Beginning in the 60’s, accelerating in the 70’s, and becoming professionalized and institutionalized ever since, a revolution in leadership style has been taking place among American ordained ministers. Hierarchy and the-pastor-knows-best are ugly ideas for the up-to-date. So now clergy read books and go to workshops and conferences to hone their collaborative leadership skills.
This paper is based on the observation that the changes we ordained leaders seek to make in our parish leadership style are often contradicted by our most widely observed activity—our leadership of worship. Adopting collaborative leadership in meetings, consulting fully and openly about parish decisions, welcoming and encouraging wide lay input—changes of these sorts—are often unconsciously gainsaid by our Sunday face in worship.
Let’s start with two theses:
I. Our Sunday worship expresses not only theological beliefs, but leadership and relationship beliefs.
II. Sometimes the realities of our lives are congruent with these expressions of belief and sometimes they are not.
It’s always easier to see something like this in other times and other people. Let me give an illustration from my own heritage as an Episcopalian. When I was a child in the 30’s and right up until the mid-60’s, money was taken up during worship and offered to God only by males of recognized substance in the congregation, almost always members of the vestry, and frequently the same men every week—the men who called the shots. First they went from pew to pew taking up the collection. Then they formed in solemn procession, the organ boomed forth the doxology, the congregation leapt to its feet, and the men strode forward, stopping at the altar rail, where they handed the collection basins to the acolytes, who in turn handed them to the ordained minister, who then offered them to God, holding them high until the doxology concluded.
Talk about hierarchy! That procession spoke loud and clear. Nobody was in doubt about the pecking order. These men, said this ceremony, were in charge of the money, they had the power, but they could go only so far. Only the ordained and his acolytes could enter the holy space around the altar. Lay authority stopped at the rail.
That was the public expression. Women could not take part. Children could not take part. Non-established men could not take part. Only the well-established and the ordained could do so.
We know, of course, that in fact women called many of the shots in parish life. Many a joke has been told about the behind-the-scenes activities of the senior warden’s wife or the rector’s wife, the humor rooted in the gap between public face and private reality. It was also not uncommon for the warden to wield more power in parish affairs than the ordained minister.
This public ceremony acted out the publicly acknowledged power relationships among us. Sometimes it was reasonably true to the realities, and sometimes it was not.
Congregational leadership has a Sunday face. Sometimes that face is truthful; sometimes it is not.
Now I offer a third thesis:
II. Pastors who wish to change their leadership style have a powerful tool in the way they lead worship. By changing their Sunday face they can broadcast the change in leadership style they are trying to make.
I remember vividly the pivotal change in my own Sunday face, the one that publicly signified my own adoption of a collaborative leadership style. It was in the mid-60’s. I had become rector of a high-church Episcopal parish. Liturgical reform was all the rage. For reasons I do not now remember I decided to introduce the passing of the Peace. (You know, that ceremony in which we liturgical types greet our neighbors with the peace of God, shaking hands or even hugging.)
Now this was before we Episcopalians had begun officially working toward changes in our worship, before we had books of experimental services, the “green book” or the “striped book,” and well before we had our new Book of Common Prayer. When I set out to make this change, I was getting ahead of the crowd.
It was also still a time when women wore hats in church, or, if—God forbid!—they showed up without one, the ushers provided little doilies to pin on their heads. It was still a time—nearing its demise—of formality and hierarchy.
I started preaching about the Peace—what it meant, and why we should do it, and how we might go about it. I started getting negative feedback almost immediately. There were some unhappy people out there. My stomach began to tie into knots. I recognized the symptoms and knew that if I didn’t do something different from what I had done before, I was in trouble. My first ten years of ordained ministry had been painful years of hierarchical style leadership that I knew would not work anymore.
So I tried something new. I had recently been at a conference in which the leaders used flip-charts to lead group discussion. They wrote down what participants said and posted the sheets on the walls. I decided to call a parish discussion-meeting and do the same.
It was my first serious attempt at listening to a group and seeking some kind of group agreement. And it worked! Before the morning was over we had reached an agreement that wrought a parish revolution!
I really hadn’t known much about passing the Peace. The only model I had was one in which the presbyter stood at the altar steps and said to the congregation, “The Peace of the Lord be always with you,” and then passed the peace to acolytes who then went down the aisle passing it to the persons at the ends of the pews, who in turn passed it along their pew. The presbyter stood in place, benignly watching over it all.
In our discussion, after the walls were covered with flip-sheets of comments pro and con, of complaints and wishes, of suggestions and counter-suggestions, we discovered two fundamental concerns—did everybody have to take part? And why wasn’t the rector taking part, why was he just standing there watching, why wasn’t he taking part like everybody else?
The first concern was easy. We wouldn’t insist on passing the Peace from one person to another. Instead we would make it free form. When the presbyter said the Peace, instead of having the acolytes pass the Peace down from him to the pews, neighbors could turn and shake hands with neighbors and give the Peace if they wished. But nobody had to.
The second concern really got to me. What! They didn’t want me to stand up there in my cocoon, my protective shell! They wanted me to come down among them! I hadn’t realized up till this moment how much being “up there” at the altar, in that holy place, meant I was separated—even protected—from the congregation. If the Peace was going to be instituted I was going to have to change my relationship to them.
I gulped and agreed. It was a major turning point—for me and for them.
What is important here is to notice the congruence of the change in worship style and the change in leadership style. I led the parish into a new way of making decisions and the parish led me into a new way of worship congruent with our new relationship. We still had a long way to go, but this one change set us on our path.
This step marked a revolution in several ways. Previously our physical arrangement had been clearly hierarchical and formal. Parishioners sat or knelt in rigid rows—pews—facing one direction, toward the altar, at which the ordained minister stood with his back to them. It was very much like an army—the officer in front, the troops at his rear. The relationship was troops to officer.
Now the “troops” paid attention to each other. Now they were a community, not just soldiers following a leader; and their leader was having to come down among them, be one of them.
The hats and doilies soon went. Handshakes frequently became hugs. The formal words of the Peace were soon joined by informal words of friendship. The moment became one of friendly chaos.
And now the rector was in the midst, not up front. Now he was part of the community, not the austere remote figure up there next to God.
This Sunday face expressed the new collegial decision-making method. This Sunday face was congruent with the new leadership style and with the new communal relationships.
But old habits die hard. Old clergy-centered ceremonial actions persist, even with the best of collegial intentions.
An important liturgical reform introduced in the 60’s and 70’s was to move Baptism into the center of Sunday worship. Baptisms were no longer to be seen primarily as individual or family events, but as actions of the community. So they were moved from private celebration to Sunday communal celebration.
It amazes me how long it took me to discover a major incongruity in the way we did these Sunday baptisms. Communal they were in many ways. But when the candidates were presented for baptism, we did it the way it had always been done. I stood in the aisle, in front, facing the congregation, and the baptismal party stood with their backs to the congregation, facing me. For this communal act the candidates were presented to the ordained minister!
This went on for several years until one day, at a rehearsal, somebody pointed out the incongruity. Why were the candidates being presented to the ordained minister? Why were they not being presented to the community?
So we reversed the order. I stood in the middle of the congregation. The baptismal party stood at the head of the aisle facing the congregation. And the presentation now clearly expressed what we thought we were doing.
That’s the kind of incongruity that still frequently occurs among us. We believe in collegial leadership, but we still unconsciously act out our old styles.
Each denomination has its own ways. My comments are being made in terms of the tradition I know best—my own. But I will try here to look at actions that are common to many traditions, and I hope my readers will be able to examine their own traditions and be able to apply what I am saying to them.
Announcements, for example—what is the ordained minister’s role? How, if at all, do lay persons function in this event? Does the pastor make all the announcements? Or does the pastor moderate announcements made mostly by lay folk? This Sunday face dramatically proclaims leadership-style beliefs. If the pastor is preaching collegiality, if the pastor is trying to make collegial-style changes, and yet continues to make all or most of the announcements, both pastor and congregation get the message.
The same holds true for leadership in prayers. In my tradition the Book of Common Prayer italicizes the Amen at the end of some prayers and not at the end of others. In the first case the minister is to speak the text and the congregation to say the Amen. In the second case the entire prayer is to be said in unison. It seems a small point, but I find myself annoyed with ministers who say the Amen in the first type of prayer. As I see it, the prayer is to be an instance of partnership, of difference in roles, each completing the other. The minister acts articulates the text and the congregation ratifies it. When the minister says—or, even worse, leads—the Amen, that important partnership is disrupted.
In traditions of pastoral prayer in which the ordained minister not only speaks the prayer but composes it either in advance or extemporaneously I hesitate to intrude. But I do wonder if there can be some way to express partnership in this act? In my own tradition I know that more and more prayers are being said in unison—even those printed with an italicized Amen—and I take this to be an expression of collegial leadership beliefs.
Offerings are commonly taken up these days by all manner of folk—even children. And that strongly speaks collegial belief. But at the same time I wonder if it is truth-telling. Who controls the money in congregational life? Who decides how it is raised, how it is spent? Ought not these people to be the ones who take up the money? And if we don’t like who that turns out to be, ought we not to do something about that?
That’s my basic thesis—in our Sunday face we want to be telling the truth we really intend to carry out. And if there’s an inconsistency, we ought to be doing something about it—either changing the Sunday face to tell the truth as it is, or change our leadership behavior to fit our Sunday face.
There are many details in the pastor’s Sunday face—the pastor’s use of voice (We all know what a “preachy” voice sounds like.), where the pastor stands and sits, the pastor’s body movements, vestments, etc. What message do these details send?
And there are lay behaviors that also speak loud and clear. In my tradition it is common, for example, for lay persons to want to know what they are “supposed to do” during the service—when are they supposed to stand, sit, say responses, etc. The standard of behavior is often set by some firm-minded person up front who sits at a certain point, and then everybody sits; stands, and everybody stands.
I am not saying that lay and ordained persons are to behave alike, that for the pastor to take a key role, and for his or her actions to express that role, is somehow wrong. No. Not at all. The pastor is the elder. The pastor’s role is eldership—presiding over the life of the congregation in pastoral care, in preaching, in worship, in decision-making. The Sunday face of both lay and ordained needs to express these differences in role.