Beyond the Story with Peter Chin

In the July issue of Sojourners, Peter Chin of Rainier Avenue Church in Seattle discusses why so many pastors are stepping away from ministry in the wake of the pandemic, and how this phenomenon could fundamentally change the landscape of the American Christian faith. Editorial assistant Liz Bierly spoke with Chin about the current pressures on pastors, God’s loving-kindness, and how we courageously move forward. Read Chin’s full feature, “Here Is the Church, Here Is the Steeple – Where Is the Pastor?” in the July issue.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Liz Bierly, Sojourners: What drew you to pastoral ministry?

Peter Chin: I think pastoral ministry was definitely a call out of the blue. I had been preparing for medical school all throughout my adolescence and was taking the MCAT and doing all the pre-med requirements, and then just felt a very stark and sudden calling to ministry, which was very unexpected for me and for my family. But it did feel like a calling, and it remains that way. I don’t often feel fitted for it, to be honest, but I do feel like it’s a calling that I’m continuing to be faithful to.

Your July feature highlights that 38 percent of pastors have given real and serious consideration to stepping away from ministry. What is leading to this “great pastoral resignation?”

Even in the best of times when pastoral calling was more focused and maybe a little more simple, it was always difficult to be the leader of a community, a boss, a teacher of scripture, and a community advocate. I think what’s happened over the past decades—not even just recently—is that some other responsibilities got added on to the pastoral plates, some of them appropriately, some of them not. And that’s made an already broad calling into what feels often unsustainable.

One of those added responsibilities was the megachurch ethos, and I think that added a level of expectation that most pastors were not ready for. More recently, there was the expectation of being able to speak into issues of racial injustice—that I think was far more justified and something that should have been addressed much earlier, but that is again something that I think a lot of pastors were under-prepared for. Seminaries were not addressing that, and churches were not addressing that, so it felt very much like new territory for people. And then to do that in a global pandemic where the stakes were so high. It’s really the confluence of all those different things [that] have broken down people and cause them to question whether they’re really called to ministry or not.

Do you feel like people understand the type of pressure that people in ministry are experiencing right now?

I think it depends on the person. In terms of the unsustainability and the amount of pressure on pastors generally, I don’t think they do. I think there is kind of this sense of like, “Well, you only work one day a week.”

A lot of the cultural issues that we’re talking about—politics, race, philosophy, health, freedom—intersect with church in really substantial ways. Do you wear a mask in church? Do you close the church? What do you say about white supremacy? What do you say about racial violence? All of those get expressed in the church context, and I think that’s an element of pastoral ministry and the church context that many people don’t realize: It is the nexus of a lot of the issues that we’re struggling with, and we don’t know how church intersects with a lot of them at this point, which makes it even more difficult to navigate as a pastor.

We used to address those conversations probably once every couple of months. Nowadays, those kinds of issues of theological or political or medical divergence happen on a much more frequent scale, and they’re difficult to deal with. Controversies happen at church—that's not surprising—but the cadence is so rapid now, and the context in which we talk about these discussions is just poor for really figuring these things out. The reality is that people are ready to leave or abandon things much more quickly if things don’t align with their perspectives, and that’s across the board politically. I think a lot of pastors are saying, “I’m going to drop the mic, and I am going to walk away because I can’t do this.”

You’ve previously written about the Hebrew word chesed and how it has brought you greater peace and direction in the middle of all this rancor.

It's one of those evangelical Hebrew words that people love, and it’s interpreted or translated as “loving-kindness.” And I think I really benefitted from that word because implicit in chesed is remembrance. It’s not just an emotion, it really is historical: It gives us a sense that God has been faithful, He will be faithful. When I went deeper with it, what I realized was that chesed was not just a word that God exclusively demonstrates, it's also something that people demonstrate to one another. We love to say, “Oh, God loves me and God is going to be there for me,” but it’s more challenging to say, “I’m going to love others and I’m going to be there for them.” That's given me a lot of direction in this time, even as I can continue to wrestle with, Can I sustain this? Can I do this?

The church is in a season of disruption, yet, as you point out, that may not be a bad thing. Where do we go from here?

I think the immediate future is about processing, grieving, understanding what has happened, and asking good questions about it—real questions about the implications. I think the temptation for churches and for Christians is going back to normal but not acknowledging that normal has departed. There is no normal. We have effectively transformed people’s understanding of what church looks like and where church takes place.

Past that point, what I think really needs to happen is a time of courage. The instinct for myself and for a lot of other people would be, “Let’s go back to how it was before. It was functioning.” What really needs to happen during this moment is courageously moving forward on what we learned and the convictions at that time and not simply going back to business as usual, to say, “No, God did something, and we want to embrace the movement of the Spirit rather than just going back to how things were previously.”