Dan Smith & Mary K. Hucyke: CourageousSpace Newsletter
Is Your Leadership Putting Your Church At Risk
March 2006
These questions are often posed to clergy to help them ascertain their level of self-care. We pose them to you to help you ascertain how your attitudes and practices are influencing your congregation's health. Pastors are regularly told that their self-care practices influence their vulnerability to pastoral misconduct. What you may not know is that your attitudes and practices influence your congregation's vulnerability to pastoral misconduct.
If you are over-functioning because you believe it's in the best interest of your congregation - "they're at a critical juncture," "it's only until things smooth out," "my job is to serve," - be aware that what may seem helpful in the short term just might be setting the church up for big problems in the future.
A surprising number of congregations have clergy misconduct as part of their history. Such congregations typically display one or more of the following traits:
~ preference for pastors with poor personal boundaries
~ absence of spiritually mature, self-differentiated laity in key leadership positions
~ informal decision making by a few, supplanting formal decision making structures
~ indirect patterns of communicating that promote secrecy
~ estrangement from the denominational system/structure.
Alone, any of these traits can subvert a congregation's missional purpose. In combination, these systemic traits create a closed and isolated community where a clergy leader can have free reign to abuse his or her power. As those traits become more firmly entrenched, congregations lose their missional vitality and their outward focus that is their fundamental purpose.
In some cases these traits were anchored during the tenure of the abusing pastor. In others, the traits were already present in the system and the abuser simply made use of them and reinforced them. However these traits happened to become ingrained in the congregation, they keep a church from developing the health and strength needed to live out their God-given mission and make them vulnerable to clergy misconduct.
Pastors, often with the very best intent, create or contribute to these conditions that subvert the church's mission and make the congregational system susceptible to misconduct. Clergy who are "predators" consciously and unconsciously look for and make use of these ground conditions. Clergy who end up offending, but who are not predators, find themselves in a system without the checks and balances that make it more difficult for a pastor to misuse their power. Pastors, congregational leaders, and judicatory leaders all share the responsibility for creating healthy conditions – and addressing unhealthy ones.
What can you as a pastor do to help "inoculate" your congregation against clergy misconduct and maintain its outward focused missional vitality?
~ Learn to say "no" as well as "yes." Have a life separate from your life at the church…and live it.
~ Understand your role as that of deepening the spiritual lives of your laity and empowering lay leadership so that THEY can discern and carry out the mission of the church
~ Foster an environment where differing opinions and ideas are welcomed as necessary ingredients for personal and corporate growth.
~ Consistently use the formal structures that exist in your church for decision making and insist that others do to. If the structures don't work, change them, rather than ignore them.
~ Communicate openly and directly. Keep people in the loop. Insist that other people do too.
~ Foster a good working relationship between the congregation and their denominational support staff. This may mean doing some work on your relationship with your denomination. Your attitudes are infectious.
Maintain healthy boundaries and a healthy lifestyle. If you won't do it for your own sake, do it for the sake of your congregation.
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