What to Do When You Can’t Afford even a Half-time Pastor? – Transcript

Jim Latimer 

Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help – wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field project, featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers and others with practical wisdom and help to offer those engaged in transitional ministry. Thank you for turning tuning into this episode of wisdom from the field. Today I’m really delighted to welcome back to the table my colleague, Quentin Chin. Quentin has been in all varieties of transitional ministry, often part-time, bivocational things, chaplain things, and is a real thought leader around when congregations as they get to that point, particularly like for today, when a congregation looks at its finances, looks at our resources and realizes, We can no longer sustain even a half-time pastor. What do we do now? And Quentin has some rich experience specifically in that area and was willing to share it with us. So, Quentin, what would you say to a congregation like that?

Quentin Chin 

Well, first, Jim, thanks. It’s great to see you today. And just a quick background and why this topic. I mean, I finished doing some work recently with two congregations, particularly in this situation. And what we came to do was to recognize that as you say, sustaining even half-time ministry was not going to be financially viable for them for the long run. Nevertheless, the work of the church has to go on. And so, what we wound up doing was saying, Okay, what are those things that the congregation can do? And we’re talking laity now. This is truly empowering the laity. Because less than half-time, which some people would look at as quarter-time pastor, which means that from the clergy compensation perspective, you only get preaching one out of four Sundays. What do you do the other three? What do you do with pastoral care? And particularly, in our congregations, as they’re aging, we are seeing increased need for pastoral care, or demand for pastoral care. 

So, in working with these congregations, to be really clear, what I’m proposing is not going to save the congregation. This is just to buy time for the congregation to do some serious thinking about what it wants to do for the future. So, fiscal year begins January 1. Trustees are going through the budget. In October, pledges come in, and you’re going, Oh, my gosh, we can’t sustain half-time ministry here. What do we do? Well, first, I would say, Please don’t tell your pastor, Oh, Pastor on January 1, your half-time ministry goes away. That would be really unjust. But what I do see is for the congregation to work with the pastor. I would say stay at least for one year, sustaining half-time, with the idea that instead of trying to do all this stuff, it becomes really targeted.

So, what I did was, now mind you, mine was an actually quarter- time in two congregations. What I did was we’re going to work with how to do basic worship, liturgy stuff. What are the resources that we have? We have the Revised Common Lectionary, the back of The New Century Hymnal, and many hymnals have indexes that tie in with the lectionary – tie in thematically. So, if you want to talk about forgiveness, go to the index and there’s the whole thing on forgiveness. You want to talk about the Christian home, there’s a whole thing about that, and you have hymns on the Christian home. Or you have particular scripture passages, and you can look up in the Scripture index about recommended hymns. 

So, beginning with the lectionary, and then also many hymnals have additional worship resources. So, you know, what are opening prayers? What are prayers of confession? Draw upon those things. We also looked at how to read scripture, how to interpret Scripture. Granted, those of us who have gone through seminary, we have many, many hours of this. But, it was really revelatory for the people who participated in this in that they realized, Wow, there’s more to it than just reading what’s on the page! Doing something like teaching them Lectio Divina as a way to open up – using scripture to enter into that conversation with God. So those so those are ways to help give them some of the tools to begin thinking about worship thematically, how to come up with ideas. And then, how worship is structured so that they can put that together. And even how might they want to look at a sermon? And so, we become this coach to help them with the worship side.

The other piece is congregational care. The UCC has the Call to Care program, which I believe as of this recording there should be the new revised version out. I haven’t seen it yet, but it should be out. That’s an excellent program. It is geared to be lay lead. It’s a lay-driven congregational care program, and it’s pretty comprehensive. And that even brought up ways to look at how to interpret Scripture and what have you. So that also helped reinforce the worship piece.  So, those two ideas alone, or the idea of selectively working with the pastor to identify those activities that a congregation can pick up.

And then there’s also, I think, from the congregation’s perspective, the need to recognize that expecting the pastor to do four out of four Sundays is not possible. And even with sustaining, that half-time pastor might even be saying, You know what? We’re not even going to ask you to do two Sundays a month, one Sunday, a month. Let us get used to doing it ourselves. Those would be two areas I can see right away to help.

And then, the pastor to help the congregation begin to identify where it needs to go for its future.  So, you know, October, November and realizing that you can’t sustain half-time ministry, at least for a while, pay the pastor half-time if not for a year, at least six months or so, so that there’s some transition there. And then create a situation where the congregation begins to identify the pastoral resources that it really will need to sustain its ministry. So, if there’s a Confirmation class, for instance, maybe the pastor just gets hired to do Confirmation, or maybe using a pastor who’s not connected to the congregation at all, maybe retired pastor to come in and do this Confirmation class.

Jim Latimer  09:22

So, you might actually be engaged with different pastors doing different pieces – just a couple hours here a few hours there for various things that they need. Yet, they are basically lay-lead and the kind of primary pastor that they have, if you will, even though very part-time, it’s really a kind of a coaching or mentoring capacity with them around pastoral care and around worship and things like that. All the while they’re discerning what’s next. Right?

Quentin Chin  09:48

Right. And the discernment piece is actually most critical because as I said, this is just a holding place for the congregation as it begins to look forward. What we do know is that when congregations can’t even sustain half-time ministry, the chance of the congregation growing to the extent that it will be able to return to half-time ministry or even more, is much less than continuing its downward slide. Right? There is some work, actually, there is a side piece, which I think we need to talk about another time, which is the idea that churches as they come, as they’re in this place, this liminal place, a reset, that it’s not the end of the church as much as it is the end of this time for the congregation that there is more life after that.

Jim Latimer  10:56

Yes. There is hope. But it’s not a hope of returning to how things were. And so, the sense of upward or downward really isn’t so helpful in my experience. I don’t use that language so much. It’s more, Okay, what’s next? What form of ministry is faithful to the basic values that we have? And there are lots of things, but it probably won’t be the same model and format that you have had for the last, I don’t know, however, long, 100 years, 200 years, maybe. But it can still be very faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ and have a real-life giving impact on your community and on yourselves. But it will probably look different.

Quentin Chin  11:38

It will look very different. Yes. Every once in a while, I used to talk about this, and they would say, You know, it’s too bad, that we only get to read x in Eastertide. Because x is the whole thing about the birth of the church and the movement of the Holy Spirit in the early church, which looks completely different than the church today. But really what we’re talking about today is helping the congregation return, not even return, but to reclaim the church as it was in the first century.

Jim Latimer  12:21

To reclaim, not about returning but about reclaiming that initial energy, that original vision of those very earliest followers of Jesus and all. Quentin, that’s fabulous! And I sense there’s a couple of more podcasts here, but let’s just this one to a close, because this has been really rich. When congregations get to that point where even a half-time pastor just isn’t is no longer sustainable, what can they do with various pastoral resources to help buy time so that they can think about what’s next in a way that’s faithful to the ministry that they have had. And they can move forward then, in a way that is faithful and in a way that is respects all the good things they have.

Quentin Chin  13:12

And which respects, the Holy Spirit and the Gospel. Well, just a sidebar. We were chatting before this, Jim about the early church and how over 2000 years we’ve seen the church has always been changing. You and I saw remnants of an early church of 2000 years ago. And it’s very different than the church that stands above it now.

Jim Latimer  13:45

That’s a Geneva Switzerland story, and we’ll leave that one for another podcast. Yes, that was rich. Quentin, thank you so much for generously sharing your ideas and your time. It’s so good to be with you. Until next time.

Quentin Chin  13:57

Hey, Jim, good to see you too.