After hundreds of years, a model of the perfect pastor has finally been articulated.
The perfect pastor preaches exactly 18 minutes and then sits down.
She condemns injustice, but never hurts anyone’s feelings.
She works from 8am to 10pm, in every type of duty, from preaching to custodial service.
He makes $60 a week, wears good clothes, regularly buys good books, has a nice family, drives a good car, and gives $30 a week to the church.
He also stands ready to contribute to every good cause that comes along.
She is 26 years old and has been preaching for 30 years, and is entertaining and politely challenging.
She is tall and short, thin and heavy set, handsome and beautiful.
He has one brown eye and one blue; with hair that is parted in the middle, left side dark and straight, the right brown and wavy.
He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spends all available time with older folks.
She smiles all the time with a straight face because s/he has a sense of humor that keeps one seriously dedicated to the work.
She makes 15 calls a day on church members, spends all spare time recruiting new members, and is never out of the office.
Well somebody appreciates paradoxes!
Of course, I found this description of the perfect pastor floating around on the internet! But as you may know, UU ministers rarely get called “pastors”! Maybe that is because UU congregants reject the insinuation that they are sheep. So, perhaps this articulation doesn’t describe how we might list the attributes of the perfect “minister”!
I know, I know, there are some of you who are thinking there is no perfect minister!
Perhaps, my point is made!
And that point would be, that we look for “perfect”, rather than learning how to be in relationship. Perhaps trusting those who are in leadership has to with trusting that there is an area for growth that goes beyond rejecting what is not perfect, neither perfectly good, nor perfectly bad…
The David Brooks article I quoted earlier appeared in the New York Times on Father’s Day a few years ago. In that article Brooks was lifting up that it appears we are living in a time when most Americans are having a difficult time trusting authority.
There are good reasons for that! Examples of the abuse of power by leaders both in government and in the church world abound.
But Brooks does not spend time analyzing the misuse of authority by those leaders. Rather he is interested in what is going on with those who distrust leaders.
Maybe the lack of trust is because we have become so accustomed to “assign[ing] moral status to victims …rather than to those who wield power.” The underdog is always, in our collective minds, more worthy of respect, than the authorities.
I agree that it is difficult for liberals to respect anyone we perceive has authority primarily because they have benefited from the privileges afforded by an unjust system.
Brooks also suggests that perhaps we don’t trust authority because of “our fervent devotion to equality”, which makes it hard for us to lift any one out of the crowd as superior to anyone else!
We are all so equally worthy that no one is better than anyone else, right? (Or maybe, what is really going on is that many of us feel, I am better than everyone else, so I only really trust myself!)
But none of these are the reason we fail to trust authority. In Brooks’ analysis the “fail” is more likely with the dis-ease we have being followers. It is not about leadership “fail”. It is a follower problem!
Who has that dis-ease more than us?
He concludes that we-the-followers have an “inability to think properly about how power should be (can be) used to bind and build.”
For Brooks, “thinking properly” would mean moving past the simplistic belief that everyone in power is corrupt, or at the very least, suspect, and thus all authority is to be rejected out of hand.
Brooks points out that like leadership, “followership is also built on a series of paradoxes. “Yes, in this society (and in this church)] …we choose our leaders but we also have to defer to them and trust their discretion.” We may be proud and independent individuals, but we also need to understand that we only thrive in a well-organized group, led by a just authority.
This, in my opinion, is the essence of “covenantal behavior”. We each have worth and dignity, but we are not all in equal in positions of authority. Some are leaders, more are followers. And all positions are informed by the nuances of paradox.
A recent UU Commission on Appraisal study entitled; “Who’s in Charge Here” focused on ministerial authority, power and oppression in our UU systems.
My colleague the Rev. Thomas Schade in a recent blog post detailed what happened during the 20th century that reduced the authority of the office of minister within liberal religion.
He points out that humanism and atheism greatly altered any thought that the minister knew something “special” about or had a direct line to ultimate reality. The expansion of university level education made many lay members equally or better educated than their ministers. The Unitarian growth strategy in the 50’s led to what came to be known as the “fellowship mentality”, the belief that congregations can function just fine without ministers.
Add to those factors that liberal religion stopped being any sort of authority on sexual morality. We entered a period of no questions asked. No shame. No guilt. It was almost as if there was an unspoken bargain struck between ministers and congregants. We silently agreed not to judge each other’s sexual lives. “Of course, [that] …was going to end badly as …. sexual misconduct proliferated.” It was ministerial authority that took the hit, when the ministers behaved like everyone else.
At the same time came all sorts of anti-oppression movements. The minister in the closed system of congregational life became “the Man”. Question Authority, meant oppose the authority.
Then you sprinkle more women in the ministry, who were cheaper, and perhaps more compliant in their leadership. Many new female ministers who were Baby Boomers entered churches with pre-boomer mentalities. The new female ministers were expected to conform to the cultural styles of the male ministers of a generation before. A congregational review became comments on hair, makeup, shoes, wardrobe, “warmth”….
Then came the first wave of the aggressive conservative movement, starting in the 70’s and powerful by the 80’s, which attacked all forms of liberal religion saying they were “morally relativistic, ethically slack, sexually libertine, “touchy-feely”, politically correct (thus really a left wing of the democratic party) and in all ways, ridiculous as a religion.
Is it any wonder that liberal self-doubt took hold? ….affecting both leaders and their potential followers?
There is little left of what my colleague Tom Schade calls “positional” authority, the power that has do with being in the role of ministerial leader. Rather, than the kind of authority that comes from holding a certain “office”, ministers have had to rely on personal persuasion, the kind of authority that comes from individual talents and interpersonal skills. Don’t like this one, exchange him or her for another one, with a different set of personality traits…
It has been interesting to be in the Forward Together Moral Monday movement and be in the presence of the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, President of the NC NAACP, and a Disciples of Christ pastor. His is a very powerful presence. He exudes leadership. His focus, of course, is on justice for those who have been and are being left out. The paradox is, in the amazingly broad fusion of people and organizations, among those who would not normally come together, he stands out. It is clear, very clear that his authority may at times be questioned, but it is followed, followed by those who are leaders in their own right. He rises and he leads.
He makes room for all sorts of voices, encouraging others to be provocative and prophetic, but he leads…
Brooks concludes by saying “to have good leaders you have to have good followers, able to recognize authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it.”
Tom Schade says “Stronger UU ministers are the key to a stronger UU movement.”
I will end with his words:
“The UU ministers I know are itching to empower and equip church members to go out and live our values in the world. UU ministers want to inspire deeper spiritual growth, and greater public witness, and a more profound service. UU ministers are ready to be inspirational voices in the public square for reverence and solidarity and openness and justice. Instead of trying to limit their authority inside the congregation, every UU should be trying to build their minister’s authority in the community. As our ministers grow stronger, we all grow stronger.”
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