The four-year itch

by Clair Earls

You've probably noticed it's September. The days are lengthening, trees are budding and spring is in the air. But something else happened on September 1 that you probably didn't notice. "Calling season" started-and your pastor is up for grabs.

Many pastors and their families anticipate this time of year with about the same enthusiasm ducks have for hunting season. For the uninitiated, it is the time when conference presidents and committees look around the other conferences and pick out the pastors they want to work for them. It is an involved process with various rules and levels of committees but eventually, the pastor gets the phone call to say that he or she is in the sights.

The months of September, October and November are nervous ones for your pastor and his or her family. Calling season may come and go without the phone call to move out of a conference but then comes the conference executive committee, when the final placement of pastors within a conference is decided. It is a time of stomach butterflies and twitchy nerves, a time when any phone call from the conference office is treated with suspicion, and when plans are made to be broken.

So, how long has your pastor been at your church? Most of you could count the years on one hand. We jokingly refer to it as the "Great Advent movement," in which pastors who have stayed in one place for more than five years are seen as the exception rather than the rule.

I am married to a pastor. We have not yet stayed in one place for more than four years. Maybe next year we will break that trend. But I don't know yet-calling season hasn't finished.

I do know, however, that many pastors' families suffer from a three- or four-year itch. Maybe it is a conditioned trait because we get moved around so often. But about now, the grass is starting to look greener somewhere else. There is a certain level of excitement about moving: a new town, possibly in another state; new house; new curtains; and, if we are lucky, maybe even a new friend or two. Who knows, maybe the next church might even be close to some of our family.

While we might dread the thought of that phone call from the conference office, it can also be the easy way out. It scratches the itch and takes the responsibility off us. But nothing good comes from moving for the sake of moving. Perseverance pays off. We might be making a tiny difference, even if we can't see it yet. If we move, we and the church have to start all over again. There will be six months of just getting to know people and trying to figure out what is happening before we can make any meaningful contribution in the new place.

I know the arguments. I use them on myself when I feel like it would be easier to just start again. That's been often lately. But an experienced pastor once put it like this: "If you move between churches every two years, at the end of 20 years you don't have 20 years' experience-you have two years' experience repeated 10 times."

If your pastor has been around for three or four years-or more or less-now would be a good time to let him or her know that you appreciate what has been done. Now would be a good time to take notice of what happens in your church and get involved if you can. Now is the time to speak up and help scratch the itch. Don't let your pastor go just because he or she is discouraged and too tired to resist a move.

But in the meantime, as I fill out school enrolment forms and plan our Christmas holidays, I do so with the constant niggling doubt of whether we will even be here next year. Should I do a spring clean and tidy up all my cupboards, or will it all get done in a couple of months when the removalists do their thing?

I think I will clean out my cupboards and hope. Maybe the itch can be scratched in some other way this year.

Clair Earls is a pseudonym.

This has been a feature from Record, September 19, 2009

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