Do you agree that clergy morale is currently at a low ebb? If so, what factors are contributing to this low morale?
I would have to agree that clergy morale is low for several reasons. The cartoon/photos of a person juggling a couple of balls to represent Seminary and the photo of several balls in the air to represent the actual church, and the hands reaching out of the ball pit representing the current situation is right on. It was on facebook, I believe.
One of my contributing factors is that the resources we have to do the ministry we were trained to do has shriveled up. People to volunteer, money to do ministry, and the training to operate in the current situations are all extremely volatile. I was trained 45 years ago by teachers who were themselves in ministry 30 years prior to that teaching. What worked for them has not spanned the distance from their experience to ours in the world today. They taught us what succeeded for them, which I appreciated, but realized, especially recently that mindset is not really available anymore. As the church participants aged, and we are in the most vulnerable to be sick profile, they held back their participation. The loss of gathering for obvious reasons, affected the income sources. The givers in the church responded after a while, but the rental income was severely cut off. Right after the book published to help churches to diversify their income streams to rentals came out, by the way.
Another major factor in reducing morale, I think, was the challenges related to the political atmosphere and the racial tension in the air. We've probably not been good at those, but the news and the tension in the air, certainly pushed those issues to the surface more readily. The Covid pandemic and the response, or lack of support for the common sense vaccinations and common decency to all wear masks, added to the difficulty of creating a supportive community we once knew was the congregation. The lack of support from media and the highly publicized controversy from religious leaders as well, doomed our chances of working together and hope of seeing any kind of progress. since we are being "results oriented" for so long, can really take its toll on you when all your numbers are going down and look like they will for a while as well.
Producing quality online services required a great deal of flexibility and a change from a verbal to a visual skill, I think that hurt some who were more verbally skilled and couldn't quite get the hang of everything needed to do quality visuals. Too much was just talking heads for the online experience, rather than the amount of video that was available to help in worship. The abundance of that material required an exorbitant amount of time to review and get permission to use in an online worship experience.
Another factor is the shriveling of the attention span for most adults. We were trained that a 30 minute sermon was required, especially to use all the background resources and research. Today 7 minutes of attention span or less is available to the average human, camera angles, changes in scenery on all forms of media makes talking to people a burden, if you are not conscious of the need to change focus every 6 or 7 minutes. Being creative in the sermon/message slot took on a whole different approach and not having real comfort in that ability has lowered the morale of preachers.
Finally, what strategies can clergy engage in to help them deal with low morale?
Our clergy cluster group, all UMC pastors in a region, found that we needed/wanted more time together to help each other, to be a listening and supportive colleague so much more important than just gathering to coordinate church calendars and the requests from the conference for agenda and support items. We offered each other what was working and became less competitive than we had previously.
I think we are going to need a lot more resources given to us to train us in dealing with the ever changing world views among our communities and parish participants. In our UMC world, we are going to need a great deal more support for the loss of certifiable progress, we have been so numbers conscious, baptism, conversion, small group participation, volunteers, worship attendance, finances, that are all not very good in comparison to former years, can really hurt morale. It is hard for a supervisor to say well done thou good and faithful servant, when it looks like you are seeing the destruction of Jerusalem going on all around you.
Anyhow, enough ranting and raving. I retired, thinking I could help my church recover some of the income they were paying me. I had a promise of another appointment, thinking I could offer a whole package of ministry for a lot less being retired, that hasn't happened yet, which is affecting my morale too, is all a part of the scene.
Thank you for listening to all of this.
Pastor Jeff
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