Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Active Pastors who have Lost Their Faith anniversary post number 11 by Bart Ehrman Here's a post that covers a topic many of you have wondered about, either of others of you have asked me about, and yet others of you may never have thought much about pastors in the pulpit who are no longer believers. Wow. This is anniversary post number 11 from April of 2023.
[00:00:27] Are you curious about Christian pastors who have lost their faith?
[00:00:31] You may not know this, but if you're in a Christian church, whether it's a traditional Roman Catholic church or Episcopalian or Southern Baptist, whether it's independent, Bible thumping, fire and brimstone fundamentalist, your priest or your pastor may be losing his or her faith. They may already have lost it, and yet they're still in the pulpit.
[00:00:51] There are some times when you might suspect something was up, other times you'd have no clue.
[00:00:57] I've been there on both sides of that equation.
[00:01:00] I won't talk about the loss of faith on the part of pastors who are preaching in front of me every week, but I can say something about myself in the pulpit, desperately trying to hold on to my faith and seeing it ooze away from me while preaching every week on the radio.
[00:01:15] It's not a pleasant feeling and it can lead to massive confusion, self doubt, self condemnation, and uncertainty about what to do and where to turn.
[00:01:25] Many of my classmates at Moody Bible Institute went off directly from there to be missionaries and pastors and are still serving the church now, over 40 years later.
[00:01:36] Our education there involved not only the Bible and theology classes, but also classes on preaching, on Christian education, on evangelism, and so on.
[00:01:47] I myself was not sure what I would do when I graduated missionary. I considered it pastor, maybe more education. Yep, I went down that route.
[00:01:57] In my final year at Moody, I became a youth pastor at a church in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and I led Bible studies and prayer meetings and trillions of social activities with high school and college kids and young adults.
[00:02:10] I did it for three years while finishing my degree at Wheaton and I loved it. But I didn't think I wanted that to be my life.
[00:02:18] Then I went to seminary. I decided at that point not to go into ministry, but to get credentialed to teach at the university level.
[00:02:26] My idea was to have a different kind of ministry in a secular setting. As an evangelical spokesperson with academic credentials.
[00:02:34] I had known a lot of professors teaching among the evangelicals. I wanted to be an evangelical among the secular professors, a Christian mission to the secular academic world.
[00:02:45] In the course of my Seminary training. I was not allowed to take only the topics I was really interested in the history of early Christianity, the Old Testament and the New Testament. I had to take courses in preaching, in pastoral counseling, in church administration, in Christian education, and so on.
[00:03:01] I received the same training as everyone else, most of whom were training for lifelong ministry.
[00:03:08] It was a Presbyterian seminary, so most of my friends from those days were heading to the Presbyterian ministry and are still there.
[00:03:14] I myself was active in an evangelical church in those days, running the adult education programs.
[00:03:21] When I got into my PhD program, I continued on in the church.
[00:03:25] By that time we had moved to an American Baptist church. It's an interesting denomination, not as consistently conservative theologically or politically as the Southern Baptist Church has now become.
[00:03:38] My church was certainly conservative in many ways, but it was in Princeton and there was a broad range of theological and political views there.
[00:03:46] I was at the time heading toward a more liberal view of things in every way. As I advanced in my education during the second year of my PhD program, the pastor of the church left and the governing board asked if I would serve as an interim pastor for a year.
[00:04:01] So I did. I preached most weeks on the radio. I performed church duties and services.
[00:04:08] Funerals were not high on my list of pleasurable pastimes. I visited the sick and the grieving. I organized and I ran the whole thing.
[00:04:16] And I was losing my faith.
[00:04:20] I don't need to explain why here, just one very quick anecdote. One Sunday, I gave a sermon dealing with how a certain passage of the Bible tried to explain why there can be such intense suffering in a world created by a good God.
[00:04:34] Afterward, a parishioner came up to me. He was a lovely man with a gentle disposition and tears in his eyes. And he gave me a hug. He and his wife were stalwart members of the church and their 17 year old son had committed suicide the year before. And they didn't know how to handle it, how to make sense of it, how to have faith in the light of it.
[00:04:55] This kind soul simply appreciated someone actually talking about the hard problems of the church, even if there were no obvious answers.
[00:05:05] Pastors confront this kind of thing all the time. It really beggars belief what some pastors deal with, getting into the horrible lives that so many people have to deal with.
[00:05:15] And some of these pastors lose their faith for a variety of reasons. It happens all the time. These are humans.
[00:05:23] But what do pastors do when they are losing their faith?
[00:05:27] How do they keep ministering to those in need? How do they keep preaching Each week, assuring mourners at funerals. How do they keep following the church rituals of baptism and communion and so on.
[00:05:39] In my case, it wasn't so bad.
[00:05:41] After a year, the church found a pastor and I left to go to another church. And my slide continued. But I didn't have to feel like a hypocrite standing in the pulpit, preaching something I wasn't as sure about anymore, let alone preaching something I didn't believe, and counseling people in a faith I wasn't sure I held.
[00:05:59] Others are not so lucky.
[00:06:01] It's very, very difficult to lose your faith emotionally and socially. What you've always believed is getting sucked away from you, and you have based your entire life on it.
[00:06:11] You may have a deeply religious spouse, kids, parents and friends.
[00:06:16] Everyone looks up to you for spiritual guidance and support. You are to be a model, and the model is crumbling.
[00:06:24] And one thing outsiders may not think about as much if you leave the pulpit, you can't just find another comparable job.
[00:06:30] You've never done or thought about another job, and you aren't trained for another job. You have a family that you're the sole or main support for, and your kids need a place to live, clothes and food. And how are you literally going to survive if you lose your faith?
[00:06:46] This is an incredibly tough position to be in. It's a horrible situation to be in.
[00:06:52] Some simply gut it out and hold on to what little faith they have as best they can.
[00:06:58] Others feel forced to be a hypocrite for the good of everyone else, to continue to comfort and help those in need and doubt, to avoid destroying the emotions and lives of family and loved ones, and so on. Yet others realize they simply can't live on with themselves. And so they admit the problem, they leave the church, and they try to figure out a way to mend all the relationships and move on somehow, but not always successfully. There are some heartbreaking stories out there.
[00:07:26] Most of you will not know about this, but there is an organization that came into existence eight years ago to deal with precisely this problem.
[00:07:35] It's called the Clergy Project.
[00:07:37] You can find its public page here.
[00:07:46] There's also a nice Wikipedia page devoted to it and a Facebook page, and it's worth checking out. It's designed to help clergy and other religious professionals who either still active or have left the ministry and lost their faith.
[00:08:00] It's an amazing project to join. One does have to have been a religious professional, not just Christian, but any religion who now does not hold supernatural beliefs. Applicants are carefully vetted to make sure there's no trolls and people in this situation can join completely anonymously.
[00:08:21] The group is massively protective of identities. No one needs to know who you are unless you are ready to come out.
[00:08:28] The group provides lots of vital services. There is an online support group with others in the same boat. There's counseling services and there's career development opportunities for retooling. Pastors actually have a lot of skilled, well honed that are useful in other careers in if they can figure out how to redirect them.
[00:08:46] There are monetary grants for career transition and so forth.
[00:08:50] The group is justifiably pleased just now that they have reached a milestone of 1,000 members. It's a great accomplishment as the numbers continue to grow.
[00:08:59] Members come from a large range of Christian denominations and groups, but not only there. It also has Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Scientologists and others.
[00:09:10] This blog is a source of support for a cross section of religious and non religious people.
[00:09:15] I know a lot of people on the blog who have also lost their faith. Others have started to have some doubts, yet others are completely committed to their faith as much as others. We represent a broad swathe of religious and non religious communities and hopefully being together in this format is helpful to people no matter what their commitments and views.
[00:09:36] Whatever our views, it is important to be supportive of one another and to realize that there are others in our boat with us.
[00:09:43] The Clergy Project does this in a very focused way. We do it in a different way.
[00:09:48] The goal for both is to help people think through matters of importance to their personal, religious, spiritual, emotional and intellectual lives.
[00:09:56] Both to help them come to what they really think is the truth, and to support them as they move forward in life thinking and believing as they do.
