(Brutal) honesty

by Bromleigh McCleneghan

My family and I recently went through a month-long process of packing up our life and moving. My new church doesn’t have a parsonage, so we bought a home—so the transition time involved a mortgage application and the inspections and appraisals and negotiations. I nearly let the details of this move to a new appointment overwhelm me: I allowed myself to be preoccupied with the boxes and the mortgage broker as an avoidance tactic, because I wasn't sure how to leave the people at my church. It is so much easier to worry about the boxes.

Before the beginning of the new appointment year, my annual conference “strongly encouraged” clergy who were moving to new appointments to attend a workshop on transition. I did, and the insights were helpful. Participants discussed how to set boundaries and avoid pitfalls when starting at a new church. We shared our feelings of grief and ambivalence and excitement.

The one thing we didn’t really discuss was how to interpret the event of our departure for our churches, or how to manage that task while experiencing a host of complex emotions ourselves. I felt much like an oldest daughter planning a family funeral—immersing myself in the details, worrying about other people’s feelings and needs, because I was unsure how to feel.

The big challenge was figuring out how honest I should be. Although the bishop reappointed me, I had requested the move—and my old congregation knew that when a pastor requests a move, she doesn’t know where she’ll be sent. This keeps clergy honest, I think: it limits the habit of fishing for more desirable appointments and helps curb the practice of jumping ship when a ministry gets difficult. One has to be awfully sure one is done with the ministry at a current appointment before looking to the next one. Still, the impersonal and open-ended nature of the change-of-appointment request makes it hard for congregations not to feel as though their beloved leader would rather be anywhere but there.

I wanted my congregation to know that the cabinet was not arbitrarily plucking me away, plunging them into the murky and deep waters of a pastoral transition when they’re already working so hard just to stay afloat. If they needed a target for their anger, it should not have been the cabinet or the incoming pastor. It was better that they know that I felt I'd reached the end of my ministry there, that I had discerned, in the hardest decision of my adult life, that I needed a change.

But what reason to give? How to convey my grief and relief? How to tell them of my plans in a way that would not betray the love and trust we have shared? How to explain that this was not a sign of my lack of faith in their collective future? How to keep them from feeling abandoned?

Back to the funeral analogy: I couldn’t protect them from their feelings. The loss is real, and knowing that another pastor will follow is not always sufficient comfort. Instead, my task was to speak and preach and teach the truth that is the gospel: that we know the end of relationships, we know loss and grief, we know fear and anxiety in the face of the unknown. Death is messy and complicated. But we also have faith that God’s love, the presence of the risen Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit continue on, carrying us toward new life and new hope.

As for me, I have to trust that the work I did there will continue to bear fruit in the body of believers.

Bromleigh McCleneghan is associate pastor and director of Christian education at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Charles, Illinois.