A year ago, I wrote an article entitled Departure: Why I Left the Church as a farewell letter to my career as a pastor. Unexpectedly, that article went viral and was read more than 400,000 times. Within that article, I dissected all the problems I perceived to be wrong with the church and the pastorate. The brutal honesty of my writing struck a chord with readers and ignited a flurry of conversation about the role of pastor.
At the time, I was inundated with messages and media requests. I remember someone sending me a DM saying, “Congratulations! With this one article, you’ve reached more people than you ever did during your time as a pastor in the church.” I’ve thought about the absurdity of that truth. Had I remained a pastor in a church for my whole career, my reach likely would have never extended much beyond my local community.
But now that I was leaving, suddenly, people cared about what I had to say. Similar to the way the death of an artist or author who was largely dismissed during their lifetime sheds new light on their work and they become famous posthumously, the death of my ministry all of a sudden made people take note.
A Moment in Time
What I am most proud of is that my article sparked a national conversation about clergy mental health. I heard about meetings that were held all over the country where clergy had the opportunity to talk about their own experiences of ministry burnout and what they needed to better function in the role.
It seemed like, maybe for the first time, the needs of pastors would be taken seriously, not just by their colleagues, but by the parishioners in the pews. Unfortunately, like everything in our current world, the interest in my article lasted for a hot minute and people moved on. Those conversations about clergy mental health were soon forgotten and the church returned to its old ways. Pastors kept pastoring. Parishioners kept worshipping. The system seemed largely unphased.
I, however, was not unphased. My life was changed. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how this viral conversation would impact my life, but a year later the reverberations of that moment are still playing out. Not because I became famous (I didn’t) or because I reaped riches and rewards from people reading my work (again, I didn’t), but because I finally possess clarity concerning how my voice can make a difference.
The Seeker Paradox
One of the biggest reasons why I left the church is because parish ministry in the United States is collapsing. There’s no arguing with that fact. Put plainly, the Christian religion is on life support. The older generations that monetarily support the mainline and Catholic church are dying. The younger, educated population tends to have little or no interest in organized religion. The largest group of Christians are conservative evangelicals who largely eschew education, live in an echo chamber of fear and increasingly align with Christian Nationalism rather than traditional Christianity.
Therefore, the pastors who remain in the church are essentially hospice chaplains for the institution. This doesn’t mean that their role is any less important, it just means that the environment in which they are working is not engineered for success.
Imagine being a surgeon and every time you enter the operating room, you discover that more of your tools are missing. At first, it’s little things—a missing drape, a suction hose. You can still perform the surgery, it’s just more difficult. After a few decades, not only are vital tools missing, but you don’t even have enough assistance to complete the task. You do everything on your own. Is it possible? Sure, but you’re exhausted. Every surgery requires you to do more with less, and you fear that one day you won’t be able to stop the bleeding and your patient will die.
Whether consciously acknowledged or not, every pastor in the United States is somewhere on this spectrum. And yet, the perplexing paradox is that this problem should not exist. Every pastor will tell you that they are constantly encountering people who are spiritually hungry. There would seem to be an endless supply of seekers who should be flooding their pews, but they’re conspicuously absent. Where is everyone?
When I interviewed the religious scholar Reza Aslan for my Restorative Faith Podcast, he said: “What’s happening in America is not that people are becoming more secular. It’s that people are turning away from traditional religion towards alternative ways of experiencing transcendence.” In other words, people are as spiritually curious as they’ve ever been, they just don’t see the church as the place where they wish to explore their curiosity.
Stepping Out of the Death Spiral
As I discussed in my Departure article, becoming an ordained pastor differs from denomination to denomination, but in my denomination, the PC(USA), you have to possess a bachelor’s degree and a Masters of Divinity (M.Div) from an accredited seminary. In the past, this investment felt worthwhile because you knew that you could be a pastor for your whole career and retire with a pension after 30 years of service.
Now, with the church in decline and many parishes unable to afford full-time positions, many pastors are required to find other sources of income. Inquirers who might have previously pursued ministry are opting for other career paths. As a result, seminary enrollment is dropping precipitously, which means, eventually, there won’t be enough pastors for the remaining churches. This negative feedback loop is better known as a death spiral.
When you’re inside of it, you’re like the surgeon trying to save the patient by any means necessary. However, by stepping outside of this death spiral, I’ve gained some important perspective over the last year. Perhaps the most critical of these insights is realizing the degree of stress I internalized trying to keep my church afloat. There were so many moving parts: preaching, programming, pastoral care, fundraising, staff meetings, committee meetings, building issues, etc.
Think of the lead blanket you wear when you’re getting x-rays at the dentist. That blanket is heavy when they first put it on, but like everything else in life, you acclimate. Then, after 15 minutes, the x-rays are finished, and they remove the blanket. Even though you forgot how heavy the blanket felt, once it’s gone, you feel normal again. This is how leaving the pastorate has felt for me. I didn’t realize how much the stress was weighing me down and affecting my ability to function.
Communication Chasm
The second most important insight I gained from stepping outside of the death spiral is finally understanding why the lead blanket was becoming so suffocating. I realized I had been handed a set of rules for communicating with the world by the church that simply don’t function under the present conditions.
For example, the weekly sermon is still considered to be the most important method for conveying the church’s message and attracting new members. Unfortunately, the sermon simply doesn’t conform with the way people consume information these days. The idea of listening to a person speak at them for 20-30 minutes just doesn’t make sense.
Our attention spans have been drastically reduced due to how people consume information online. Social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where you’re constantly scrolling through short videos (often less than 30 seconds), are the dominant form of media consumption.
Think about what you enjoy watching when you’re on social media. What tends to drive clicks, likes, and interaction are the clips that grab people’s attention: famous moments from television shows and movies, sports highlights, comedian bits, police chases, celebrity interviews, weather events, and also short bits of information. People are on social media primarily to be entertained, but secondarily to glean information for their lives.
A church sees this and attempts to adapt. They take a clip from a Sunday sermon and turn it into a short. Sounds good, except we all know that watching someone preach from a pulpit isn’t entertaining. Even if the pastor is saying things that are thoughtful and relevant in a compelling manner, it’s likely not going to grab people’s attention simply because it’s competing with other content that is far more entertaining.
However, if you take that same content and turn it into a skit where you act it out with yourself or you’re able to catch people’s attention by delivering the content in a unique way, then you have a higher probability of getting your content to land. The problem is this level of creativity requires a lot of time, which is in short supply when you’re in charge of managing a church.
But let’s say you find the time and you manage to gain followers from a viral clip, this type of popularity doesn’t often translate into people physically coming to your church and supporting your ministry. People will like your clip, comment on your video and subscribe to your channel, but that’s a far cry from serving the needs of a local church (volunteers, money for salaries and maintaining a building).
Put simply, social media is meant to build the public profile of the person featured in the video. Unless that person becomes famous and people are seeking them out, social media will not reverse the fortunes of the church’s decline. If anything, I believe social media is accelerating the demise of the church.
What’s Next?
I believe that the future of pastoring is no longer in a physical brick and mortar building. I also believe you can no longer view pastoring as a career where you receive a paycheck every month and assume there will be a pension waiting for you in retirement. The sun is quickly setting on that version of church.
Now that I am free from the stress of the lead blanket and no longer shackled by the communication constraints of the church, I’ve had time to think about how I could package my own message in a way that people might appreciate and find engaging. In my last article, I talked about how, earlier this year, I was watching YouTube and I came across an old episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian pastor who was ordained to serve children through television programming. He looked at the culture of his day and saw that television, as this burgeoning medium, had a massive gap—nobody was really trying to meet children where they are. What’s also fascinating about Fred Rogers is that he never explicitly discussed God or Jesus on his show, yet, underneath every one of his episodes was this beautiful theology of love and acceptance.
Fred Rogers was a super out-of-the-box thinker who had great success with a non-traditional ministry. I figured his show could be a model for my own efforts. I decided to create my own version of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood for adults. The show is called Kokoro, which is the sacred Japanese word for the connection between body, mind and soul.
The first season of Kokoro will debut on YouTube and consists of 12 episodes, the first of which is set to launch on September 18 with new episodes being released every Wednesday throughout the fall. Each episode touches on a theme that is universal to our journey through adulthood. The goal is to eventually move Kokoro from a pre-recorded show to a live show on Patreon in January where we can experience restoration by interacting with and supporting one another.
Whether or not this experiment is successful, I’m just excited to try something new. This is my attempt to reach those seekers who yearn for something deeper in their lives, but do not see the church as the place to find it.
So that’s where I am one year later. If you couldn’t tell, I have zero regrets about my decision to leave. I want to express my sincere thanks to everyone who wrote and expressed their support a year ago. Wherever you find yourself, here’s to new beginnings and new possibilities!
While It's been several years since I completed the non-believing clergy research project, I recently had the insight that pastors are a lot like social workers (I'm trained as a social worker!)
Here are some of the differences and similarities:
- Social workers focus on mental health and pastors focus on religion.
- Instead of seeing people during scheduled appointments, pastors can see them any time.
- While pastors are in a religious setting and social workers are not -- or don't need to be. Some of the work - e.g., counseling and referral, is otherwise quite similar.
- Thus, it's likely that the same kind of person goes into either line of work, i.e., someone who wants to…
FYI: I disagree strongly with the criticisms of gretchen.connell and her negative interpretations of the writer's perceptions and opinions.
I remember reading your article Departure: Why I Left the Church and I was excited to read what you had learned. You learned how to reach large numbers of people online and some other useful things, but unfortunately you haven’t learned much (at least not the most important thing). It doesn't seem like you have reflected on what part you played in your previous position. You are still viewing yourself as superior while putting others down, and lumping people into groups, failing to see them as unique individuals. When you say things like “The largest group of Christians are conservative evangelicals who largely eschew education, live in an echo chamber of fear and increasingly align with Christian Nationalism rather than traditional Christianity”. It…
Excellent! I really look forward to your YouTube videos. I was one of those people who saw your first post and subsequently joined your blog. I had a special interest in pastors who left the clergy, as collaborator, with the recently deceased Dan Dennent in a research project with non-blieving clergy