Faith Works 10-27-18

Faith Works 10-27-18

Jeff Gill

 

Ministerial ethics in a modern age

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For an assortment of reasons, people have been asking me about ministerial ethics recently. What they are, what they should be, how people apply them to certain situations. Events in the news, changes in churches, and local developments have all contributed to a surge of interest in a subject that I'd argue is always important, but not usually "top of mind" with church members until, as they say, stuff happens.

 

For a Christian minister, the story would start necessarily with the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and start to expand out with Jesus' great commandments of "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."

 

Of course, that's an ethical basis for all Christians to follow, with clergy just a bit more public in their lives and with outside scrutiny. For ministers, though, there's a few different opinions about where you go in particular for that calling and an ethical standard.

 

One of the best known ethical standards is the Hippocratic Oath of doctors, beginning with "First, do no harm." It's not a bad start. And many ethical professional standards start and tend to live in a place of negative guidelines: don't do this, don't do that. "Do no harm" is an interesting ethic to apply: think about surgery, which starts with a knife and cutting, but with a goal to do more help than harm by the time you're done. So a Hippocratic standard would say "don't just cut to be cutting, but if you take something worse out or fix something you have to cut to get to, it's okay if you sew it up well." Or "do no harm."

 

I've become part of a professional field within my years in ministry, that of mediation. In training with the State Supreme Court and other instruction around the practice of mediation, I've learned there is a general ethical benchmark that goes something like this: "never re-victimize a victim." That also sounds like a negative instruction, but mediators I've worked with over the years and I have learned it's a fairly expansive guide to when to mediate, and how, and where you step back and say "this is not a case for mediation."

 

For clergy, many denominational bodies have a "statement of ministerial ethics." Most of these I've seen are long, and wander off into exhortations of best practices, with most including a few negative guidelines about when not to offer pastoral care. A common ethical question is about when a former pastor can do a wedding, baptism, or funeral.

 

My own tradition has a pretty strong stated restriction on this, and I've backed into it by way of saying to an elderly surviving spouse at the graveside, in response to a direct question, "yes, I will do your funeral." Of course, they lived longer than I think they expected, and when that day came the church was not only no longer where I was serving, they had an interim pastor, who was not happy I'd even implied I would do that service when the time came. After some awkward discussion, the person said "but honestly, I'd rather not make an extra trip up there in the middle of the week, so you go ahead." It's an area where I'm not sure sweeping prohibitions work as well as they look on paper . . .

I've had many conversations over the years with fellow preachers about when and how you can "borrow" sermons. My feeling is that if you preach a message as if it's the result of your work in the previous week, you need to state clearly "most of today's sermon is taken directly from Fred Craddock, and I don't think I can improve on his thoughts on this passage." But if I take a general outline of ideas and two illustrations? If I just liberate the title, but go in a different direction? How much is plagiarism, and what is homage? There are differences of opinion here, though I am adamant that if you tell someone else's story and put yourself into the pronouns directly, I think you've got a problem.

 

In general, I think ministerial ethics boil down to this: don't be a jerk. Seriously. Be kind, be humble, be honest and clear. Keep the confidences you've promised to keep, and don't make promises you can't. And when in doubt, apologize. Do the loving thing, even when it's hard. Especially then.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's learned that the loving thing is often harder than it looks but still has to be done. Tell him about your interactions with ministerial ethics at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.