Dear pastors

Dear pastors,

We have now hit the halfway mark in this year like no other. Maybe you came into 2020 excited for what was to come. Maybe you were limping along in ministry, battered by conflict or worry about church finances. Whatever your outlook was in January, no one has escaped untouched by the global crises we’re experiencing.

In the past three months you have remained faithful to the gospel and your call, learning how to produce or livestream worship, preach to webcams and empty sanctuaries, reach new constituencies via online platforms, offer pastoral care and spiritual formation from a distance, and manage virtual meetings. You have lost sleep over when and how to re-gather physically as church. You have responded to the disparate calls to re-open immediately and and to keep the doors closed until the rate of infection trends downward, the divide between these groups matching up awfully closely with the boundaries of political camps in our already-charged civic life (in an election year, no less). You have absorbed “feedback” from well-meaning church members who don’t fully know how to operate their own devices or think your home worship space is too cluttered or don’t like how your complexion or clothing show up on camera or don’t think you’re working enough, God forbid. You have wondered how to be church to those who don’t have smartphones or computers. Your head has nearly exploded from all the Zoom gatherings you’ve attended.

You have given up visions for a blow-out Easter Sunday service. You’ve been unable to celebrate fully your beloved graduates. Your summer looks nothing like you expected, whether it’s usually full of camps and mission trips and VBS or characterized by a much-needed slower pace. You’ve seen sabbaticals slip through your fingers. You’ve canceled plans, one detail at a time, for that conference or vacation that you were eagerly anticipating. Some of you have even changed calls in this midst of this mess, unable to get and give hugs to those who’ve ministered alongside you and forced to meet and start to get to know a new congregation through a screen.

You’ve done all this while either living alone and missing real-life human connection or while never getting a blessed moment to yourself, surrounded as you are by a roommate, partner, and/or children working and schooling from home. You’ve done all this while rationing toilet paper and cooking more than you ever have in your life. While, of necessity, discovering or inventing new outlets for self-care. While your primary systems of moral and professional support - other clergy - have been as distracted and weighed down as you are.

You initially thought this would all be inconvenient for a few weeks, then you could get back to normal. But then it became clear that the virus was accelerating, and you had to shift from a sprint to a marathon mindset. And you did, tough as it was. You pivoted again when murderous violence was perpetrated and videoed against several BIPOC* in rapid succession. You saw the moment we were in, the chance to make headway on current iterations of centuries of racism, the opportunity to speak into white silence and have more and bigger conversations about structural inequities. If you are a BIPOC, you heard people debate (again) your experiences and raised your much-needed voice. If you are white, you started or continued work on your own complicity in racial injustice. This is good and needed work - and it does not lessen the stresses and necessities related to pastoral leadership in the time of Covid-19.

Do you recognize how well you have led during this time? I am in awe of you.

Still, you are understandably weary. It is ok - holy, even - to rest.

You are wondering if you are enough. Yes. God equips and empowers us each to maneuver our part of Christ’s body.

You might even be questioning your call to vocational ministry. That is between you and God, but always remember that you - that we all - are called to and gifted for ministry in some form.

Thank you for who you are as a person and pastor. Thank you for what you do. God delights in your faithfulness, your innovation, your tenacity, even as God invites you to tag out for self-care and sabbath.

Blessings be upon you.

Your cheerleader, conversation partner, and admirer,

Laura Stephens-Reed

*The acronym BIPOC might be new to you like it is to me. It stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Photo by Kate Macate on Unsplash.