Pastors leaving the pulpit behind

Feelings of burnout or frustration cause many to pursue new careers.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
COLUMBUS, Ga. -- Brandon Robinson didn't like U.S. history class. Then last year, he transferred to high school, where his history teacher keeps a little jar of mustard seeds on his desk -- the Bible says the faith of a mustard seed is faith enough.
And on the classroom walls are motivational quotes such as "People can alter their lives by altering their attitudes."
The teacher, Tom Scott, used to be the Rev. Tom Scott of Waldrop Memorial Baptist Church.
"He is a very thorough teacher," Brandon said. "He's taught me a lot more than at my other school. I'm doing a lot better."
Decision to switch
This time last year, the 53-year-old Scott was preparing to leave his position in Columbus, Ga., where he had pastored for 11 years, to return to the classroom. Teaching was his first career, but he left it after three years to go to seminary and later became a pastor in Macon, Ga. He has extensive experience in youth ministry.
"Several things came together," said Scott, whose wife, Amelia, teaches at an elementary school. "It was time for me to leave Waldrop. I was burned out. I didn't want to pastor another church, and we didn't want to leave Columbus."
While volunteering with Teen Advisers, a faith-based organization for teenagers, he began to think about teaching again.
"Last March, I talked to some friends," he said, "and I decided it was time to go. Being a pastor was sucking the life out of me."
Scott represents a trend: pastors who leave the ordained ministry for work that's considered secular, yet which also offers them tasks they enjoyed in ordained life.
Crises and departures
Among all denominations nationwide, 1,600 ministers per month are terminated or forced to resign their pulpits, according to Sunscape Ministries in Colorado, whose focus is ministers in crisis.
Scott's denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has reported that roughly 1,400 ministers per year call a toll-free crisis hot line. And nearly 100 Southern Baptist pastors leave their churches every month.
In fact, the current pastor of the Southern Baptist Convention's founding church, the Rev. Timothy Owings, recently resigned after 13 years at First Baptist of Augusta, Ga. He has no new job.
Scott has a minister friend in Atlanta who left his church recently and is waiting tables. But Scott said pastor friends, for the most part, didn't understand his decision.
"They looked at me with pity," he recalled. "I saw it as changing vocations."
Rising frustration
As a pastor, Scott had been working hard preparing sermons, preaching weddings and funerals and visiting the sick and hurting. But he became increasingly frustrated that the congregation at Waldrop Memorial wasn't growing as his previous congregation had in Macon. He also faced conflict, which he called "intergenerational."
"The church has to make changes to reach young adults, yet you really have to feel for the people who are 70 years old who worked and gave and sacrificed and feel like the church is being taken away," he said.
Scott, caught in the cross fire, chose to get out.
The reasons clergy leave the profession are varied, individual and complex. Like Scott, some say they're burned out. The Alban Institute in Washington, D.C, reports that 17 percent of clergy are experiencing the same thing. Some pastors step down after revelations of scandal, or stir up congregational conflict and division themselves. Others are targeted by powerful factions in the churches that don't want them around.
Enjoyed teaching
"My wife always said I was a better teacher than preacher," said the Rev. John Durden, chairman of the faculty of Beacon College and Graduate School, who for 20 years was a pastor in churches in the South.
His most recent congregation is now defunct.
Durden, 48, left that church in the late '90s to become Beacon's registrar. Then he began teaching.
He said his departure from the church wasn't a rejection of congregational ministry -- he was drawn to teaching. But he admits that running a church has its share of frustrations, especially in what he calls this "postmodern culture."
"It was a difficult decision because you want to minister to people, yet there was a different opportunity to minister to a different group of people. The students are hungry, and they want to learn. In the classroom setting, you have discussion; you're exchanging ideas. You can impact an even broader audience."
Weak community
Stephen Muse left congregational ministry about a dozen years ago to become a counselor at the Pastoral Institute. He thinks the ordained ministry is harder these days than when he was in it "because there is less community and everybody thinks their way is the only way, or they take that insipid dodge of 'My way is right for me and yours for you,' which sounds comfy but in reality is a recipe for chaos."
A director of counselor training at the Pastoral Institute, Muse is an observer of how congregational ministry has changed since he left it. He led a rural Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania for 11 years, the same amount of time he's been in his current job.
"We live out of our personalities rather than our essence, and personality isn't really willing to die for anything. It's a weasel and a chameleon," Muse said. "Essence can never quite forget that we weren't put on this earth just to have a gin and tonic, lie around the pool and wait for our stock portfolio to grow large enough not to have to work anymore."