East End Presbyterians are facing a unique challenge this year as six churches here are without a full-time pastor — and everyone’s trying to find one.
The East Hampton Presbyterian Church lost its pastor earlier this year when the Rev. Scot McCachren gave two weeks’ notice after serving for six years.
The congregations in East Hampton, Sag Harbor, Southampton, Shelter Island, Springs, and Amagansett are all in various stages of filling a vacated pastor position.
Mark Tammen, Presbyter of the Presbytery of Long Island, attributed the paucity of pastors to a simple twist of fate.
“There’s no explanation, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Mr. Tammen said. “It’s unusual in that we haven’t had that many vacancies in the same [area] for as long as I’ve been here.” Mr. Tammen assumed his church leadership post in 2011.
He said Sag Harbor, Springs, and Amagansett lost their pastors within months of each other, but for different reasons. “There’s nothing we can identify that says, ‘Why did they go at once?’ The Presbytery has a high level of turnover generally, but they’re more likely to get called away by family or other reasons than get driven away.”
The pastor-recruiting conundrum on the East End is historical and multifold, said Rachel Lys, a member of the East Hampton church who serves on the nine-person pastor-nominating committee. When those committees convene, she said, they’re looking for a pastor who would most fit in with the local congregation, but she added that the character of East Hampton is a dynamic unto itself that makes for a tough fit.
“The interesting thing about our community is you have to check a box, and we don’t really fit into a box as a seasonal resort,” said Ms. Lys, a physical therapist in Montauk. “Are you city, rural, suburban? You have to pick one of those things and we’re not really one of those things, we’re a little bit of all of it.”
Pastors tend to stick around for five or six years, she said, and the high turnover rate means there’s not a sturdy support system for newcomers to the area to rely on. The current situation means there’s no cushion of a built-in community of pastors for anyone.
“It’s not the most ideal setting for someone who is just graduating from seminary school,” said Ms. Lys, who described the search process as “kind of Match.com but for pastors.” Another limiting factor, she said: Some churches provide housing, others don’t. The East Hampton church, which is also nearing the end of a major renovation, offers housing right next door.
“It’s a task for the pastors to find out how they can connect with their community and meet their needs,” added Ms. Lys, “since the summer visitors have different income levels and different priorities than myself who’s a middle-class working-mom type of person.”
That dynamic was amplified during the Covid era, which saw people who lived on the South Fork for three or four months a year leave the city to live here permanently — but it’s unclear, at best, said Mr. Tammen, whether that had any bearing on the departures of local Presbyterian pastors.
The Covid impacts on pastor recruitment and retainment were highlighted in an Aug. 28 opinion piece in The New York Times by Tish Harrison Warren, a pastor who wrote that struggles associated with the pandemic — stress, loneliness, and political division — were especially felt among pastors “who bear not only their own pain but also the weight of an entire community’s grief, divisions, and anxieties.”
Ms. Harrison Warren also wrote about the additional strain brought on by the death and misery associated with the pandemic, noting that “Most pastors walked with people through death and grief well before the pandemic, but the sheer number of deaths, coupled with the isolated nature of Covid deaths, has been particularly difficult over the past two and a half years.”
These impacts were especially tough on younger pastors, added Ms. Harrison Warren, whose opinion piece highlighted a study from Barna, a Christian research organization that “showed that pastors are struggling with burnout at unprecedented levels.”
Whether that played a role in the South Fork’s mass exodus of clergy is anyone’s guess, but now that the pandemic seems largely under control, Ms. Lys said the East Hampton church is looking for someone with significant experience both in preaching and teaching — “a captain of the ship,” as she described the ideal candidate, “in a fleet where everyone can be harmonious.”
The churches are making do in the meantime. For now, Amagansett is using a substitute minister from Shelter Island, while East Hampton is pulling in help from the New York Presbytery database, said Ms. Lys. Community service continues apace: The food bank at the Springs church is still up and running, signaling that “it’s the lay group and not the pastor who is driving that,” said Mr. Tammen.
The Presbyterian Church has old bones on the East End, with Southold and Southampton each laying claim to having established North America’s first Presbyterian house of worship, in 1640. The church enjoys cross-cultural appeal to Koreans, Latinos, and others, and local Presbyterians have done outreach with homeless locals as well as in Haiti and Cuba. They’ve been characterized locally as robust institutions with generally strong attendance, a lot of community involvement, and none of the scandals that have haunted the Catholic Church.
Ms. Lys says her committee has gotten the applicant pool down to the first three possible contenders — and are at the exact same point in the search process as Southampton. “What if both churches want the same pastor? That’s never happened before,” said Ms. Lys.
Mr. Tammen said his role insofar as the pastor search was to help expedite and assist the South Fork churches in trying to find an ideal candidate, as he underscored the Presbyterian Church’s historically decentralized authority. Mr. Tammen said he’s not picking anyone, just sending names to the churches and providing guidance when asked. “We’re more active when there’s not a pastor,” he said. “We’re more involved with them now because they’re more anxious because they don’t have a leader.”
There’s a committee of church elders and ministers drawn from across Long Island, said Mr. Tammen, who would deal with a contentious issue should it arise — such as two churches looking to hire the same pastor. He thought it was “possible but unlikely” that would happen in East Hampton and Southampton. “The two churches have different enough personalities,” said Mr. Tammen.
