Serve the church, not the attachment

Recently one of my coachees made an incredibly wise observation, which she has graciously permitted me to share. She was mulling how she wants to approach her resignation letter to her congregation, and she had requested samples from colleagues. Some of them, she noted, seemed to be geared toward preserving the church’s goodwill toward the departing pastor. The messages boiled down to, “Don’t blame me for leaving. If it were up to me, I’d stay with you forever!” Even though these ministers would need to step away from relationships with congregants for ministerial ethics reasons, they still wanted to maintain the emotional attachment. That might make everyone feel better in the short term, but it can breed discontent and stuckness in the long term.

It’s really difficult to write a good resignation letter. First, this is a point at which big changes for you and congregation become real and irreversible and pick up steam quickly. Second, people will have big feelings upon reading or hearing your resignation announcement. (However uncomfortable these feelings are, they are better than your congregants responding to your exit plan with, “Meh.”) Third, these letters come after months of discernment on your part, during which you might already have felt like you are betraying her congregation by contemplating leaving. You might have a lot of guilt - or anger, depending on the circumstances surrounding your exit, which adds its own challenges to composition. Fourth, there are also things you can’t, or at least probably shouldn’t, say in a resignation letter. (That doesn’t mean there won’t be other, more appropriate venues such as an exit interview for sharing some frank thoughts.) All of these realities make it very tempting to resort to hyperbole or half-truths.

The resignation letter, though, is a pastoral missive. The writing of it is an act of ministry, and ministry must always be in service to the congregation’s vocation as an iteration of Christ’s body. So while the letter is personal, it is not ultimately about the pastor. It is about the church. When you are writing your letter, then, consider what it is that your congregation needs as you share your news in order to move forward in hope. Is it gratitude for what you have experienced together? Is it reassurance that there are lay leaders or staff ready to pick up responsibilities, that the judicatory is on standby to lend support, or that a process for calling a new pastor is ready to be activated? Is it a reminder that the congregation, not the pastor, is the church?

To be sure, the resignation letter must thread a needle with a very small eye. As you write, continually ask yourself, what do I want the readers to know and to feel by the time they reach my signature, and why? How can I be a pastor in the way that I write? How do I both look backward and forward so that I can work toward a positive sense of closure with my people and prepare them to love a new minister?

This letter and leaving in general are hard, holy work. You can be a pastor to those in your care just as much in your departure as in all the good ministry you have done to that point. This worthy goal can be an orienting point for your approach to your exit.

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash.

Note: the blog is moving to Substack! I will cross-post articles here and there in September, then post only on Substack from October onward. You can find me here on Substack.