Ministry after 2020? The year when COVID-19 caused clergy stress to zoom to a new level

When training pastors and chaplains, educators frequently stress the need for "boundaries" between work and home.

Clergy need -- somehow -- to find "personal" time, along with face-to-face contact with loved ones. That challenge became more difficult in the age of smartphones, texting and emails, noted Marlon C. Robinson, pastoral care director at AdventHealth in Manchester, Ky., and a specialist in marriage and family therapy.

Then came the COVID-19 lockdowns and the pressures on clergy zoomed to a whole new level.

"Everything came home, all at once," said Robinson, reached by telephone. "Pastors were spending more and more time with their families -- jammed into one space. But this wasn't quality time. Everyone was at home, but they were staring at their own phones and computer screens. There was no intimacy, and all the pressures of ministry grew even more intense."

To make matters worse, the usual struggles with church leadership and finances were complicated by political warfare and conspiracy theories that, literally, began to shape how congregations handled worship, pastoral care, education and even efforts to keep sanctuaries clean and safe.

Instead of arguing -- to cite church clichés -- about the color of new carpet or outdated hymnals, the faithful were fighting about whether masks were necessary to save lives or merely "politically correct" virtue signals.

Meanwhile, people were sick, and some died, with their pastors and families on the other side of locked hospital or nursing-home doors. And it was illegal to have funerals? Attendance dropped, along with offerings. More than a few members vanished.

Ministers "are inundated with phone calls, emails, text and WhatsApp messages, and communications through a host of other platforms," wrote Robinson, in Ministry Magazine.

While it's impossible to know how many will flee the ministry, early research indicates pastors are "experiencing intensified stress levels that … put them at increased risk for developing a mental illness. …

Time for a solid update on the changing realities in U.S. evangelicals' retail business

Hammered by superstore chains and then the online omnipresence of Amazon, America’s bookstores are struggling.

Thus there was more sorrow than shock when the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources announced on March 20 it will close down its chain of 170 brick-and-mortar stores, which sell books, Bibles, curriculum and a variety of other religious products.

Baptist Press reported the gap between LifeWay stores; sales and operating expenses grew from a manageable $2.3 million in 2010 to $35.5 million by 2017. That year, LifeWay’s chief rival, Family Christian Resources, shut all of its 240 retail locations, following the 2013 demise of the United Methodist Church’s 38 Cokesbury stores.

The Baptist collapse raises two themes for solid stories, the limits on what products religious stores should be selling, and the ongoing disruption as U.S. religious retail, dominated by evangelical Protestants, shifts toward online and phone-ordering operations. As a company, LifeWay will continue alongside the likes of family-owned Christian Book Distributors. There will be ever fewer independent stores surviving to serve as local ministry and fellowship centers.

On the first theme, officially Christian stores obviously are not going to sell lottery tickets, randy novels and movies, pop music that degrades women, or books that deviate from their faith’s doctrines. The Baptists’ no-no’s include the prosperity gospel and accounts of purported visits to heaven. Some respondents danced on LifeWay’s grave over the way its policies reflected the Southern Baptists’ narrowing definition of doctrinal fidelity.

The most-discussed example occurred in 2012 when LifeWay refused to sell “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” a slightly sassy book on the gender wars by well-known author Rachel Held Evans, published by Thomas Nelson, an evangelical subsidiary of HarperCollins that’s based in Nashville, the same city as LifeWay.