Ideal up against reality in lay ministry career

By THOMAS LUCKING

While studying for my master of divinity degree at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, I was presented with a church leadership scenario of lay and clerical collaboration. A vision was proposed that included lay empowerment, shared responsibilities with clergy/staff equality and ministerial ownership.

Then I graduated and started working in the real world. My first ministry assignment after graduation led me to realize that the academic vision and the reality were far apart. Other parish lay ministers have confirmed this disconnect between the academic and the real ministerial situation. My hope is that someday reality will catch up with the academic vision of equality and collaboration -- but we have a long way to go.

Ministry in the church is my second career. My first was working as a software engineer and business owner in the computer field. I have had extensive experience with companies such as Texas Instruments and Microsoft. While the politics are real and the competition sometimes fierce in the corporate environment, never have I run into a leadership structure that supports and allows dysfunction as much as in the Catholic church.

I resigned from my first parish ministry position after a year and started wondering if my experience of ineffective and even abusive leadership was unique and random. Is there something about the church that fosters this type of environment? An initial reflection on my business career versus my church work led me to realize that parishes do not have the same level of accountability that exists in businesses. Leadership is much less motivated to be efficient, collaborative and nurturing.

For example, I was put in charge of the annual youth music festival as part of my pastoral associate responsibilities. My first task was to create admission tickets. Having computer science as my first career, I applied my problem-solving skills to make this task quick and efficient. Immediately, I was reprimanded for deviating from last year’s ticket creation methods. This verbal assault came as a shock. Where was the big-picture, results-oriented management approach that I had found so effective in the past?

After putting so much time, effort, and money into my master’s degree, I felt quite concerned about the viability of my newly acquired education. Possibly the thousands of lay ministers in training would be interested in the questions I was pondering. In fact at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, lay students will outnumber Jesuits in training for the first time in the academic year beginning fall 2004. The need for lay ministers exists and many seem to want to fill that need, but how many lay students are choosing parish ministry and how many have a real understanding of the current working environment?

As a result I ask the fundamental question: Given the current power structure in the church, is parish lay ministry a feasible career choice?

Secondary to the ordained

My fellow graduates, when I asked them about their parish lay ministry positions, voiced concerns about leadership problems in the church. They expressed distress about not being fulfilled in their work. Even though many felt empowered and worked collaboratively with clergy, they admitted an inability to reach people. Because they were not clergy and could not provide the sacraments, they were seen as secondary to those ordained.

When sacramental leadership is combined with administrative power, what is left for an energetic, competent lay person seeking to serve in a parish? My fellow graduates were all looking to leave parish lay ministry shortly. I have encountered only a few people who have stayed in one parish lay position for more than three years. Later I learned that before my arrival as pastoral associate, the position was occupied by three people in three years.

We are a sacramental church. The seven sacraments ground our existence and form us as conduits of grace. Everything points to these deep grace-filled moments of church life. The Eucharist is the pinnacle of our existence as people of God. Not only do our theological understandings build on this sacramental foundation, but our institutional ones as well. The church’s leadership structure is not driven by practical goals and objectives, but by theological idealism. Useful priorities such as efficiency, team building and visionary leadership do not hold a place of priority in how the church is run.

Because of this situation, we find competent theologians and pastoral ministers who happen to be ordained to the priesthood being given the power to run parishes and dioceses. The problem with this scenario is that pastoral excellence and administrative success tend to use different sides of the brain, right and left respectively. Asking people to do both can lead to ineffective performance in one or both of these areas. The main problem that has evolved as a result of this theology-based leadership system is clericalism.

The church’s theology states that priests are transformed in a metaphysical way upon receiving the sacrament of ordination. This graced moment completes their formation and certifies them for leadership, pastorally and administratively. Most if not all of a priest’s formation is theological and pastoral. An MBA is not required for leadership in the church. Nevertheless, priests assume management responsibilities that parallel positions in corporations that do require an MBA. Because of this misappropriated theology-based power we find priests in positions of responsibility who are not qualified to be there.

The requirements for priesthood are less about skill set and competency than they are about lifestyle and gender. Priests must be celibate males who commit themselves to this status for life. Insisting on these requirements for clerical leadership limits the number of applicants and creates an exclusionary power circle. Less healthy candidates are more likely to be accepted simply because there is no other choice. Issues and policies brought up for discussion receive a limited frame of reference that does not fully represent the broad spectrum of church members. We have to ask ourselves what is more important for priesthood -- competency or lifestyle and gender status.

Vatican II declared that all baptized Catholics “have their own share in the mission of the whole people of God.” The ranks of priests are down 26 percent since 1965 and their average age is climbing to 60. The need for lay ministers is obvious. Yet the protectionist attitude of the hierarchy continues to limit the gifts of the laity. The recent directive on the liturgy states that only priests and deacons may read the Gospel and priests “should ordinarily” deliver the homily. The priest may occasionally delegate the homily to a deacon, “but never to a lay person.” If you are a lay person who is blessed with the gift of applying Scripture to people’s lives, your gifts are not welcome at a Catholic Mass. This is an example of clericalism at an institutional level. It sets a tone and fosters a climate of potential arrogance and power that may be actualized at the local level.

The priest I worked for in my lay ministry position provided me with multiple examples of actualized clericalism at the local level. One example was when the day of the parish youth music festival arrived. Early in the day I went to the concert venue to get things set up because volunteers were scheduled to come later with food. My plan was to leave after setup and return an hour before the event. Unfortunately, despite my arrival time not being specifically defined, this plan was unacceptable to my priest supervisor. The reason I knew it was unacceptable was because of his reaction: Father lost control of his emotions. He jumped in his vehicle, slammed on the gas and drove towards me as I walked up the road. Father’s SUV burned rubber as he violently hit the brakes. This created quite a spectacle for all in attendance. After some screaming at me, he put a smile on his face and engaged his parishioners. I was left to gather myself and prepare to lead our event for the evening. His inability to act as a professional in a public setting was a clear example of a leader placed in a position of power without the necessary skills to be effective. The ongoing reality of clericalism will only continue to perpetuate these misuses of power in the church.

Nowhere to turn

A byproduct of clericalism is that within diocesan structures there is an inequality between lay and ordained ministers. I had nowhere to turn when I had a grievance with my parish supervisor. The benefits, salary and management were all done within the parish. Clergy are part of a larger structure from which benefits are derived and grievances dealt with. The result is that lay people have little recourse outside of civil law to deal with conflicts. I wrote a letter to the bishop of the diocese where I worked, outlining my concerns. To this day I have received nothing in reply.

Support of lay ministers varies from diocese to diocese. For example, some dioceses promote lay councils that advise the bishop, while others do not have these entities in place. Other variables of support include job descriptions, clearly stated expectations, personnel management practices (such as annual review processes), grievance procedures, protection from harassment and abuse, and some form of job security. This has produced a random and somewhat confusing array of job situations for lay ministers. Pursuing a career in parish lay ministry is a bit like rolling the dice. The odds that a well-trained lay person will find a position with the appropriate benefits and management structure along with duties that utilize his or her gifts is quite rare.

In his book, Excellent Catholic Parishes, Paul Wilkes comments that at the heart of a good parish is an “innovative priest, open to the possibilities of lay leadership and ministry … [a priest] who see [his] role as essentially empowering a community to act and to raise up its own leaders.” Wilkes reflects on a priest he interviewed who referred to a female administrator in a parish that did not have a full-time priest: When a lay person is in charge, the priest said, “you have much more lay involvement, so the result is actually a parish that is able to do far more, not less, because of not having a priest here.” In effective parishes, the pastor respects lay leadership.

In the big picture, the church is somewhat new at lay ministry. Lay ministers have been active for about 30 years out of a total of 2,000 years. The church deserves a certain amount of understanding as things get sorted out. There are over 34,000 lay ministers working at least 20 hours per week in the United States, according to a Georgetown University study. Clearly there are success stories out there. Yet if informed critique is not produced, how will the church improve? How will we increase the number of good lay ministry experiences compared with bad experiences?

Hope for the future

I still have hope for the future. Much can be done to reduce clericalism and the inequality between laity and clergy. Disconnecting the leadership power from its theological roots would require papal intervention. Until this is done, we must live with a certain amount of clericalism.

What can we do within the current theological framework to build a more nurturing working environment where long-term lay ministry careers will flourish? Creating a lay council that advises bishops on a national level would be an excellent place to start. This council would mainly be concerned with standards implementation, addressing the inconsistencies that lay ministers struggle with today. Occupational policies and leadership formation would be two important areas to deal with in this council. The Catholic church would be much more effective with a balanced leadership that represents the Spirit’s work in all the people of God.

Given the current church power structure, parish lay ministry is a difficult career choice. I am disappointed that my studies did not adequately prepare me for this reality. The proposed vision of empowerment, collaboration and ministerial ownership is not impossible to find, but it is rare.

Addressing the ills of clericalism is necessary to avoid my recent pastoral associate experience from becoming the norm rather than the exception. Considering the growth of the church and the declining number of priests, empowered and enthusiastic lay ministers are necessary if more parishes are to be included in Wilkes’ category of excellent parishes.

Thomas Lucking has worked in pastoral ministries for six years. He writes from Seattle.

National Catholic Reporter, September 17, 2004