Lifelong ministry
People today are leaving ministry in droves. Churches, likewise, are shockingly under-staffed. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, “ministers are in short supply.” The pandemic is a major factor, but it exacerbated existing trends; it did not create the problem. The ministers I know—and for the purposes of this post I’m thinking exclusively of “low-church” traditions, not mainline or catholic—get calls on the regular from churches offering generous salaries and appealing jobs, and the churches in question are reasonably sized, in cities anyone would be happy to live in, and often have gone without a lead pastor for months, if not years. Whereas, on the flip side, many churches that once (pre-pandemic) had a budget for X number of ministers are now having to cut their staff down to size.
A few reflections on the dynamics at work, past and present.
Of the teenagers and college students I meet who (a) are believers, (b) go to church, and (c) are interested in pursuing formal ministry, none of them, with only the rarest exceptions, plans on becoming a “head” or “lead” pastor/preacher. What they want instead is a job with one of four modifiers affixed to the title of “minister”: children’s, youth, college/young adult, or worship.* There are many reasons for this shift. One is that the person who most influenced them in their faith was such a minister. Another is that the churches in which they were raised aren’t organized by and around a single visible head pastor, along the lines of the traditional parish or rural/neighborhood church model. Instead, these churches have ministry staffs, filled with specialties and sub-specialties (including evangelism, outreach, missions, poverty, rehab, media, sports, etc.). Naturally, young people being raised in such communities see modeled for them a specialized ministerial role, not the single (if capacious) traditional “office” of ordained pastor, whose principal task is the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments in the context of public worship. To the extent that these young people’s churches do have a single visible “head” person, he is usually conceived (in their minds and in their experience) as a Public Speaker, whose primary job is, naturally enough, public speaking. Indeed, he is paid the highest salary to be the best possible weekly speaker he can be. Such a person is not necessarily (or uniquely) involved with pastoral tasks, the sacraments, and/or worship more generally. And because young people, like all people, fear public speaking as a fate worse than death, only rarely do any of them see in this Head Role a vocation to which they might aspire.
Thus, whatever the reasons—and there are surely others, not least the decline of seminary and of churches’ expectation that ministers have an MDiv—more and more young people who enter ministry today are doing so much differently than those who did so in the past. In my anecdotal observation, a majority of people who enter one of the “big four” ministry staff roles I mentioned above—children’s, youth, college/young adult, worship—exit full-time, formal ministry at some point between ages 30 and 45. I’m tempted to speculate that the percentage is far higher than a bare 51%, perhaps even as high as 75-85%. Such ministers serve, often ably, in the churches for (on average) a dozen years before returning to civilian life. Half of those remaining stick with their original titles; the other half climb the staff ladder (for there is unquestionably an internal hierarchy at work, even if it is never spoken outright) to administrative, pastoral, or preaching roles.
As I trust is obvious, there is a problem here. Not only are fewer and fewer young people seeking and entering lifelong pastoral (homiletical and sacramental) ministry. Those who do become ministers aren’t remaining ministers for long. Worse still, the process is compounded, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. I suppose the crisis isn’t more pronounced than it already is because churches are themselves declining in numbers and closing their doors at high rates. Which itself raises a chicken-and-egg problem for figuring out what’s going on here.
In any case, here’s one last thought prompted by these trend lines. It seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for a person to enter into, to undertake, and actually to accomplish a lifetime of formal ministry as a pastor in the local church:
Belief in and commitment to a concrete ecclesial tradition.
The socially embodied and transmitted principle and concept of being called to be a “ministry lifer”—whether explicitly, through the sacrament of holy orders, or implicitly, through a tacit but passionate understanding of and dedication to the pastoral vocation as divinely given, normatively irrevocable, and necessarily enacted at the parish or congregational level.
This, I think, is the deeper problem at issue. The young people I have in mind are “non-denominational,” down to the marrow, even when they belong to a specific denomination. The Baptists attend the local “community church,” the Reformed attend the local Church of Christ, the CoC-ers attend the local Baptist church. In other words, they’re all members of that ever-embattled, ever-thriving American family called evangelicalism. And because they have little to no deep-set, self-conscious membership in, much less identity as, this or that particular denomination or tradition, they swap churches without a second thought. It’s the gig economy applied to the church: a more or less comprehensive collapse in institutional durability and reliable ecclesial identity. So that, if and when a thoughtful, committed young Christian considers ministry, s/he does not do so with a mind toward serving this particular tradition but only “the church” in generic, non-denom terms.
Furthermore, such a person lacks any reason to believe that s/he is making a lifelong commitment, or that the church expects—much less that God commands!—ministerial service to be for life. That lifer status still applies by default to catholic traditions and, in an attenuated but real way, to mainline and confessional Protestant traditions that maintain official procedures and gatekeeping bodies for equipping, credentialing, and ordaining priests and pastors. Not so here. I’ve come to realize, though, that something like a wholly untheorized analogue to sacramental orders existed for quite a long time in the evangelical (and adjacent) communities I have in mind. That is the only explanation (along with the existence of sectarian and/or denominational identity) for why nineteenth- and twentieth-century ministers would spend their whole working lives slaving away in financially painful, psychologically grueling, and emotionally punishing congregations, sacrificing all that they had, moving twice a decade, and rarely considering the simplest option: namely, heading for the EXIT sign. Truth be told, there was no such sign, at least most of the time, since the two conditions I’ve named were met. Given, that is, thick ecclesial identity and thick pastoral vocation, to be a minister just was to be a minister for life, since that is what the call of God through the church entailed as a matter of course. Remove either or both of those conditions, however, and the EXIT sign lights up in bold, bright neon. Its flashing letters begin on the periphery then drift toward the center of one’s vision. At some point, ministry involves too much sacrifice for any but the most heroic to stay. Lacking the necessary conditions to hold them in place, to endure through the suffering that ministry invariably brings in its train, ministers head for the door. They may come back, but not as clergy. That door is closed for good.
Can you blame them?
*In case it’s necessary, allow me to add that my comments here in no way imply denigration of what I’m calling “specialized” forms of ministry. My first book is dedicated to my youth minister, who is the reason I earned a PhD in theology and am now a professor, and my second book is dedicated to my children’s minister, who is the reason why literally thousands of children who came through the doors of my home church first heard the name of Jesus. Nothing I’ve written here should be taken to mean that such ministers are either “less than” or an unwelcome development. It does mean, however, that their development raises new questions and challenges for modeling, communicating, and training young persons for lives of full-time, formal ministry. And that we ought to be identifying and addressing those questions and challenges now, for they are as urgent as any problem facing the church today.
