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The Pastor at Low Tide
Why are so many pastors leaving the ministry?
The following tweet hit me this morning:
As a fellow pastor, I was shocked and nodding in agreement at the same time. I can understand why so many pastors are throwing in the towel. COVID really placed some stress on pastors, so on one level, it’s not a surprise.
That said, I think COVID was more of an accelerant than a cause. A lot of the causes were taking place long before the lockdown. There are a lot of things happening in our culture that leave clergy feeling depressed, ignored and unappreciated. At some point, they just give up and leave.
I’m still hanging on. I haven’t given much thought to leaving the ministry-yet. But the last year has been depressing. There is this feeling that I’m doing all of this for nothing. You get the feeling that people don’t really care about faith, or about the congregation they belong to. I’ve been working in trying to help turn around a small church in the Twin Cities suburbs, but at times I wonder if the congregation really cares if the congregation survives or not.
You work to welcome visitors doing whatever is possible to greet them and they end up going to a larger church down the street. Others attend for a while and then just stop coming. As much as we talk about the church as a community, it feels more and more like your church is in the bargain bin, as people go for the shinier model on the endcap. People going to church now feel at times like consumers instead of adherents. Yes, I know that back in the 50s, people went to church because it was the thing to do, but even those people were dedicated to the institution than it seems today.
But it isn’t just local issues, as important as they are to pastors. I think there are larger issues that are making an impact on the local church. There’s that poll that shows the number of people who go to church has dipped below 50 percent. There are articles like this one by Shadi Hamid that talk about how politics has taken the place of…
