Saturday, July 25, 1998

Ministers, congregations often go their separate ways

By Mark I. Pinsky

The Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, Fla. - On paper, the marriage was made in heaven: a large, upscale congregation and a pioneering pastor with a string of "firsts" to her credit.

In 1996, the Rev. Barbara Williams Riddle became minister of preaching at the 2,000-member First United Methodist Church of Winter Park, Fla., where as a younger woman she had served as associate pastor for four years.

But in less than two years in her senior post, the relationship went sour, and the preacher and the congregation went their separate ways. At the recommendation of a church committee, the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church did not renew Riddle's yearly assignment.

The Winter Park church now has a new pastor, and Riddle is in the pulpit of Ortega United Methodist Church, a 1,100-member congregation in Jacksonville, Fla.

What happened at First United Methodist Church is not unique. Nearly one in four ministers has been forced out of their pulpit sometime in his or her career, according to a study of 600 pastors conducted by Leadership magazine, a publication for Christian clergy.

Almost half of those who said in the 1996 survey that they had been forced out cited conflicting visions of the church as a reason, and about the same percentage said a small faction - 10 people or fewer - was the cause of their departure.

Ministerial leadership, like marriage in many ways, is a two-way street.

"Congregations can ruin clergy, but clergy can betray congregations, too," said the Rev. Jim Armstrong, senior pastor of Winter Park's First Congregational Church for the past seven years.

"Pastors sometimes impose their psychic needs and their own material goals on congregations," said Armstrong, who was a bishop in the Methodist Church before leading his present United Church of Christ congregation. "It's as if they weren't called to ministry but were using the congregation as a stepping stone for something."

How did things go wrong in Winter Park?

Every divorce - religious or marital - is different. At one point, a management consultant engaged by the Winter Park church to resolve the conflict did what any good marriage counselor would do to heal a troubled relationship, but the consultant did so without success.

Those who know exactly what happened are tight-lipped, but there was considerable grumbling about Riddle's "people skills," and all parties agree that there was staff turnover and a decline in membership and contributions when she succeeded an extremely popular pastor, the Rev. Tom Price.

Hunter Short, chairman of the congregation's Staff/Pastor/Parish Relations Committee, acknowledged the difficulties in following charismatic and beloved pastors.

"When they leave, you see some of the declines that we have seen in our church," he said. Under those circumstances, said Short, himself the son of a Methodist minister, it is wise to appoint a minister on an interim basis - which did not happen in Winter Park.

Riddle's appointment to the Winter Park congregation was "anything but a match made in heaven," said a local minister, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Almost anyone immediately following Price after 10 years, he said, was "fore-doomed."

Riddle, 49, who was the subject of an Orlando Sentinel article in February about women who have broken through the church's "stained-glass ceiling," declined to comment on the circumstances of her departure after 22 months in the pulpit. She referred to a letter to the congregation that listed her accomplishments and quoted a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes: "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven."

This kind of vagueness is not uncommon, under the circumstances.

"Very rarely is the reason that you get the real reason for the divorce," said Steve Brown, an author and professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Maitland, Fla. "Roast preacher has become the meal of a lot of people."

There are lots of reasons ministers and congregations go their separate ways, said Brown, a former pastor whose commentaries and observations are syndicated on religious radio and television stations throughout the country.

"Sometimes it comes from pastors who live in a kind of a dream world," he said. "There's a corporate culture in a church, too, and sometimes the pastor who is called doesn't fit that corporate culture."

There are matches between pastors and congregations that last for decades, with pastors putting an imprint on the congregation and the community until leaving with elaborate retirement ceremonies.

The Rev. Robert Hock served for 23 years as senior pastor of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Winter Park before retiring in 1996. The Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Community Church in Longwood, Fla., has been in the pulpit for 17 years. Both the Rev. Jim Henry of Orlando's First Baptist Church and the Rev. Charles Horton of College Park Baptist Church are in their 21st years of leadership.

"Like in a marriage, you want to be close but at the same time have some freedom," said Rabbi Rudolph Adler, who led Congregation Ohev Shalom in Orlando for 30 years, before his retirement. "You want to be loving and trust each other."

Sometimes the breakups between clergy and are seismic. In 1997, the Rev. Jimmy Creech blessed a wedding-like commitment ceremony between two lesbians at First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Neb. Earlier this year, a church trial acquitted Creech of violating Methodist doctrine, but in June his assignment to the congregation was not renewed.

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But not all partings between pastors and congregations are the product of bad feelings, incompatibility or theological differences. Sometimes, the parting is amicable and friendly, if poignant. It is the natural order of things when a rising star in the ministry leaves to accept the challenge of a larger congregation.

Julie Pennington-Russell was associate pastor and senior pastor of the 95-member 19th Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco for 13 years. But the 38-year-old mother of two young children recently left that post to become the first senior pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Texas, leading the 600-member Calvary Baptist Church in Waco.

"There are absolutely mixed feelings," Pennington-Russell said. "The decision to leave 19th Avenue was possibly the hardest I've made in my memory. It was really wrenching, just pondering what to do.

"There are a lot of tears, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of prayer," she said.

More often, the separation process is an unhappy one.

In the 1980s, the Rev. Alex Clattenburg led Calvary Assembly's growing congregation into a $21-million structure overlooking Interstate 4 in Winter Park. But a $14 million debt, crushing mortgage payments and a series of staff firings led church elders to a vote of no confidence in Clattenburg, who resigned in 1990 after serving as senior pastor for nine years. He now heads the 1,000-member Church in the Son in Orlando.

The Rev. Randolph Bracy left his Philadelphia church to pastor Shiloh Baptist Church in Orlando, one of the largest African-American congregations in Central Florida. A year later, he left the church, taking with him several hundred Shiloh members to form New Covenant Baptist Church, which now numbers more than 500 members and has a new building.

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Experts agree that there is no accurate predictor of marriages marriages between pastors and congregations.

"There aren't any standard tests that provide perfect matches," said Lloyd Rediger, author of "Clergy Killers: Guidance for Pastors and Congregations Under Attack" (Westminster/John Knox).

"But we are getting better," he said

Much of the responsibility for rests with members of the congregation, Rediger said.

"Lay people have to recognize they're not just customers in the church, that they share responsibility for a successful ministry," said. "That means we have to learn how to cooperate with each other and pray together instead of fight."

(c) 1998, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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