SHORT OR LONG PASTORATES.
The question is being discussed in many journals, "How long ought a
minister to stay in one place?" Clergymen and laymen and editors are
wagging tongue and pen on the subject--a most practical question and easy
to answer. Let a minister stay in a place till he gets done--that is, when
he has nothing more to say or do.
Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are
after a twenty-five years' residence in a parish so full of things that
ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity. Others get
through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to get
them away. They must be moved on by committees, and pelted with
resolutions, stuck through with the needles of the ladies' sewing society,
and advised by neighboring ministers, and hauled up before presbyteries and
consociations; and after they have killed the church and killed themselves,
the pastoral relation is dissolved.
We knew of a man who got a unanimous call. He wore the finest pair of
gaiters that ever went into that pulpit; and when he took up the Psalm book
to give out the song, it was the perfection of gracefulness. His tongue was
dipped in "balm of a thousand flowers," and it was like the roll of one of
Beethoven's symphonies to hear him read the hardest Bible names, Jechonias,
Zerubbabel and Tiglath-pileser. It was worth all the salary paid him to see
the way he lifted his pocket-handkerchief to his eyelids.
But that brother, without knowing it, got through in six weeks. He had sold
out his entire stock of goods, and ought to have shut up shop.
Congregations enjoy flowers and well-folded pocket-handkerchiefs for
occasional desserts, but do not like them for a regular meal. The most
urbane elder was sent to the minister to intimate that the Lord was
probably calling him to some other field, but the elder was baffled by the
graciousness of his pastor, and unable to discharge his mission, and after
he had for an hour hemmed and hawed, backed out.
Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister's
wife. The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a
skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side
said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his
pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar
after he had been three years eating grass like an ox. We admire long
pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who
boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows
they have been there twenty-nine years too long. Their congregations are
patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude. Meanwhile, those
churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet--not because
they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen
foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.
If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical
tyranny, it might better be abandoned. There are many ministers who go away
from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as
many who do not go soon enough. A husband might just as well try to keep
his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try
to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence. Study the best time to
quit.