Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I am writing from a break in a Clergy Day where 40 clergy have gathered together for conversation as well as to hear about an exciting program called Mary’s Hope. This has me thinking about the clergy groups I have been a part over the past 36 years. My first was as a college student intern when I was invited to attend a clergy day in the mountains of North Carolina. All men. Very chummy. Entitled. Stable almost to the point of being inert.

Today’s gathering is half men and half women. As I look around the room another description might be half-time. That first group in the mountains was made up of full-time solo rectors of congregations with 50-100 members subsidized by diocesan and congregational endowments and funding: a clergy full employment program. Today a congregation with 100 members in our diocese can afford a quarter-time priest. I look around and see many colleagues who are unemployed, or underemployed, and among those with full-time work I know for a fact a number of them serve congregations on the financial edge.

Collegiality for me has always been an important aspect of priesthood. As a young priest I had an idealistic view of clergy gatherings. I pictured wise elders studying scripture, sharing bon mots and a glass of sherry, and helping form those entering the ministry as young adults. Sometimes that was my actual experience.

But over time, what I saw taking place in clergy gatherings was a sharing of the hurts and shortcomings of our calling. The parish priesthood is a tough business and no one understands it like another priest. Blowing off steam can be an important role for a clergy gathering. But if the group doesn’t set up some boundaries and procedures they can degenerate into bitch sessions with the bishop and the diocese and our parishioners as targets.

Clergy need to gather to share their experience, their pains, their joys. Our groups are very important. But they need a structure and an agenda that keeps them from running up on the rocks of our fears and insecurities. Our agenda today meets that need.

The experience of clergy today might have many of the markings of the priesthood 35 years ago, but the experience is drastically different. The old boy network needed a clergy gathering in their time. We need them even more today.