Waiting on the call process

There are snails that move faster than the pastoral call process.

My husband and I are currently waiting on the call process. We're at a complete standstill, one foot in our current call (and yes, I do consider it a call for both of us), and one foot in what could be. We'll be here for the next 3-4 months at best, testing our patience. Maybe longer. And at the end of it all, we might not even move. We might stay exactly where we are, doing exactly what we're doing.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Lutheran call process-the process by which a pastor moves from job to job-I’ll give you a quick (or not so quick) rundown.

Let’s start with a pastor's very first call. This is a significant one. Pastors are issued their first job upon graduating from seminary (pastor master's program). When a student graduates from seminary, there’s not only a graduation ceremony, but also something called Call Day. This is the ceremony in which all of the eligible seminarians who have finished their coursework get lined up in front of hundreds of people (and thousands more watching online via live stream) and are told where they’re going to be moving themselves and their wives/families to for the foreseeable future.

It’s as bad as it sounds.

It's not uncommon for wives to be spotted crying in the pews as their husbands stride across the front of the room to accept a job in a place they have no desire to be. You really have to keep your face in check that day, since people from your new congregation are probably watching every twitch of your facial muscles on their TV. I was 32 weeks pregnant on our Call Day, so I won't pretend I was exactly emotionally stable.

I really don’t recommend being this pregnant on Call Day. For one thing, I almost missed my husband’s call because baby kicked my bladder.

But I didn’t cry until later, so I count that as a win.

How do we get to Call Day? There's really only 2-3 steps total. In the final year of seminary, students (and wives if they have them) have an interview with the call director about their preferences, and then they fill out some important paperwork outlining those preferences. For the guys who want to be a sole pastor, that's it until Call Day. They walk into that late-April service blind. For the ones who want to work alongside another pastor in a larger church, the seminarians and wives interview with a handful of churches who are interested in calling a new pastor. After those interviews, you guessed it, that's it. The rest of the year, all of the fourth years and their wives are wound tighter than balls of string, wondering where they're off to in a few months. Come March, it’s all anyone is talking about.

I wish I could say this trend of living many months in active uncertainty dies with Call Day.

The thing with being a pastor is that you can’t just reach out to a church that you’re interested in working at and apply. The call process dictates that hiring churches reach out first, either to the district offices/presidents asking for those forms I mentioned earlier or directly to a pastor they’re interested in. They take a look through the forms of guys that might work with their church setting and take suggestions. After narrowing the field, someone from the hiring church fires off an email to the pastors out of the clear blue sky. “Hi, do you want to interview with us?”

Remember, they're reaching out to men who are actively working at another church, just going about their business. Sure, maybe some are hoping to get out soon, but others are blindsided by these emails.

Then all heck breaks loose (or maybe just in our house).

Thus begins the process of multiple phone interviews spanning a few months, emailing back and forth, and finally, the church offers to pay for the last candidate or two to visit their church. This is the final step before they issue a job offer to the pastor (or are turned down by a a candidate and start all over again). At some point in this process, the pastor tries to be polite (or he should) and tells his coworkers that he's seriously considering another job. That sets off a bomb of tension in the office, let me tell you.

That’s where my husband and I are currently sitting. My husband has been offered an invitation to visit a church he's been interviewing with and he accepted. It's not like we hate our current spot, but it's like any other job; sometimes your life circumstances dictate where you need to work. Our current church doesn't have much of a family or children's emphasis. We have two kids 3 & under. You do the math on why we're interested in a church with a booming school and children's minstry program. When will we visit, you ask?

Two months from now.

Two months of walking on eggshells with the church staff. My husband is already starting to read into their moves. Does a lack of questions about this new church mean they really want him out, or are they merely being polite? What if someone asks why we want to leave? Do they assume we hate them? Does he plan events down the line on the church calendar or stay in the moment? Two months of panic Googling the church and the town, trying to determine from a distance if we can see ourselves there.

And it doesn't end after the visit.

After the visit, the church takes some time to deliberate. Even if they do want to call a pastor, some churches’ bylaws expressly dictate that a certain percentage of the congregation must be present to vote on a new pastor, or that a collection of people holding certain church roles need to get together. This alone can take an additional few weeks or months. After all, it's not everyone's top prioity to hire a new pastor.

What if we visit and decide we're not interested, after all? All of this waiting will feel pointless. What if we're interested but they're not? Hopes dashed. Back to our current call with ill feelings and resentment (I'm just being honest).

For now, we are stuck in limbo, analyzing everything in our current area and current church, wondering if it’s time to leave, but then reminding ourselves in the next breath that the leaving part is really out of our hands.

On average, the call process takes 6 months to a year. It's been known to go on much longer, though. I hope you can see why. At any point, either the church or the candidate can part ways and the entire months-long process restarts. It's painful for both sides of the hiring equation.

Does anyone else feel like we could speed this up a bit with the same results?

So we’re stuck in the waiting. Waiting on the call process. We can Google the heck out of the church and the surrounding area, but otherwise we're stuck living in tension with coworkers and within our own home. Radio silence from the hiring church until we finally get to visit. And then more silence as the church deliberates.

I'm angry. I'm angry that this process is set up as some sort of glorified thing, as if God has a larger part in the pastoral job process than anything else in life and we need this impossibly complicated process to match pastors with churches to make it more divine. I simply don't feel like that's true. God is equally involved in getting pastors into churches as He is in getting you hired at the local coffee shop. We've turned into a holy hooplah, and I'm just not okay with it.

But we're all just expected to be okay with it. The churches don't mention how they're hurting without their vacant position filled, and the pastors don't speak on how hard it is to live split between two worlds for half a year or more.

But here's my question: is anyone actually okay with this?

There may have been reasons for the call process to work the way it does in other times in history. There's a reason for everything, and I'm sure there's one for this process. However, it doesn't seem to be serving anyone well anymore. Maybe that's just me and my husband. Perhaps we're the odd, unsatisfied ducks in the pond of pastors' families.

So, here's to the waiting. (And yes, I probably will be getting out a glass of wine with my husband tonight as we hash this out yet again.)

To the pastors' wives who are in this stalled boat, waiting to see what's next for your family with eagerness that isn't matched by the speed of the process, I see you. At least I hope I'm not alone in this.

And if you're reading this and can actually make some tweaks to bring the call process into the 21st century, please do. I think a lot of us would thank you.

Love,

The Pastor's Wife