Negotiating new realities

We were at the tail end of the G.W. Bush administration, and the mild discomfort that we had been feeling since 2001 became agonizing. The stock market tumbled. The housing bubble met a sharp needle. College graduates accumulated debt to get their degree, but it didn’t actually ensure them a job. People began to go into bankruptcy because they couldn’t pay their medical expenses. Gas prices had crept from a dollar a gallon to four a gallon. Each day revealed a new, disturbing banking scandal.   

In our corner of the economy, excellent pastors got fired and many took wage and benefit cuts. In some cases, congregations didn’t realize that their decrease in membership was a national trend that had a lot to do with shifting demographics. They needed to change in order to reach a new generation. Sometimes membership resisted the transformation that pastors wanted, then turned and blamed the pastor when the church decreased in size. Endowments shrank, older generations passed away, and congregations began to feel the effects of not reaching out to younger generations. The new reality became very stressful for pastors.

In all of it, most of us woke up to the fact that we would need to start living much differently. In our home, even though our income had not changed, we began to prepare. We dug up our lawn and planted a garden, banned using credit cards, junked our second car, eliminated as much debt as we could, and learned to live without much air conditioning. We thought more about the planet-at-large, changed our light bulbs to CFLs, and stopped celebrating Christmas as the great American hoard-a-thon. I cut back on clothes and haircuts. We realized that the days of pastors having secure jobs were over. We were just like everybody else in our economy.