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08/09/2016 12:00 AMLee Ireland knows she will not be the pastor at the United Church of Chester for long. She knew it when she accepted the call to the church’s pulpit. That, in fact, is Ireland’s specialty: coming and going.
Ireland is an interim minister, called to the church while the congregation searches for a new full-time pastor. Most United Church of Christ (UCC) churches engage an interim after a minister leaves to provide a breathing space for the congregation before welcoming a new pastor into a permanent position. In other situations, an interim can come when a minister, who is going to return, takes a sabbatical year.
Ireland knows the drill; she has served some 12 different churches as an interim. In Chester, she follows longtime minister Kathy Peters, who retired in June of 2015. Ireland started in August 2015 and estimated that she will be at the Chester church until this spring.
“Most interims are from 18 to 20 months,” Ireland said. “You learn to live in the moment.”
Still, an interim minister is more than a place and space holder. Often, Ireland noted, when a longtime minister leaves, congregations have to face issues they had not fully acknowledged in the past.
“Part of the job of being an interim minister is engaging in the tough questions. Interim work is different. Your are helping a congregation clarify who they are in the now, not trying to look backward,” Ireland said. “You celebrate the now and listen to the vision that is theirs emerging.”
Toni Smith understands what Ireland is saying, and not simply because she is a parishioner at Chester’s United Church. She is also an ordained minister whose specialty is serving as an interim. Though largely retired, Smith still conducts occasional services as a visiting minister. When an interim takes over, she noted, things are both the same and different.
“We preach, we visit the sick, we study, but in a different context. Things are not the same. It’s about who we are now, what is possible now. It’s how do we be faithful to the congregation and also how do we change,” she said. “That is the job of the interim.”
Neither Smith nor Ireland started out in the ministry. Ireland had done everything from waitressing to working as a bank teller. She was a secretary in the chaplain’s office at Dartmouth when she decided on a career in the ministry. What helped her make that decision was the 1982 movie Sophie’s Choice, with Meryl Streep playing the role of a distraught concentration camp survivor who had been forced to make an awful choice between which one of her two children to save.
“I didn’t know how God could let that happen. I knew I had to study [for the ministry],” she said.
Ireland attended Andover Newton Theological School, arranging a schedule to spend only one night a week away from her family. As a result, the process took her five years instead of three.
Smith started out as an elementary school teacher at a New York City private school. When she and her husband moved to Montclair, New Jersey, she felt a growing interest in religion, so she started attending a nearby church.
“That minister brought the scripture to life. It was wonderful. A whole new thing opened to me,” she recalled.
The result was Smith’s decision to attend divinity school at Drew Theological School, a part of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. At the very first church she led in 1978, she was not sure the congregation was altogether eager to welcome her.
“Nobody would take me, but it was a church that couldn’t get a man. Nobody was excited when I came,” she said.
When Smith first came to Connecticut, she knew the names of every female minister serving a United Church congregation in the state, but “Now there are so many, I don’t and that delights me,” she said. “There is much more acceptance of females.”
Balancing the demands of family and the opportunities offered in the ministry brought Ireland to interim work.
“I didn’t have to take my children out of the East Lyme School system,” she said.
She has served churches in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and on Fisher’s Island. With her children now grown, before coming to Chester she served for five years as an associate pastor at a church in Orange, a position eliminated through staff reduction.
Smith chose interim work because she found that she liked it. “There are some similar characteristics, and issues that need addressing,” she said.
One of the issues that she has confronted is serving in congregations where there has been inappropriate sexual contact between the minister and a parishioner.
“Usually a male pastor and a female congregant,” she said, emphasizing that the situation is not a common one. “It is something one hopes not to find, and something I have never known when I arrived. It is a complete betrayal of trust,” she said.
For all interims, hello quickly turns into goodbye, but it can be a parting with great satisfaction as well as sadness.
“There is a sense that this group of people is ready to move on,” Smith said as she recalled leaving congregations.
“You leave hoping the congregation has valued your work and that they will call somebody who is a good fit for them,” Ireland said. “You must remember it’s never about you. You are parting for good reasons.”