The church office went back on regular office hours today. I spent the morning in meetings and reading mail; I spent the afternoon doing pastoral calls and returning phone calls; I hadn’t a moment to relax between nine in the morning and six at night. In other words, summer’s over and I’m back in the regular rhythm of the church year.

This will be my third year at First Unitarian in New Bedford, and everything is going much more smoothly. Over and over again, I hear about the “honeymoon year” — in popular imagination, the first year a minister spends at a new congregation is the “honeymoon year,” when supposedly the new minister can do no wrong and everyone is happy and joyful. I’ve never experienced such a honeymoon year — the first year in a congregation is when you do things wrong (“Umm, knocking the candle over is not the way we usually do the Christmas eve service…”), step on people’s toes (“Umm, Eliza Hubbard always chairs the Holiday Fair Committee, and she’s really peeved that you suggested that someone else chair it this year…”), and generally flail around trying to figure out a new order of service, a new filing system, a new everything.

If you survive that first year (assuming the congregation is relatively tolerant of your flailing about), I suppose the second year could be more relaxing. Although that wasn’t the case for me here last year, however, because last year our new Director of Religious Education resigned the week before Sunday school was to start, and that came on top of three deaths in the congregation in September, and I never quite got caught up again for the rest of the year.

What I hear over and over again from ministers is that the third year is when the congregation and the minister have gotten to know each other pretty well and some real trust starts to develop, and that’s when things can start to happen (or, sometimes, the trust doesn’t develop on one side or the other and the ministry starts to unravel, but that’s another story). And the church experts tell us that it really takes five years for trust to develop, so if there is a honeymoon year in ministry, it probably takes place in that fifth year.

The first year of a ministry, a honeymoon year? I think that’s just a myth.