Does Being United Mean Being Unionized?

     Comments.    Considerations. Questions.

  

                                              By Kenneth Bagnell

 

     An issue, now looming on the horizon, makes me remember a conversation I had, I believe in Maine, with an aged man, retired after many years in New England politics.  He’d been asked the day before -– given his many years in elected office — what his formula for success was. “I don’t know the formula for success,” he’d replied, “but I know the formula for failure: try to to please everybody.”  His words have stayed with me for a half century, and may well apply to many ministers of the United Church (the country’s largest if declining Protestant church) given the fact that many of them are feeling mistreated by congregants and church leaders.

      The clergy, men and women, reported to total about 2,500 in all, are now being invited or urged to join a union within the orbit of the former CAW. Its best known figure remains Buzz Hargrove, the CAW president from 1992 to 2008, now a professor at Ryerson University and a member of the Order of Canada. Recently the CAW merged with another national union and is called, Unifor, with over 300,000 members. The clergy union is within it, and named Unifaith.  Mr. Hargrove attended Unifaith’s inaugural meeting on January 14^th in Toronto.

      As to why the labor movement and a United Church group have reached out to each other: the major reason is basic and, to some, very sad.  Morale among United Church ministers, coast to coast is -– at least as Unifaith’s organizers see it — very low. The crisis is described in vivid language by a document prepared way back in 2005 for the CAW. It was from the group called The United Church Clergy Union Organizing Team.  Its purpose, the document maintained, was to help United Church ministers “to serve without being abused, intimidated, defamed, sexually assaulted, harassed, wrongly accused or threatened with death.”  Threatened with death? I found myself pausing at that, but maybe it’s just a skeptical aspect of my nature and my work as a journalist. Could it be that too many ministers just aren’t able to live with the folk wisdom of the elderly politician in my first paragraph: that no matter where we are or what we do, there’s bound to be some criticism and some people who are simply difficult to along with?

        This isn’t a new issue. Ministers have always been easy targets not just for reasonable critics, but also bullies, tyrants, pedants, cranks and, now — if the union advocates are right — predators. The critics we will always have with us. Yes, there may be more and for a reason:  in my view, it’s partly a byproduct of the decline in respect accorded years ago to the clerical calling. For example, to some friends of mine – mostly ministers in middle age or more — the decline is abetted by some ministers themselves who, for example, drop the honorific (Rev.) and clerical collar and “dress down,” so as to be just one of the “guys” or “girls.” This, they argue, sets the table for those authoritarian parishioners to pounce on the down-rated hence more vulnerable minister. That said, in my experience, the bullies are vastly outnumbered by the almost wall to wall goodwill of United Church people as I knew them in my years in the pastorate.

        Nonetheless there’s a problem. The movement –-concentrated in the United Church Clergy Union Organizing Team -– deserves some gratitude for seeking to put it on the church’s agenda. Their campaign has been waged for roughly a decade and has drawn increasing attention. For that alone, the United Church leaders should be grateful. As for myself, I feel regret and skepticism toward the idea that a labor union should represent ministers in a church culture, one that has its own conciliar, hence democratic governance system. Introducing a union with often confrontational principals strikes me as a discordant misfit. A very active Anglican layman in Cape Breton -– a former high school teacher in Toronto — was shocked at the very idea: “Clergy are shepherds of the sheep. It’s absurd to think of them as possible union members.”

        In any case, a few days ago, I contacted a senior member of the United Church’s General Council, The Rev. Alan Hall, who along with other heavy responsibilities, is Executive Officer of Ministry and Human Resources. He’s clearly both diplomatic and candid. He made time to answer a few questions, I asked three, all by email. First, what did he sense to be the collective attitude of the United Church on this matter. “What I’ve heard,” he replied, “is concern among ministry personnel that people think they have been unionized when this is not the case. The community chapters are not certified bargaining units representing a definable group of employees but a voluntary association, as I understand it, of not just ministers and lay employees but former employees, ministry students, retirees and family members. It is unfortunate that something different has been heard.” Then he added:   “Transparency about actual numbers and their distribution across the church would be interesting to see.”

        Next question: “Overall, how do you think the church as an institution can cope with this matter without causing what is known in the corporate world as “major breakage?”  His reply: “Given that ministry personnel make up half of all the “courts” or governance bodies that establish minimum standards for “employment” and standards of practice for ministry personnel, and given that they are represented on all review and hearing panels for both ministry personal and pastoral charges, it is hard to understand how  a ‘union’ would better represent the voice and concerns that ministers hold or bring something new to the development of effective and responsive policies and practices.”

    Last question: “How do you feel this matter is being felt, if at all, in the so-called ‘pew’ across Canada” His answer: “One church member wrote to me a couple of years ago after hearing of the efforts to unionize United Church ministers. She said her husband, a member of CAW, didn’t want ministers in his union — they are management! She went on to write that ministry is a vocation, not an hourly job. With the publicity generated by the creation of a community chapter this winter, the response I hear from church members is bewilderment.” He ended with this observation: “And not the variety expressed by the shepherds.”

         As I went to my study to write this, a moment from long ago came back to me, one involving a man of much stature back in earlier years of the United Church. His name was Clarence Nicholson, then Principal of Pine Hill Divinity Hall, Halifax, a preacher of national renown and Moderator in the early 1950s. One afternoon in 1957, in a lecture on Practical Theology, he said something I still remember. “Gentleman,” he said back then, “you will find in your life calling that there is no fellowship as deep and strong as the fellowship of the ministry.” It was that way in my day and, given this issue, I like to believe it may still be.

                                   30

All past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome there: www.kennethbagnell.com.