Research On Religion » clergy

David Buckley on the Demand for Clergy in Politics

tonygill — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 08:00:32 +0000

Do religious individuals prefer to have their spiritual leaders directly involved in politics? Whereas the common assumption might be that religious adherents would like to see clergy directly involved in public policy decision-making, Prof. David Buckley (University of Louisville, political science) shows that the opposite is true. Using data from the World Values Survey, he noted an interesting pattern wherein the more spiritually-engaged a population was, the less likely those individuals were to support an active role for priests, pastors, and rabbis in the government. Prof. Buckley then explains this phenomenon can be explained by two causal mechanisms. First, in highly religious societies, there are many informal “back channels” wherein clergy already have influence over policy, thus necessitating less direct and formal roles. Second, direct and visible involvement in politics raises a set of risks for confessional leaders including political backlash for supporting losing politicians, deterioration of moral authority when clerics support unpopular (or unsuccessful) policies/politicians, and the chance that taking a political stand would divide their parishioners making them less likely to remain engaged with the religious institution. David illustrates these causal mechanisms using the debate over a reproductive health bill in the Philippines in the past decade. Recorded: April 8, 2016.

David Buckley on Academia.edu (access site for several papers).

Cosmos Club Foundation.

World Values Survey (main website).

Philippines’ Reproductive Health Act of 2012 (mentioned in podcast).

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William Vanderbloemen on Pastoral Transitions

tonygill — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 09:00:17 +0000

If your church is facing a period of transition of leadership, who you gonna call? Well, this week we talk to William Vanderbloemen, founder and president of Vanderbloemen Search Group that specializes in matching clergy with congregations. This is a fascinating look into an entrepreneurial niche market that supports churches during periods of pastoral succession. We discuss this business and William’s book about the topic of leadership transition, Next: Pastoral Succession that Works.

As is par for the course, our discussion begins with a bit of background about Mr. Vanderbloemen, who we learn was raised in a Presbyterian tradition in a small North Carolina town. While somewhat of a rebel spirit in college interested in business, he found himself drawn into philosophy, which then took him on a journey to Princeton Theological Seminary. We explore some of his time in the ministry, starting as an associate pastor and then moving down to Alabama to help rebuild a flagging congregation. He learned a great deal about reviving churches and also about transitioning leadership during his 15 years in the ministry, which also took him to run a large church in Houston. Tony probes those periods of transition, asking about how different churches found out about him, and what it was like to leave one church to go work at another. Having seen pastoral succession from the vantage point of the pews, Tony was curious to find out what it was like from the other side of the pulpit.

We then examine how William came to run a business focused on assisting churches replace pastors and find new leadership. William explains how his experience in a Fortune 200 company, combined with his zeal for entrepreneurship brought him to the point of striking out on his own to set up a business in this niche “headhunting” business for clergy. Starting out in the less-than-hospitable economic climate of 2008, and initially working from a folding card table at home, he has been able to build up to a staff of 30 and a permanent office in Houston. He shares some of his experiences including how he came to get his first client.

We then spend time addressing some of the bigger concerns that churches should have when it comes to finding a successor to their current ministerial leadership. We begin with two case studies of failure in the process of pastoral succession — the Crystal Cathedral and First Baptist Dallas — drawing lessons from both cases. From the former case of Robert Schuller’s famous ministry, one of the biggest lessons learned is that even the most successful of ministries is always just one generation from potentially disappearing. William also talks about how early innovations in Schuller’s ministry became traditions and how the church found it difficult to innovate. This combined with a tightly-held leadership council that led to sibling rivalries spelled disaster for this world renown church.

The other failed transition we discuss involves the First Baptist Church of Dallas. Led for nearly a century by two very dynamic pastors — George Truett and W.A. Criswell — this church served a spiritual home of many spiritual leaders including Billy Graham. The transition between Truett and Criswell went smoothly due to close connections between the spouses of the two pastors. However, upon Criswell announcing retirement the church set about looking for a new minister. Given the long tenure of both preachers, the transition proved choppy with the lesson being that even with the best intentions about planning for a transition, the actual task of finding a successor can be difficult.

We then move on to some notable successes. For the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the process of succession was enhanced by the retiring pastor being able to take up a new role to channel his interests into international church planting. William makes a point that it is easy for pastors to become fatigued with their position and providing new outlets for creative energy often enhance the leadership transition process. He also mentions that success in this case was due to the humility of the pastor knowing when it was time to leave rather than trying to stay for an extended period of time. Part of any successful transition process will involve, early on, letting young leaders find pastoral options for their later years. We also talk about the Peach Tree Presbyterian Church where a popular leader — Frank Harrington — died without much warning, leaving a vacancy to fill. With no succession plan in place, the congregation plodded along for a few months with membership starting to drop. Victor Pentz, who replaced Rev. Harrington was an outsider to the church, but he made a very critical decision to learn about Peach Tree’s history and honor it in his leadership. While paving some new territory, Rev. Pentz still was able to find a connection to the past that helped keep older members connected to the process of change.

We finish our discussion with a number of William’s thoughts on successful successions. He quickly notes that there is no one single recipe or set of factors that guarantees a transition will proceed smoothly. However, he does note that the most important thing about such transitions is that a conversation about succession begin immediately with new leadership. He points out that the topic of succession should even be brought up when negotiating the contract of a new pastor. Successful business firms employ such strategies and Mr. Vanderbloemen feels the church can learn a great deal from this practice. William also has a few other important pointers for church elders, pastors, and even congregants, but you will have to listen to the interview to hear those. Recorded: January 26, 2015.

Next: Pastoral Succession that Works, by William Vanderbloemen and Warren Bird.

William Vanderbloemen’s twitter feed.

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Jim Tonkowich on Converting to Catholicism

tonygill — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 09:00:23 +0000

After serving in the Presbyterian ministry for over two decades, our guest Jim Tonkowich, former president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, made the decision to convert to Catholicism. We follow Jim’s journey in this interview that is part personal reflection and part sociological look at the state of Christianity today.

We begin our discussion by going back to Jim’s early upbringing and learn that his family was rooted in the Russian Orthodox Church. His curiosity in religion, though, was piqued while attending boarding school in Connecticut when he purchased a Bible and began reading it. Finding this reading difficult on his own he began participating in a Bible study group and also attended a “Ski and Skeptics” program that helped him to start making sense of Christianity, much the way a the box top picture on a jigsaw puzzle helps one align the pieces. We follow him through his college career at Bates College and his further investigations into theology and philosophy. At this point in his life, he is still not a Roman Catholic.

Jim’s varied travels them take him to Gordon Cromwell Theological Seminary where he begins studying for the ministry. His own religious participation at this time involved a non-denominational Protestant congregation and participation at Park Street Congregational Church where he met both his wife and Marcus Grodi (also a Protestant who would later “make the journey home” to Catholicism). It is at this point in the interview we begin a conversation about church polity — i.e., how congregations are organized in terms of authority structure. This theme appears numerous times in our discussion and is one of the key pieces to understanding Jim’s conversion to Catholicism. Jim also reveals how he read the early Church Fathers and how that influenced his long-term thought process.

Following seminary we then move cross-country to a Presbyterian church in Silicon Valley, California. We discuss Jim’s experiences as a pastor here as well as the various challenges that ministers face in their profession. While Jim was pleased with the folks in that congregation, he talks about the professional grind and loneliness that often accompanies the pastorate. It is at this point where he brings up the issue of pastoral formation — preparing clergy for the tough road ahead — and mentions that the Catholic Church tends to excel at this task relative to its Protestant counterparts. Again, we start to see the pieces of the conversion puzzle start to fall into place. We develop a sense that Jim’s conversion wasn’t a Pauline “flash of light on the road to Damascus,” but rather a long and intellectually-engaging path.

After his ministerial stint in California, it is back to the Washington DC area where he shares a number of other stories regarding a variety of experiences, including an interesting interview he had with a few Presbyterians and the questions of whether Catholics need to be rebaptized if they move in a Protestant direction. Here we reflect a bit upon attitudes towards Catholics and how this challenged Jim’s thinking further. We also return to the question of orthodoxy and church polity at this point before finally learning more about the final pieces to his Catholic conversion that involved his son attending Thomas Aquinas College and bringing a group of friends home from California, an event that led him into the National Basilica for Mass and a great sermon “worshipping among the nations.” We further go into a wide range of topics involving connections with other intellectuals who converted Catholic (e.g., Frances Beckwith, Robby George) and a number of other interesting topics related to theology and church organization.

The podcast finishes with a few of Jim’s insights from his e-book How (Not) to Become Catholic, which is a humorous self-reflection of his journey and a variety of mistakes he and others often make when looking across the Catholic-Protestant divide. Recorded: November 7. 2014.

RELATED LINKS

Jim Tonkowich’s web page (including biography another links)

How (Not) to Become Catholic, by James Tonkowich (an e-book on becoming Catholic)

The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today, by James Tonkowich.

The Coming Home Network International (mentioned in the podcast)

The Institute for Religion and Democracy (where Jim was the former president).

Called to the Ministry, by Edmund Clowney (mentioned in the podcast)

Wyoming Catholic College (mentioned in the podcast)

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Matt Boswell on What Pastors Don’t Want to Reveal

tonygill — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 08:00:20 +0000

If there is one person in church on Sunday who seems to “have it altogether,” it is probably the preacher standing up in front of the congregation, right? How easily we forget that clergy are people too and they have many of the same struggles that their congregants do, plus a few that might just be unique to the profession. Pastor Matt Boswell of Redemption Church in scenic Duvall, WA opens up about the challenges he faces being a “man of the cloth.” Our conversation is based upon his enormously successful blog posting entitled “Ten Things Pastors Don’t Want to Reveal.” Throughout our discussion, we reveal them all.

Pastor Matt is not new to the program as we have followed his adventures in previous podcasts in our Redemption Church Series (see below), but he hasn’t been on the show for over a year. The reason for this prolonged absence is that one of his congregants has been M.I.A. for the past year and the show starts with a confessional — Tony admits to not having been in attendance all that often. We discuss this typical challenge for many middle-aged folks and their ministers, and then use this as a platform to discuss what has been happening to this relatively new church over the past year including a few personnel changes, as well as the passing of a cherished member.

We then jump into our discussion of the ten things that worry and bother the clergy, but that the clergy are often afraid to reveal. This list includes:

Pastors take it personally when you leave the church;
They feel pressure to perform week after week;
The clergy struggle to get their worth from ministry;
Ministers regularly think about quitting;
They say they are transparent, but they might actually be opaque;
Pastors measure themselves by the numbers (attendance and finances);
They spend more time discouraged than encouraged;
They worry about what you think;
Clergy struggle with competition and jealousy;
And they often feel like they failed you more than they have helped.

Although certainly a bummer of a list, and probably not the best topics for dinner conversation, Matt keeps it light by discussing how he copes with all of these different challenges. The conversation remains upbeat with Tony comparing the pastorate to his own teaching profession at times, and making the occasional odd reference to characters in Winnie the Pooh. Recorded: April 23, 2014.

“Ten Things Pastors Don’t Want to Reveal” on Pastor Matt TV.

Match Coffee (the site of this podcast).

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Richard Hammar on Churches, Taxes, Donations, and Liability

tonygill — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 08:00:11 +0000

Houses of worship are legal organizations and, as such, are subject to a wide variety of laws and regulations regarding taxation, charitable contributions, and liability issues. Alas, most congregants, and even a significant number of clergy, don’t pay much attention to the legalities of running such an organization. Richard Hammar, an attorney and certified public accountant who specializes in legal and tax issues for clergy as well as running Christianity Today’s Church Law and Tax Report, joins us to discuss a smattering of these issues.

We begin our discussion talking about the National Association of Church Business Administration (NACBA), which serves as an umbrella organization for a variety of churches seeking to share information about management issues facing religious groups. While we often think of churches or denominations existing in relative isolation, or only branching out ecumenically on theological issues, the existence of the NACBA is one example of a fairly large cross-denominational infrastructure that has developed to assist churches in navigating a variety of management issues.

To celebrate Tax Day (April 15th), we take up the issue of church and clergy taxes. Tony naively asserts that church tax lawyers have very little to do since houses of worship are tax exempt, unlike houses of pancakes. However, Mr. Hammar sets Tony straight by providing a long, yet incomplete, list of the multiple ways in which religious organizations are taxed, including property tax, income tax, sales tax and on and on. This leads to a discussion of the recent controversy over the tax-exempt status of parsonages (houses for clergy on church property) and how this differs from housing allowances paid to ministers who live off-property. (Hint: the latter are taxed.) We also cover the recent spate of tax scams hitting religious workers, most notably in the Archdiocese of Seattle, and Rich explains how these problems can be avoided.

Our next topic covers the issue of large bequests to religious groups. Using the case of Curran v Building Fund of United Church, Rich talks about some of the difficulties a church can find itself in when a wealthy individual suddenly changes his/her will and diverts millions of dollars away from relatives who were expecting it. Not surprisingly, the relatives get mad and sometimes take the matter to court arguing that church leaders exerted “undue influence” in getting the person to alter their estate planning. Rich details a variety of legal conditions that must be met to prove “undue influence” and talks about how churches can protect themselves from such legal challenges (e.g., allowing an outside party to manage the elderly person’s estate rather than a member of the church). This leads to a bit of discussion about the litigious environment facing churches and how appearances in court may or may not tarnish the reputation of religious groups.

This discussion then transitions nicely to the issue of liability facing churches. Mr. Hammar is quite aware of the large number of liability claims that face churches, anything from claims of sexual misconduct to personal injuries resulting from hayrides and aquatic events. We note how the clergy are in a particularly vulnerable position when dealing with individuals who may be experiencing very difficult times in their lives and how this may lead to inappropriate conduct on the part of the ministers/counselors and/or false accusations being leveled against clergy members. Rich explains how churches can minimize this impact. We also cover a number of other liability issues that extend to pastoral outreach programs designed to take the congregation to the community. Rich warns against the dangers of trampolines, yet acknowledges that everything we do involves risk and churches must think carefully about their pastoral programs, particularly youth groups.

We end with some general reflections about the legal environment facing religious organizations. Despite the seemingly unending flow of problems confronting clergy and congregants, Mr. Hammar explains how his own personal faith keeps him optimistic. Recorded: March 27, 2014.

RELATED LINKS

Richard Hammar’s bio over at the Church Law & Tax blog at Christianity Today.

Pastor, Church & Law, by Richard Hammar.

Church and Clergy Tax Guide, by Richard Hammar.

Compensation Handbook for Church Staff, by Richard Hammar.

National Association of Church Business Administration.

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Joe Fuiten on Clergy & Politics

tonygill — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:00:49 +0000

In a follow up to our earlier podcast with Erik Stanley regarding clergy and free speech, Tony talks with Pastor Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Church (Bothell, WA) about his involvement in the political arena. This podcast provides an interesting view on whether, how and why members of the clergy should be politically outspoken. Pastor Fuiten discusses his early interest in politics and his eventual call to the ministry. We then turn our discussion to the issue of taxation, realizing that one of the reasons often mentioned for clergy avoiding politics is the “tax-exempt status” of churches. Pastor Fuiten covers the various ways he has been involved in politics, including in campaigns for candidates and voter iniatives, and how his parishioners have responded to his political involvement. Our guest provides his thoughts on the recent political changes in America over the past decade. Recorded: May 17, 2010.

RELATED LINKS

Pastor Fuiten’s website.

Cedar Park Church website.

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