Chapter 20

Shining the Pastoral Patina

Listen to Jim Dethmer speaking. He built from scratch a 1,500-member independent church in Baltimore and is now one of the teaching ministers at Willow Creek Community Church, the nation's second-largest congregation, in South Barrington, Illinois.

The church of the 21st century will be a radical distribution of power to the laity. At present the laity exists to serve the clergy's program. The clergy will be important, but the heros of the twenty-first century will be laity who will shepherd small groups of six to ten people. These, fully empowered by the church, will make the difference. To get larger, churches will have to think smaller.

   The clergy will empower and equip the laity to do this, returning the ministry to the people. They won't be doing the bidding and will of the pastor but the work the laity are cut out to do. To have led and birthed small groups successfully would be a pre-requirement for seminary candidacy.

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   The seminaries have largely outgrown their capabilities to train leaders for the next century. Most seminaries are dysfunctional in training life-changing leaders. Life-change, through the Holy Spirit, doesn't usually mean you need to know Greek, exegesis, etcetera. This stymies people who want impact in their lives.

   Today's typical seminarian will become absolutely irrelevant. He's become ghettoized. He needs to know the needs of modern man. Seminaries will be caught between an economic rock and a hard place. They'll be stuck with large campuses and libraries. But radical decentralization is the wave of the future. So a whole new paradigm in training is needed.

   The educational model for the future will be decentralized to train an army of laity. It will happen through interactive TV, satellite disks, etcetera. Leaders will get content through their own home. But the major training won't be cognitive; it will be more on-the-job and in-service training. There are fifty skill sets needed for leadership in my opinion. Small-group leaders need to get these — intellectual development and character training from a coach — plus evaluations. This can happen while the trainee is being a commodities broker and raising the kids, for example.

   We'll see an explosion of powerment of lay people like we've never seen. A second Reformation. The ministry is going to be returned to the people. The average church size is seventy-five. They're led by clerics, seminary trained, who are unwilling to give away ministry to other people. They must release power and leadership to others. Churches of seventy-five to 200 will become a thing of the past.1

   Dethmer, who, by the way, is ordained, may be a visionary or just a dreamer. But he is not crying in the wilderness. Other leaders — largely those representing independent ministries rather than ones closely tied to denominations — are making similar sounds. And seminary administrators are starting to listen. More than a few denominational honchos may see their secure sinecures come apart at the seam (or sems) by the turn of the century.

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The Seminary Scene

   Mainline magnate William McKinney, director of education programs and professor of religion and society at Hartford Seminary, dares to ask:

Where is it written that effective ministry always demands three years of post-college study in an accredited seminary? Where is it written that virtually all of our theological education funds must go to the preparation of ordained clergy and virtually none to the preparation of laity and their ministries in the world? Where is it written that every congregation must be able to support a full-time minister, or occupy a building with a steeple, or own an organ, or gather for worship for one hour a week beginning no earlier than 8 and no later than 11 on a Sunday morning?2

   On the evangelical side of the aisle, Carl F. George, director of the Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth in Pasadena, goes so far as to recommend that a person shouldn't be allowed to enter seminary without demonstrating leadership over several small-group Bible studies for three to four years! Another seven to eight years of proven leadership should precede ordination, George believes.3

   One recent study found that more than one-third of the senior ministers of megachurches (2,000 members and up) do not hold a seminary degree.4 At the same time, many Protestant denominations are rethinking whether the ministry should be a full-time profession. Churches with less than 150 members probably won't be able to afford a full-time pastor by the end of the 1990s, in any case.

   "We'll be working out new patterns whereby people can be both ministers of a church and hold another job," says Robert Lynn, retired senior president of Lilly Endowment. Lay people will be far more involved, Lynn added, partly because of shrinking church budgets and partly because there's "a new recognition of the diverse talents required in ministering." He questions whether one person can or should be expected to do all the things we assume a minister or priest should be able to handle.5

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   Parish consultant Lyle Schaller ponders the future of seminaries that educate students to serve a shrinking number of small churches barely able to afford a full-time pastor. But, he wonders, "Who will perpetuate the orthodox Christian faith if the large churches do not depend on seminaries for future ministerial leadership?"

The Knot at the End of the Church's Thread

   Schaller puts his finger on another trend that threatens seminaries: large churches that cull their staff from volunteers. "Church leaders hand pick laypersons, then train and socialize them in megachurch culture rather than send them off to seminary. Will the megachurches, rather than the seminaries, be the primary source of both ordained and lay staff for tomorrow's megachurches?" Schaller asks.6

   This is happening at churches like Willow Creek. And Frank Tillapaugh advocates this strategy in his book Unleashing the Church.

   "It's amazing that we continue to put so much emphasis on a formal education for people in vocational ministry," Tillapaugh writes. "Educational resources are so numerous and available we can educate people on the job. We ought to be looking for ministry effectiveness and we're best able to spot them within our own churches.

   "Allow the Body to determine what kind of staff the church needs," he adds. "The church unleashed can't afford to take a set approach to hiring its staff. It shouldn't look for people on the basis of resumes and paper credentials."7

   David Barrett, a research consultant for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, says ministerial leadership is "a massive psychological problem; one has to find the leadership that clicks. And there is limited 'clickability.' "8

   Another factor may shrink seminaries: diminishing job openings. A little arithmetic shows that if you have twenty congregations with 100 members, you have jobs for twenty pastors. But one megachurch of 2,000, though it might typically hire ten pastors, would provide only half as many ministerial jobs. Optimists answer, of course, that a thriving megachurch will reproduce itself several times, providing

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more jobs for pastors, not less, and that small churches seldom reproduce.

   At any rate, it appears that many seminaries are training people for jobs that no longer exist. Or else failing to equip them for the tasks that are needed. They don't prepare clergy to market, manage, forge relationships, and lead, complains Barna. "Seminary should be the place where the average Christian can go and get equipped for fighting the fight of spiritual warfare," he says.9

   At the beginning of this decade, at least, seminary enrollments weren't suffering. Yet shifts are occurring: more women students; more older, second-career students; and a lower proportion of students planning to enter pastoral ministry.

   Although the 203 seminaries associated with the Association of Theological Schools grew in the early 1980s, they leveled off and dropped slightly in mid-decade. Then they started climbing again at the decade's end.

   In 1990, women constituted 29.7 percent of seminary enrollment in the United States and Canada (17,501), more than three times as many as in 1974, when women accounted for only 5,255 of ATS enrollments.

   The trend toward older students preparing for the ministry is likely to extend into the next century. A 1988 study by Shopshire and Ellis Larsen found that students age thirty and up represented 43 percent of all seminarians in Master of Divinity degree programs, the usual pastoral track. And at least one quarter of all seminarians were employed — many in a previously chosen career. So now it often takes a seminarian four to five years rather than three to complete M.Div. degree work.

Women in Ministry: Frustrated?

   The Larsen-Shopshire study also showed that 65 percent of students over thirty intended to enter the parish ministry; of those under thirty, 60 percent did. Less than half (47 percent) of the women planned on parish ministry, compared to 62 percent of the men.

   No doubt, Shopshire concludes, this is partly explained by the "barriers and discouragements" women in ministry face in almost all denominations.10 (About 60 percent of all U.S. female clergy are

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within five denominations: Assemblies of God, Salvation Army, United Methodist, Presbyterian (USA), and United Church of Christ. In all, only about one-third of U.S. denominations currently ordain women.)11

   The 1990 Yearbook lends support to Shopshire's thesis. A report based on women in four major Protestant denominations in Canada (Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Canada) notes that the women "are concentrated in the assistant and associate levels among the ranks of Christian education directors, as chaplains, [and] in the head offices of denominations as staff, executive assistant and secretary." Less than 30 percent of women in ministry are sole pastor, senior pastor, or co-minister, and less than one-sixth of all who have graduated from theological schools are pastors or co-pastors.12

   Frustration may also undergird a powerful, female-driven revolution now quietly taking place behind the desks and in the dorms of seminaries and divinity schools across the country. Martin Marty says this religious feminism "represents the most comprehensive of the changes in the thinking and acting of church and synagogue in the past two decades."13 And it is influencing theology, historical interpretation, and biblical scholarship.

   This multifaceted feminine spirituality includes conservative evangelicals, radical lesbians, black "womanist" thinkers, Jewish and Roman Catholic women, goddess-worshipers, Marxists, liberal Protestants, atheists, and "pure scholars," according to Christian Science Monitor staff writer Robert Marquand.

   Are you ready? Expect the fractious controversy to roil and polarize churches as the arguments are turned up to full volume. Marquand sees three main feminist groups affecting what happens at churches near you:

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   Much of the shift in female religious perspectives is taking place at major universities and liberal seminaries, where theological tensions are likely to accelerate as we race toward 2001.

   Liberal Protestant seminaries have become more like the graduate schools of religion at secular universities, notes Jeffrey Hadden, who wrote Gathering Storm in the Churches more than a decade ago. The kind of thinking that moves these seminaries away from the mainstream of their churches is continuing, he said. "For example, Illif [a United Methodist seminary] just hired a Buddhist. Who is going to stay around and teach what it means to be a Methodist? This makes about as much sense as a med school hiring a Christian Science practitioner."15

Clergy Confusion

   By many estimates, the 1990s will be a time of continued confusion for the clergy. Ministers compose the "most frustrated profession" in the nation, according to management consultant Peter Drucker. George Barna says only a third of the clergy believe that their efforts to produce spiritual growth in members will succeed. The incidence of clergy stress and burnout is high, and the average career length for ministers is steadily decreasing.16

   "After a decade of catching up to the behavioral patterns of the people they serve, clergy will have crisis conditions — divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse — at rates that approximate those of the population at large" by 2001, Barna predicts.17

   Loren Mead, president of the Alban Institute, a research and development group that focuses on local church life, speaks about a "massive change in understanding" regarding "the role of clergy vis-a-vis the laity." This is bringing about sharp conflicts within congregations, intrachurch clashes, and "fights between staff. Our institute works with people within local churches to figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. We're frequently called in when there are sharp conflicts," Mead said.18

   Mead is busy these days.

   A 1989 survey among Episcopal priests showed they were "confused and uncertain" about their jobs. The study, prepared under the auspices of the Episcopal Church Foundation, concluded that

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"many old and valued patterns for ordained leaders of the church are no longer working."19

   Among clergy comments in the Episcopal study:

   Many clergy, the report said, "are conceiving a role for themselves like chief executive officers of a multi-level organization, where skilled laity are middle managers."20

   It appears this tension will be exacerbated as the call grows louder in many churches for greater lay training, participation, and leadership.

"Wounded Pastors" Talk

   Stressed-out clergy do seem more willing to talk about their problems than they were a few years back. "Healing Our Wounded Pastors" was the title of a Denver conference in early 1991. A female minister in the audience said she'd been overwhelmed by the emotional and personal problems prevalent in modern society. "Am I co-dependent? Am I a workaholic?" she wondered aloud. "It used to be we just worried about whether we had sinned."21

   Data compiled by church groups puts the problem into focus:

   A few commonsense measures may help ministers make it through the millennium. Things like learning to be involved in continuing education, setting boundaries for how much time they spend on the job, and taking vacations.23

   From the lay side of the chancel, the Alban Institute suggests:

   If Jim Dethmer is right, the clergy will get more than a shoeshine from the laity as lay people assume responsibility for church leadership.

Chapter Twenty-one  ||  Table of Contents