A Good Farewell Starts at the Beginning- Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers, best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. I am your host Reverend Jim Latimer, and today we have the good fortune to have with us Reverend Arlen Vernava. Arlen is a remarkable human being – clearly a person of power, but also modest. He’s also a long-time Interim Ministry Network faculty member. I know lots of people that have been through interim ministry training having had him as their teacher, and all the blessing that has happened that way. He also is an executive coach, and has the credential of being a Professional Transition Specialist in the interim world. He also has a process consulting business in the secular world. So, he’s a deep thinker about a lot of things, and articulate as well. It’s a joy to have him with us. And in this particular segment here – this particular Bit of Wisdom – he said to me, Jim, a good farewell of a ministry time starts at the beginning. And I’m thinking, what? So, Arlen, if you could say more about why or how a good farewell starts at the beginning, we’d love to hear it.
Arlen Vernava
Thanks, Jim. Thank you. And hi, everybody. It’s great to be with you today in this way. So, here’s the phrase, and I don’t know who came up with it. I remember writing it down at one point. And it’s this: Joining stands on the shoulders of farewell. Joining stands on the shoulders of farewell. So, friends, how was your last farewell? Because the nature of your last farewell – and that’s your last farewell in your place of practice, and also all of your farewells in your life, whether it’s in your place of practice, or with friends or with family, but the nature of how you do farewell will hugely predict and influence how you move into joining with your community of faith.
Also – on the side of the community of faith – how they experience and know farewells will either hinder or help them in their joining you. I remember serving a congregation who after a little while, shared with me that in all the ministries that they’d experienced that were still in memory, they had not experienced a clergy – their pastor – who had said to leadership in this kind of honest and vulnerable way, I’m sorry, that’s on me. I messed up. I was wrong. Forgive me. What do I need to do to make amends? They had never experienced that. And they were a community that were accustomed to managing their life with that absence, which meant that relationship with their clergy was always a little bit guarded, a little bit distant.
Joining has kind of five practices. These are in no particular order. They all matter. They are: giving thanks, celebrating, forgiving, making amends, and blessing. And blessing has two parts: both affirmation and challenge. Of all of those five practices, I have to work with extra intention around giving thanks because I grew up in a family of origin where the subtle message was, You just always do the right thing. Why do I need to thank you for what you’re supposed to be doing anyway? You just do it. And so, when I’m in a community of faith, I make a point of looking both to say that to individuals, but to say that to the community as a whole with a certain intention, because it wasn’t something that was ingrained easily in me growing up.
On the other side of that, I’m able to make amends and offer forgiveness in a pretty organic and natural way. All of you, or each one of us I should say, probably has of those five practices, something that we do easily, organically. It’s a strong muscle. And some of that we don’t do well, or often, or perhaps – I hope not – but perhaps even at all. And yet joining is about sharing your heart. And it’s about receiving the heart of the community of faith and its leaders.
Jim Latimer
Let me just stop you there. That was really profound. Joining is about what? with the heart? Say that again.
Arlen Vernava
Joining it about sharing your heart. Offering your heart to the community of faith. This measure of just being comfortable in your own skin. Of a measure of vulnerability.
Jim Latimer
And receiving theirs, I think you had told me.
Arlen Vernava
And receiving their heart, which means curiosity, an openness, a posture of, I want to say less judgment – we’re always making judgments, constantly. But a posture where the stuff we’re receiving, we hold gently, because it’s uniquely theirs, and we don’t know always what it means. And so, we receive their heart. That’s who they are, even if it’s different from our experience, even if it feels strange, or perhaps even wrong at first. Joining – that habit, that posture – I think that is essential. It’s huge.
Jim Latimer
So, joining is primarily a heart thing. Often, we think of joining as when I sign the contract, or it’s when I move my books into the new pastor study. Those are part of joining too, but joining can start before any of those things happen, and probably might very well ought to perhaps. Who knows?
Arlen Vernava
Oh, I think so. Jim. I know that when a community of faith and I begin an initial conversation about, Oh, we’ve heard about you. Are you available? Are you interested in having a conversation with us? At that point, I’m already beginning to join. And so, is my heart guarded? Am I feeling protective? Can I offer an honest and truthful reply to that inquiry? Am I able to receive and hear the stuff that they are not just saying, but that’s underneath what they’re saying? Am I in a place where I can enter into their life and ask them questions that will help me more deeply know what they want and need? That’s all in that. That’s agreement making time, friends. That’s when we’re in conversations around: Should we be together? And what’s the nature of that – even the practical dollars and cents stuff that we all at some point manage? That’s all part of joining. And it’s heart forward. It’s heart forward for sure.
What’s remarkable to me about this as well, is that when communities of faith experience joining – experience these five practices throughout the arc of the entire ministry, then two things happen. When you finally do say farewell, there’s a relationship. There’s a real relationship there. It’s not just a ritual. It’s not just a gift or some words. You’ve got the experience of celebration and thanks and forgiveness and amends and blessing. That’s all in back of you that you’ve all shared together. And when that community of faith moves on to invite and welcome and join with their next clergy person, they’re doing it on this kind of solid space. It’s this wonderfully solid experience of having said farewell well, so that they can join well.
Jim Latimer
And the clergy person is also. They both are. Because it comes –
Arlen Vernava
it comes right back around –
Jim Latimer
to where you started, that joining stands on the shoulders of farewell. That’s a perfect phrase to end this. Arlen, this was really something! It got me thinking in a very helpful way. Thank you so much for your generosity of heart and spirit.
Arlen Vernava
You’re welcome, Jim.