North Idaho Times

Clark Fork United Methodist Church issued the following announcement on April 4.

It might help you understand if you think of your pastor as a grizzled bluesman in rural Mississippi.

“Mississippi has produced some of the most amazing folk art and blues music,” said the Rev. Trey Jones, senior pastor at Crossgates United Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. “Because of the pain, the sorrow, the grief, the hurt, the injustice. And it's real, it's visceral.”

Jones says he felt a bit like that in December when, after a hard year, his scheduled break between Christmas and New Year’s got swept away.

Something came up every day of his vacation, including a funeral on New Year’s Eve. 

The Rev. Trey Jones is pastor of Crossgates United Methodist Church in Jackson, Miss. Photo courtesy of the Rev. Trey Jones.

“The best way I can describe it is that slow burn of burnout, that slow heat, that slow poison,” Jones said. “Something broke in me. Something absolutely just snapped.”

Jones called his chair of staff-parish relations and said he needed to get out of town — immediately.

“I just said, ‘Charles, I'm done, but I don't want to be done with ministry. I am broken. … I'm sorry. It crept up on me.’”

Jones took off in his car with his wife and just drove, ending up taking the scenic route to Key West, Florida. Another pastor filled in for two Sundays.

Jones is not alone among United Methodist clergy who are stressed these days, whether it’s from COVID-19, racial unrest, denominational uncertainty or natural disasters that just keep coming.

The Rev. Angela Cooley Bulhof, senior pastor at University United Methodist Church in Lake Charles, Louisiana, can relate. That state has been pounded by seven hurricanes and two tropical storms since August 2020. Most recent were Tropical Storm Claudette in June 2021 and Hurricane Ida in August 2021.

“As we were approaching the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Laura, that's when Hurricane Ida was flying in the southern part of the Gulf (of Mexico),” Bulhof said. 

“I sat in my car in the parking lot of the place I was going to get my hair cut, frozen, and I just bawled my head off,” she remembered. “I must have been crying for an hour in my car. I thought to myself, this must be what PTSD feels like.”

The Rev. Martin Thielen, a retired pastor who writes the Doubter’s Parish blog, conducted an unscientific survey of 50 or so fellow pastors.

“I've just never seen so many folks having so little fun in ministry ever,” he said. “A lot of those people that were doing better seem to be in the real small churches, because they didn't have big budgets and big staffs and programs to worry about.” 

The Rev. Martin Thielen is a retired pastor who writes the Doubter’s Parish blog. Photo courtesy of the Rev. Martin Thielen.

One common point of division is what Thielen calls “the Trump factor.”

“The ugly politics of masks and vaccines and conspiracy theories and whose side are you on had hit them like it had never hit before,” he said. “They couldn't win no matter what they did.

“I just heard that again and again — ‘can't win.’”

Among mainline Protestants surveyed by Ipos for The Episcopal Church, 25% attended church once a week before the pandemic. Now, that has dropped to 17%. 

“The COVID-19 virus affected my ministry at the First United Methodist Church in Monrovia, Liberia, in several ways,” said the Rev. Julius Y.Z.K. Williams. “It affected attendance, finances and interaction. The virus caused significant stress for me during 2020.”

Many of the pastors contacted by Thielen said they knew these declines were not their fault, but “looking out to the empty sanctuary every Sunday morning is miserable.”

The Rev. Jeff Ridenour arrived July 1, 2020, as the new pastor of Faith United Methodist Church in Oregon, Ohio. By then, COVID-19 had killed 100,000 people in the U.S. In addition, Ridenour’s wife has an immunodeficiency, so he needed to be extra careful about taking precautions.

“I'm by nature an extrovert,” Ridenour said. “In a normal situation, by the third or fourth Sunday in a new parish, I know everybody's face. I know everybody's first name. I have figured out a lot of who's related to who.”

That wasn’t the case at Faith United because the coronavirus forced worship online and to the parking lot, where a “Popemobile” was constructed from tarps and Plexiglas so he could preach safely.

Unfortunately, the contraption tended to blow over in strong winds — thankfully only when Ridenour wasn’t occupying it. There was also the issue of getting electricity safely installed so the sound equipment would work. 

Original source can be found here.