Do you remember how Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince begins? The little boy asks the grown-ups if his picture frightens them. Since it is not obvious to them that the picture is of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, they are not so scared. But that opening raises the question of what we see when we look at pictures, and so in that spirit I ask you this: does my picture, above, frighten you?
This snapshot (taken at the spring Transition Ministry Conference) is consistent with ones taken across the United States over the past five or six years. Notice that there are more positions open than clergy who are looking for new positions. I know this frightens many. I know that it causes anxiety in the system. It provides some “evidence” (even if anecdotal) of a big challenge all the mainline churches are facing, what some call the “clergy shortage.” It helps to “explain” why parishes can put out a beautiful profile, offer a fair compensation package, and still only get one or two interested clergy to apply.
But I want to say two things about my picture. First, it does not frighten me. It simply is the reality that we are dealing with, and I choose to face these days with hope. Not denial, not wishful thinking, but hope that this is still Christ’s Church.
And second: I don’t like the shorthand “clergy shortage” and I’d like to suggest a moratorium on using that phrase in our diocese as long as I am in this position of Canon to the Ordinary and Transition Officer.
Hear me out: there are far more complex realities underneath the simple number of clergy looking. First of all, many clergy are bound geographically these days even when looking, and some clergy are “open” but not actively looking. A challenge is that we no longer live in a time when clergy are the main bread winners in their families; often their spouse makes more money. And so if the spouse is settling into their career, we see limitations on clergy profiles: I need to live within 45 miles of Duke University, let’s say. (Sometimes we get lucky and someone says to me, my spouse just took a faculty position at UMass Medical School and I’m a priest…anything open in your diocese?) But the point is that even those seventy looking for full-time work have limitations on them. Sometimes those are related to grandchildren or aging parents or any other number of reasons. Search committees tell me they want to “cast a wide net.” I tell them that they need to work on their fly-fishing skills.
But one thing is clear: most clergy looking, especially if they are at the beginning of their vocations, need full-time work. The real news in my picture is not that we have fewer millennial and Gen-X clergy taking the place of retiring baby boomers. The real news is that we have an even bigger job shortage than we have a clergy shortage. The real news is that lots is shifting going on.
More than half of our congregations cannot afford to pay for a full-time priest. It is simply not sustainable. And this is true in dioceses bigger than ours (like Connecticut and DioMass) and smaller dioceses as well. Across the country we have a LOT less full-time jobs. And some of those that are “full-time” are the results of partnerships that mean the cleric is serving two positions to make one full-time job. This helps to explain why young clergy are frustrated when they hear there is a “clergy shortage” and yet still can’t find a suitable call and especially when the system we’ve inherited assumes that transitional deacons become curates.
I hear people in the peanut gallery say that this means “we need more bi-vocational clergy.” That may be right. But the system we have inherited isn’t built that way and mostly we still are relying on seminary-trained clergy. I had an associate rector years ago who was a pharmacist and a pastor: it was not as simple as it sounds to manage those competing demands. If we really are serious about bi-vocational clergy can’t just wiggle our nose like on Bewitched. It will take vision and purpose and time to make that shift.
In the meantime, what? Here is what seems clearest to me: lay leadership is more important than ever. We will have congregations that have Morning Prayer at least three times a month, for the foreseeable future.
I’m told that when the “new” Prayerbook came out in 1979, many congregations resisted the new “normal” that Eucharist be celebrated every Sunday. They were accustomed to Morning Prayer. Well, now we may be back to the future! See, there is nothing new under the sun! See, if you wait long enough, things circle back! I served recently in two small congregations that cannot afford even a half-time salary for a priest with benefits. They had gone three months without Eucharist until I showed up. Yet they seemed mostly to be doing ok.
In the early 2000s, I had an opportunity as part of my D.Min. studies to travel to China to explore the Church there. I’ve never forgotten that at a time when bans on worship were being lifted, it became clear the Church there was strong. They’d gone “underground” for decades, worshiping in people’s homes and singing hymns without ordained clergy. Of course they were happy to have an option to gather on Sundays again, but the point is that the Church didn’t die when that was illegal; it just changed.
I think we are in the early stages of a reformation. I don’t have a crystal ball. But the old model of a full-time seminary-trained priest in every congregation (the model may not really be very old, but simply our lived experience if we grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s in the United States) is not coming back. We are learning, growing, changing, adapting, hoping, trusting, loving our way into a new reality. Always with God’s help.