The past few days have been…interesting…on clergy social media, especially the PC(USA) side of things. A pastor left a church and parish ministry in general and wrote an article about it, and people lost their darned minds.

I will not get into the arguments about it because frankly, they all exhaust me. I have a couple of comments that lead to this piece, but the vitriol and hatred — and counter-vitriol and counter-hatred — just astounded me (or would have if I did not already know that pastors hate other pastors more than anything else, myself included).

Pastors, this is why we cannot have nice things. Or point out the not-nice things we would like to replace and leave behind.

Two things about this I need to say, one that I will explore in more detail and one I will just name here: his treatment of laity in the piece rings a bit unfair. After reading it, I told Nora that he had to burn a lot of bridges to publish such a piece (more on that below), and some of those bridges got burnt before the ink had dried on his Covenant of Separation paperwork. I definitely have felt the urge to do the same at times, but I did not because the dissenters and the supporters get hit with the same bridge-burning, and the supporters feel it worse.

He could have had more grace. I am not saying he should have — we make decisions, and sometimes the “right” decision is not the graceful one — and I think he could have had less grace, as well, but I must acknowledge non-clergy probably felt rightly off-put by it.

The other thing we need to look at is that we all* read the article. It took over the public and private social media activity of a lot of PC(USA) pastors for a couple of days. It got spread far and wide. He has a platform, and leaving this congregation will likely amplify him to a public theologian platform.

He also had a salary that helped afford him options in leaving. If you doubled my salary (not an exaggeration in this case), I could definitely save enough to take a risk on doing something different and leaving ministry. He could afford to burn the bridge he walked over and torch his pastoral career in a way most pastors could only dream of. Even if I left parish ministry tomorrow, I would need those bridges to serve as a safety net in case something fails and I needed to reenter parish ministry to provide for my family.

This clearly cuts both ways, though. He may have gotten to speak out in a way a lot of people want to, but his experiences and observations resonated with a lot of parish pastors, and those experiences and observations got heard by a lot of people who would never have heard them otherwise.

(I would bet that article has had more views today than this blog and any of its predecessors have had total.)

We can point to all of his privileges and the platform he has, which is all fair, but I also saw a lot of people who do not have those privileges talking about how his experiences mirrored their own — especially BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and female clergy toiling away in “minimum-salary, part-time call”-land or who left for largely the same reasons.

He touched a tender spot in the church world, and some people needed it (and needed someone with a platform to do it).

But that leaves us with a question: how do we amply the voices who do not already have a platform and amplification? Parish ministry is hard — no matter the salary, position, or additional staff people — and we all have struggles, but a few of the standard struggles of pastors he did not have by virtue of his position, his inherent identity, and the opportunities afforded to him. How to we let pastors without a platform, pastors who do not have those bonus privileges, tell their stories of leaving the ministry after hardship and heartbreak? How do we amplify those stories so people can hear them?

How do we give voice to what are, ultimately, more interesting, more painful, and, unfortunately, more commonplace stories?

And too, the bridge-burning makes this so much harder, right? It is not just platform and amplification; it is also ramifications of sharing what happened publicly.

You may ask, “Why do you think we need to do that?” Because we cannot keep the pain hidden away. I have also recently heard stories of pastors who leave parish ministry permanently and…no one asks them why, no one tried to understand, no one acknowledges they even exist anymore. This does not happen everywhere in every situation, but having to swallow all that pain and knowing the very people who vow to support and love you have failed to do that in one of the hardest moments in answering and understanding God’s call for you just makes the pain worse.

Giving pastors the opportunity to be heard, to have their pains and cries heard, can begin to lead to healing and justice.

I do not know how someone can vulnerably share their experiences without burning the bridges behind them, but I know being heard is needed and longed for.

Which leads to the title. I know I longed for — long for — the opportunity to just share what happened and be heard. I, thankfully, had a few “important people” that earnestly listened to my story and colleagues and family (both official and chosen) who lovingly listened in real-time, but a lot of people do not have that voice of someone who hears your story and says, “Yeah, that is bad, and it is so hard. I am sorry.”

So, this is my call: tell me (or someone else) your story. I have ears that provide great pastoral care while sharing “an amount” of alcohol, I have eyes that love to read the stories of others, I have a desire to know you deeper, even or especially if I do not know you much at all.

What happened? Why did you leave? Why did you stay? What wounds have healed? What wounds are still open (or have reopened)?

Let us start telling our stories.

Love,
– Robby

*Hyperbolic.