1. I was the beneficiary of a Transition into Ministry program funded through the Lilly endowment. It placed me in a church with a stable leader for the first two years of my ministry, and is probably the reason I've stayed with ministry for so long. They stopped funding those positions, and nothing has come to fill in the gap.
2. Churches are run by volunteers; your CPE residency was filled by salaried professionals. Of course the church runs slower.
3. One of the reasons church's take long periods between pastors is to work on the health of the congregation. I don't think it helps anyone to throw a newer pastor into a congregation that isn't healthy, and a lot of our congregations are in that place. Todd Ferguson and Josh Packard actually recommend closing dying churches as a way of helping young pastors not get stuck in a bad situation.
I'm not saying there aren't problems. The mainline desperately needs to get better at reallocating resources- churches at the end of their life cycle need to be encouraged to transfer their money to new initiatives, rather than hold on to some hope that things will eventually turn around. I've known way too many pastors in the first ten years of their ministry that have jumped into positions with churches that are essentially sinking ships, and then left ministry altogether because no one wants to do that.
Many parishes in my mainline church are looking for part-time pastors, as they cannot afford a full-time one, yet a pastor who has gone through all the formal education and training is looking for a full-time pastorate. We are exploring how to raise up & train pastors from the congregations themselves, or someone in the diocese who lives close enough to be raised up for those smaller, vibrant communities that need a part-time past.
This is a model which would fit neatly into the parameters I muse over in my comment, but yes -- we could do a different sort of commissioned ministry out of the local setting, if we could figure out (again, as I say in my long comment) how we'd pay for it. Because even on the cheap, it costs something. But as we're both saying, it's costing the wider church quite a bit to NOT do something.
One way we reduce cost is educating/training people by creating our own seminary/mentorship programs like CPE or houses of study like the Jesuits. We are currently partnering with other diocese supporting a school that is mostly zoom with quarterly weekend meetings onsite at a central location. The school/mentorship program is staffed with local pastors in our church.
so much of the 'system' needs to change - denominational silos, search processes that take forever, assumptions about part-time meaning every Sunday (when it shouldn't), what a pastor actually does (not *everything*).
I also can't help saying that skillfully using today's technology can solve a lot of these problems.
An additional thought, please - I think two things should be implemented l: 1., localized ed & formation of clergy candidates; 2., candidates’ ed and formation should be funded by the larger church, not themselves. Remove the two biggest barriers to a clergy vocation.
:snort: You seriously think they'll listen? (Let's just say matching good priests with parishes in a timely manner isn't always the diocese's priority...)
The pipeline feels long because we’re forming both the person and the pastor at the same time. If laypeople were already leading, serving, discerning, and carrying responsibility before ordination is even on the table, the on-ramp becomes a continuation, not a cliff.
We’re running into a “good, fast, cheap—pick two” problem. Right now we’re trying to form people well and deploy them quickly, which makes everything feel slow and heavy.
Faster pathways are possible, and they could help, but only if that upstream formation is already happening. Otherwise, we’re just speeding up the same bottleneck.
So: your CPE-ish model sounds great. Until you ask the question "who pays for it?"
Seminaries, our seminaries anyhow, have endowments of $30 to $120 million dollars, which sounds great, but it's largely tied up for particular purposes. They can only access the money, and often only the proceeds from the investment, for those purposes, which is usually ministerial education. They've all worked to make sure they can draw funds to cover costs for newer forms of ministerial education, like online learning with intensives, etc., but the rubber band only stretches so far. Could a visionary board and a good general counsel get those funds released for other risky outlays? The correct answer is: maybe. So generally, no.
Regions can staff the supervision, many say. I laugh, I hope kindly. Regional staff are trimmed beyond the bone (think amputation), running fast to only fall behind slowly rather than quickly, with their dance card filled by crises for the most part. We can talk also about how regions are "paid for," which is increasingly less DMF income as a percentage of the congregational giving to the wider mission, but through direct support and also investment income from endowed funds which . . . often come with designations for what the money can be used for. If a John D. Rockefeller or Chester Cadieux were to give regions major bequests with the proceeds off the principal going to ministerial development, that might open up a door by way of regional hires, under RM/CoM supervision, who would be funded by that income -- I don't know enough rich people to make that work, but it's an option . . . for the future.
Within regions, it's an often discussed issue that the concept of mentorship is complicated by the fact that the clergy most likely to volunteer to mentor are, um, not necessarily who you want. We could discuss the why & whether or not at length, but volunteer or minimally stipended mentors are a category for supporting ministerial development & training that most regions have some horror stories around. It is often discussed, frequently expected on paper, in practice rare to see function. Exceptions exist, but rare enough to prove the point.
So if seminaries aren't doing it, regional ministers aren't doing it, and regionally overseen mentors aren't doing it (on the cheap), how do we make this happen? Other religious traditions have seminary & ministerial training programs with funding, low cost of entry, and big numbers completing their work -- but what little public data exists on how many of those end up in ministry suggests that's not necessarily the solution. We see "leakage" of such interestingly trained* clergy getting hired by Disciples churches, then the region calls on the congregation & minister to meet certain criteria for standing, and the non-DoC clergyperson says "but I have all this training already" which I can bluntly say often proves to be, in Twain's immortal line about the Mississippi, a mile wide and an inch deep. Lots of Baptist "ordained" ministers are produced by their more adept & flexible systems (I know they're adept & flexible because they keep telling me they are, but mostly they drop requirements for Hebrew, Greek, or history: I digress), but many end up selling tires. I feel the Midwest and South are like Hollywood, where all the wait staff are just doing this until they get a break into acting; we have many mid-level professionals who are just doing copier servicing and sales until they get a break into a church job.
The "barrier" you seem to point at over your shoulder is between denominations -- sorry, my grandmother coughed in Heaven, I mean religious traditions (denominations being abominations, according to my forbears). Those are breaking down, as is anything resembling a recognizable ecclesiological theology let alone one of sacramental or even soteriological theologies. If DoC & UCC & PCUSA & UMC & even ELCA are all functionally equivalent (I leave out TEC because their endowments, locally and diocesan and seminarian, ensure they can maintain barriers as long as Wall Street and Trinity Church stand), then most mainline ecclesiology becomes an affiliation with tendencies, not defined beliefs, and the Apostles Creed an agreed upon pleasant sound.
Still, I think the timelines you describe are also, even in our less well-endowed precincts, tied to held funds. The more money in named trust accounts, the longer it takes because of the higher barriers, because, well, money. You don't want to have that slosh around too widely. Small churches paying weekly honoraria? Lots of 'em out there; I could preach four times a Sunday at such, and burn most of my checks (yes, paper checks) in gas driving between them, but if a church is insignificant in all three of numbers present, real estate value, and investment funds held, no one cares out there who is preaching or under whatever arrangement -- which is how such odd fits get made, often because the chair of the trustees meets a guy while buying bolts for the downspouts who "actually has a seminary degree, and will preach for what we're paying."
In that last paragraph, I'm playing the game of snark, but I'll also say: if I never hear another fellow clergy member complain about the untouchable funds their church holds, I will be a happy man, because I will be in Heaven with grandma and Alexander Campbell before that happens. My spouse worked in higher ed, I have done a great deal of contract writing for development purposes, and it is tragic how poorly most clergy understand that fact of life, and how to leverage it to get new money with which you can do more of what you want now. Burning time and energy on trying to get the 1912 fund for horse trough maintenance shifted for buying software subscriptions is a mug's game.
We need a model, practiced in a small area successfully, then pitched to those with funds (Lilly comes to mind here, but there are others, too) for getting it up and running. Regional Commissions on Ministry are almost never directly beholden to the seminary model in a conscious fashion, but your best point, if I may make it for you, is that the mainlines, having spent the last century working to get from an apprenticeship model to a post-graduate model, are not internally able to speak the language of a new model. We need an organization or institution with less at stake in the pivot to help stand up a working experiment in action-reflection-action, on the job ministry training which is back to the future, but would have some lovely modern twists thanks to ZOOM and other tools of direct communication over distances.
But dissolving all the progressive denominations into a single pool -- I am not sure I WANT it, though you make good points for how it might help. It's the unintended consequences, some of which I think we're already seeing at work, which worry me, and keep me unenthusiastic for it -- and I regularly preside at UCC, PCUSA, UMC, even GMC churches as well as Disciples settings. I see how it's evolving, and I am not sure what rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
If we think from an outsider/layperson’s perspective, it does make me wonder: Why is clergy formation so dependent on expensive, centralized institutional structures in the first place?
There’s a difference between guarding depth and dismissing people. If we’re concerned about formation, the question isn’t which label someone carries- it’s whether they’ve actually been formed in a way that bears fruit over time. Some of it does require deep academic formation. But a lot of the work is simply faithful presence.
Alex, if you saw one of my recent posts on predicting church in 10 years, I do suggest that judicatories will function more as certifying bodies rather than training as you say here.
The one hope the less hierarchical mainline Protestant groups saw for ministerial education was embracing HARD the professionalism model. And in early & frontier America, medicine, law, and ministry were the three professions. Teaching became a profession along with teacher's colleges/normal schools which became state universities, and the idea journalism was a profession didn't exist. Ditto dentists.
What happened was the 1910 Flexner Report. It was about medical schools, but it had huge consequences for higher education more generally. The Carnegie Foundation helped to leverage, with an offer for retirement credits through the new TIAA, a consistent pattern of credit hours and credentials for teachers, what became our modern accreditation system. But in 1900 only 20% of all lawyers had been to a law school -- it was still mostly apprenticeships. Medical schools were EVERYWHERE, but the quality of them ranged from high to not at all (plus we have the "fields" of naturopathic medicine, osteopathic medicine, and chiropractic medicine, each of which went its own way, with only the osteopaths seeking comity with "scientific medicine." Which is what Flexner & Carnegie supported.
After Flexner and the Carnegie inducements, by 1914 you needed a high school diploma to get into medical school; by 1916, at least (!!!) a year of college; by 1918, two years. The nascent American Bar Association had similar hopes, working through the Carnegie Foundation, whose consultant Alfred Reed published “Training for the Public Profession of the Law” in 1921. Law like medicine was considered a "public profession."
Colleges of the Bible only developed as we know them in their proto-seminary form in the 1920s; by 1930 less than half of all Disciples ministers had been to college -- and this is before Restructure, so include many/most independent Churches of Christ in that. We didn't get to half of our ministers having a seminary degree until about 1960, and arguably that was a Pyrrhic victory for ministerial education . . . because while teaching as a profession had a truly public professional basis through public education, and income supported by unions and local property taxes, ministry had, and has, no such external support. The 1960s saw the rise of "codes of ministerial ethics" (they existed in the wartime era, but weren't 'required' for standing until after 1978, and yes, because of Jim Jones), and many mainline groups adopted "mandatory minimums" and salary schedules -- but in our hyper-congregational polity, that was never an option. And in fact, we celebrated the arrival of a consensus practice of each church having a seminary trained minister about the same time it became cost-unfeasible (salary, housing, retirement, health care) for 40% and soon more of our congregations.
Tl;dr -- we chased a sort of second cousin parity with law & medicine in terms of training & certification, knowing we would stay behind them in income, but we'd had stature in communities alongside them, so it was a natural pursuit. What we didn't see was the quick turn to centralization and commodification of legal practices & medical care to maintain income for those professions. We took on the expense, but couldn't manage the turn to how our fellow professionals, including teaching, handled compensation.
1. I was the beneficiary of a Transition into Ministry program funded through the Lilly endowment. It placed me in a church with a stable leader for the first two years of my ministry, and is probably the reason I've stayed with ministry for so long. They stopped funding those positions, and nothing has come to fill in the gap.
2. Churches are run by volunteers; your CPE residency was filled by salaried professionals. Of course the church runs slower.
3. One of the reasons church's take long periods between pastors is to work on the health of the congregation. I don't think it helps anyone to throw a newer pastor into a congregation that isn't healthy, and a lot of our congregations are in that place. Todd Ferguson and Josh Packard actually recommend closing dying churches as a way of helping young pastors not get stuck in a bad situation.
I'm not saying there aren't problems. The mainline desperately needs to get better at reallocating resources- churches at the end of their life cycle need to be encouraged to transfer their money to new initiatives, rather than hold on to some hope that things will eventually turn around. I've known way too many pastors in the first ten years of their ministry that have jumped into positions with churches that are essentially sinking ships, and then left ministry altogether because no one wants to do that.
All valid points. I do have an podcast episode with Packard and Ferguson, talking about their book I assume you are also referencing.
I listen to Future Christian regularly, so I'm sure that's where I learned about it.
Thanks for listening!
Many parishes in my mainline church are looking for part-time pastors, as they cannot afford a full-time one, yet a pastor who has gone through all the formal education and training is looking for a full-time pastorate. We are exploring how to raise up & train pastors from the congregations themselves, or someone in the diocese who lives close enough to be raised up for those smaller, vibrant communities that need a part-time past.
This is a model which would fit neatly into the parameters I muse over in my comment, but yes -- we could do a different sort of commissioned ministry out of the local setting, if we could figure out (again, as I say in my long comment) how we'd pay for it. Because even on the cheap, it costs something. But as we're both saying, it's costing the wider church quite a bit to NOT do something.
One way we reduce cost is educating/training people by creating our own seminary/mentorship programs like CPE or houses of study like the Jesuits. We are currently partnering with other diocese supporting a school that is mostly zoom with quarterly weekend meetings onsite at a central location. The school/mentorship program is staffed with local pastors in our church.
This is so true!
so much of the 'system' needs to change - denominational silos, search processes that take forever, assumptions about part-time meaning every Sunday (when it shouldn't), what a pastor actually does (not *everything*).
I also can't help saying that skillfully using today's technology can solve a lot of these problems.
look at how many clergy positions are on Indeed!
An additional thought, please - I think two things should be implemented l: 1., localized ed & formation of clergy candidates; 2., candidates’ ed and formation should be funded by the larger church, not themselves. Remove the two biggest barriers to a clergy vocation.
Some Episcopal dioceses do that (the Iona Collaborative). Some don't.
Episcopal Church in Colorado, are you listening?
Have them hit me up!
:snort: You seriously think they'll listen? (Let's just say matching good priests with parishes in a timely manner isn't always the diocese's priority...)
The pipeline feels long because we’re forming both the person and the pastor at the same time. If laypeople were already leading, serving, discerning, and carrying responsibility before ordination is even on the table, the on-ramp becomes a continuation, not a cliff.
We’re running into a “good, fast, cheap—pick two” problem. Right now we’re trying to form people well and deploy them quickly, which makes everything feel slow and heavy.
Faster pathways are possible, and they could help, but only if that upstream formation is already happening. Otherwise, we’re just speeding up the same bottleneck.
So: your CPE-ish model sounds great. Until you ask the question "who pays for it?"
Seminaries, our seminaries anyhow, have endowments of $30 to $120 million dollars, which sounds great, but it's largely tied up for particular purposes. They can only access the money, and often only the proceeds from the investment, for those purposes, which is usually ministerial education. They've all worked to make sure they can draw funds to cover costs for newer forms of ministerial education, like online learning with intensives, etc., but the rubber band only stretches so far. Could a visionary board and a good general counsel get those funds released for other risky outlays? The correct answer is: maybe. So generally, no.
Regions can staff the supervision, many say. I laugh, I hope kindly. Regional staff are trimmed beyond the bone (think amputation), running fast to only fall behind slowly rather than quickly, with their dance card filled by crises for the most part. We can talk also about how regions are "paid for," which is increasingly less DMF income as a percentage of the congregational giving to the wider mission, but through direct support and also investment income from endowed funds which . . . often come with designations for what the money can be used for. If a John D. Rockefeller or Chester Cadieux were to give regions major bequests with the proceeds off the principal going to ministerial development, that might open up a door by way of regional hires, under RM/CoM supervision, who would be funded by that income -- I don't know enough rich people to make that work, but it's an option . . . for the future.
Within regions, it's an often discussed issue that the concept of mentorship is complicated by the fact that the clergy most likely to volunteer to mentor are, um, not necessarily who you want. We could discuss the why & whether or not at length, but volunteer or minimally stipended mentors are a category for supporting ministerial development & training that most regions have some horror stories around. It is often discussed, frequently expected on paper, in practice rare to see function. Exceptions exist, but rare enough to prove the point.
So if seminaries aren't doing it, regional ministers aren't doing it, and regionally overseen mentors aren't doing it (on the cheap), how do we make this happen? Other religious traditions have seminary & ministerial training programs with funding, low cost of entry, and big numbers completing their work -- but what little public data exists on how many of those end up in ministry suggests that's not necessarily the solution. We see "leakage" of such interestingly trained* clergy getting hired by Disciples churches, then the region calls on the congregation & minister to meet certain criteria for standing, and the non-DoC clergyperson says "but I have all this training already" which I can bluntly say often proves to be, in Twain's immortal line about the Mississippi, a mile wide and an inch deep. Lots of Baptist "ordained" ministers are produced by their more adept & flexible systems (I know they're adept & flexible because they keep telling me they are, but mostly they drop requirements for Hebrew, Greek, or history: I digress), but many end up selling tires. I feel the Midwest and South are like Hollywood, where all the wait staff are just doing this until they get a break into acting; we have many mid-level professionals who are just doing copier servicing and sales until they get a break into a church job.
The "barrier" you seem to point at over your shoulder is between denominations -- sorry, my grandmother coughed in Heaven, I mean religious traditions (denominations being abominations, according to my forbears). Those are breaking down, as is anything resembling a recognizable ecclesiological theology let alone one of sacramental or even soteriological theologies. If DoC & UCC & PCUSA & UMC & even ELCA are all functionally equivalent (I leave out TEC because their endowments, locally and diocesan and seminarian, ensure they can maintain barriers as long as Wall Street and Trinity Church stand), then most mainline ecclesiology becomes an affiliation with tendencies, not defined beliefs, and the Apostles Creed an agreed upon pleasant sound.
Still, I think the timelines you describe are also, even in our less well-endowed precincts, tied to held funds. The more money in named trust accounts, the longer it takes because of the higher barriers, because, well, money. You don't want to have that slosh around too widely. Small churches paying weekly honoraria? Lots of 'em out there; I could preach four times a Sunday at such, and burn most of my checks (yes, paper checks) in gas driving between them, but if a church is insignificant in all three of numbers present, real estate value, and investment funds held, no one cares out there who is preaching or under whatever arrangement -- which is how such odd fits get made, often because the chair of the trustees meets a guy while buying bolts for the downspouts who "actually has a seminary degree, and will preach for what we're paying."
In that last paragraph, I'm playing the game of snark, but I'll also say: if I never hear another fellow clergy member complain about the untouchable funds their church holds, I will be a happy man, because I will be in Heaven with grandma and Alexander Campbell before that happens. My spouse worked in higher ed, I have done a great deal of contract writing for development purposes, and it is tragic how poorly most clergy understand that fact of life, and how to leverage it to get new money with which you can do more of what you want now. Burning time and energy on trying to get the 1912 fund for horse trough maintenance shifted for buying software subscriptions is a mug's game.
We need a model, practiced in a small area successfully, then pitched to those with funds (Lilly comes to mind here, but there are others, too) for getting it up and running. Regional Commissions on Ministry are almost never directly beholden to the seminary model in a conscious fashion, but your best point, if I may make it for you, is that the mainlines, having spent the last century working to get from an apprenticeship model to a post-graduate model, are not internally able to speak the language of a new model. We need an organization or institution with less at stake in the pivot to help stand up a working experiment in action-reflection-action, on the job ministry training which is back to the future, but would have some lovely modern twists thanks to ZOOM and other tools of direct communication over distances.
But dissolving all the progressive denominations into a single pool -- I am not sure I WANT it, though you make good points for how it might help. It's the unintended consequences, some of which I think we're already seeing at work, which worry me, and keep me unenthusiastic for it -- and I regularly preside at UCC, PCUSA, UMC, even GMC churches as well as Disciples settings. I see how it's evolving, and I am not sure what rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Wow, Jeff that could be it's own blog post! Glad to see I inspired such thought from you!
It’s think about this, or about Medicare billing. Look at it as avoidance behavior masquerading as productive musings.
If we think from an outsider/layperson’s perspective, it does make me wonder: Why is clergy formation so dependent on expensive, centralized institutional structures in the first place?
There’s a difference between guarding depth and dismissing people. If we’re concerned about formation, the question isn’t which label someone carries- it’s whether they’ve actually been formed in a way that bears fruit over time. Some of it does require deep academic formation. But a lot of the work is simply faithful presence.
Alex, if you saw one of my recent posts on predicting church in 10 years, I do suggest that judicatories will function more as certifying bodies rather than training as you say here.
The one hope the less hierarchical mainline Protestant groups saw for ministerial education was embracing HARD the professionalism model. And in early & frontier America, medicine, law, and ministry were the three professions. Teaching became a profession along with teacher's colleges/normal schools which became state universities, and the idea journalism was a profession didn't exist. Ditto dentists.
What happened was the 1910 Flexner Report. It was about medical schools, but it had huge consequences for higher education more generally. The Carnegie Foundation helped to leverage, with an offer for retirement credits through the new TIAA, a consistent pattern of credit hours and credentials for teachers, what became our modern accreditation system. But in 1900 only 20% of all lawyers had been to a law school -- it was still mostly apprenticeships. Medical schools were EVERYWHERE, but the quality of them ranged from high to not at all (plus we have the "fields" of naturopathic medicine, osteopathic medicine, and chiropractic medicine, each of which went its own way, with only the osteopaths seeking comity with "scientific medicine." Which is what Flexner & Carnegie supported.
After Flexner and the Carnegie inducements, by 1914 you needed a high school diploma to get into medical school; by 1916, at least (!!!) a year of college; by 1918, two years. The nascent American Bar Association had similar hopes, working through the Carnegie Foundation, whose consultant Alfred Reed published “Training for the Public Profession of the Law” in 1921. Law like medicine was considered a "public profession."
Colleges of the Bible only developed as we know them in their proto-seminary form in the 1920s; by 1930 less than half of all Disciples ministers had been to college -- and this is before Restructure, so include many/most independent Churches of Christ in that. We didn't get to half of our ministers having a seminary degree until about 1960, and arguably that was a Pyrrhic victory for ministerial education . . . because while teaching as a profession had a truly public professional basis through public education, and income supported by unions and local property taxes, ministry had, and has, no such external support. The 1960s saw the rise of "codes of ministerial ethics" (they existed in the wartime era, but weren't 'required' for standing until after 1978, and yes, because of Jim Jones), and many mainline groups adopted "mandatory minimums" and salary schedules -- but in our hyper-congregational polity, that was never an option. And in fact, we celebrated the arrival of a consensus practice of each church having a seminary trained minister about the same time it became cost-unfeasible (salary, housing, retirement, health care) for 40% and soon more of our congregations.
Tl;dr -- we chased a sort of second cousin parity with law & medicine in terms of training & certification, knowing we would stay behind them in income, but we'd had stature in communities alongside them, so it was a natural pursuit. What we didn't see was the quick turn to centralization and commodification of legal practices & medical care to maintain income for those professions. We took on the expense, but couldn't manage the turn to how our fellow professionals, including teaching, handled compensation.