From the First Letter to Timothy:
Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching; for the scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves to be paid.” Never accept any accusation against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Tim. 5:17-19 (NRSV) – May 24, 2013.)
During the past decade the Episcopal Church has monkeyed about with its scheme for clergy discipline, the bunch of rules and canons and procedures that are lumped together in what we call “Title 4.” As a member of the Bar and a former diocesan chancellor who had had to assist a bishop in facing some clergy discipline situations, as well as from my standpoint as a priest, I didn’t think the extensive revisions (indeed, the word “overhaul” would apply) were necessary. But there they are. Whether they have done any good and whether they are actually working as the revisers apparently hoped is anybody’s guess.
A few days ago, a friend (a retired lay church professional) called just to chat. My friend lives in another area of the country but the Episcopal Church is a small denomination, really, and we have a lot of mutual acquaintances, including some clergy who have been subjected to the new disciplinary plan and their current whereabouts and goings-on came up. In the course of our conversation, he told me that in the diocese where he now lives something like twenty congregations and their clergy are at some point along the spectrum of investigations and activities that compromise the discipline and dissolution processes of Title 4. Twenty congregations in one diocese!
In my current diocese, there have been a couple of disciplinary matters over the past few years. One resulted in a cleric being suspended; the other, in the priest renouncing holy orders and leaving the Episcopal Church’s ordained ministry. Across the church (and across denominational lines) I have been told by colleagues that they live in fear of being subjected to discipline, not because they think they’ve done anything wrong, but simply because their careers could be ruined by an accusation. A Lutheran spouse recently published an internet essay critical of the lack of support given pastors by their hierarchical superiors and detailing the devastating effect of an accusation on the clergy family. I have friends who have moved from one jurisdiction to another because they felt they couldn’t trust their bishop (or bishop-equivalent) to back them up if an accusation was made.
I could not help but think of that conversation and these other instances when I read St. Paul’s advice to the young bishop Timothy regarding the compensation and then, immediately, the discipline of the presbyters (elders) in his jurisdiction. These pastors, he says, especially the preachers and teachers, are to be honored and compensated and, if an accusation is made against them, it must be supported by the corroborating testimony of other witnesses. The linkage of honor, compensation, accusation, and discipline in this text is probably purely circumstantial; I’d bet that Paul was dictating this letter to a scribe and just thinking of things “off the top of his head,” and yet now inscribed in Holy Writ for all time, the linkage is there.
Last week, my wife and I were invited to a parishioner couple’s home for an informal dinner. Just the four of us, a bottle of wine and a couple pizzas. It was great! We all had a good time; we talked about our experiences raising kids and now being parents of adults in their late 20s and early 30s. We shared stories of vacations, of illnesses, of family crises, of joys, and of disappointments. And it later occurred to me how rarely my wife and I have enjoyed this sort of intimate dinner in a parishioner’s home. In fact, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of parishioner households who have hosted us for dinner in the last three years (not counting church group get-togethers, which I would suggest are a different category of event).
When I was a kid we didn’t go to church, so I have no nuclear family experience of dinners with clergy, but I do know that my Methodist grandparents (with whom I spent summer vacations) and my Disciples of Christ grandparents (who took care of me after school in the early elementary grades) both entertained their pastors and their wives on a regular basis. When I became an active Episcopalian adult, I was aware that our rector and his spouse regularly socialized with parishioners, and once I was ordained and began working as his assistant, my wife and I were often invited to join parishioners socially. Of course, those parishioners were also long-time friends as I had been a lay member of the congregation for about seventeen years before joining its clergy staff. So maybe that was an out-of-the-ordinary experience.
When we left that church and I took my first parish as rector, a very small parish in the rural exurbs of a midwestern city, we socialized often with parishioners. Then we came to Ohio. During our first couple of years, there were dinner invitations . . . but they tapered off and now they are, as I suggested above, rare.
Now I’ll admit that maybe I’m just not a likeable person and that it may just be that people don’t want to eat with me. That’s a distinct possibility. (It couldn’t possibly be my wife; she’s the sweetest person in the world.) But in my conversations with colleagues, I’ve been told that their experience is the same. Few of them, they tell me, are asked to socialize with their parishioners in the manner and to the extent that we might have been a few years ago, and certainly not to the extent that our predecessors seem to have been.
Back when I was practicing law, well actually before it – when I was a paralegal, I would socialize with the secretaries and other non-lawyer personnel of the law firm, but not so much with the attorneys, and then only with associates never with partners. Then I went to law school, passed the Bar exam, and became an associate. I still socialized with the secretaries and the paralegals, but more and more often with the other associates and occasionally with the partners. And then I became a partner. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way in my early years of being a partner, it became clear (in fact, a senior partner made it explicit) that partners did not socialize with the secretaries. You didn’t invite “the help” to dinner; they didn’t invite you.
I wonder if that’s what’s happening in the church. For years we (the clergy, at least) have fought the idea that priests are “hired.” We are “called,” we insist. Our relationship with our congregations is not that of employer-employee. It’s more like a marriage or a partnership; we are colleagues in a ministry which is mutual and reciprocal. Of course, the one colleague (the parish) pays the other colleague (the priest) a salary, and we have letters of agreement and denominational policies requiring a pretty good array of benefits . . . but we are not, we insist, employees!
Are the discontinuance of social invitations, the increase of concern about disciplinary schemes, the upsurge in instances of clergy discipline cases, all symptomatic of a sea change in the church’s unspoken understanding of the priest-parish relationship? Is it all because clergy are no longer seen as respected elders “worthy of double honor?” Are we just “the help?”
Maybe so. There may be many reasons for such a paradigm shift. In a brief meditation on a short sentence of scripture one doesn’t have the time or the space to consider what all of them might be. All I can do here is suggest that these apparently disparate phenomena — changes in clergy disciplinary rules, a rise in the number of discipline cases, clergy moving out of fear, and a downturn in clergy-parishioner socializing — may be symptomatic of a change in the way the church community functions.
I admit that I don’t really know. But if my morning musing is even close to correct, I’m sorry to see the decline of the former model, the model of the pastor who could also be the social friend of those in his or her flock. I don’t believe an employment model is as conducive to mutual respect between priest and congregation, nor as supportive of relationships between bishops and clergy. I hope someday to see the church return to the earlier paradigm — or maybe find a new one; at any rate, we need to find a paradigm for this relationship with less of the fear that seems to pervade the one we have now.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
There are some parts of the Bible that I am thankful I don’t generally have to read aloud in public. The story of Ruth seducing Boaz is one of them, especially this verse. I get to this verse and I’m “laughing out loud” – I mean, really, I’m like LOL! A guy falls asleep on his threshing floor and wakes up to find a woman “lying at his feet,” and not only that, he finds that she has undressed him!
And there you have it, ten years in the lives of six people, and the deaths of three of them, put to rest in five short Bible verses. As Antonio said to Sebastian, “What’s past is prologue” (The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1) and for the author of Ruth apparently not very interesting prologue. The storyteller is (pardon the pun) ruthlessly efficient in his introduction (I assume the author was “he” – maybe not). He clears away the unnecessary detail of sixty “person-years” of life to set the stage for what is to follow. 
I was told once that there is a difference between Yankee fairy tales and Northern fairy tales, and the difference is found in the way they begin. Yankee fairy tales start off, “Once upon a time . . . . ” Southern fairy tales begin, “Y’all ain’t gonna believe this!”
Which brings us to the second story, the “y’all ain’t gonna believe this” story of the first Christian Pentecost. The twelve (with the addition of Matthias a few days before) who would become known as the Apostles were again together in the Upper Room, perhaps together with several other disciples including all those women, Joanna, Suzanna, Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalen, and the other Mary, those women who “used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee.” (Mark 15:41) The first ECW! They were there in that room where they’d shared that last supper, that Passover meal with Jesus, that room where they had cowered in fear on the day of the crucifixion and the next day hiding from the Jewish authorities and the Roman police, that room where the risen Jesus had come to them not once but twice and had allowed Thomas to feel his wounds, that room where Jesus had told them to wait for “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:26) There they were, in that room, probably as confused and bewildered as all those people on the plain at Shinar when the Lord scattered them with confused speech.
Once again I find this serendipitous connection between one verse in the Daily Office psalm and a news item in the daily papers. Psalm 105 is divided into two parts and our lectionary bids us read the first at Morning Prayer and the second at Evening Prayer. The psalm describes the Hebrews sojourn in Egypt. Part One (vv. 1-22) describes the captivity of Joseph and his later elevation to leadership in the pharaoh’s court, which occasioned the children of Israel taking refuge in “the land of Ham” where they were subsequently enslaved. Part Two (vv. 23-45) tells the story of Moses, the Exodus, and the Hebrews coming into the Promised Land.
There’s a homiletic maxim attributed to Karl Barth that clergy should preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. These days, that sort of describes how I say the Daily Office. I use my laptop computer (I’m still not hip enough to have a “tablet” device) to access the 
I’ve been thinking a lot about this listen to voices stuff. A few weeks ago, the Fourth Sunday of Easter (April 21, 2013), we heard one of the “good shepherd” lessons in which Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27). Now, he says, we hear his voice in the voices of his apostles, those whom he has sent. (This verse is taken from his instructions to and commissioning of the Seventy who are sent out to preach the Good News and heal those who come to them.)
Today’s Old Testament reading is a disturbing piece in which the Prophet Ezekiel is instructed to lie down for several days (in fact, for more than a year) as a sign of the number of years Israel and then Judah will be punished. 
As I read this verse from the Letter to the Hebrews, continuing education in the faith (an “adult Christian formation” program) has apparently been an issue in the church for quite a while. There is certainly a crisis of lifelong learning – or the lack of it – in the church today!
