Divine Details
Hard to Negotiate
Along with Advent comes salary-negotiating time here in the Merritt house, my least favorite part of the year. Honestly, I hate it. I wish that everyone just got paid from the Local Governing Body (LGB). You know, a socialized system where everyone is given as they have need. I wish that each pastor had a set amount, based on cost of living, housing, experience, and education. A set salary, where certain things don’t matter, things like ethnicity, age, or gender, and certain things do matter, like how much you had to go into debt to get your seminary education.
I’m not even sure that the size of the congregation should matter. I
mean at this point there ought to be some systemic realization that
women are in small parishes and associate positions, not because they
are less wise, intelligent, or capable, but because there’s that thick
stained glass ceiling that we’re slowly, surely trying to crack
through.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Most women of the Friends generation have endured, at least once, that excruciating rite of passage known as The Break-Up. There are three general types of break-ups:
- The Amicable Break-Up: The two dating partners agree that one or both of them have outgrown the relationship, and they leave the door open to friendship.
- The Claw-My-Eyes-Out Break-Up: You are miserable in the relationship and decide to bail.
- The Ambush Break-Up: You are unceremoniously dumped, or your dating partner makes life unbearable to force you to throw in the towel.
For young clergywomen these personal kinds of break-ups may have eerie parallels in the professional world. We are, after all, still discovering our pastoral gifts and searching for the environments that will allow our ministries to flourish. It is likely that we will have to break up with a congregation at some point early in our careers.
Congregational Interviewing 101 (Or What You Should Know About Parish Interviewing but No One Tells You… Or What I Wish I had Known a Few Years Ago)
Ah, the call process. What an idyllic, prayerful time, characterized by careful consideration of congregations and clergy alike, with everyone putting aside worldly concerns to discern the will of the Triune God. Sound familiar?
No? What's that? You experienced stress, anxiety, or confusion while looking for a position as an ordained minister? Blasphemy, blasphemy! Well, maybe so, but, given a choice, I’d rather be a blasphemer than a prevaricator.
Taming the Busyness: Getting Organized and Staying That Way
Ministry is a high calling: a cliché, but also true. We have the joy and privilege of being present at the milestone events of life—births, weddings, deaths—what some of us call “hatch, match and dispatch” in our cheeky moments. One of the practical things I learned in seminary was this: when the call comes that a parishioner has died, hang up the phone, take out the calendar, and cancel any non-essential commitments for the next several days. The pastoral care and funeral are now the priorities. Then turn to the following year’s calendar and write a reminder to contact the family: “anniversary of Rose’s death—call her daughter.”
Tending to one’s calendar seems like a mundane activity in the midst of the emotional upheaval of a death—and it is. And yet our ministries are full of such moments. Yes, ours is a lofty calling, but we still need to get things done. There are plenty of urgent and important matters in ministry (death of a church member). Others are not urgent, but deeply important (our own self-care). Still other issues are merely urgent, but not important (insert your own example here). How do we organize our lives so as to make the best use of our time, while providing flexibility to respond to needs as they arise?
The Fake Search
Recently, at a local governing board meeting, the chair of a search committee presented his candidate before the governing body with the words, “We really did have a real search.” I sat back in my pew, folded my arms, and rolled my eyes, because we all knew the truth. It was just another sham.
Have you ever fallen prey to the fraudulent pastoral search? Do you know what I’m talking about? Between my husband and me, we’ve been caught up in it. I hate to say just how many times.
Whose Hair Is It, Anyway?
Sibling Rivalry
As
an only child, I never really understood the whole issue of sibling
rivalry. I grew up with my own room. My toys were safe from
the hands of younger siblings who might play with them and perhaps break
them. I had the attention of my parents and maternal grandparents,
without the competition of siblings. Then I married an only child
as well. We are a good match because we understand the other’s
need for space and independence, even though I have no sister-in-laws
to share stories with or nieces or nephews to dote on. Two years ago,
we gave birth to our child, who is still an only child herself and an
only grandchild on both sides. She has our attention, her own
room, the loving attention of four sets of grandparents and one Busha
(great-grandma).
What Did She Just Say?
As the below true-life examples illustrate, I've been known to let faux curse words slip in my sermons on more than one occasion:
“The disciples had been fishing all day, and they hadn't caught anything whatsoever. They probably felt like crap.”
“You're going to break your wedding vows. It might not be in a big, dramatic Grey's Anatomy kind of way, but you will break them. I mean, I love my husband Jeff, but when I'm pissed at him for eating the leftovers I wanted for my own dinner, I'm pretty sure I'm not cherishing him.”
“So if you're sitting there thinking to yourself, ‘Well, great, I'm screwed,’ don't worry; you're not alone.”
These words started making appearances on the smaller, more informal Wednesday night service, when I was preaching without notes. I soon found myself saying these kinds of things in my Sunday morning sermons to hundreds of people. I started to ask myself why recently.
What Not to Wear
I love Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her books, loosely autobiographical—about a young girl who explored the West with her pioneer family—were the basis for games my friends would play during every 2nd and 3rd grade recess. We fought over who got to play Laura, her blind older sister Mary, or the darling younger sister Carrie. We made boys pretend to be wolves and guarded our “homes” against them.
We never got so involved in
the game that we developed costumes, but if we had, this women’s clergy
blouse from Wippell
would have served the purpose nicely.
In it for the long haul
We’ve been in our home for a year now. In actuality, it’s been almost two years, but that first year, this didn’t feel like our home. We were renting. Now we own our home (or at least part of it), and I feel settled.
I am a nester. Not in the sense that I like to clean, but in the sense that I like to decorate and I don’t like to move. I love to hammer nails into the plaster. I am the one who buys the paint entitled “late tomato red.” In our last home, my husband and I embellished our upstairs with the designs of the Ndebele tribe of South Africa.
