The Pastors' Conference

Today was day 2 of the pastors' conference. I decided we'd better deal with their most pressing issues, even though they were not really about contemporary culture. So I taught them two English words: vent and brainstorm. We looked back at our list of topics and identified all those relevant to the life of pastors. Basically they boil down to the fact that pastors aren't paid. Both venting and brainstorming were new concepts, and the conversation went well. Several people thanked me for giving them the opportunity to speak openly about their problems. Actually it worked out pretty well -- using "I am a pastor's wife, so I know something about the burdens pastors carry" gave me the rhetorical stance to pull it off.

Here is what it's like to be a priest in the diocese of Lui: You have no salary from the church. You have to cultivate sorghum to keep your family alive. You don't really have the resources to buy clothing for the family, much less clergy shirts and vestments. You have trouble scraping up the income to pay your children's school fees -- registration, uniforms, and exam fees, plus room and board, at least for girls, in secondary school. You have no money for health care for yourself and your family. You are so busy cultivating that it is very difficult to find time for pastoral calls and work in the church. You have almost no formal theological education and no training on modern technology. You might not have gone beyond about 4th grade, actually. If you want to send a message to someone, it may or may not get there; you have no phone, mail service, Internet, or car. You may not even have a bicycle. That was venting.

When we came to brainstorming, I talked about the idea of base pay and asked them what they would consider reasonable base pay here. They went off to the other side of the cathedral, away from our team and the diocesan staff, to discuss this. They came back with the figure 500 Sudanese pounds per month, roughly 200 USD. I asked them how they could generate it. They thought that if each archdeaconry had a large farm, it could generate pay for pastors. The end result of that conversation is that they really need a tractor to cultivate larger plots so they can earn money by farming. But this seems hopeful. The other track of thinking was encouraging congregations to tithe.

So then we moved on to brainstorm the various problems caused by no salary. We talked about having the Mothers' Union sewing shop create local vestments. (Mary and I put in a plug for using local fabric and embroidery instead of wearing used woolens from the UK and US.) We talked about the possibility of church schools waiving fees for pastors' children. This is a no-go. I said more than I realized I knew or believed about the relationship between a priest and his or her parish, and suggested that even if the congregation couldn't pay a salary, they could agree to provide school tuition. And I talked a little bit about stewardship in general and the responsibilities of laypeople. Then we looked at one of Paul's passages of encouragement for the church and talked about what the bible promises and how God can carry us through even when our own schemes and plans fail us.

I think it went well, but it was nevertheless quite depressing. At the point when I felt pretty hopeless, the pastors came back with comments about their faith in God to take care of them that cheered me up, and Mary gave a response to all their discussions that wrapped everything up very nicely, so we broke for lunch in relatively good humor. After lunch Jim returned and showed them a condom and demonstrated putting it on a stick that Stephen had supplied. They had kind of an uproarious good time with the whole idea, but they also took it seriously and made suggestions about how they could teach people to use condoms without condoning extramarital sex. Jim gave them a chance to talk about other public-health issues, and they had many questions. At the end of the conference, Morris made a very nice speech in reply to us.

Lunch today was beef in a lovely sauce, rice, greens, and mango!