. It is
not the experience of every pastor under appointment. My comments are
not directed at all District Superintendents or Bishops. And I do not
name any clergy by name, but only highlight examples of MY narrow
experience.
First,
the biggest issue I have encountered is that the needs and gifts and
experience of a clergy person, or the needs of their family, don’t
really amount to much in the math of determining where an appointment
will take someone. The needs I have expressed at times over my
career, the passions that I have had for ministry, the gifts that I
have displayed, or the personality that drives me were, in my
opinion, never really regarded. If they were taken into account, they
were taken into account as only the bare necessity of function.
I
have expressed a disconnect with rural settings that began in my
teenage years, yet my appointments have led me to 15 years of rural
setting. My ability to teach has never put me into a setting where
that could be highlighted or used for anything beyond teaching a
Sunday School class, small Bible study, or youth group. My
involvement in campus ministry as the beginning of my call and the
emphasis I placed on it in my seminary studies resulted in 1 year of
campus ministry.
My
family has also experienced a serious lack of acknowledgment in
appointment. When I requested a move to be near Lisa’s family, the
outcome was that we were moved almost as far away from her family as
we could be in Oklahoma. When her dad died in the first year after
that move, it rattled us. When her mom died that next year, it shook
us badly. I began to question how 3 District Superintendents could
not hear the need in my request to be closer to Lisa’s family.
Those events brought back the betrayal and hurt from the experience
of being moved in the first place. I lost all of the progress I had
made on moving past what I felt was having our needs ignored.
As I
look back on my time of ministry, there have been 5 times when my
requests for what I felt were reasonable consideration in an
appointment were disregarded with no explanation for why it couldn’t
realized. There have been 3 of those times when the exact opposite of
what I requested became my appointment. In one of those, I was told
an outright lie regarding the request (more on that instance in a
bit). In all, those 5 times represent all but once when I expressed a
need or desire for a ministry. In every other case, I stated that I
would make myself available to whatever appointment was given to me.
Or to re-frame the point I’m making, in 21 years of serving as a
pastor, 6 times I asked to be considered for a particular type of
appointment. In 21 years of serving as a pastor, I received the thing
I asked to be considered for 1 time. That request: to allow my family
to remain so my oldest son could graduate. So the one time I received
what I asked for it was a request to make no change whatsoever.
My
next biggest issue comes from being in a position where the people
who are directly responsible for determining my gifts, skills,
talents, and resources have never been a position to personally
evaluate me in those areas. Our appointments are, ideally, supposed
to take the gifts and skills and experience of a pastor into
consideration to match to the needs of the a local
congregation/appointment. The person who, ideally, is supposed to
have that knowledge is the District Superintendent. In 21 years of
ministry I have been under the supervision of 10 District
Superintendents. Of those 10, only 2 have taken an extra amount of
effort to get to know me outside of the annual consultation. And it
is in those annual consultations where I expressed my desires and
interests in appointments.
I
have expressed that I enjoyed campus ministry and working with
college age students. I have expressed being considered for a
multicultural setting. I expressed a desire to serve in a less
conservative appointment. I feel drawn to fringe cultures. I would
like to try to serve in a non-traditional setting. I am moderate and
mission minded with classic Wesleyan beliefs and influenced by modern
social justice viewpoints. But those desires and interests were taken
with the grain of salt they were worth. I have served in mostly near
super conservative traditional settings with little college or
multicultural connection in churches who took pride in being “not
very Methodist” and interested in chaplain or maintenance roles of
the pastor.
And
part of the problem is that District Superintendents do not know the
churches under their supervision, either. There is little time for
those in the role of “pastor to the pastors” to learn who they
are as individuals. There is an impossible task of knowing the
churches whom those pastors serve. As we continue to find ways to
move into a future with declining resources, the number of districts
is at the top of the list of cost cutting measures. That means fewer
District Superintendents to shepherd more pastors and more churches
in their service area.
It
is nearly impossible to know every church in a district. It is
impossible to know what their needs, gifts, history, and ministry
setting is. It is impossible to know what their ministry potential
could be. The role of the District Superintendent in this capacity is
so overwhelming that it is ridiculous to assume that they can be
effective in fulfilling the task. Yet that is exactly what the
expectation is.
That
brings me to the third frustration I see: little accountability for
District Superintendents for errors in matching pastors and churches.
Whether it is a failure to hear the pastors needs, gifts, and skills
or it is the lack of understanding of a church’s needs or ministry
potential, if a “bad” appointment is made, it is not the fault of
the District Superintendent or the Cabinet. The fault of the a failed
appointment rests in the pastor not being available enough or the
church being more destructive. Or it just wasn’t a good “fit”.
But if pastors and churches were known at a deeper level than what is
on a very biased evaluation form, those types of “fits” wouldn’t
happen as often. There is no accountability to change the approach.
There is no accountability to fix the system when it fails.
In
my own “greatest failure” of the system, I approached 3 District
Superintendents about my expressed need to be closer to Lisa’s
family. At no time, that I am aware of, was that need made known in
the Cabinet conversation. When we moved to the opposite end of the
state, whose fault was it? Regardless of the outcome of my ministry
in that appointment, the need that was expressed (and that was what
it was expressed as) was ignored by my own District Superintendent
and two others with whom I expressed that need. Those two were
appointed to areas closer to where we needed to be. It would have
been in their service area that I could have been appointed to meet
that need. Whose fault does it rest upon that the need of my family
was not met?
I
can say that not one of those District Superintendents ever
apologized. Not one ever acknowledged that nothing could have been
done. Not one recognized the pain of my family when Lisa’s parents
died. But I have been counseled to keep my opinions about the system
on the down low. I can express my hurt, but making those hurts public
would not be a good thing. Well, if we don’t make things like this
public, how can we improve the system? How do we make change if we
just accept the failures and the errors to continue with out
accountability?
Perhaps
the frustration I have struggled with the most is that I have been
lied to by District Superintendents. In asking to be considered for a
campus ministry position, I had a District Superintendent tell me a
bold face lie. How did I know it was a lie? Because I knew campus
ministries that were opening when I expressed an interest in being
considered for the position. And my District Superintendent told me
with a straight face that there were no campus ministry positions
coming open that appointment year. I had a District Superintendent
tell me that if I didn’t accept the appointment that I was being
offered, that there were no other appointments available except for
appointments at a lower salary level.
In
an Annual Conference of 400+ churches, there were no other
appointments other than the one I was being offered or something that
should be served by a local pastor or student pastor. There are
around 100 moves every year toward moving season. Not all of them are
at Annual Conference. But somewhere in the vast wisdom of the system,
it has become easier to lie to a pastor about an appointment that
isn’t available than it is to be honest and express what is really
in the way of that appointment. This has led to a theory and
frustration.
The
theory I have developed is that there is a caste system within the
itinerancy. The caste system that is in place has various levels. It
is easy for a pastor to move within their caste, if there is an
available church. It is somewhat easy for a pastor to move down in
caste, but the higher one is in caste, that downward movement is
scalable. The higher one is, the less significant the move down. The
lower one is, the lower the caste you can be moved into. It is very
difficult to move up in caste. Breaking into a caste requires some
significant presence or associations.
The frustration comes from not knowing where the lines of the castes are. I thought originally that there were three castes: the noticed, the notorious, and the supply. The noticed were pastors and churches who were in high profile positions. They were recognized and known broadly. The notorious were pastors or churches that were known to cause problems. The supply were the pastors who don’t draw attention or recognition and churches who just maintain themselves.
I
think the castes may be more defined. I think there may be regional
castes. I think there may be political castes. There may age-based
castes. And there are “fruitfulness” castes – whoever fits into
the current definition of fruitful as determined by the Bishop and
authorities guiding the Annual Conference.
I
consider myself a supply caste. I haven’t drawn attention to
myself. I haven’t served churches that go beyond maintaining their
local presence. I seem to be considered a rural caste pastor (due to
the types of appointments that I have served). I am a non-entity in
political castes because I have been seen as “the other” by both
political extremes. And, if there is an age-based caste, I am in the
Generation X group. I am too young to be part of the current
powers-that-be and too old to be of vital age.
The
caste that does not seem to be present is experience. Years of
service and experience don’t seem to have any weight in determining
where you rest in the system. I could retire soon. I could find
another career and fill my days of life with another field of
interest. And honestly, I don’t feel like my years of experience
will be missed.
I am
coming to the end of my frustrations. I have one left that seems to
be a recurring beast of burden. It has to do with where I mentioned
the leveraging of an appointment. It seems that there are some
pastors who can refuse an appointment with no negative consequence.
I’ll be honest. If it weren’t for my family, I would accept an
entry level appointment. The reduction of pay wouldn’t bother me.
And if we were in a better place financially, Lisa wouldn’t have a
problem with it, either. I would be willing to serve an entry level
appointment because it seems that my experience and current age would
be a gift to an appointment that is used to breaking someone in or
getting someone on their way out. I would take an entry level
appointment just to refuse being leveraged into accepting “the only
appointment available”. I would take an entry level appointment
with 20+ years of experience just to tell the system, “You are
broken.”
But
some pastors can say, “No” to an appointment and be offered
another chance at something that is “right” for them. There isn’t
a negative consequence if they refuse to take it. It used to be a
threat that if you refused an appointment, they would send you to the
Panhandle or somewhere just as bad. I can tell you that the Panhandle
has great churches filled with godly people. They care for their
pastors and love the willingness of pastors to serve them in the love
of Christ. Yet, it is challenging to get a pastor to serve in the
Panhandle. It is challenging to get a pastor to accept an appointment
in the “far reaches” of the state of Oklahoma. And if someone
says, “No”, what will they do?
Yet
the threats are still present. The leveraging of appointments is
still a practice. The idea that there will be a negative consequence
seems to be idle bluster. Well, I have served the Panhandle. For 10
years, I have been faithful to my appointment. I served in good
times. I served in bad times personally, professionally, and
congregationally. I have tried to love the people and they have tried
to love me. It hasn’t always been easy for us to get along. It has
always been rewarding for me to be in that appointment. And for 15
years, I have served the “far reaches”. I have been in Northwest
Oklahoma longer than anywhere else in my lifetime. There are only a
few regions I would like to serve in this state. But I am glad I am
in Northwest Oklahoma.
This
may seem like a manifesto leading to a resignation. It is, in fact,
the very opposite. This is a manifesto declaring that in spite of all
of these frustrations, I am remaining. I get cross with the system. I
get envious of younger pastors getting bigger or more prestigious
appointments than me. I let my pride get the better of me sometimes
and wonder, “When is it my turn?” But God has not released me
from the United Methodist Church. More importantly, God has not
released me from the vow I made to the UMC.
24
years ago, I made another vow. Lisa and I stood before God and a
gathering of family and friends to make a vow to stay with one
another. There have been some difficult times. There have been times
both of us have wanted to quit, give up, find a better way of moving
forward. But we take that commitment to our vows seriously. I take my
vow to the United Methodist Church and Oklahoma Annual Conference
very seriously. It seems that the system has betrayed me at times. I
have let it down at times. But I am not giving up on my vow and God
has not released me from it. I am here to stay for some time. When
God may let me know that I am free, well it may never come. It may
happen should something occur in the union of the UMC. But until that
day, I am appointed under the authority of the Bishop, submitted to
the supervision of a District Superintendent, and sent to serve the
church of Jesus Christ under the banner of the United Methodist
Church.
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