Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.
The most powerful institution in Black Cleveland has no HR department, and most of the time it acts like it doesn't need one.
That's what I kept thinking while I watched Dr. Heather E. Burton's latest episode of Sanctified & Stilettos. The topic sounds light. Pastors and dating. Two well-known Cleveland pastors, both single, both willing to talk. Dr. Burton opened by warning the audience not to DM her for anybody's phone number, because this is not a dating show.
She was right. It isn't. By the end of the hour, it was a show about power: who holds it inside a congregation, who gets hurt when it's misused, and what it takes to protect the people in the pews.
The pulpit is a public office
Dr. Burton put it plainly early on. We put pastors on a pedestal. In her words, "the reality is pastors are celebrities."
Rev. David Cobb of Emmanuel Baptist Church on Quincy Avenue, pastoring there going on 19 years, wouldn't take the celebrity label. But he didn't argue with the math. "All eyes are watching," he said. People watch who comes to preach, how he moves, what he does when he's out. Whether he likes it or not, he has to be on.
Rev. Courtney Clayton Jenkins, senior pastor of South Euclid United Church of Christ for 15 years, gave it the right name. She's a public figure. She leads in public, and she said her congregation has grown from about 40 people to more than 400 in the building and another 250 online on Sundays.
That's a constituency. And anybody who has ever run for anything knows what comes with a constituency. Every move you make gets read as a message.
She wrote the rule down
Here is the part every church leader in this city should hear.
At South Euclid, Rev. Jenkins has a dating and monogamy policy for her leadership. Staff, deacons and clergy sign it at the top of every year. If a leader wants to date somebody in the congregation, they come talk to her first. And they get one opportunity. If it doesn't work out, the next person comes from outside the church.
She didn't write it for fun. She said the policy exists because somebody in leadership was found dating multiple people in the congregation at the same time.
Then she said the sentence that turns a church policy into a power lesson.
“It’s not just a relationship. These are positions of power.” — Rev. Courtney Clayton Jenkins www.realpower.tv
She's right, and she's rare for saying it out loud. A deacon who breaks a member's heart isn't a private matter. A staff member who uses their title to get close to somebody isn't gossip. That is leverage being abused inside an institution that runs on trust. Corporations figured this out years ago and wrote it into the handbook. Too many of our churches still run on the honor system and hope for the best.
Rev. Jenkins went to scripture for her backing. Everybody remembers Hannah praying at the temple. Keep reading into the second chapter of First Samuel, she said, and you find Eli's sons abusing their place with the women who came to worship. Eli wouldn't rein them in.
"So my policy exists because the glory of the Lord will not leave this temple."
Then she brought it down to earth. "I got a payroll to meet." If she fumbles, it isn't only her life that takes the hit. It's every family that puts food on the table working under her leadership. That's an operator talking. The pulpit is also an employer, a property owner and an economic engine, and she runs it like she knows it.
Be careful what you start
Rev. Cobb brought the other half of the lesson, the part about boundaries a leader sets on himself.
When he first came to Emmanuel, he said, he wanted to be a super pastor. Anybody who needed him got his phone number. Over the years he had to walk that back, and it took work, because the congregation had come to expect it.
His advice to anybody stepping into a pulpit: be careful what you start. Whatever you start becomes an expectation, and expectations are hard to take back.
I've watched the same thing happen to elected officials, to nonprofit directors and to business owners in this town. You can't be everything to everybody. The leader who never says no burns out, and the institution burns with them.
The leader who never says no burns out, and the institution burns with them. www.realpower.tv
On dating, Rev. Cobb keeps it simple. Nobody from the congregation. And he wants whoever he's seeing to meet the man before they meet the title. "Can you get to know David first," he said, "and then let's talk about the reverend."
That's clarity, and it's the first thing he said he looks for.
The double standard in the pulpit
Then the table named what a lot of us don't want to say. Women in ministry are judged by a different rulebook.
One of the women at that table said a mentor once told her, "You can't date like a man." A male pastor seen with a few different women gets a side-eye. A woman pastor gets a reputation. Rev. Jenkins has built her privacy around that reality. She said she doesn't lead with her title when she meets somebody new, and anybody who wants a place in her personal life signs a nondisclosure agreement. She said the men she's asked took it well. Her reasoning was simple. Date somebody who has just as much to lose as you do.
You can argue with the tactic. You can't argue with why she needs it.
What the rest of us should take from this
Dr. Burton pulled something out of two pastors that most churches never say in public. The Black church isn't a private club. It is civic infrastructure. It holds our money, our buildings, our children and our trust, and it moves votes in this city like nothing else. An institution with that much power needs written rules, not just good intentions.
An institution with that much power needs written rules, not just good intentions. www.realpower.tv
If your church has a policy for its leaders, good. If it doesn't, ask why not. The answer will tell you who the current system protects.
Watch the full episode of Sanctified & Stilettos → Watch on YouTube
Does your church hold its leaders to a written standard, or does it run on trust alone? Tell me below. I read every one.
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