kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way [repeat this over and over while you’re brushing your teeth]; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing . . . (1 Cor 13: 4–6)
That’s the secret. Piece of cake.
Now I’ll note three pieces of advice I acquired over the years that I thought were essential principles for partnership.
1/ Don’t split your own congregation. Wherever two leaders are gathered together, there will be a third person trying to play one off against the other. Don’t make this easy to do.
I got this advice from an older head pastor who had a long record of good relationships with his assistants. He gave the advice about preaching schedules: he never alternated assignments but staggered them so that no one could come only to hear one person on the staff preach. But obviously the advice goes beyond scheduling.
There are always people willing to tell you how much better you are at something than your partner is. You can’t stop this from starting, but you can stop it from continuing. However, if you need to hear this or if you resent that someone else is hearing it, I’ll say once more: do not serve in a team ministry. You’ll split the congregation apart.
2/ Don’t argue in public. There are no perfect choices, approaches, strategies, or styles in church life. No two pastors will agree on all of them. One of you will want to fill the service with music from a website called something like “New hymns with impossible rhythms that no one on earth has ever heard”; the other won’t be able to understand what’s wrong with singing some version of “Old One Hundredth” every week. Settle it in the office. Settle it and let it go. Don’t debate it at the council meeting. Don’t evaluate it in the narthex with your fans after the service. Speak with one voice.
It might seem more honest, more ingenuous, more open, to debate these things freely with everyone, to let people know you disagree. In one sense, that’s true. I didn’t mind people knowing we disagreed and compromised, but it was more important that they knew we finally agreed and supported the same decision. Also, knowing we disagreed was one thing, seeing it fought out was another. Any open, extreme disagreement will inevitably be exploited by someone else for their own purposes. You can’t let that happen.
3/ Respect each other’s work. Don’t look over each other’s shoulders. If one of you is writing the sermon, leading the adult class, planning the funeral or the wedding, negotiating with the budget committee, prioritizing visitation, let that be that. Certainly, a staff should talk, share ideas, settle on strategies and directions, evaluate what worked and what didn’t. But there’s a point where you have to accept the fact that the call to ministry and the authority of word and sacrament are no greater for you than for your partner.
Also, it never hurts to speak some words of praise.
Now, somewhere in the above reflections, you should be able to find a reason why our shared ministry is the background, not the subject, of this writing of mine.
Extremely Isolated, Extremely Cold, Extremely Dark
Our first morning in our first call was very still, very bright, very cold. It was twenty below zero, and it had been that cold for days. The ground was like steel: walking, you expected it to clang. The air was thin, sharp: breathing, you thought your lungs might crack.
From the parsonage yard, you could see both the north and the south edge of town. Beyond them, all you saw were flat, empty fields, extending farther than you would want to walk in a day. A joke I would hear every year for the next couple of decades went like this: “Well, this isn’t the end of the world. But you can just about see it from here.” While the congregation helped us unload our trucks, my daughter announced she was going to walk downtown and see what it had to offer.
About an hour later, I saw she had returned. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, out of the way, slumped down, staring at nothing. I walked over, she moved her eyes slightly to acknowledge my presence.
I said, “And the verdict is—?”
“I’m going to go upstairs and hang myself.” She stood up and left the room. It was a great exit line.
(I will note, to reassure the reader, that she did not, in fact, hang herself. Her more considered judgment, delivered that night, was that she would finish school, move to a city, and never return. And that’s what she did, living her adult life in New York and Chicago. Her idea of a vacation is to go to London, Paris, or Los Angeles. Her idea of a visit to the wilderness is to go to Atlanta or Milwaukee.)
People were always telling me “this is a great place to raise kids,” but I was never sure even they believed it. They would usually say it as though that was the consolation prize for living in a place so remote, with so little to offer. It was a fifty-mile drive to a decent movie theatre; if you wanted a choice of movies, it was an eighty-mile drive. The same was true of anything else you might want that was a cut above the basic, from clothing to groceries to sports gear to wine.
I think, at best, that remark about raising children had more to do with the fear of parents than with any benefit to youth. They felt they didn’t have to worry as much as they might in a bigger town. At worst, the remark was a coded rejection of the racial and ethnic diversity they might have to face elsewhere. I met people who were still outraged that Martin Luther King’s birthday was a holiday. But growing up with people exactly like you, half of whom you’re related to, whose major life goals are getting a driver’s license and killing their first deer, seems to me no advantage at all to a young person, let alone a great one.
The teachers I knew made heroic efforts to bring as much of the world as they could to their students. But as the rural areas lost population, the schools were collapsing into themselves: consolidating, cutting budgets, offering less. The same was true of every other institution that might sustain a community, from hospitals to hardware stores to police departments to churches.
There were barely three hundred people in our town, only five thousand in the entire county. Our town had no doctor, no dentist, no police officer. The nearest hospital was twelve miles away when we came; after it closed, the nearest was fifteen, with a doctor so dismissive of people’s complaints he was known as “Doctor Death.” The sheriff’s office, which had to do more and more of the law enforcement, was fifteen miles away.
One year, on Halloween, all the street lights were shot out. Another year, somebody shot up the bank: the bank tellers had their picture taken for the local paper pointing to the hole in the wall, as they might have done when Wyatt Earp was still alive. (By the time we left, the bank was gone, too.)
But the thing that really isolated you was the winter, especially the extreme cold.
I was up one January night, unable to sleep. We had an old mercury thermometer just outside the kitchen window. (Because of the heat loss through the window, the thermometer would usually register a little higher than the actual temperature.) To torture myself mentally, I tried to see how cold it was, but I couldn’t make out the mercury in the tube. I got a flashlight and shined it through the window. There was no mercury: it had dropped below the forty below line and was huddled in the bottom of the tube, like a wounded animal.
It could be forty below zero for weeks. People made a valiant attempt to keep their lives going but it took a real effort to leave the house for anything but the most necessary trips and, by the end of January, the isolation would be getting to everybody.
We did a funeral one spring after a horrible cold spell. During the funeral lunch, we were talking to some of the relatives who had come quite a distance. The conversation, as it often does in Minnesota, turned to winter weather. One of the out-of-town ladies shrugged and said, “Well, cold is cold. So you just dress up. What’s the big deal?”
The locals stared at her in disbelief. One said, “You don’t go outside much, do you?” Another said, “And you sure aren’t from around here.”
It’s hard to convey how devastating extreme cold can be to someone who’s never experienced it. Once you’re used to northern Minnesota,