I’m speaking out of some of my personal experiences as a Unitarian Universalist parish minister for twenty years (2003-2023) who is 56 years-old, white, straight, cis-gender, and who has complex PTSD. Ministry experiences can be so diverse. But I wonder: if you are a minister, do any of my experiences speak to yours? In sharing this, I am not looking for pastoral care, personal coaching tips, or for a debate. I am merely wondering if anything here resonates with colleagues. 

1. You pour yourself into the co-creative work of building a church community. The work is the work of love. Yet, the day always comes when you leave, and the divorce must be total. This is a UU best practice. You must leave in a complete, “no strings attached” manner so as to respectfully give way to the next settled minister. This realization goes with you into every subsequent ministry. When you minister in your second church, or your third and beyond, you realize that every congregant you see and hold in love is also someone you will need to let go of some day. And yet you will love them completely in that moment anyhow. Or try. 

2. The growth of the church community depends a great deal upon the size and clarity of your vision combined with your energy level and practical skills. However, the wear and tear of daily life in community (some concern or conflict comes at you from left field, some last-minute responsibility is added to your already full list of things-to-do, you’ve got 50 emails to respond to, and so on) continually threatens to contract your vision and exhaust your energies. Establishing boundaries is vital here, and one day, I found myself creatively imagining such boundaries as similar to the radiation suit that nuclear power plant workers must put on to prepare for their work. The nuclear power plant worker must wear a radiation suit to navigate radioactive spaces or handle radioactive materials, and, similarly, the minister must handle difficult personalities, or declining pledges, or insistent problems which lack clear (or easy) solutions, and so on, each of which puts off radioactive-like energy. The minister must put on the suit, or else.

3. You always live in the wake of “explosions” and “earthquakes” (e.g. a congregant’s child is murdered, some traumatic event in the larger world takes place, a worship service you are leading is disrupted by a shouting fundamentalist Christian). Secondary PTSD is a real risk. And yet, nothing in your training for the job prepares you for this. It is vital to remain relatively non-anxious, positive, and cautiously optimistic in your work, but some ministry moments can emotionally fracture you.  

4. The ideal is to stay hopeful and joyful, even as the work is so often filled with difficult personalities, petty gossip, political agendas, control and authority issues, unreasonable expectations, and on and on–things that can turn a saint cynical.

5. Some congregants tell you to take good care of yourself, and then they give you something else to do. They do not do this maliciously, because they think that their request is the only one that is before you. They aren’t able to imagine that you have, figuratively speaking, 50 bosses, or 500. (It’s quite similar to being a kindergarten teacher. Your students can’t imagine that you live anywhere else but in your classroom, so when they see you at the movie theater or at the grocery store, they are astonished.)

6. You are endlessly challenged to steer the ship of your congregation while, simultaneously, you must build on parts that are missing or repair holes in the hull. Of course, you do this in partnership with other staff (if available in your context) and certainly with lay leaders. But the unique pressures you face in this take you straight into an “imposter syndrome” feeling. Yet you also hold on to what Ray Bradbury once said: “First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.” 

7. You are charged by your congregation to help lead them in the accomplishment of high ideals and lofty goals. But such ideals and goals, which you yourself value, do not in themselves include unambiguous definitions of the words involved or clear and actionable plans for achieving them. Resources are available, but they often don’t define things well or provide clear directions. Usually they mostly repeat the high ideals and lofty goals in different words, ad infinitum, and with increasing levels of urgency. So, you are in a situation in which you are expected to accomplish important but vague goals without step-by-step plans in hand, and you feel great pressure to do so. At this point you gently remind yourself that perfectionism is an obstacle to improvement. Yet, you remember how, in past times, you had put perfectionism aside, positively embraced the vagueness, threw yourself into the work, and endured the consequences. (The pattern too often looked like this: For a time there was creative excitement and a sense of freedom. But eventually the vagueness caught up with things and capsized the project, and everyone was shocked and dismayed.) You are also aware that it is, generally speaking, unfair to be held accountable to accomplishing goals which are unclear and for which the means are uncertain. No less than bell hooks has said, “Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.” This is a given in the world of business. Yet few people acknowledge this in the realm of church. And yet, and yet–you cannot not try to accomplish the high ideals and lofty goals. They matter.

8. Congregants often rush to complain that the church is not performing as much as it should. This is especially true where justice ministries are concerned. It is likely, however, that the prior basic question of what is reasonable to expect out of a church’s performance has never been asked. Therefore, expectations are all over the place. Congregational programs may have been churning out programs and activities but people will still feel like failures. Without some shared basis of understanding, anxiety eats away at the congregation. 

9. The stereotypical complaint is that UUs can be “all talk and no action.” However, the polarity (talk vs. action) makes no sense, since the essential work of character development and spiritual formation necessarily involves conversation, in addition to other forms of action. The real question is, Are UUs talking about the right things? Are they doing that enough? (Abraham Maslow tells us that when his students began to talk to each other about their peak experiences, they began having them all the time. It was as if the simple act of being reminded of their existence triggered more of them. When we think and talk about moments of people being saved every day, it makes it more likely that we will have such moments ourselves. Conversely, if we do not talk and think about such things, we may block their happening.)

10. The community looks to the minister for leadership, and yet only as more and more people see the work of ministry as theirs–only as more staff and more congregants see the work of ministry as shared–does the community truly MOVE and LIVE.

11. Our tradition enjoins the minister to stay firmly grounded in their own story and truth (“life passed through the fire of thought”), and yet, by virtue of being in a covenantal relationship with hundreds of people, you are challenged to enter, empathetically, into hundreds of different stories and hundreds of different truths–or to try. 

12. When facing interlocked systems of oppression in American society, or when wars and other disasters happen, congregants can feel overwhelmed and, in the end, disempowered. However, since ours is an activist tradition which refuses to get stuck in hopelessness, one possible result is congregants who take their activism and turn it towards something that they do have some control over: their church. With the zeal of the Hebrew Prophets, they can over-energize and overfunction around church-related details (from congregational bylaws to the paint color on the walls) even though such things are inward-focused and don’t solve the real problems. You became a minister to be engaged in more important things, but, often enough, you will find yourself busy dealing with these inward-focused church issues. And yet this, too, is genuine ministry, to folks whose hearts are overwhelmed.  

13. Often, just when you are addressing a long-standing problem in the congregation, a congregant will charge you with being ignorant of the problem and not doing anything at all about it. (I call these “perception gaps.”) Once, in a public meeting to improve congregational communications which I called for and which I happened to be leading, a congregant criticized me for doing nothing to improve congregational communications. Yet they would have said nothing if nothing was being done.

14. You leave your ministry in a certain church, and if it has been generally successful, the leavetaking process is a bittersweet one. Even as congregants share their sadness and loss, they celebrate your accomplishments and they forget your mistakes. Maybe you yourself forget your mistakes, or maybe you aren’t even aware of them. But the mistakes themselves persist. Your legacy to the colleague following you is always mixed. You tried your best. You are not perfect. But it can be hard to look them in the eye once they have fully stepped into the position you once held. You wonder what your sins of omission or commission have been. You wonder if some of your well-intended solutions to problems themselves became problems. 

15. Even after all the years, some of the things your seminary professors said still inspire you. They go before you like a lamp which illuminates the darkness. For me, it was Rev. David Bumbaugh, who defined an attitude to take towards ministry that helped me then and continues to help. He said that a minister ought to “act always in trust that however partial or flawed their contribution may be, the universe will take it and turn it into some good.” 

16. Just as a 70 year old might say that, inside, they still feel like a teenager, so I feel that my ministry is still very much young and growing. 20 years is a long time and it is just a thimbleful. So I am still learning. One thing I am learning is about how central imagination is to our work. Mark Twain once said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Adrienne Maree Brown took things much farther when she declared that “We are in an imagination battle. […] Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.” From both, I am learning that if theological power is anything, it is the power to reshape how we and others imagine our world, and ourselves in it–which in turn determines how and what we see. This is a great power. 

17. As a UU, I find myself too often trapped in a “works” mentality that imagines human salvation or happiness as the result of effort. The 19th century Unitarians, with their “salvation by character” motto, cheer this on. However, as one who is also a child of the Universalists, I continue to try to expand beyond the “works” mentality to one that envisions “works” balanced by “grace.” Every time a congregant, overwhelmed by justice work and the enormity of things needing to be done comes to me, I am prodded to do this. So I was grateful to be reminded of Michelangelo’s art of sculpting. For Michelangelo, you go into the risks and messiness of sculpting convinced that you aren’t starting at zero but that it’s only a journey towards revealing what is already there. “Works” and “grace” combine to form the Mystery of Ministry. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” he once said. He said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” In my 20th year of UU ministry, I will take this and use it to reshape my imagination about what ministry can be for me, for the next chapter that gets written.