Crunching the numbers

At times, it seems like the United Methodist Church has a 'numbers obsession.' The statistics are familiar: when the church was formed in 1968, it had well over 10 million members in the U.S.. Today, just 40 years later, the numbers have dropped to below 8 million - all in a time when the population of the United States itself has risen from 200 million to over 300 million people.

That's right. While the population of the country has risen by 50%, the membership of the church has dropped by 20%. By any measure, that is a failure.

But what does it mean?

In the past, I have written disparagingly about the church's obsession with numbers. I've never had a problem with focusing on thriving, growing churches. I've just worried that an obsession with numbers would lead us to offering cheap grace, with an over-attention to adding warm bodies to the pews while watering down the gospel in order to get them there.

The Igniting Ministry campaign has always seemed to confirm that fear to me; its intent is to market the church - to 'raise awareness' and hopefully increase numbers - but it does so by offering a message so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless: "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors." (I know and have read about the work Igniting Ministry does with target congregations and the training they have received, but that is a relatively small part of the way the campaign has affected the whole church. It is bad theology, and - I can't say this strongly enough - it is a crying shame that we have spent so much money on advertising that does not mention the name of Jesus Christ, all in the name of being sensitive to "spiritual seekers." I have no doubt that John Wesley does somersaults in his grave over this.)

Today I want to offer a mea culpa. I believe numbers are important, and I believe we need to focus on them. Two things have caused me to change my tune and openly embrace a focus on numerical growth in the church.

The first is that I've come to believe we have nothing to fear from the watered down message of marketing programs like Igniting Ministry. They don't work. Igniting Ministry has been around for years, and its results are as hollow as its message. UM Communications can offer press releases every time a new Barna study says that Igniting Ministry has increased the 'favorability' of the United Methodist 'brand' in the public at large, but that has done nothing to arrest our precipitous decline in numbers. Thus, I can only conclude that my fears about cheap grace were wrong. In our cultural climate, apparently even cheap grace doesn't draw a crowd.

The second point is really more important, and it's the subject of my new column in the United Methodist Reporter. In December, I was with Wesley Seminary's Lovett Weems at a conference in Washington D.C., and he presented on the importance of pastors and congregations that are serious about their numerical growth. The core of Lovett's message to us that day can be found in this article. It really boils down to this: Jesus called us to make disciples, and the church in Acts exhibited remarkable growth by boldly proclaiming the gospel of Christ. As the inheritors of that apostolic ministry, we are called to do the same.

I've got to admit that this has really shaped my thinking about my own ministry. The testimony of the Scripture is that, when the true gospel is proclaimed, people will respond.

Might this be a litmus test for faithful ministry?

God's best work...

Is the authority of the clergy in crisis?

Are pastors as respected in society as they once were?

During the fall semester, I served as a graduate assistant for a course in American church history taught by Prof. Grant Wacker here at Duke. One of our main course texts was Brooks Holifield's God's Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America. Holifield takes up these questions, in part by suggesting that the clergy of every era in American history have always viewed their power and authority as on the wane.

Holifield goes back to the earliest European clergy who came to this continent - first Catholic missionary priests and then Puritan congregationalist ministers in New England and Anglican priests in Virginia. In the colonial era, it is true that clergy held all sorts of authority that seems strange to us today. They acted as judges, drafted legislation, served as de facto physicians, and were the most widely-read authors. When institutions of higher education like Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary were founded, clergy served as both presidents and professors for generations.

As American society developed and became more complex, the clergy gradually lost their dominance in all these areas. Holifield points out that as the professions developed and as the high education level of the clergy was matched by people pursuing other careers, it became less necessary to have clergy serve so many functions in society. (And interestingly, the clergy in some populist traditions like Methodists and Baptists in the early 19th century actually eschewed education.)

But here's the catch - and this is what I write about in my new Reporter column - Holifield argues that all these arenas of authority outside of the church have always been only peripheral to the clergy's true authority. And that authority is the ministry of the church: preaching the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, engaging in the ministry of pastoral care, and leading & equipping the people of God for ministry in the world.

I find Holifield's thesis compelling, and here's why: All too often, we are tempted to think that God has abandoned the church in order to do his work in more exciting venues. Whether it is politics, non-profit work, or social advocacy, the tendency is to think there has always got to be some exciting new area that aspiring clergy should gravitate toward. And in that milieu, the church becomes a 'fall back' option for those who can't do something 'sexier.'

But the reality is just the opposite. God's best work really is done through the church. We only know what words like justice, compassion, reconciliation, and love mean because we learn them through the grammar of the faith. And it is a grammar that is taught by the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us" (1 John 3:16, NKJV). The church is the steward of God's mysteries, and it is the community of God's own people. It is the very vehicle of God's salvation in the world!

As a pastor myself, I can tell you that ordained ministry in the church truly is an exciting vocation. Is it hard? Sure, it can be. But when one begins to gain the skills necessary for ministry (courage, patience, gentleness, among others) and allows oneself to be led by the Holy Spirit, fruits can be borne to which nothing else can compare. Fruits that include seeing glimpses of the coming Kingdom of God.

Why would the clergy need any other authority than that?

Unfortunate, self-inflicted confusion

About the orders of ministry, that is.

If you have time, read this United Methodist News Service report along with this blog post. It explains the 2008 General Conference's decision to allow deacons, with their bishops' permission, to preside over the sacraments within the deacon's primary appointment.

Why is this a problem? Well, because historically deacons do not celebrate the sacraments. Whether they are "transitional" deacons meaning they are on their way to becoming elders (as in the UMC prior to 1996 and in many denominations today) or "permanent" deacons (as in both Roman Catholic and United Methodist practice in the present), the ministry of deacons has never been understood to encompass celebrating the sacraments.

Deacons have an important calling. As the Book of Discipline (2000) makes clear in Par.310, the deacon is called to servant ministry in the world, embodying "the interrelationship between worship in the gathered community and service to God in the world." Thus, you'll find deacons who are teachers, social workers, chaplains, youth ministers, music ministers, and activists.

Elders (or presbyters, priests, pastors, etc.) have a different calling. They are called as the shepherds of congregations of the faithful, leading them through teaching, preaching, guiding, and worshiping. And so it is to the elders of the church that the responsibility for celebrating the sacraments falls.

Note: this does not imply a superiority on the part of elders. Elders are not 'better' than deacons, just as the ordained clergy (elders and deacons) are not 'better' than laity. But all these categories have different callings as Christian disciples, callings which are derived from Scripture and the tradition of the church. And importantly for our purposes, they are callings that the UMC has spent a lot of time trying to reason through over the past few years.

It was the 1996 General Conference that separated the orders of ministry, defining the elder and the deacon as two distinct ordinations and phasing out the 'transitional' deacon. The GC made this move because it believed that it was faithfully Scriptural and that it provided for a more coherent account of the orders of ministry. Yet with the 2008 General Conference's decision to authorize bishops to allow deacons to celebrate sacraments in their primary appointments, it has begun to overturn what was developed 12 years prior.

From what I understand, the ostensible reason for the 2008 GC's action was to allow for the sacraments to be celebrated in areas where elders are not readily available. But does this mean that deacons will be serving as the pastoral leaders of congregations? That really makes no sense. If deacons are leading worship because they feel called to do so, then they should begin the process to be ordained as elders. And if there are still truly rural outposts out there without an elder for miles around, then surely our tradition has enough historical knowledge about how to circuit ride that we can get an elder to each local church on a regular basis.

I spoke with a young woman earlier this year who is a seminarian and (I believe) wants to be ordained a deacon. In arguing that deacons should be granted sacramental authority, she said something to the effect, "I have friends who are called to be deacons, but they also feel called to celebrate the sacraments."

The proper response to a statement like this is "No, actually your friends are mistaken. They cannot be called to be both deacons and celebrants. In the church's understanding, if they are called to preside at table, then they are called to the pastoral leadership of congregations. If, on the other hand, they are called to the servant leadership of a deacon, then our understanding of that does not include pastoral leadership."

Sacramental authority is not a commodity, to be claimed by those attracted to the stature it conveys and offered in a consumerist manner when and where one pleases. It is a means of grace, given to us by Christ and provided for our salvation. One of the chief reasons that the presbyteros exist at all is to safeguard the sacred mysteries, ensuring that they are taught faithfully and celebrated rightly. And when we go tinkering with the orders of ministry at each and every General Conference, we do violence to the ecclesial covenant God has given us and introduce unnecessary incoherence into our orders of ministry.

As they have always been, the bishops of the church are the last line of defense for orthodoxy. Let us hope each one of them declines to use the new authority that the General Conference recently offered them.

Good news for young clergy

A few weeks ago, I posted about the new findings of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Seminary about recent trends in the numbers of under-35 year old clergy in the United Methodist Church.

As you may be aware, the Lewis Center's original report, covering the years 1985 to 2005, showed a distressing downward trend in the numbers of young clergy in the church. But the updated findings show that the trend may be reversing, as both the absolute numbers of young clergy and the numbers of young clergy as a percentage of all UM elders has risen.

I recently spent some more time reading the report, and I contacted the director of the Lewis Center, Dr. Lovett Weems, for his thoughts on the new findings. I discuss my thoughts in my new column in the UM Reporter, "New stats offer hope for young UM clergy."

Dr. Weems is cautiously optimistic about what the Center has found. But he notes that he thinks various levels of the church are really doing a lot in nurturing a 'culture of call' that facilitates the ability of youth and young adults to hear the Holy Spirit's calling on their lives to ministry. He cites the work of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, the advocacy of individual annual conferences, and the proactive attitude of young clergy themselves in helping their brothers and sisters respond to the call.

All of this is encouraging news. And it is a great reminder to each of us that we have a responsibility to help raise up a new generation of leaders in the church. God is good!

Young clergy age trends

The Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., has released an updated version of its Report on Clergy Age Trends in the UMC. This updated report is built upon the original report done by the Lewis Center, which was chronicled in the book, The Crisis of Younger Clergy by Lovett Weems and Ann Michel. (I wrote a book review of Crisis, which you can access here.)

There is information on all age groups (including elders, deacons, and local pastors). My own interest is largely in the "younger clergy" age group, and the good news is that there is actual good news to report.

The numbers of under-35 year old clergy elders and their percentage as a number of all elders bottomed out in 2005 (the year I was ordained), but it has climbed since then. The numbers for elders look like this:

Year - % - Total
2005 - 4.69 - 850
2006 - 4.89 - 881
2007 - 4.92 - 876
2008 - 5.21 - 910

Those changes aren't huge, but they are promising. There is also a nice statistic to report from my home conference - the Arkansas Conference. We have the highest percentage (9.29%) of under-35 clergy of any conference in the U.S.!

[Note: the report is helpful this year in the amount of information it contains on the trends in numbers of deacons and local pastors, which were missing from the report as it was presented in The Crisis of Younger Clergy.]

Do we need a new clergy order?

Tom Arthur, a student at Duke Divinity School, is proposing a new order for clergy, which would be called the Order of St. James. You can see his post about it here. As a way to respond to the rampant materialism of our age, this order would covenant around the practices of simplicity and hospitality. The group Tom is gathering has devoted an entire blog to their ongoing conversations, and they are beginning a process of discernment about intentional practices in which the order will engage.

I think the issue that Tom and this group are pressing is an important one. In more and more interactions that I have with other clergy, the need to covenant around something deeper than just our common ordination vows often comes up. The reasons for this are many: For one thing, the level of accountability both in ministry and in the church as a whole is extremely low. For another, the very issue that this nascent Order of St. James is responding to - materialism - is so pervasive in the culture that it is sometimes hard to even see. When everything around us is devoted to mammon, it makes it difficult to remember how deceptively idolatrous mammon can be.

One other reason an order would be helpful is that it's becoming less and less clear what the mission of the church truly is. Many Christians - and I include Methodists here - don't take salvation very seriously. We've become soft universalists, assuming that our choices have no real bearing on whether or not we are saved eternally. In that milieu, a rededication by the clergy to living and preaching according to the gospel is desperately needed.

When I was in Nashville, some close friends and I entered into a process of discernment over whether to move toward living in an intentional community of some kind. We had lived and studied together in divinity school for a couple of years, and a number of us had been active in an anti-death penalty movement where we experienced a special call from the Holy Spirit. The text we kept coming back to was John 13:34, where Jesus gives a mandatum novum, a new commandment, that the disciples should love one another as they had been loved by Christ himself. Most of us were headed toward ordained ministry, and at some point the conversation came around to whether we should found an Order of the Mandatum, whose members would covenant to live in intentional communities and engage in certain biblical practices.

More recently, I have talked with friends here at Duke about an Ordo Missionis Wesleyani, an Order of the Wesleyan Mission, which would essentially be a preaching order for Methodist clergy. Its members would commit themselves to faithfully preaching the "three grand doctrines" of Scripture that Wesley said were indispensable: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the Holiness consequent upon that justification. Though such a doctrinal orientation might at first seem very different from either the Order of St. James or the Order of the Mandatum, it's not. When you understand what Wesley really meant by holiness, it becomes clear that doctrine and practice are twin sides of the same coin.

I will say that I think this stuff is much harder than it might at first appear. The Order of the Mandatum floundered, due largely to competing understandings of how it should be constituted and diverging desires on where to live and what to do. That group read Jean Vanier's Community and Growth together (a book that I highly recommend anyone read who has an interest in either a religious order or an intentional community), and I was struck at Vanier's comment that any group of people who have an idea of what a community will look like before it is actually formed are setting themselves up for failure. As I remember it, Vanier suggests that such an approach shows a lack of faith in the Holy Spirit's ability to shape and form communities according to God's desires. That, I think, was what my Mandatum friends and I did wrong. I would be curious to hear from anyone who is in the Order of St. Luke or who is a part of an annual conference where the Order of Elders and Order of Deacons are taken seriously.

The problem we American individualists have in terms of really entering into an order is that we can't really submit to the ancient monastic vow of obedience. We are too committed to making our own decisions and living our own lives. And yet, it is that very quality of obedience that we most need to learn. If the church is to have a future in this land, it will be through a renewed obedience to God rather than the superficial triage techniques that you see lining the bookshelves of Christian bookstores. "Church growth" is not the church's salvation.

An order for preachers, to guide their lives and help them better pastor the flocks God has given them ... Is it needed? Desperately so. Is it possible? For us? For Methodist elders and deacons? I don't know. But I'd like to find out.

What's happening to the preachers?

Lovett Weems and Ann Michel think they know.

They have a new book out from Abingdon, entitled, The Crisis of Younger Clergy, that analyzes the results of the 2006 survey conducted by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary on clergy demographics in the United Methodist Church.

In 1985, there were over 3,200 ordained elders in the UMC under the age of 35. Today there are around 850. The book tries to get a handle on this troubling trend and, even more importantly, suggest ways that the church can provide the kind of culture where youth and young adults are able to really hear the Holy Spirit's call to ministry.

I write about Weems and Michel's new book in my new column in the United Methodist Reporter. In addition to that, Robin Russell has a good Q&A article with Weems where he answers questions about the importance of young clergy in the church.

I endorsed this book before it came out, and I have a review of it that will appear in the Reporter in the coming weeks. I think it is timely and important, and it is a great book for anyone who cares about the future of leadership in our church. I could easily see how a Sunday school class or small group might use this book as a way to start a conversation about how to nurture the kind of church environment where calling is affirmed and supported. Check it out!

Clergy collars: yea or nay?

Every year at annual conference, I see more and more of my Methodist clergy brothers and sisters wearing collars. I have never asked any of them why, and I have never donned a clergy collar myself. But the issue of collar wearing has come up among some friends here at Duke recently, particularly with my Free Methodist friend and fellow blogger Casey Taylor, who has posted a couple of times on this issue recently (see here and here). Besides engaging in a fascinating and friendly debate with a Baptist pastor from Australia named Gordon (a contributor to the Neo-Baptist blog), Casey raises a lot of helpful points around this issue.

My brother Barkley is an Episcopal priest in Roanoke, VA, and he wears a collar everyday. (In fact, that's him in the picture above.) He has mentioned to me one of the points that Casey raises - that, because he is so easily identifiable as a member of the clergy, the collar sometimes provides ministry opportunities he would otherwise miss. He has also shared with me a bit of the history of the collar about which I was not aware: that it (in combination with the black clergy suit) is essentially a modern adaptation of the cassock which was once the everyday apparel of the clergy. That is interesting, since most people today think of the cassock as a vestment (an opinion which Barkley says is technically incorrect).

These points are echoed by a former Duke student named Jonathan Melton, who is now serving an Episcopal parish in west Texas. In a reflection piece in Duke's Anglican/Episcopal House of Studies publication Perspectives, he calls clergy collars "symbols of humility and availability." Jonathan argues that it is important to wear the collar exactly because it can be an awkward and difficult experience for the person wearing it at times. Like a policeman's badge or a physician's white coat, it announces to the world that this person serves a certain role and that he can be called on for aid.

I am curious to hear others' opinions on the pros and cons of wearing a collar. Theologically speaking, I regard it as adiaphora - there is no clear Scriptural injunction either for or against it. That means it essentially boils down to a pastoral issue: Is it conducive to a more effective ministry to wear the collar? Two strong issues in its favor for me are: 1) that it marks one as clergy and hence as a minister of the gospel to the watching world; and 2) it calls the wearer to a high accountability for actions and attitudes in the public sphere. As our culture continues to secularize, I can see many benefits to this form of public clerical witness.

If you are clergy, do you wear a collar regularly? And if you do not, have you thought about it?

Crisis of Younger Clergy

Lovett Weems and Ann Michel have just written The Crisis of Younger Clergy, a book that analyzes the results of both the Lewis Center for Church Leadership's study of clergy age trends from 1985-2005 as well as its recent survey of young adult (under 35) clergy. This is all new stuff. The study of clergy age trends came out in 2006, and the survey of young adult clergy took place in March 2007.

I recently reviewed an advance copy of the book, and it is really well-done. Weems and Michel offer a detailed picture of the crisis the church faces in regards to its young clergy (who now number less than 5% of elders), as well as suggestions about actions that can be taken in areas as different as recruitment & response to call, theological education & debt, and emotional isolation & the appointment process. If you are a young clergyperson and you read this book, a whole lot of it will ring true. Abingdon Press will be publishing it in early 2008, and I highly recommend it.

On a related note, I have continued to get responses on the issue of the UMC's candidacy process for ordination. One of the most revealing was this one from Kyle Roberson, who is in his final year at Perkins School of Theology:

"As a young person going through the ordination process I cannot tell you how often I have truly felt like abandoning the process b/c of my frustration with some of the very issues you point out in your article. I have also spoken recently with three young people who are 'lifelong United Methodists' who are now seeking to serve as ministers with non-denominational congregations in our area b/c they feel they don't have the time to 'waste' on the ordination process ... I strongly agree with your observation regarding the UMC's apathy towards the seminaries, and I would add that the same sentiment exists towards campus ministry programs across the country who are doing the hard work of raising up leaders only to watch them become frustrated and bound by a process that is supposed to be, in the end, the focusing and enriching journey one takes to discern how to serve God's people in ministry. I pray that those in the United Methodist system who have ears may hear these words and take them to heart as we prepare to meet for General Conference and discuss this issue among the many we have before us."

That is just one anecdote, but I think it speaks for the experience of many.

Blogging about ordination

In the past week, there have been several blog posts about the issue of the candidacy and the ordination process in the UMC. If you are interested in what has been said elsewhere, check out:

-- This Methoblog post that I wrote on Friday, basically summarizing what I said a couple of days earlier on Gen-X Rising.

-- This impassioned and poignant post from Gavin Richardson (who, by the way, may be the hardest working blogger in show business). Gavin offers a few good examples of how bad candidacy can really be. It wasn't nearly this bad in my own experience, but I have certainly heard stories of the kind Gavin shares.

-- This post on the United Methodist Reporter's new blog, written by Amy Forbus. Amy mentions on the Reporter post that Rebekah Miles' op-ed piece is going to come out in the Aug. 31st edition of the Reporter. Keep an eye out for that. The Reporter's general website address is here.

I will link to Dr. Miles' Reporter article when it appears. In the mean time, you might be interested in seeing this report on clergy age trends, compiled by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary: youngumclergy.pdf. It is filled with fascinating and shocking statistics, most of which are related to the aging of United Methodist clergy. For instance, did you know that in 1985, over 15% of clergy were under the age of 35?

Want to take a guess what it is now? Try 4.69%.

Correlation does not prove causation, as psychologists like to tell us. And I have no doubt that there are many reasons why younger folks are not answering God's call to ordained ministry in nearly as high numbers as they once did. But I also do not doubt that the length and complexity of our candidacy process does not help.