I cried my eyes out to my friends on June 25, 2019. We stayed up way into the night talking. I felt a little better knowing that I had the support of my friends.
The following day, I called my counselor to get his advice. It was hard to find any privacy at camp, so I left the dorm and found a quiet seat in the balcony area of the auditorium. I was able to video chat with him and talk things out. He was very confused by the evaluation. I walked him through each part, and we discussed it at length. As my counselor, he was most concerned about my emotional state and wanted to ensure I was in a good place before I called the pastor. After we worked out a plan, he suggested that I place a call to the pastor as soon as I could so I could talk things over with him and discuss all the things I found unfair about my evaluation.
My counselor told me I should bring up that I only had eight months to fulfill a year-long goal. He also said that it seemed to him that my evaluation was based on full-time employees’ hours rather than part-time employees. He said I should remind the pastor that my evaluation should look slightly different than full-time employees.
Since the moment I had walked out of the church after my evaluation two days before, I wished with everything in me that I had asked the pastor for a copy of my evaluation. I wanted to see it. But unfortunately, I never even had the chance to look at it.
I asked my counselor if it was fair to ask for a copy of my evaluation, and he said absolutely.
I placed the call to the pastor, and when he answered, he asked me if I was still worried about the stupid number I received on my evaluation. When I said yes, he replied, “You’re killing me smalls .”
I wasn’t impressed with the fake empathy he offered; I felt stupid and immediately worried about how the conversation would go.
I tried to gain control of my emotions and continued the conversation.
I told him that I couldn’t help how I was feeling, that I was struggling in so many ways, that my evaluation score made everything I had worked so hard for seem like it wasn’t enough, and that I just didn’t have anything more to give. I was doing all I could possibly do.
I cried the entire time I talked to him. Finally, I asked him if evaluations were designed to build up or destroy. I told him I felt set up and could handle receiving a 2 for my church attendance, but I did not think I deserved the others.
I explained that having eight months to reach a year-long goal was insane.
He told me that was just the way things were, and I would have to learn how to make it work.
I then started begging for a way to improve my evaluation score. I offered to do more work. Looking back, I hate myself for being weak; I wish I had been stronger. I felt like a child asking for more allowance.
I asked if he would reevaluate after VBS and camp. What if more kids were saved and baptized? Could we add those to the total?
What if kids participated in See You at the Pole in September, and that event was a successful way for the kids to share their faith? Could we change my score on that part?
What if I found time to have a Sunday School Training after the busy summer? Could I bring that score up?
His answer at that time was no; he said those months were just lost.
The pastor explained that the Personnel and Finance committees needed this information in time to decide what our raises would be before the beginning of the church’s fiscal year. That meant evaluations needed to be done in June, and goals would need to be set in October after the fiscal year was complete. I continued to plead my case that if we did it that way, I would lose July, August, September, and part of October.
How was this supposed to work? I couldn’t set year-long goals this way. I couldn’t complete 12 months of work in 8 months. It didn’t make any sense at all to me.
I confronted him about being only part-time and felt like I had received a full-time evaluation. It was the first time in our conversation that he seemed to consider what I was saying. I told him it was unfair that he expected me to accomplish as much in one year as the rest of the staff. I was only paid for 20 hours each week. I couldn’t physically fit anything else into my schedule.
I asked the pastor for a copy of my evaluation to look it over and figure out how I could do better. He agreed to give me a copy.
This phone conversation was brutal for me. When I say I cried the entire time, it was more like sobbing so hard that I couldn’t get my words out. I wish I hadn’t been upset, and I may never be able to adequately explain to others why that evaluation hurt me so badly, but it did.
My husband and I were scheduled to drive back to the church that night to interview a prospective music minister. I didn’t realize how crazy this part was until I typed that out. We were at camp, 2 1/2 hours away from the church and the pastor expected us to drive home to meet this prospective music minister. My husband was on the Personnel Committee, so he needed to be there. It was also important that he be at camp to chaperone. I have no idea why the pastor planned this meeting for this time. Camp had been on the calendar for an entire year, and the pastor knew we chaperoned camp. The timing couldn’t have been worse, but we did what was expected of us and drove to Tree Town for the meeting and then back to camp that same night.
The pastor said on the phone that morning that he would talk to me when we came to the church that night.
When we got to the church to interview the prospective music minister, I immediately went to the pastor’s office. My husband went with me. The pastor asked us to sit down. He said he had been thinking about our call that morning. The one thing that resonated with him was that I said I felt like I had been evaluated like a full-time employee instead of part-time.
He apologized for how that made me feel and said he had done my evaluation again. So, my new evaluation score would be 4.2 instead of the previous score of 3.65.
I’m not going to lie; that being the only thing that resonated with him was a little painful for me to hear. I’m glad that something made him think, but that wasn’t the only thing I said that held any weight. It was, however, the easiest thing for him to “fix” without admitting that he had done anything wrong.
He pulled my old evaluation out and ripped it in half. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive a copy of the new one, and he threw the old one away.
I appreciated his apology and the fact that he redid my evaluation, but does it make sense when I say the damage was already done. I couldn’t easily forget the things he said in the first one. It wasn’t as if he had just given me a number in my first one. He had gone into detail over each different section. I couldn’t forget what he said the first time.
It was too little too late.
It seemed like he only changed it because he felt caught. Like he really thought that he could convince me that a 3.65 was a good score, but when I didn’t buy it, he knew he needed to change it.
I felt like the 3.65 was what he wanted to give me, but after seeing just how upset I was, he was afraid that I would keep pushing, and if I spoke to the wrong people about it, it could look bad for him.
No one had ever said anything negative about the job I was doing. Even though the church as a whole had never really done anything to show their appreciation, individuals had. I regularly received compliments on the things I was doing with the ministry.
I’m pretty sure that most of the church would also have been surprised that I had received that score.
I wasn’t impressed with a 4.2 consolation prize because that’s what it felt like, a consolation prize.
I returned to camp for the rest of the week.
I visited with the Youth Pastor a little about his evaluation when I got back to camp. At this time, he hadn’t had his evaluation yet but, since he had worked for different churches before, I felt he could give me some insight. However, I expected him to say that this was just how things went, that this was normal and that I was overreacting.
I was wrong.
He was surprised by how the pastor handled things. This would be his first evaluation at Tree Town, and he said he planned to stand up for himself if his evaluation went as badly as my first one did.
I asked him how he felt about having eight months to fulfill a year-long goal, and he agreed it wasn’t fair, and if this was how we were to be evaluated, he would fall short as well.
I asked him if an evaluation was supposed to build you up or destroy you. He said that all the ones he had at his previous jobs were definitely not to destroy you, and if I felt that way, then something was wrong with how the pastor handled mine.
New Evaluation Score Tally
Pastor: 4.6
Me: 4.2 (but still 3.65 in my mind)
Youth Pastor: 3.25
Secretary: 2.2
Something still doesn’t add up.
And can I just point out that the pastor gave the two lowest scores to people he single-handedly hired? These two people were his choice.
I will always believe that he planned to make the secretary feel so bad about things that she would quit or that the Personnel and Finance committees would see the bad evaluation and offer to fire her. But, whatever his plans were, they backfired on him that year because neither of those things happened.
I also know that if a score of 3.65 left me feeling defeated, then a score of 2.2 had to destroy her, and I would imagine that a 3.25 didn’t feel good to the youth pastor either. We were all doing the best we could possibly do… it just wasn’t enough…
Especially the secretary. He had done nothing to help her. He just continued to pile on more and more in hopes that she would fail. That in itself is hard enough to think about, just knowing that he would treat someone this way… but in the end, the stress that she was under would eventually cause her to have significant health issues… and that is the saddest part. No church job is worth that. No job at all is worth that. I wish I could change how I handled things with the secretary with every fiber of my being. I treated her so poorly. Instead of helping her, I helped the pastor.
He’d had nothing but negative things to say about the secretary or the youth pastor since the day he had hired them. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that people grow in a positive environment, just like children with their parents. A child will never reach their full potential if all they ever hear from their parents is what they did wrong. When someone begins to believe that all they can do is fail, a small part of them dies.
I can’t speak for everyone else, but I know that I told myself after my evaluation that there was no reason for me to work as hard. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t succeed, so why try. I also couldn’t make the pastor happy with the job I was doing, so why keep killing myself trying to do so. It was never going to be enough.
I can only imagine that I wasn’t the only one in the office to feel this way. It wasn’t an environment to grow in. Not spiritually and not in our leadership. Looking back, I realize it was an extremely toxic environment.
We had all just come out of a crazy busy year. We had not only maintained our schedules, but because we didn’t have a music minister, we had all taken on extra responsibility… every single one of us.
This was not the year to do a stricter evaluation. This was a year to see and acknowledge that we had all filled in the gaps by working harder and doing extra things (not in our job descriptions) because we were short one staff member. This was a year to realize that maybe we didn’t meet every goal, but we had worked our tails off.
I have no idea what the pastor hoped to accomplish. Tearing a staff down isn’t helping in any way to help build up a church. Only someone so insecure that they have to belittle others to make themselves feel good would do that. That is not a sign of a good leader.
I went back to work when we got home from camp. The two most significant children’s summer programs were coming up… VBS and Centrikid were just around the corner, and there was still much to do. So I hit the ground running, trying very hard to put the evaluation behind me. I didn’t want to dwell on it anymore, and I didn’t want it to affect how I did my job. I was working to tell kids about Jesus, and this evaluation incident was just a bump in the road. Things could only get better, right?
And now, my score was high enough that I should get the full 3% raise promised me. Of course, a 3% raise would do little to help my paycheck, but I thought it would boost my confidence in what the church thought of the job I was doing.
When I got home from camp, my grandmother also came home. My aunt had been keeping her away from the entire family. She talked my grandmother into forgoing the radiation and chemo treatments that the doctor suggested and instead talked her into trying a homeopathic cure.
The two of them traveled back and forth to Missouri for two months. We didn’t see my grandmother at all during that time.
When she moved back home, she had deteriorated immensely.
This whole situation made me very sad and angry, but now that she was just half a mile from my house, I was going to make the most of the few months she had left.
My relationship with my grandmother had been so strained for so long. When grandmother began to lose some of her memory, she softened. It was as if God had given me the gift of reconciliation. I was extremely thankful for this gift of time with her, and I vowed not to waste it.
My grandmother loved to sing. She played several instruments and wrote songs as well. She would rather sing with the family than anything else in the world. When she got sick, this only intensified. She was happy and peaceful when she was singing.
She had her days and nights mixed up. Before she got sick, she was always one who went to bed extremely early and was awake to watch the sunrise. During this time, though, she would have her caretaker call us to her house almost every night after her bedtime for what she liked to call a celebration.
It was magical and good for the soul. The whole family would go to her house to play instruments and sing. These “celebrations” became a special time for my family.
My grandmother couldn’t remember much, but she could remember the lyrics to almost every song she had ever written. It was amazing to watch how when she forgot almost everything else, she could still sing about Jesus. She never once forgot about her Savior… There are so many lessons in that… maybe I can write about that another time.
I made sure to visit her every day.
I would go by her house in the mornings on the days I went to work and again on my way home, then back down to her house for the celebration at night. I spent even more time with her on the days I didn’t work.
This became my priority.
But as magical as it was, it was also painful. I realized all the years I had lost with my grandmother. I mourned the way things had gone. I questioned how I handled things and wondered when cancer had attacked her brain. I couldn’t help but think that maybe this was why she began to treat people the way she had. Was it cancer the whole time? I wondered if I should’ve done things differently. I was mourning. I cried on the daily.
I realize this is a different narrative than the church story, but I add it here for this reason…
I was emotionally spent, physically ill, and mentally exhausted… I was mourning in a way I never had before.
I wasn’t asking for special treatment. I knew that I still had a job to do, and I never skipped a beat. Things were done just as well as they always had been.
I was asking for understanding, a little grace, and maybe some empathy from my boss.
Until Next Time,
Whitney