A recent Washington Post piece says that only 50-65% of seminary graduates find ministry jobs, matching up with an earlier NYTimes piece that said much the same.
However, the WP piece talks about pulpit shortages, but the NYT piece talks about twentysomething seminarians choosing not to go into the ministry. Add to that anecdotal evidence of multi-charge appointments and ordination committee hazing (from my United Methodist plants, anyhow).
So what’s going on here? What’s causing what? And what needs fixed first?
Could it have anything to do with money? The pay not being great? Maybe it’s really “no pulpits that pay a reasonable living wage for seminarians”? I don’t know, but maybe that’s it. “Young people are thinking about possibilities, about blue-sky possibilities. Older people have mortgages and responsibilities…” seems to imply that might be part of it. Also, I like the idea of other options besides serving a church. We have a UU community minister in JPD who’s a police officer.
PASTORING: Whose Fault Might This Be?…
The Washington Post has an article up on the woes of winning a pulpit to pad the pocket and pay the pipers.
It seems the Mainline (Episcopal, Lutheren, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) Denominations’ decline over the last 100 years has blocked the p….
Joyce, I think your last comment is insightful and where my own thinking on this trend has been lately. I expect it is revealing of all kinds of shifts underway in church culture, especially among twentysomethings. BTW, for a recent report on the faith trends among this age group especially how they are disengaging from church in ways that might be deeper than the usual “leave then come back when you have kids” approach, see researcher George Barna’s update at http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrowPreview&BarnaUpdateID=245. But for one trend I tie it into the overall shift of what church means and where one goes to experience and find it, a growing lack of interest and passion to serve institutions that look and feel and act like they have for decades especially given the downsides to churches having been so clergy-focused, and the great increase in competition in the culture which has made resources shrivel and increased anxiety in so many mid-size churches where ministers become the lightning rods.
We have seen in the UU faith a rise in the number and percentage of community ministries which are attractive in part, and in part it’s an illusion, for the greater freedom and flexibility they seem to include compared to parish ministry. And we have a rise in part-time parish ministries and cobbled ministries for some of the same reasons, and we had a decline in religious education ministries and these ministries are perhaps the ones most embedded in the “institutionalization” of the church, moreso than in the common “parish ministry” to use the old terms for the UU ministerial “tracks.”
So “serving a church”, as you put it, is now taking on new shapes than just “pulpit.” It means or will mean being in all kinds of partnering relationships. We need to continue expanding our sense of pulpits, and I expect we are, and that the media will just take awhile to catch up.
Public opinion may be changing, but it’s the loud minority who often make the changes. I know that there are those in the fundamentalist Christian community who are training their children for politics, meaning our separation-of-church-and-state problems can be much more challenging in the future. I don’t see those among the liberal religious, especially UUs, doing the same. Do we have any aspiring AU & SPLC directors in seminary? I suppose they don’t have to be ministers, but I think it would help. We also need more than national leaders in such things since fundamentalist Christians are being taught how to infiltrate the public schools through the local Boards of Education. If there are too few equally adamant about freedom of (and from) religion, then the conclusion of that report could indeed be correct: “American Christianity could play a larger role in shaping the norms of our culture in the future.”
[…] Making Chutney points out a seeming contradiction in recent proclamations regarding the claim that seminarians lack pulpits, and pulpits simultaneously lack seminarians. I’m confused, I admit it! […]