Plural Non-salary – An ePistle by Joanna Wave Willoughby – DEVOTION: A Blog by Brethren Life and Thought

My name is Joanna Willoughby and I am a lay-leader at Common Spirit Church of the Brethren in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a microchurch in the Michigan District that started 10 years ago. Together with Roya Stern and Randall Westfall, we make up the leadership team using a Nonsalaried Team Ministry model. Outreach Magazine defines a microchurch as, “an intentionally simple, streamlined approach to church that’s often small, volunteer-led, and informal in style. Typically, these spiritual communities involve five to thirty-five people.”¹ We have intentionally remained informal and volunteer lead. We also spent our first decade as a house church, but we have recently started meeting in a local church building. In both settings, our average attendance has been between fifteen and twenty people. Some groups define themselves as a house church and others may say microchurch. In my experience, many traditional churches meet the criteria of being a microchurch as defined by size but not by the informal, volunteer-led structure.

When we first started meeting in 2011, the Nonsalaried Ministry model was unfamiliar within our district and met with some head-scratching. It had been a very long time since a congregation had intentionally operated this way. Some wondered how a church, especially a church plant, could function without a designated pastor. It was suggested that Common Spirit would never become a real church because there was not enough traditional structure. But there’s really nothing new for the Church of the Brethren in such a model, as noted by James Meyer’s 1975 article in Brethren Life and Thought:

Brethren have always held the view of the priesthood of all believers. In fact, the existence of the ‘high’ clerical ministry in Europe was part of the basis of the resistance movement which led to the formation of our church. The highly trained ministry tends to project the image that it is only those with a particular training who are eligible to preach the Word, lead in worship, and minister to various needs. The move toward the professional ministry today [note: from the 1950s on] is leading us back to the very thing that our founding fathers rejected.

Due in part to a shortage of trained ministers in 1996, the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference Standing Committee addressed the issue of Free Ministry and called together a task team to report back. In 1997, the team reported back to the Standing Committee:

In the Spring 1967 issue of Brethren Life and Thought, in an article entitled ‘The Free Ministry,’ Harold S. Martin writes: Historically, the ordained ministry within the Church of the Brethren consisted of a system known as the plural free ministry. Each congregation was served by more than one ordained [person] who earned their livelihood at regular occupations and gave their service to the church without charge.²

The Church of the Brethren Annual Conference adopted the report and a polity statement on free ministry was added as a new section titled “Plural Nonsalaried Ministry” in the Ministry chapter of the Church of the Brethren Manual of Organization and Polity. The polity describes the process of calling, training, and credentialing nonsalaried ministers. Currently, there are training options for ministers in these settings through the Brethren Academy including Education for a Shared Ministry and Training in Ministry. In the gathering of statistics, the Church of the Brethren stopped using the term Plural Ministry in the 2017 Church of the Brethren Yearbook and adopted Team Ministry in its place.³

There is an important distinction between Free Ministry and Nonsalaried Ministry. Often the terms are used interchangeably but they are not the same. Nonsalaried Ministers are often reimbursed for their time and travel through special offerings or other funds. Free Ministers donate their time and travel with no expectation of reimbursement. While our leadership model lies somewhere in between the Free Ministry and the Plural Nonsalaried Ministry model, our congregation has benefitted from the knowledge and expertise of seminary-trained ministers. Our congregation reimburses expenses for training and conferences but not other expenses incurred by our ministry work. We do give an honorarium and pay mileage for our congregation’s moderator for business meetings and we also pay mileage and an honorarium for any special speaker we ask to visit.

Having a group of leaders to respond to the needs of our very small congregation has worked well more often than not. No one has been overburdened with responsibility. We are each able to give as much time as we are able or to step back and replenish our energy when we need to. Someone is generally available for any needs that may arise such as a person being in the hospital or needing a ride to an appointment. There is a sounding board to discuss ideas and problems instead of one person needing to solve every issue on their own. Volunteering to lead the service once every other month is much easier to do rather than every single week. Each of us brings our unique gifts and personalities to serve the congregation. Roya Stern has a deep sense of Church of the Brethren history and practice. She grew up as a pastor’s daughter and helps our congregation stay sensitive to our expectations of one another. She works as a substitute teacher and is very good at keeping discussions organized. She has advanced degrees in both theological studies and sociology. Randall Westfall brings with him a connection with Creation and musical talent. He works in outdoor ministry as Director at Camp Brethren Heights. His job has him working with every church in the Michigan District so he helps maintain relationships with other congregations. He is finishing his studies in the TRIM program at Brethren Academy. In the past year, he has also organized a small group of men who met to support one another during the times when our church was unable to meet in person. I organize the communication, run the social media accounts and receive the mail. Together, we function pretty well.

In our congregation’s current practice, having a Plural Ministry team has left our congregation with more financial resources for outreach. Our congregation has been able to focus on giving funds to organizations and projects that are doing work that is important to our mission. We have donated money to Camp Brethren Heights, Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests, a food pantry, and organizations that serve people experiencing homelessness, substance abuse disorder, and domestic violence. We have also given our time and talents to local ministries. Our work helping a refugee family settle into their new life in the United States inspired three of our youth to complete internships working with New Americans. When a member of the congregation began working with an educational gardening program, she organized a blessing of the garden and workdays for the congregation. Another church member has organized a Christmas caroling outing at a local hospital for several years in a row. With no designated pastor, we have been forced, by design, to share the work among ourselves rather than rely on someone else to handle it simply because they are being paid.

Worship planning, visiting, and administration don’t fall on one person. I have taken on the role of administration. Our congregation, until recently, has been a house church so I would make the schedule of where we planned to meet, who was leading the service, and what people should plan to bring for the shared meal. Roya Stern and I both check the emails that come in and fill out forms that need to be sent in for the denomination. I post announcements and information on the Facebook page and I share details for our meetings in the Facebook group. I participate in our shared worship planning discussion to make sure that each Sunday is covered by someone. When new people are interested in attending, I have often been the one to meet with them and help get them acquainted with our congregation. Often, I will be the one who handles requests for help and prayer. I bring these requests to the others on the Leadership Team to decide how we should handle the situation.

We definitely know that no method is perfect. There have been times when we have had miscommunication and let things fall through the cracks. Recently, I thought someone had volunteered to lead the service and they had not confirmed with me. It was the first Sunday at our new location and we ended up having a very good conversation about our future as a congregation in our new space. Flexibility and clear communication is something that we continue to work on. Our collaborative style has enabled us to make decisions that work well for everyone in our group. Several years back, a family asked the group to change the meeting time to finish earlier so kids could get home and be ready for school. Another family requested that we meet on the second and fourth Sundays to avoid time conflicts with another church they attend. Having that informal and simplified structure made it easier to be flexible for the needs of these families.

In the beginning, our congregation tried very hard to take turns so that each congregation member would have the opportunity to lead. We spent a season where each person shared their personal faith story with the group. It was very meaningful to learn new things about people who have known each other for a long time. Another time we used The Bible Project videos and discussed them as a group. We slowly lost the rhythm of sharing leadership among the whole group and relied on worship planning from me, Roya, and Randall. In an effort to get back to everyone leading, we are currently using the Jesus in the Neighborhood Bible Study available from Brethren.org. It is helpful and less intimidating to have a framework to work from. Music has also been a worship aspect we have struggled with. We have several very gifted musicians but before we started meeting in our current location, we didn’t always have instruments available. One person found a way to play hymns by playing the instrumental version on YouTube through a speaker. We now have access to a piano in our new location so that will prove to be helpful. Embracing technology to enhance our worship together has been a slow transition. We have been able to have hybrid worship services on Zoom by connecting a tv screen to a laptop and placing a microphone in the middle of the group. We are slowly adapting.

I have been concerned about whether or not our microchurch would continue to be sustainable if one of us were to move away or leave the congregation. Ideally, new leadership should be called from within our congregation on a rotating basis so that each person would have a chance to be in leadership for a shorter time. It would also help us be more intentional about cultivating and equipping leadership from within our group. Because our congregation is only 10 years old, we haven’t had to go through a major change yet. A congregation that revolves around one or two people’s style and personality could lose the Brethren way of believing in the priesthood of all believers. Becoming stagnant is a concern. Without ministry projects that people are passionate about, it’s hard to keep up the momentum. When someone makes a suggestion, we have tried hard to be ready and willing to follow their leading.

During the beginning of the Covid Pandemic, we switched to meeting virtually to meet the needs of our congregation. We met weekly instead of twice each month to help overcome the isolation and loneliness that people were feeling. Recovering from the Covid Pandemic has proven to be a difficult time for many churches. Not everyone is ready to resume life as it was before. With a microchurch, it’s hard to regroup after such a massive disruption. Some of our people did not feel that comfortable meeting virtually. Being unable to sing together or eat together over Zoom didn’t have the same experience. We have started meeting in person again but some people don’t feel comfortable in groups yet. There have been weeks that we have switched from a planned in-person meeting to a virtual meeting at the last minute. Remaining flexible to meet the spiritual needs of our congregation has been key. Either way, our congregation has never had to worry about being able to pay the salary of a pastor if an in-person offering wasn’t collected.

Currently, there are many Church of the Brethren congregations that fit the definition of a microchurch from a size perspective but not the informal or simplified style. For a congregation challenged by trying to find full-time pastoral leadership, Nancy Heischman from the Church of the Brethren Office of Ministry suggests that nonsalaried plural ministry could be a positive step in reclaiming the value in the priesthood of all believers. She says, “The varied gifts of the Holy Spirit are present in congregations and need to be called out and put to use for vibrant ministry.” Calling church members to share their time and talents is often less intimidating if the person is not expected to have all the qualities desired in a pastor. Within each congregation, there are many gifts to be shared.

Keeping track of how many churches use the Non-Salaried model is a big task. According to the Church of the Brethren Yearbook Specialist Jim Miner, there are 31 congregations currently in the Church of the Brethren that fit the criteria of having Non-Salaried leadership. The statistics are difficult to track because even our congregation was not on that list. The Church of the Brethren Yearbook used to use the term Plural Ministry for data collected up until 2016 but currently, they use the term Team Ministry. There is also no designation for Free Ministry as opposed to Non-Salaried. It is hard to know which congregations fall into which category. Additionally, I would assume that there are quite a few smaller congregations who operate on a Non-Salaried leadership model temporarily in times when they don’t have a pastor employed. Many congregations also use Pulpit Supply for Sunday morning leadership and divide the rest of the administrative tasks up among congregation members. Pulpit Supply implies that Sunday morning leadership is not necessarily led by a member of the congregation. While these congregations may define themselves as using a different model, they likely embrace many aspects of Non-Salaried ministry.

Non-Salaried Team Ministry is a model that works for us at Common Spirit Church of the Brethren. In our micro-church setting, we have been able to function well for the last ten years. Our congregation may change in the future but for now, it’s where we are.

Joanna Wave Willoughby lives near Grand Rapids, Michigan with her husband and the two youngest of their four children. She serves on the leadership team at Common Spirit Church of the Brethren and has served the church in other capacities. She spends her time growing plants and showing up where she is needed.