How I got here
Why am I writing about being a pastor in the not-quite-post-pandemic mainline church?
Let’s start with the basic bio. Let’s start with the stuff I tell people when they ask me about my career.
When I was in seminary, people would sometimes talk about their call stories. Some people had impressive stories about things like being at a church camp and experiencing the heavens opening. I had a less interesting story: I was walking to work one morning during my aimless post-college years and thought, “Seminary sounds like a good option.”
I had no plans to become a pastor. I had no plans to become a chaplain. I had no plans to become anything. I even used to say, “I was called to seminary and given no further instructions.”
So after I graduated from seminary, I just kind of fell into a different career as a fundraiser. And I was good at that—I was really good at that—for about twelve years.
And then I was given further instructions.
I became the pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ in DeWitt, Iowa, in 2018. First Congregational is a financially stable, mission-oriented, generationally and ideologically diverse congregation in a rural-but-growing town in Eastern Iowa. And while there were problems and headaches, I was more than happy to be a pastor in this community.
And then COVID.
When the pandemic hit, I went into crisis mode. We closed the church building. We went to online worship services. We endured Zoom bombings, including one that led to conversations with the FBI, and pivoted to pre-recorded services. We added communication channels. We did everything that we could to keep people engaged during a time when we could not gather.
And that meant a lot of new work to do. But that was okay, because this crisis was only going to last six weeks or so, right?
Wrong.
We closed the building in March of 2020. And while we managed to have a few masked, healthily-distanced, outdoor events when the weather warmed up, we didn’t reopen the building until February of 2021. Even when we reopened, we took a lot of precautions: we wore masks, we kept our distance, we cut responsive speaking and all singing, we stopped passing the peace and the offering plates, and so on.
We broke habits, and we developed new ones, and the crisis just kept going. It just took on new shapes.
And as of 2022, attendance is down, engagement is down, giving is down, and it feels like this congregation that was financially stable and mission-oriented is teetering on the edge of oblivion.
And I am now the pastor of an in-person congregation, and an online congregation, and an absent congregation.
A few weeks ago, early on a Sunday morning, I got a call from one of the local funeral homes. I had been expecting this death and I was ready for it. But it kicked off a few overloaded weeks: a funeral, a wedding, two burials, five wider church meetings, a leadership retreat, and some interpersonal crises in the congregation. And, of course, all of the not-quite-normal stuff that comes with being the pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic era.
Stacks on stacks of crises. And I realized that I was not okay.
So I took a week to recalibrate and reorient myself. And this is one of the results: a kind of secret public journal about being a pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic mainline church.
I want to be clear. I’m not going to write my wounds out here. But I am hoping to write about what being a pastor looks like from the inside right now. The good parts and the bad parts. The victories and the defeats. And the scars that I bear.
Join me on this weird little journey.