The new secretary position had been filled, the church voted on her hiring, and she started in May of 2018.
This part of the story is one I wish I could change. I have real regret about how I handled myself and how I acted.
It took the pastor about two days to realize his mistake. His changing his mind at the last minute on who to hire would be something he regretted.
This wasn’t an easy position to fill. The lady who had done it for 20 years had it down to a science and made it look easy, but there were so many boxes to check, so many things to be done, it was an overwhelming position.
I would love to say that this new secretary and I hit it off and were the best of friends, but it wasn’t that way. We didn’t fight or argue, but we weren’t best friends either.
The pastor began to speak ill of her almost immediately after she was hired. He dreaded going to the office because of her. She drove him crazy. For some reason everything from her mannerisms to her laugh, to the multiple times she would come to his office, to the numerous times she would leave her desk and miss phone calls… it all drove him nuts.
He gave her extra busywork just because he could and thought it was funny. He said that if she didn’t have enough work to keep her in the office, he would just give her more.
One day I came to the work, and he was giddy because he had given her a massive stack of books. He told her to make copies of specific pages for his sermon.
When she copied them in the wrong direction, he made her do it again and joked to me that she wasn’t even capable of making copies.
He wished he had done things differently. He blamed her hiring entirely on the Chairman of Personnel. He took no responsibility for it at all. I can’t tell you how many times he told me that he wouldn’t ever let the Chairman choose for him again. He even told me that he told the Chairman to his face that this was all his fault, that he was “suffering” because of him. Let’s not forget that it was the pastor who changed his mind at the last minute.
It wasn’t uncommon for him to call me in his office to talk about what she had done during the week.
He thought she was lazy. He thought she was incompetent. She definitely wasn’t the same as the lady who had retired, but she wasn’t really given a chance.
Unofficial office alliances were formed. The new secretary and the music minister got along splendidly, and the pastor and I were friends. A new youth pastor hadn’t been hired at this point. So, it was the pastor and me against her and the music minister, unofficially, of course.
Gosh, I wish I hadn’t acted that way. I wish it hadn’t been so important to me to have the pastor’s approval. I became a bully. I didn’t say things to her face, but I did behind her back. I didn’t try to reach out and be a good friend because the pastor didn’t like her, and for me to take her side would be choosing her over him. That is no excuse for my behavior. I’m a grown woman. I know how to treat people, and I failed.
She was overwhelmed. She made mistakes, and some were big ones. I’m not trying to make her look perfect. She was, I think, genuinely in over her head. But that doesn’t make her someone to be ridiculed and belittled, it makes her someone who should be loved even more, and helped, and supported.
He didn’t like the way she ran the office, handled the people who came in, or the way she asked him questions all the time. It was a constant conversation between me and the pastor. I own up to the fact that I regrettably partook in those conversations. When she and I would have a disagreement, I would talk to the pastor about it.
His words to me were; blow it up, make her mad, and make her react so we will have something to use against her. And I never once stopped to think that this might be wrong. I never said anything to anyone who could’ve helped her because I was a bully. I was wrong, so very wrong.
I should’ve helped her. I should’ve been a friend. But I never reached out to help her or defend her to the pastor… the lines had been drawn, and I knew on which side I belonged.
These were some words the pastor spoke… she will eventually hang herself, give her enough rope, and she will… let her fail. She will have to quit then… I can’t fire her; it will look bad on me…
Now that I’m gone and my head is clear, I realize how terrible this was. If you’ve hired someone and you think they are failing, take responsibility for it. Or maybe they are doing the job to the best of their ability and it’s just not good enough for you… maybe own that. Maybe realize that no one starts out the same as someone with 20 years of experience. It takes time to learn and grow in a position. There should be some grace.
Get her some help, get her some extra training, or just let her go, but just wanting her to fail or hang herself is not even being a good boss outside of a church setting. It’s terrible actually.
Where’s the mercy, the grace? Is this not a church? Are we not to show the love of Jesus to everyone, especially our sister in Christ? Why not call her in and say this just isn’t working out?
I’ll tell you why… this pastor cared for his own reputation more than anything or anyone else. From this point forward in the story, that will become even more clear. I wish it had been clear to me when it happened, but it wasn’t. And instead of standing up against it, I played right into his hand.
I wish I could say that she learned how to do the job to his standards, and she’s still there, but the truth is the end of that story doesn’t belong here. And, unfortunately, her ending there was way more traumatic than mine.
Until Next Time,
Whitney