advantage is time: you get the time to work on your sermon because someone else is doing the visiting that week; you get time to make those visits next week because someone else will be doing that week’s sermon. Time, and more than time—it’s a rare gift for a serving pastor to hear someone else preach regularly.
Also, if there’s a funeral on Friday and a wedding on Saturday with Sunday still to come—and sometimes more—at least you won’t be burdened with all of them. (What it’s like to find the words for a young person’s burial in the morning, then the words for a happy couple’s wedding a few hours later, is simply beyond telling.)
We set our week and our tasks by who would prepare Sunday’s sermon: that person was in the office that week, studying, preparing the service, dealing with whatever came through the door. The other person did the visiting, the hospital trips, anything that required being on the road. (When the major hospitals are fifty to a hundred miles away, this means a lot.)
Essential things we did together: all worship services (including funerals and weddings, which we understood as congregational milestones), council meetings, major educational events. We alternated Vacation Bible School by the year, confirmation by the half-year, and we split up committees.
But there’s one absolute about a team ministry, whether your partner is spouse, friend, stranger, or enemy: if you have to be the center of attention, if you have to shine more brightly than anyone else, if you need to control anything you see as important, if you need the credit, the name above the title, then don’t do it. Don’t serve in a team ministry, or on a staff. In fact, do me a favor and don’t be a pastor. Be a politician or talk show host instead.
Paul’s hymn to love, which most of us know from its use at weddings, was meant much more broadly, as a call to life in community: it remains just as vital for the smaller community of the church staff:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way [repeat this over and over while you’re brushing your teeth]; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing . . . (1 Cor 13: 4–6)
That’s the secret. Piece of cake.
Now I’ll note three pieces of advice I acquired over the years that I thought were essential principles for partnership.
1/ Don’t split your own congregation. Wherever two leaders are gathered together, there will be a third person trying to play one off against the other. Don’t make this easy to do.
I got this advice from an older head pastor who had a long record of good relationships with his assistants. He gave the advice about preaching schedules: he never alternated assignments but staggered them so that no one could come only to hear one person on the staff preach. But obviously the advice goes beyond scheduling.
There are always people willing to tell you how much better you are at something than your partner is. You can’t stop this from starting, but you can stop it from continuing. However, if you need to hear this or if you resent that someone else is hearing it, I’ll say once more: do not serve in a team ministry. You’ll split the congregation apart.
2/ Don’t argue in public. There are no perfect choices, approaches, strategies, or styles in church life. No two pastors will agree on all of them. One of you will want to fill the service with music from a website called something like “New hymns with impossible rhythms that no one on earth has ever heard”; the other won’t be able to understand what’s wrong with singing some version of “Old One Hundredth” every week. Settle it in the office. Settle it and let it go. Don’t debate it at the council meeting. Don’t evaluate it in the narthex with your fans after the service. Speak with one voice.
It might seem more honest, more ingenuous, more open, to debate these things freely with everyone, to let people know you disagree. In one sense, that’s true. I didn’t mind people knowing we disagreed and compromised, but it was more important that they knew we finally agreed and supported the same decision. Also, knowing we disagreed was one thing, seeing it fought out was another. Any open, extreme disagreement will inevitably be exploited by someone else for their own purposes. You can’t let that happen.
3/ Respect each other’s work. Don’t look over each other’s shoulders. If one of you is writing the sermon, leading the adult class, planning the funeral or the wedding, negotiating with the budget committee, prioritizing visitation, let that be that. Certainly, a staff should talk, share ideas, settle on strategies and directions, evaluate what worked and what didn’t. But there’s a point where you have to accept the fact that the call to ministry and the authority of word and sacrament are no greater for you than for your partner.
Also, it never hurts to speak some words of praise.
Now, somewhere in the above reflections, you should be able to find a reason why our shared ministry is the background, not the subject, of this writing of mine.
Extremely Isolated, Extremely Cold, Extremely Dark
Our first morning in our first call was very still, very bright, very cold. It was twenty below zero, and it had been that cold for days. The ground was like steel: walking, you expected it to clang. The air was thin, sharp: breathing, you thought your lungs might crack.
From the parsonage yard, you could see both the north and the south edge of town. Beyond them, all you saw were flat, empty fields, extending farther than you would want to walk in a day. A joke I would hear every year for the next couple of decades went like this: “Well, this isn’t the end of the world. But you can just about see it from here.” While the congregation helped us unload our trucks, my daughter announced she was going to walk downtown and see what it had to offer.
About an hour later, I saw she had returned. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, out of the way, slumped down, staring at nothing. I walked over, she moved her eyes slightly to acknowledge my presence.
I said, “And the verdict is—?”
“I’m going to go upstairs and hang myself.” She stood up and left the room. It was a great exit line.
(I will note, to reassure the reader, that she did not, in fact, hang herself. Her more considered judgment, delivered that night, was that she would finish school, move to a city, and never return. And that’s what she did, living her adult life in New York and Chicago. Her idea of a vacation is to go to London, Paris, or Los Angeles. Her idea of a visit to the wilderness is to go to Atlanta or Milwaukee.)
People were always telling me “this is a great place to raise kids,” but I was never sure even they believed it. They would usually say it as though that was the consolation prize for living in a place so remote, with so little to offer. It was a fifty-mile drive to a decent movie theatre; if you wanted a choice of movies, it was an eighty-mile drive. The same was true of anything else you might want that was a cut above the basic, from clothing to groceries to sports gear to wine.
I think, at best, that remark about raising children had more to do with the fear of parents than with any benefit to youth. They felt they didn’t have to worry as much as they might in a bigger town. At worst, the remark was a coded rejection of the racial and ethnic diversity they might have to face elsewhere. I met people who were still outraged that Martin Luther King’s birthday was a holiday. But growing up with people exactly like you, half of whom you’re related to, whose major life goals are getting a driver’s license and killing their first deer, seems to me no advantage at all to a young person, let alone a great one.
The
