[to an Internet group of Australian Baptist pastors]…

These days when I’m asked what is the major human factor predicting ‘success ‘ (whatever that means 🙂 in ministry, my response is ‘They chose their parents well!’

Freud said, ‘The child is psychological father to the adult….’ Building on Freud, Erik Erikson described eight stages of life in which we, ideally, develop lasting traits, such as trust, independence, purpose, feeling of competence, an ability to love, etc. A massive amount of clinical experience with disturbed patients has confirmed that early psychological experiences were important causes.

I’m writing an article on this for the Baptists in W.A. Watch for it on this site…

BTW… Another question: do we (ie. the Baptist Union) have any _moral_ obligation to care for someone who has invested four or five years of their lives to be ‘trained’, then become one of us, only to fall by the wayside? How much – six sessions with a psychologist?

At a recent reunion of Blackburn Baptist folk from the 70s/80s I said I inherited a church without any skeletons in the cupboard. Not entirely true. A guy had spent a thousand hours making an organ, which he donated to the church, but which occasionally broke down (not a pleasant happening, when you’re recording a service for an ABC broadcast!), and before I got there the deacons had to pull the plug on it. Which caused deep hurt. About six months into my pastorate there, the secretary and I visited him and expressed our sorrow/appreciation to him – which, his widow told me the other day, made a significant difference…

I can think of a couple of hundred Baptist ex-pastors who could benefit from something like this – from someone in authority (yes, we’re all busy…)

Another example of our abysmal approach to all this: a Baptist ex-pastor in another state thought his credentials were current, and happened to come across a Yearbook – to discover his name was not there! No contact from anyone, no phone call, no pastoral care… We’ve got to do better than this!

Also: about half of all Baptist ex-pastors tell me they had no significant pastoral/caring contact from their peers when they left pastoral ministry…

Rowland Croucher

April 2002