Are You Stuck? Rethinking the Real Pressures of Pastoral Life with Author Todd Ferguson
In this episode, sociologist and former pastor Todd Ferguson shares insights from his book Stuck: Why Clergy are Alienated from Their Calling, Congregation, and Career. Drawing on interviews with over 40 pastors, Todd uncovers why so many clergy feel trapped—not because they’ve lost their faith, but because of the structures of ministry itself. He names the pressures of congregational decline, bureaucracy, and the demand to “produce” faith, alongside the stigma clergy face if they consider leaving ministry. Yet his research is not without hope: Todd points toward practices of honesty, storytelling, and traditioned innovation as ways pastors and churches can reclaim authenticity and joy. This conversation offers language, perspective, and encouragement for anyone wrestling with what faithful ministry looks like today.
About Todd W. Ferguson, Ph.D.
Director of Social Sciences Quantitative Methods Program
Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology
Rice University
Todd W. Ferguson is a sociologist of religion who specializes in studying congregations and pastors. In his 2022 book STUCK, he analyzed interviews of clergy who no longer wanted to lead their congregations. He and his co-author discovered that it wasn’t psychological burnout or a loss of faith for these pastors. It was the structure of the profession that led to their alienation from their career and calling. These leaders felt that the congregation was no longer the place where they could follow their calling. They wanted out but felt stuck in the ministry.
Todd serves as the Director of the Social Sciences Quantitative Methods Program and an Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology at Rice University. He leads the undergraduate social statistics curriculum and loves training students to use large amounts of data to make discoveries about our social world.
Todd earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at Baylor University and an M.Div. at Duke Divinity School. Before becoming a sociologist, he was a pastor for a congregation in Houston, Texas.
Todd is married to Emma, a veterinarian, and they have two beautiful children. They live in Houston, Texas.
To find out more about Todd Ferguson, visit his personal website https://www.twferguson.com/
Education
Ph.D. in Sociology (Baylor University)
M.A. in Sociology (Baylor University)
M.Div. (Duke University)
Additional Resources:
STUCK Why Clergy Are Alienated from Their Calling, Congregation, and Career… and What do Do about it.
Stuck is a guide for understanding how and why a traditional approach to ministry does not align with the modern realities facing pastors, congregations, and seminaries. More than simply describing findings from their firsthand research, however, Todd W. Ferguson and Josh Packard offer a new understanding of why professional ministry can be so alienating today.
Stuck shifts the dominant narrative around calling, vocation, and ministry away from a focus on individual traits and characteristics of pastors and congregational leaders and toward a more structural understanding of the social forces that impact modern ministry. The authors focus on the nature of calling; the need for modern, flexible congregational supports; and a different approach to training professional clergy.
Stuck lets pastors who feel stuck know that they're not alone, they're not crazy, and it's not their fault. It helps congregations be more supportive of their clergy. And it participates in the conversation for reshaping seminary training and professional development.
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Transcript
[Introduction]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College, where we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada as they seek to thrive in their passion to share the gospel. I am your host, the Reverend John Borthwick, Director of the Center and curator of all that is ministryforum.ca. I absolutely love that I get to do what I get to do, and most of all that, I get to share it all with all of you. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to give us a listen. Whether you're a seasoned ministry leader or just beginning your journey, this podcast is made with you in mind.
This week on the Ministry Forum Podcast, we're sharing something really special, a recast from one of our most meaningful retreat experiences, yet. Picture this: an intimate gathering at the beautiful Crieff Hills Retreat Center, a farm to table dinner with author, Todd Ferguson, followed by fireside conversations that stretched late into the evening. The next morning, Todd led a workshop that had everyone leaning in, nodding and finally finding language for experiences that they'd been carrying alone.
Here's why I think Todd's work matters so much. Todd Ferguson wrote the book, Stuck: Why Clergy are Alienated from Their Calling, Congregation and Career. It put words to struggles many of us have felt, but couldn't quite name. Through his research, Todd discovered something so crucial, when pastors want to leave ministry, it's usually not burnout or lost faith. It's the structure of the profession itself that creates alienation from the very calling that brought them into ministry in the first place. Our retreat participants found Todd's insights incredibly relevant to the Canadian context, and the conversations were both real and hopeful. It felt like finally having someone who truly understood.
Let me tell you a little bit about Todd. Dr. Todd W. Ferguson brings a unique perspective as both sociologist and former pastor. He's currently Director of the Social Sciences Quantitative Methods Program and Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology at Rice University in Texas. He loves training students to uncover insights from data about our social world now. Todd earned his PhD in Sociology at Baylor University and his MDiv at Duke Divinity School. Before academia, he served as a pastor in Houston, Texas, which means he's lived both sides of the research that he's sharing with us today. He's married to Emma, a veterinarian, and they have two children, and they call Houston home.
Now, what are you about to hear Todd's lecture from our retreat called, Are you Stuck? It captures the
heart of his research. It offers insights that might just change how you think about ministry challenges, whether you're feeling stuck yourself or you're trying to support colleagues who are having this conversation. Stuck offers both understanding and hope, if you haven't read Stuck yet, we'd highly recommend it. Keep an eye on your email, because we're planning more of these intimate retreat experiences with our good friends at Crieff Hills. Now, here's Todd Ferguson speaking to our retreat participants on March 31, 2025
[Todd Ferguson]
Thank you for being here. I want to say thank you to John, to Ministry Forum, and to Christine from Crieff Hills; this place is amazing. It's beautiful, and it was a good break from the Texas weather, to come back to winter. We are not in winter right now. I want to do a brief overview of this book, Stuck, but I want to do some caveats. The book is called Stuck, and it is about pastors who honestly just don't want to be pastors anymore, but I don't want you to think I am a doomsdayer for the pastoral profession. I come to this profession with a lot of hope and with a lot of joy, but I do think it's important to listen to the voices on the margins who are maybe waving a flag and saying something's not working. I think that, especially as a sociologist, I'm going to listen to those voices to say, Okay, what does that tell us about larger cultural forces? I also want to say that I am not approaching this as an expert, non-expert, and like, let me teach you something not at all. In fact, I'm approaching this as like, Y'all are the experts, and I want to learn from you. I did some research and I approached it sociologically, but I think your boots on the ground, expert experience and a theological orientation is also helpful. Please understand my orientation, I want to hear from you, and that's why we're doing a panel session, and that's why we're doing a workshop. The workshop is where we're going to gather around tables and actually talk about, what does this look like in your specific context? Are there things that are different? Are there things that resonate with that?
Okay, to start, I want to introduce Marcus.Throughout this presentation, everyone's a pseudonym, and all the pictures are AI generated. When I've given this talk before, I Googled, Presbyterian pastor, and the images that came up, I put it up there, and I said, Hey, this is a pseudonym, and that's definitely not his picture. If you know this person, they are not the person in our study. I realized that's kind of unethical, so I asked ChatGPT and some other systems to create images for me, and oh my gosh, it did it really well.
Marcus, he's a Presbyterian pastor. He's 33 years old, and I want to offer Marcus's story, because it really is an overture. His story highlights key themes that I found. He's living in the American South, and he says in his story that every week when he's in worship services and he's up front leading, he's like, Yep, it's no longer spiritual. It's not resonating with his soul. It's not leading him closer to Jesus. It's a job. He says this quote, “For a long time, it's felt like work. It's where I go to do what I'm doing for my job.” It wasn't this idea of a spiritual ministry anymore. He says, “I've begun to see myself as an actor and not as a participant.” This idea of worshiping, but you're always leading. You're trying to remember, remember, like, okay, is the microphone on? Why is the heating not working? In Texas, it would be, why is the AC not working? Is my fly down? All these things, right? I'm just doing my job. I'm not actually having a spiritual experience. Then later on in the interview, he said, “You never want to know how the sausage is made.” He's doing the work of ministry behind the scenes, and these worship experiences are no longer meaningful for him.
We asked him, Okay, why are you still in ministry? If this is not working for you? He gave us two answers, and they're really fascinating because of the order he said them. He said, “Number one, stability, and two, Jesus.” And he put them in that order. He said, “I've got young kids, I've got bills. This is a pretty steady income. It's not a lot of income, but it's steady. The Presbyterian Church in America has really good benefits, and then also, Jesus called me.” Jesus was second, okay? His experience, he was struggling in the pulpit. Now, I don't mean as a preacher, he was struggling to lead, and he said, one of the reasons is because the people who sign his paycheck, are the ones who can fire him. That's not the same with every denomination. The Anglicans and Episcopalians kind of laugh at that. You know, Catholic priests are not a thing, right? In my world, I come from the Baptist world, that is absolutely a thing. He told us, “There's a catch, that the congregation is paying you, and so you have to withhold some of your vision.” He actually had to withhold some of who he was and where he wanted to lead the congregation in terms of authentic expressions of faith and where's the Spirit leading. Because, if he pushed too hard, he was going to get the ax, and remember his number one reason was stability.
This is a great overview, an overture of what we found in Stuck. People are withholding who they are. People are frustrated that worship feels like a job. People are in it because it is a stable profession, but also people are in it because Jesus called them and continues to call them. I want to introduce Josh. Josh Packard and I - we wrote this book, and I'll tell you the story of this book. Josh is right now with the National Catholic Education Association. They needed a sociologist. He's of Lutheran background, and previously, he was working for Spring Tide Research, which looked at youth and religion, and how do we reach young people. We were at a conference, and he was doing work as a sociologist on the Dones. The nones are the people that when people give surveys, and it asks what's your religious tradition? Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and then the last category is none, no religion. If you click that you're a none. He was doing research, and I was starting to join him on the research of the Dones. They say Christian, they check that box, but then the next question is, where do you go to church? They go, I'm done with that. Josh wrote a book separately on the Dones, called Church Refugees. He said, Todd, and he asked me at this conference because he knew I had a pastoral background. I was a Baptist minister after seminary, and found my calling for teaching there in the church. I loved it. As a caveat, I was not a stuck pastor. I loved my time in the church. He said, Hey, Todd, I'm doing research on the Dones, and we're limiting our sample to lay people, but pastors keep coming up to me saying, I think I'm done with church, but I'm still called. He was like, they can't be in my study. What do I do with them? I said, let's research them. Let's do it.
We wrote this book, and he really helped with the data collection. He was at University of Northern Colorado and had a staff of graduate students. I conducted about 30% of the interviews. He conducted about 70% and then he had his graduate students organize everything and keep it all straight. Once we had the data, I wrote 90% of the book, and he would add a couple of paragraphs here and there. We're co-authors, but he really was on the data gathering side. I was on the: how do we think about it, side. I think that fit our skill sets. He does not have a pastoral background. I could think about, Oh, I remember this feeling, or I've been through that experience. We are co-authors, but the theory is more from me.
What did we do? We interviewed over 40 pastors. We actually got grants to put it on Facebook back when Facebook reached more people and when Facebook allowed targeted ads. We targeted pastors and would send them this ad. It said, are you done with ministry, or do you feel stuck in the church? Be a part of the study. We did that, and yes, we interviewed over 40 pastors. We actually had to cut off data collection. We kept having more and more and more people come forward. In research, there's something called saturation. When you keep hearing the same stories over and over again, it's a good sign that you've collected enough data. 42 pastors from Canada and the United States. In terms of religious tradition, it was really almost half mainline Protestant, half evangelical Protestant. One person said that they were another religious tradition, but if you look at their history, they were mainline Protestant. Who's in the Christian tradition? Who's absent, it's Catholic priests. We even changed our targeted Facebook ads to try to get Catholic priests in the sample, but we could not get them. I think that was partially because we both had strong ties to Protestantism and then the nature of the profession. You could even think the sunk costs of being a Catholic priest are different, and so for them, you know, when you're ordained, you're ontologically changed. Your being is changed, and you have the vow of chastity. The idea of leaving that, which you've paid so much more, is radically different than it is from Protestants. Our sample, sadly, is just a Protestant sample. I've talked with Catholic colleagues and asked, do they have inroads to thinking about what that research would look like? But we don't. 11 of these clergy people were women, and 31 were men. Almost a quarter were women, and we analyzed, were there gender differences? Were women experiencing differences in terms of being stuck, and the answer was no, surprisingly, are there other issues, absolutely, but there were no major gender differences.
What we found is that there are three gigantic social forces that are really pushing in on pastors. Two of them are not new. One of them is new. The first one is social Darwinism, this idea that only the strong survive. What this means is, if your congregation, here, we're talking at the congregational level, if your congregation isn't getting enough resources, and resources for congregations are people and money. You got two resources. If you're not getting enough overtime, you're gonna die, and there's no state church to support you. You die. Okay? The other is capitalism, and here I don't mean capitalism almost as an economic system, but capitalism as one, we're constantly focused on growth and money and more and getting more resources, and two, in terms of prestige in our society, the most prestigious types of organizations are business organizations, not congregations. When we look for what is success, we define it through capitalist entities, not through spiritual entities. Okay, so those two are not new. Canada and the United States has always, always dealt with survival of the fittest for congregations and capitalism, not new. What is new is secularization. Secularization is this massive social force that we're living through where there are fewer people who are religious. You could also think about secularization, not only at the individual level, like fewer religious people, but maybe even at the structural level, religious groups have less power, less prestige, less or fewer resources. That's what's new. 1962-65 is a really good marker for when did this shift start to happen? You start to see, especially mainline Protestants asking, Okay, what's going on? Two forces are not new, like pastors have always lived in that you've got to maintain at least some level of resources or you are going to shut down, and we're still going to measure success by resources. But when we think about the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s there were tons of people wanting to go to church, and so the pastor just did their job, and people came in.
Now the rules of the game have changed. Now, it's, yep, you have to grow your congregation, or at least maintain it, or you're gonna close down. Okay, but you're now competing against other things. You're competing against, not only other churches, but brunch, Sunday morning soccer leagues, comfy PJs. On Sunday mornings, you're competing against all of these other things, and there are just fewer people, and that puts pastors in a really hard predicament. I used the idea of tectonic plates, these giant tectonic plates that are moving our cultural forces. We found that pastors were stuck in three ways. I think my history of being a Baptist pastor helps me to put it into a story. The three C’s: in the calling, in the congregation and in the career, and that's what we're gonna walk through today.
How did they express feeling stuck in their own calling, and then going up a level, their congregation, and then up a level, in this idea of the profession? In the calling, the first thing we found was that pastors felt like they were producing a product, and they used the language of product or manufacturing language. I manufacture, I produce, I create. That was really telling, because when I hear factory language, and I will get to it, there's very specific sociological paradigms that help inform that.
I want to introduce Peter. Peter is 62, he is almost at retirement, and that's really important, because he was like, I'm gonna hold on, maybe, I don't know if I can. He was trying to hold on. He was a senior pastor, and I'm gonna put it in past tense, was senior pastor at a mega church in the Evangelical Covenant church, which is predominantly in the Midwest, in the United States. Do we have an evangelical covenant in Canada? In British Columbia. Historically, it’s Swedish immigrants, but now it's just a pan-ethnic evangelical group. Peter preached to thousands of people at his megachurch. He said it was depressing to get out there on the church's stage, because there was the expectation of what would take place and how it would be evaluated afterwards. Okay, I'm going to pause. I don't know if any of you have gotten Monday morning emails, MMEs, right after Sunday? From someone who didn't like something from Sunday. You're evaluated every Sunday, and he said it wasn't authentic. It wasn't a real transformation. It was a job. He goes on, it was something we spent the whole week preparing, sequestered within the building and not engaged with the rest of the world, where Jesus wants us to be, to act out, to teach kingdom principles, but penned up inside for what? To make sure one hour or more is perfect. He felt like he was producing an experience, in the context of his massive mega church.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Lisa. She's 44 years old, and she is no longer a pastor. By the way, half of my sample were still pastors, and half were out. Some remained, or they were trying to transition, and some had already gotten out. Lisa is with the United Church of Christ. She had a really small congregation, and she says, something's lost. When I look at the bulletin and all the things that were pulled together to make this beautiful service, sometimes they hit, sometimes they miss, and then it seems inauthentic to me, the whole experience because it's constructed. Once again, here's construction language, producing something that could hit or miss, just depends on the week.
What we found, as they're using this language of production in a factory, it's this idea that clergy work can be alienating, and here alienating I'm using in a very specific sense. We're going to go back to the 1840s and this is not a picture from the 1840s, but it's a factory. The industrial revolution is happening. People go from being artisans or craftsmen in their homes to working in massive factories, all day, for 14 hours a day. They're putting a pin into this cog, and they move it on, and they put a pin into this cog, and they move it on, and they're exhausted by the end of the day. This is where Karl Marx comes in, and Karl Marx has a lot of baggage. I understand that. One thing we can take away from Marx is his concern for poor people, his concern for the working person. Marx writes because, he's studying these factories, the object which labour produces, if that's a cog, labour's product confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. He has this famous theory, called alienation of labor, and it's whatever you use in your job. For him, it was physical motions. Whatever you use in your job, whatever the product that is sold, can become separated or alien to you. So for instance, let's go back, if you were a chair artisan, historically, you knew the tree that it came from, you cut the wood, you dried it out, you cut it, you nailed and glued it together. You sewed a cushion. You knew where the cloth came from, and you think, this is an expression of my creativity. This is an expression of my joy. I love creating chairs. Versus the chair factory worker, you know, can I use the chair? Your job is to snap the back panel on and move it down. You get another one, you snap the back panel on, you move it down. Is that an expression of your joy, your creativity, your humanity? No, I'm a cog in a wheel. Boom, and you're alienated. Also, you might be paid pennies, and you might not be able to afford the chair that you make, right? We can see modern day examples with iPhone factories, right? Can the workers afford a $1,200 phone? All they're doing is snapping on the back of a phone, I don't know. I've never been to an iPhone factory.
The theory that Marx wrote in the 1840s got me thinking, anything you produce that is sold on the marketplace, you can become alienated from me. Another theorist, Arlie Hochschild, picked up this theory in the late 80s, and she said, Marx is talking about physical labour. What about emotional labor? She wrote a book called, The Managed Heart. She used the example of two groups, airline flight attendants and debt collectors; both have to use their emotions for their jobs. An airline flight attendant, you walk onto the plane and she's smiling and saying, welcome, welcome. Glad you're here. Welcome. Find your seat. Welcome. The plane's not going to crash because I'm smiling. I'm going to make you feel comfortable, welcome. Who cares how her day's been? Who cares if she's having relationship issues, or she's financially broke, or she's struggling with depression? She better put on a smile, or she's going to lose her job. The opposite with debt collectors, right? You gotta be tough. Knock on doors really hard and say, money is due. Who cares if you're a really nice person? You've got to produce an emotion that is then sold on the marketplace. Airline flight attendants are producing comfort, happiness, and safety. Arlie Hochschild asked the question, what happens when the flight attendant comes home and she's with her girlfriends and they're having dinner and she smiles, and then in the back of her mind, she thinks, I'm smiling. Was that authentic? Did I really have an authentic expression of happiness, or was that the company smile, because I'm selling my smile? Hochschild famously writes, beneath the difference between the physical and emotional labour, so Marx's physical labour, she's bringing in emotional labor, there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing work, the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self, either the body or the margins of the soul that's used to do the work. We were curious with this line of theory, do clergy experience an alienation of their own faith? They say they're producing a product in the marketplace, in a capitalist marketplace you gotta attract butts to seats, remember? Or you shut down. If you don't attract butts and fill seats, they go to another church, if any church at all. You're producing something that's sold, and that product is faith. It's a very cynical way of looking at please, hear me, this is not a theological way of looking at it. But what is the product being produced? It's faith. Do clergy have the potentiality of being alienated?
Noah mentioned something like this. He's 53 and he's a senior pastor. He's still in the ministry. He's Baptist. He says, “I guess over time, I've come to be frustrated by the whole structure of it. Seen again as being counterproductive. It doesn't, to me, foster authenticity, as far as how we interact with each other. It doesn't give us any real space for the Holy Spirit to really move among us. I found myself Sunday after Sunday becoming the least content person in the room, and I'm standing up in front leading worship and preaching.” This idea of producing something that is sold in a marketplace, is that authentic? The pastors we spoke to struggled with authenticity. When I was a pastor, and then I went from being a pastor, being a community leader to a lowly, first-year graduate student, where they said, Here's your cubicle. You're here for five years. I remember this struggle of, wait, has my personal devotional time been an authentic expression of who I am as a person of faith? Or was I doing that for my job? This idea of maintaining a level of spirituality? Was I doing that for my job? It took me about a year to really navigate that. What is my spiritual practice, and what was the spiritual practice of me getting paid to do it because it was my job? I personally struggled with that.
Let's go back to Peter. Peter said, “When I walk into the church, my wife often says, I start using the F word, and what she means by that is, how are you? How are you today? And the F word is fine. I realized after that I could not be myself.” He was on stage, and he can't be authentic because he has to produce a product. I'm the pastor, and I know what's going on with God, and let me share with you, because if I don't, I don't attract people, and if I don't attract people, our budget goes down, and sooner or later, it shuts down. He felt that.
Jeff and here, I've actually asked AI to create a guy who's depressed, because we're going to look at this. Jeff is with the American Baptist churches, and he says, “There's elements of it, which are kind of like doing theatrics. You're a stage presence. You're an actor. You know, it's very much the classical Greek sense, you know, providing a catharsis here for a group of people, but you're trying to do it in a way that doesn't diminish your own person. That's the struggle, to not lose yourself in the process.” Then, I asked him, Well, why is that a struggle? And here the recording gets really quiet, because he gets really quiet. You can tell he was hesitant, and he said it really softly, he said, “I think, because I'm afraid if I share too much of myself, then I'll overwhelm everybody.” He felt the pressure to create an image that was then sold, but he couldn't be who he was, because if he did, he would overwhelm people. That's one line of pattern that we saw in their own calling. The pastors felt like they had to create an image, produce a product, and they couldn't be real. They couldn't be authentic, because if they were, they would lose resources.
We went into this study with two theories. One, it was going to be burnout, so psychological, there's going to be mental health issues, psychological burnout. The other was secularization theory. We thought we were going to interview pastors who don't believe anymore. I've lost my faith. And that's not what we found. The people we found, other than Jeff, the guy who was pictured as depressed, I do think he was struggling with mental health, but most of them were not. Most of them, when we asked, Are you called? They're like, yes, yes, I'm still called. I want to lead people spiritually. They were joyful about it. That was a really interesting thing. It totally didn't match what we thought was going to happen. People were joyful. They were happy about their calling. They just felt fake in some aspects. Some pastors were like, Okay, I love my calling, but it was the congregation. It kept getting in the way of ministry.
Charles, formerly of the Presbyterian Church USA, in the Western United States. He was an associate pastor at a really wealthy, white church, and he was in charge of educational ministry. Part of that job was youth ministry, and he was really frustrated because the budget went to the admin. His calling was to help teenagers find God during those turbulent teenage years, but he would go through meetings and see all the money that they brought in wasn't going to help people. It was going to support a really beautiful building and to pay really good salaries. He said, “I didn't see any hope that there'd be any real difference. I'm not judging the people. It's just the system. It's the way it's set up. Christians are known for their committees and their paperwork wasting so much time. I'm not doing this.” He got kind of animated. He was like, “I'm not doing this. This is ridiculous.” I'll get to the bureaucracy, the layers of paperwork and rules and regulation, so Charles pivoted. He's now a probation officer, and he absolutely says, “I am living up to my calling now. Am I called? Yes! I found a job that lines up with my calling to help hurting teenagers.” He's a probation officer. It took him a while to transition, but he did, and he says, “You're better off losing your career than losing your faith and your life.”
Let's talk about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy was one of the early topics that sociologists studied. It was a new thing. We live in bureaucracies all the time, but with the industrial revolution, how do you manage thousands of workers? How do you manage factory shift shifts and time schedules? You have to have bureaucracy, so we created it. They're really powerful. They are social creations, but they are really powerful. I know we get frustrated with them, but they're really good at coordinating people. We don't live in a one-to-one interpersonal world at all times. We do live in big social structures. How do we coordinate ourselves? We were talking about honey bees, and like bees know it. They do it without bureaucracy. They have instincts. We humans are actually pretty bad instinctualists. We don't have a lot of instincts, and so we have to have social structure to house our social thinking, and one of those is bureaucracies. They can be efficient, but guess what? They can squeeze life out of ministry. They can squeeze the life out of actually anything, but they're efficient, they're useful. I don't know if you've ever been frustrated by bureaucracy. We were talking about the American healthcare system this morning. Yeah, I've been frustrated by that bureaucracy, or credit card or bank phone trees. They’re like, push here. Press one, and you're trying to find a real person to talk to, and not a robot, right? The phone tree is really efficient, but, man, if it doesn't allow you to do what you want, you get really frustrated.
Going back to Noah, he says, “You have your boards, your trustee board, the deacon board, the committees, and you get together, and it's about doing the business of the church.” And he put it in quotes, “And it just seemed like the way we're doing church was providing a structure to keep an organization going, but there was never the time or the inclination to really share life in Christ.” I think that resonates with what we were talking about last night. Leah, you were talking about business meetings, but also why don't we pray? Right? Noah was really frustrated. Amanda, she was a full time Episcopal priest. She's now part time on an interim basis, pulpit supply. She's a bank teller now, because that was the job she could get. “What I became was somebody who crunched numbers and went to business meetings. I felt like I didn't have the space to do the pastoral work that I wanted to do because of the amount of work that I had to do.”
A famous sociologist named, Max Weber, he originally studied bureaucracies when they were relatively new, and he coined the term the “iron cage of bureaucracy”, and it is this idea that the rules and regulations and the bureaucracies can become an iron cage that squeezes people in and squeezes creativity and humanity out. We took Weber's term and we said, I think it's the iron cage of congregations here; the iron cage squeezes pastors into the forms and rules and regulations and business meetings and bylaws. But, where's following your calling? Where's Jesus, where's the Holy Spirit? The iron cage: bureaucracy constrains. The pastors told us that they are questioning if congregational structures are no longer the places where ministry happens. I want to say that phrase cautiously, okay, I'm not a doomsdayer on congregations, and I don't think every pastor experiences this or every congregation, but the ones we were speaking to said, I don't know if the (not the capital C church, not the people gathered around Jesus through word and table) lower “c” church, like this building with these people, I don't know if that's working anymore. They were questioning that. They were saying, I feel called, but the congregation is getting in the way.
The other part of congregations being stuck is the mainline Protestant decline. Reporting feeling stuck in the congregation, when it was about business and bureaucracies, a lot of it was coming from evangelicals. They said, I feel like I'm leading a franchise, or I feel like I should have gotten an MBA versus an MDiv. The mainline Protestants had a totally different story about being stuck in a congregation, and it was all about decline. Christopher is a Lutheran pastor. He's 46 years old, so he's right in the midst of family life and trying to build his career. He made a career shift, so he was a small town banker. His granddad owned the bank, his dad worked at the bank, but small town banks, they're struggling, right? Because all the big banks are buying them up. He asked himself, do I need to be a banker? He felt a call to ministry, and people in his Lutheran church called him out and said, you're really gifted in this, so he pivoted, which was really challenging. He went to seminary. Some of y'all have made that shift in mid-career. He started his job as a Lutheran pastor, but when he interviewed the congregation, actually lied to him. They used budgets from five years ago to say, yes, we have enough resources to pay the minimum salary the Lutheran church demands. He thought, it's not a lot of money, but it’s my first church. I can do this. He gets into the role, and he starts looking at last year's budget, this year's budget, and he's like, Whoa, we're broke. We don't have enough money. They could not support a full-time pastor, so he had to start looking for other jobs. He still feels like he wants to stay in congregational ministry, but his wife and his children had to move away because she needed a job. They were located in rural Midwest USA, so the family moved 120 miles away while he stayed in this pastoral role. He's looking for other jobs, but all of the Lutheran churches in his Midwestern Synod can't support a full time pastor, none of them. He says, right now, being a pastor is not going to be able to sustain us. He desperately wants to be a pastor, but he feels stuck. There are churches, but there aren't enough people to support them.
Helen, she's a second career priest. She was a social worker. In her congregation, 40 people attend, and she feels like the whole job is keeping a building open. She wants to do pastoral care and spiritual leadership. She says, “I have to worry about, did the basement flood? We have a 150 year old building, and it's got historical significance, and all of the budget is going there.” She feels blamed because her church isn't big. She feels that people perceive it's her fault. She says, “When things don't go right, it's the clergy's fault.” By the way, she was pretty spicy when she was talking to us. She says, “The fact that your church isn't full isn't because the community is changing, or that there are six big churches in the neighborhood and there aren't enough people to fill them. It's because the priest isn't doing his or her job.”
Mainline Protestants, we're seeing a massive hemorrhage of numbers. Starting in the 1960s, when it was a trickling decline, people thought churches would always grow. Mainline Protestants continued to decline. We're seeing the numbers continue to plummet. I'm going to show stats from the United States. I have looked for Canadian stats. If you have a data repository for Canadian stats, please let me know. I was looking everywhere, and I could not find them. Here are the traditional mainline Protestant churches in the United States, they call them the Seven Sisters. They are all declining: the Disciples of Christ by 61%, Presbyterian Church USA 53%, evangelical Protestants are a little bit mixed. I updated this for 2020, once the 2020 data came in, and the Southern Baptists started declining in 2016, so much more recent. The Lutheran Missouri Synod, so they're a Lutheran evangelical congregation, they're losing numbers. Seventh Day Adventists are growing, Assemblies of God growing. I wish there was a statistician for the non-denominational churches, but no one's collecting that data, they're skyrocketing, they're growing. Catholics, it's interesting, if you separate out Anglo Catholics versus Latino Catholics. Immigration is buoying the Catholic Church, keeping it from decline. Southern Baptists will decline. They're going to start looking more like mainline Protestants, even though they're not similar. Most evangelical denominations are steady or growing, and so the question is, why? Mainline Protestants pastors felt like they were trying to manage a sinking ship. They see numbers decline every year. They love the people in their charge, but they see the end, meaning, in a generation, is my church going to be there? They're doing so much work to keep a building open, to keep a congregation running, or they're doing so much work and not being compensated. Jeff, he was ABC, American Baptist church, he took on two charges, and then they stopped paying him. They're like, you're gonna do this volunteer, right? He started going into his retirement account, and by the time he talked to us, he was completely broke. Why does the mainline decline? Often in the theology world, we hear messages of evangelism and conversion. It's theological.
I want to offer a different perspective, because my toolkit is with sociology. One reason is fertility rates. Mainline Protestants have about one and a half kids fewer than evangelical Protestants. Religions grow not through conversion, because usually when someone's converting, they're actually coming from another tradition, so it's like sheep stealing. You grow through fertility. As sociologists have tracked, fertility rates divided by religious groups, mainline Protestants, their fertility rate is plummeting. Evangelical Protestants, it's starting to go down (everyone's fertility is going down), but on the whole they have an extra kid, and that's an extra member in 20 years.
That's one reason, the second reason is youth retention. When we look at the stickiness of religion, the stickiness of faith, is your faith being passed down? Are your children and your teenagers retaining the tradition, the faith that you gave them? For mainline Protestants, right now, it's under half, around 40% stick with it. For evangelical Protestants, it's around 75%. Another way to say it is 60% leave the faith, versus 25% leave the faith. You can ask: Where are the groups that have really vibrant youth ministries? Where are the groups that are investing in youth camps and youth ministries? It's usually not always, it's usually evangelicals. When we lived in Central Texas, before we moved to Houston, we were a part of a large Evangelical Church, and the sole reason was because of the children's ministry. We didn't agree with everything. We didn't agree with a lot of things, but my kids walked in excited to learn about Jesus. We thought, Okay, we're gonna suck it up, and then I got a job at Rice. I was like, we're moving and we're choosing a different kind of church. Thankfully, there's a good children's ministry there too. Once we stop thinking about children and youth, we see decline.
Another reason is social class. We often don't think about this. There used to be a pipeline, and I would love to know if this is the Canadian experience or not. At least in America, the mainline Protestants were more respectable, they had more social capital. As people moved up in social class, let's say they were a factory worker on the floor, and they went to a Pentecostal church, and loved it, but then they became a floor manager. Historically, what we saw is people moved up religions, faiths. They were like, Okay, I'm a manager now. I need to be around other managers. I'm going to join the Presbyterian Church. Then we saw with managers moving into upper u CEO positions, or professions like physician, engineer, and they would move into Episcopal and PC USA Presbyterians. Even if you're not having enough kids and you’re not keeping your teenagers, it’s okay: a rising tide lifts all boats. People are moving up social class. We're getting better economically as a society, and there's a natural pipeline. As people get richer, they choose the mainline Protestant churches because they were deemed more respectable. It's not respectable to be Pentecostal, historically. That pipeline has broken. Why? You can be Assemblies of God, and have a tambourine and worship on Sunday mornings and be a manager. Evangelicalism has become more respectable. Evangelicalism, at least in America, has now wielded itself to power. If you want to be someone of power, you can still be Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, Church of God Cleveland. People are moving up social classes. People are improving their situations. They're not changing churches because they can meet other managers at their Pentecostal church. Often, we don't think about the tie between social class and religion.
Fourthly, why does the mainline decline? The culture wars, and this is an odd one. Mainline Protestants won the culture war. Well, after our election in America, did they?
Let's think about it, our society, up until January, the inauguration in the United States, has moved towards more openness, towards women in leadership, more openness toward LGBTQ brothers and sisters. When people want an organization that supports women that's open to queer people, they don't necessarily have to go to a mainline Protestant church, right? There are other groups out there, because the society is open to women and open to other ideas. If you want a racial justice group, there are groups other than mainline Protestants. However, if you want a more traditional view of marriage, if you don't think women should be ministers, if you want to be patriarchal, guess where you can go? You go to evangelical Protestants or conservative Catholic parishes. Those are your two choices. They're seeing an influx, because they're the only options left. If you like patriarchy, white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ stuff, you go to an evangelical church. Success has diminished the tension or the distinction in society. In sociology, the more tension and the more distinction you have in society, the stronger your organization, because when you can create an out-group, it makes your in-group better. When you don't have an out-group, and I think there are some really strong theological reasons for not having an out-group, aka the Holy Spirit and Jesus. Sociologically though, if you don’t have an out-group, you're not as strong, because you don't have an us-versus-them. We are called to love our neighbour, but sociologically, it changes the social dynamics. That's one aspect where I wrestle as a Christian versus a sociologist, sometimes I have to say, Nope, I'm following Jesus on this, because sociology says, create enemies. If you want a really strong in-group, you make sure you're embattled. Mainline Protestants, for the most part, did not embattle with culture. They embattled with each other internally, but they did not embattle with the culture. They won, and because of that, the distinction is gone, and so there's no incentive to join.
Okay, so we've got stuck in the calling, stuck in the congregation. Let's think about stuck in careers. We asked this, why don't you just leave? You're not happy. You feel like you're fake. The bureaucracy is constraining you. Your church is about to die. Why not leave? They said, for two reasons, there is a stigma and stability, which I said earlier. Let's think about stigma. A stigma is anything that's socially discrediting, so you're trying to present yourself in the best light possible, and a stigma is anything that reduces that presentation. When pastors are trying to transition out of ministry, employers don’t know what to do with the word pastor on a resume. People don’t understand the nature of the job that pastors actually do, budget management, communication, textual analysis, and really strong soft skills in terms of people. None of that can be translated on a resume, and employers don’t know what to do with the MDiv. One person told us that an employer looked at MDiv, on their resume, and asked, did you go to Hogwarts?
Let's go back to Jeff, our depressed guy. He quit. When he talked to us, he was the most downcast. He was in a crisis moment, and we probably should have paused and said, Let's talk later. It was very fresh. He was looking for a job, and he was angry, and he said getting interviews was very difficult, because when you see “pastor” on a resume, it essentially discounts the file. It's difficult to get people to listen to you, to even explain yourself when they don't understand what being clergy really means. What other job carries a stigma so bad that employers take your resume out? You want to transition, but how do you translate your experience to the business world?
Aaron is with the United Methodist Church. He's still a pastor, and he talked about why stay. He said, I'm staying because it's financial. There's stability. He said, I actually have two reasons for staying, the primary one is, sadly, financial. I know it's horrible to say for someone in my position. He felt guilt about saying that. Half of the pastors we spoke to left, and half stayed in ministry. What did they do? Pastors who told us that they left said, I left so I could follow my calling. I left so that I could follow who Jesus is telling me to be. There were two sticking points, they wanted connection and they wanted to build relationships with others; they wanted community, which they found in a couple ways.
Peter now manages two storage facilities. He absolutely loves that he gets to be authentic with people. I didn't know this about storage facilities, but apparently regulars come in all the time because they're coming in to change stuff out of their storage unit. I always thought of storage facilities as temporary or revolving, but he's said, I get to have these amazing conversations, and I'm more open with people about Scripture. It took him a while, but he was able to redefine his work to fit his calling.
Robert had a more interesting story. He was a former worship leader, he led the music at a big evangelical church, and he had this mystical vision. He was upset, he felt stuck, and he left. His wife has a really high paying career, so he took a year off. Not a lot of people can take a year off, but in that time, and because he was pretty wealthy, he had wealthy connections, and his finance broker friend said, Hey, I've got some real estate that we're going to develop. You want to come look at it? It was downtown, in this little square in California, and it was a perfect place for a coffee shop. When they toured the building, there's evidence that it was a former brothel or human trafficking location. He had a powerful memory of his wife two years ago saying, I know this sounds crazy, but I'm called to get women out of sex work. I don't know how, but that is my calling. I don't know what that means, but I've had a mystical vision. This guy is saying, Hey, do you want to develop this piece of property? I think it was involved in sex work, and he put the two together. He's like, Oh my gosh, so he creates this coffee shop, and he sources products through connection with the community. He's trying to build a third space. He gets the local baker to bring in their pastries, he gets the local brewer to get in their beer. He gets the local coffee roaster to provide the coffee beans. And all the profits go to rescuing women from sex work. He said, I'm absolutely filling my calling. Is he up front leading worship anymore? No, but he's doing things in the name of Christ to rescue women.
We've got the three C's. The question is, what do we do? I'll be honest with you, this was the hardest part. I turned in the book manuscript, and my editor asked, Okay, what do you do about it? I'm like, Oh, I'm a sociologist. My job is to describe what is - we need an ethicist or a theologian. She's like, nope, Todd, this is you. I had to take off my sociology hat and go back to my pastoral training, my theological education. Those of you in theological education, thank you. I had to go back and read Karl Barth. I had to go back and look at scripture. I spent months taking off the training of sociology and to ask, okay, what do we do? We've got these big forces, and here's the thing, we can't fix these. I know we have conferences where we're trying and we ask, how do we reach more people? How do we stop secularization? I hate to say it, but we're not stopping that train. Our world is secularizing for right now, and it doesn't mean it always will be, but right now, our world is secularizing. Our world is capitalistic. That's just how it is. We can't fix it, but we've got two options. One is traditionalism. We're going to do it the way we've always done it. We're going to dig in, not change a thing, tradition. The other option is to blow it all up. We don't need congregations. We don't need this idea of a pastor anymore. That's futurism. Neither are helpful. Traditionalism doesn't acknowledge that the world is changing. Secularization is a new player in the game, but futurism doesn't recognize human social structure. We actually need institutions. If you want to pass on your faith to your children, you have to have some structure, because you and a Bible that is a one generation thing. We have to have institutions. That is where our collective memory lies, and we have to have memory to pass on faith. What we're going to use is traditioned-innovation. This is an idea from Greg Jones. I did not create this. Greg Jones, he was my dean at Duke Divinity, but now he's at President Belmont University. He constructed this term, traditioned-innovation: what do we do when we literally don't know what's coming up next? He uses the phrase bewildering, what happens when we're bewildered? He says, Okay, let's bring in tradition, but we have to innovate. Look into the past for wisdom, as Christians, a lot of that is looking at scripture, but then also we have to use that tradition, that wisdom, to create innovation.
I'm going to offer three recommendations. These are not all the recommendations. I am limited in understanding, what do we do? I'm offering three humble recommendations. There are more; you are better at this. This is what I'd love to hear from you, especially during the workshop and the panel time. Number one, understand relationships are layered. Number two, and I'll walk through each of these, tell your story to undermine bureaucracy. Number three, we've got to start closing congregations, struggling congregations, because we trust in the Holy Spirit. We know that if the Holy Spirit is real and active, the church will always be active and real, right? I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church. It's one breath. It's not that I believe in the Holy Spirit, and please let there be a church still, right? Let's think about this. Here's where the wisdom comes from. I'm going to do both sociology and scripture. In sociology, we define primary groups versus secondary groups. We can think about concentric circles around our personal, social lives. Primary groups are those that don't have a goal, they are personal, emotional. You talk to people. It's who you text every day or who you want to talk to when you have a bad day. It's usually family and best friends. Secondary groups, those are goal oriented. It might be my kids’ soccer team. After a season, the soccer team dissipates. We're okay with it. Secondary groups dissipate. When primary groups dissolve, you go to therapy. Divorce, death, a breakup, relationships are layered, and there are times and people for different things in our lives. Jesus does this, right? Jesus has his inner circle, and then he has a little bit broader of a circle, and then he's got his followers, and then he's got other people, and he talks to them differently depending on which circle he is talking to. I'm so thankful for Ministry Forum, because you are doing this. How do we create spaces for pastors to not only talk to each other and not talk about business? I mean, just talk to each other, but also, how do we create spaces where pastors are worshiping without producing anything? Zero production worship for the pastors. How do we do that so they can have some authenticity? They can feel free, I'm not worrying about is the microphone on. I'm not worrying about the heating. I'm worrying about my relationship with God. These social layers are probably not within your congregation. It's probably outside. Whether it's like coming to Crieff Hills, having time to gather and say, can I talk with you about my faith right now?
I want to offer a story from my own life. When I was a pastor, we had Monday night dinner. MND is what we called it, and it was a group of us who were either single or recently married. We were all young adults in our 20s and 30s, and we rotated who hosted. We were in ministry, in some capacity, at different churches, and so we all had similar language. It was my saving grace, because I could go to dinner and I was no longer Pastor Todd. I didn't have to have my stuff together, and we spoke openly about joys and doubts and struggles and, asked, what about this? I don't know about this? We could be authentic with each other in a way that you can't within your congregation.
The second one is to tell your story. Josh said this one time as we're talking about this, he goes, Oh, yeah, no one's story is bureaucracy. No one says, You know what? I got into the ministry because I love bureaucracy. I want to be on meetings, committees. No one said that. There’s wisdom here in Galatians, I love it. In Galatians, Paul tells a story before he tries to get at this idea of, what do we do with Gentiles, what do we do with the rules and regulations? He says, Let me tell you who I am. Then he starts talking theologically about the new rules and regulations. I love that he tells his story. Our stories are really powerful. He says in Galatians 113, for you have heard my previous way of life in Judaism, and then he goes on for many passages. This idea of storytelling, it absolutely connects us to our calling. I want you to think about stories on two levels, what is your story? I've tried to ask some of you this weekend, how did you get into ministry? What is your calling? Then also, churches have stories. No Church's story is we just are here to do meetings. Why is that congregation here? I love that you started our time here at Crieff Hill with the story of this land. That's beautiful. I want to offer an example from my own life, the Imagine Banquet. When we moved to Waco, for me to start my PhD at Baylor, we joined a church called Harris Creek, and they had it in their bylaws, and once you hear the word bylaws, you go, oh, bureaucracy, right? It said, we will have a business meeting every January, so we'll do the business of the church. I'm like, Oh my gosh, that sounds awful. I'm not going to that. It was late January, but in early January, they started promoting it, come to the Imagine Banquet. What's the Imagine Banquet? They said, it's our business meeting. They rent out the downtown art house theater. They cater it, not as good as the catering here, but they cater it with pretty nice food. They told their story, We're the church who, in the 1850s, used to share a one room church house with the Methodists in a cornfield. And then they told the story of last year, here's what we did last year. And they made it a party, and they said, here's where we think God is moving us next year. It had nothing to do with numbers or bureaucracy, yeah, there were things they wanted to do based on a budget, but they also had this idea that if something didn't work, or if something didn't fit in their imagining, they didn't do it. They said, we're not doing Vacation Bible School. There are 100 other churches in Waco that do it really well, send your kid there. We're going to do other things, so they changed it. They said, every year we're doing this, if it doesn't fit where we imagine God is leading us, cut it. They were ruthless about cutting things. This turned a business meeting into a storytelling celebration. How often does your church tell its story and celebrate it as a good story?
Then the third one, it's so easy to have it on a slide, and it's so easy to write it in a book. Y'all, this is the hardest one. If a church is struggling, I think we have to be ruthless about cutting it, and that's so hard. The wisdom here, like I said earlier, comes from the Apostles Creed. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church. We trust that the Holy Spirit's active, so therefore the church will not be abandoned. We have to ask ourselves, where's Saint Augustine's Church? Where's Perpetua’s Church, Ambrose's Church? Those forms and functions are gone for the most part. We need to be okay with congregational buildings and local congregations having a Holy Death. That's really hard. We need to start thinking structurally. How do we make sure that the people who do want to be pastors, how do they have a livelihood that is sustainable and joyful, so they're not worried if this church is going to close down, or can they even pay my salary? That's at the denominational level that is beyond the level of the local pastor. I think denominations need to start thinking about this.
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us today on the Ministry Forum Podcast. We hope today's episode resonated with you and sparked your curiosity. Remember, you're not alone in your ministry journey. We're at the other end of some form of technology, and our team is committed to working hard to support your ministry every step of the way. If you enjoyed today's episode, tell your friends, your family, your colleagues. Tell Someone, please don't keep us a secret, and of course, please subscribe, rate and leave a review in the places you listen to podcasts. Your feedback helps us reach more ministry leaders just like you, and honestly, it reminds us that we're not alone either, and don't forget to follow us on social media @MinistryForum, on all of our channels. You can visit our website at ministryforum.ca for more resources, keep up with upcoming events and ways to connect with our growing community, until next time, may God's strength and courage be yours in all that you do. May you be fearless, not reckless. May you be well in body, mind and spirit, and may you be at peace.