The Cabinet's primary task

During my forty or so years of experience as a pastor in te United Methodist Church, I have watched my superiors in office change from fellow ministers to distant bureaucrats.

I'm told by clergy friends from larger conferences they always saw the Cabinet (bishop and district superintendents who make the decisions to which church ministers are appointed in our system) as distant bureaucrats to be avoided at all cost!

Having had three superintendents who are friends to this day and having met a number of superintendents who are not caught up in the general tendencies I'll describe below, I still have hope that my earliest experiences can be brought back into the present day church.

Here's what I saw happen in this transition that I experienced. Bishops no longer chose superintendents as teachers and mentors for the pastors they supervised (what else does supervise really mean?).

The bishop chose pastors who were compatible with him (it was a guy in that case). They were younger, ambitious, and more willing to be "yes" men (again, in that case it was all guys). He then assigned them to be his extension on the program committees of the conference in order to have more influence on the missions and ministries those groups carried out across the state. That gave the bishop bragging rights over successes that brought attention.

The bishop saw to it that superintendents also got onto national boards and agencies so they would have the chance to become a bishop like himself, since he had succeeded by going that route.

Suddenly, friends of mine who became superintendents stayed friendly but no longer listened to my ideas or concerns. THEY WERE TOO BUSY! And they really only saw each other between jaunts all over the state and nation working on their programmatic responsibilities and meeting those who could help them advance in the Church.

Because they really had only each other as their core relationship, being unable to sustain friendships they'd had before becoming superintendents, they began to suffer from what Irving Janis called "Group Think," taking all their views of what was going on from each other. They were in a "bubble" long before George W. Bush came along.

The old timers that were superintendents for the last six years of their careers before retirement and knew all the tricks of the trade and all the wise ways to deal with conflict and all the sanity saving activities that had helped them survive, wonderful things to pass on to the newer pastors, were quickly gone from the scene.

In their place were good pastors who got swept up into a completely different model of superintending. They were no longer the mentors and support staff to help the pastors of their district. They were the "up-and-comers" serving as the right hand of the bishop.

They no longer visited their clergy. They were never home if the pastor happened to be in their town of residence. If the superintendents showed up at a church function, it was because their busy schedules were open that day when the invitation came.

The worst symptom of superintendents' distance was their willingness to believe the first complainer who came to see them when they assumed the office . . . or worse, when they had been superintendents a long time and still immediately believed the complainers.

No matter what the facts of the situation were, an oral complaint against a pastor was an interruption to their busy schedules and the pastor should never have let something get bad enough that it turned into a complaint that ended up on the superintendent's desk!

Experienced old-timers, even in their first week as superintendents would rarely think that way. They'd have too much respect for the training and years of experience the pastor had. They'd remember when antagonists in their churches had tried to pull that kind stunt.

On top of this dynamic change, the Church gave superintendents a new power. In 1980, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church passed a law that allowed superintendents to initiate a complaint against a pastor.

In conferences where the bishop or superintendent felt they could go see a pastor, demand his credentials, and have him on the street by nightfall, this new law seemed good. It made the Cabinet member have to write something down first that could then be processed through a committee before the pastor would be out on the street.

In conferences where Cabinet members had been collegial with pastors, this new law brought a terrible wedge that ruptured the covenant of the clergy. The superintendents had a new power. They were sheriff now. And it went to their heads and the pastors did not dare trust them with anything sensitive or difficult.

In all conferences after only a little while, now superintendents not only had the power to appoint them to their next church but also had the power to destroy their ministry.

You can imagine the pressure on pastors to conform, to not take chances that could lead to complaints, to not rock the boat so the next appointment would be a better one, and to avoid the superintendent so as not to disrupt his attention in any way.

Of course, the ambitious ones saw this as an opportunity to play up to the superintendent to gain favor and attention so that s/he'd (there were women superintendents by this time) have a favorable impression when new appointments were being made.

The mix of immaturity, ambition, and fear has given us, relatively speaking, superiors in office who do not think first of the pastor's needs that only an outsider like a superintendent can fulfill.
How can we turn that around to where the Cabinet can change?

There are several things that need to be done. It would be great if they could all be done at once!

First, Cabinets need to see that their first responsibility is TO HELP PASTORS SUCCEED IN THE CHURCHES TO WHICH THE SUPERINTENDENTS APPOINT THEM.

Second, superintendents and bishops must not have the authority to initiate complaints.

If a pastor shoots and wounds a superintendent, of course as the victim, the superintendent has the right to lodge a formal complaint. And if after supervising an ineffective or unmotivated pastor by working together over at least a year on remedial education, finding medical or psychological therapy that could help, and providing support for follow-through, a superindendent would be a witness to the lack of success of those efforts and thus a proper one to initiate a complaint. The file would be thick to back up the complaint.

Any other use of the power to initiate a complaint would be hearsay or power abuse.

Third, the Church needs to pare down what it expects of its Cabinet members. Program in the conference and in the general church should be done by volunteers or those on special appointment so that bishops and superintendents would not have to use their precious time shilling for national programs or sitting in on meetings where they were not needed.

That would mean some kind of watchdog group would have to oversee the national boards and agencies to keep them from becoming feifdoms of charismatic leaders. We currently make bishops be the watchdogs.

Fourth, Cabinets have to appoint experienced pastors near the end of their careers to be superintendents. Ambition would be expressed by effective pastoring for many long years rather than by who one gets to know. And respect for the realities of ministry would replace impatience.

Fifth, bishops and superintendents would all have to take salary cuts until the church could afford to reward them. As it is, we reward them just because they are superintendents, not because they are of any help to the local churches and pastors.

Sixth, we need to elect bishops who do not need the attention which having successful splashy programs provide, men and women who are willing to be content with doing a great job matching pastors and churches and helping them both succeed. Maybe someone needs to establish an award for bishops and superintendents who work on that most primary task.

Will we get back to where superintendents and bishops are there to help the local church and pastor succeed as disciple- and apostle-makers, as "hospitals for sinners," as the vine that nourishes its branches, as the "bread of Christ broken for many"?

Do we have the grace?