Ordination Process: One more round

Dr. Rebekah Miles has published her op-ed piece in the United Methodist Reporter, calling for changes to the ordination process in the UMC. I initially told you about Dr. Miles' interest in this subject in this post back in mid-August.

You can find her op-ed here.

She makes a challenging, lucid case that the church needs to wake up and smell the ordination coffee. In the article, Dr. Miles writes:

"We have put into place a long, bureaucratic process with loads of paperwork, saying all the while that we want to attract more young adults to ordained ministry. Yet young adults (between 21 and 35) are members of two generations that tend to share several things in common: their deep dislike of bureaucracy and red tape, their suspicion of large, centralized institutions, and their frustration with hierarchical systems based on seniority and not merit.

"If we were to set out to design a system that was unattractive to Generations X and Y, we would have a hard time coming up with anything worse than the system we have now."

I only offer two observations:

1) After my posts dealing with this subject last month, I had a couple of people respond that the ordination process didn't need to be easy. If folks are really called, they said, a little red tape wouldn't dissuade them. To this, I would say that it isn't the difficulty of the process that is the problem. It is the needless difficulty. There is nothing wrong with having a rigorous ordination process, where a person's call is genuinely explored and tested. But I also think you can make a strong argument that the process we currently have in place does not do a good job of this at all. It has bureaucratic processes set up that make it look rigorous, when they are really just a series of almost-useless hurdles designed to give the whole thing a veneer of professionalism.

2) I've read the letters of Ignatius of Antioch in the past week. In them, Ignatius talks incessantly about the churches of Antioch, Philadelphia, Smyrna, Rome, etc. And it is clear that all these churches are connected to one another, communicate with one another, and send missionaries to one another. But you also get the idea that there is very little bureaucratic red tape traded between them. They didn't seem to have a problem forming people in the faith. In fact, they did such a good job of it that Ignatius and scores of others were willing to be martyred for the faith they received. So what, do you think, they had that we are lacking? Hmmm?

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.

Ordination problems ... uh, process

I was on an e-mail list that received a request from Dr. Rebekah Miles at Perkins School of Theology, about a piece she is working on related to ordination candidacy and the probationary process. The problems with candidacy are felt pretty universally across the church, I think, which is demonstrated every four years when the General Conference tweaks the Book of Discipline to try to improve it.

Dr. Miles is trying to gather opinions from recently ordained clergy for the project she is working on. As I was writing my own thoughts, it made me want to hear the thoughts of others. So to any of you probationary deacons and elders (and recently ordained clergy) what was the best and worst of your experience with candidacy?

My main concern with the ordination process is that we've allowed the whole thing to take on too much of a bureaucratic feel. We've created this system that, in theory, is supposed to aim toward good ends: making sure that candidates are qualified, that they are truly called to ministry, and that candidates with 'red flags' get weeded our before they reach ordination. But the net result of all of it is that we have handed over too much of the candidacy process to the process itself and distanced candidates from the real human nurturing and formation that should be a part of bringing someone into the clergy. We've all experienced this bureaucratic aspect with the seemingly endless checklists, forms, and tests that have to be completed and sent in to Nashville, the D.S., the DCOM, the Board of Ordained Ministry, etc. It also greatly increases the time it takes from the beginning of candidacy to actual ordination (for me, it was about six years, and I think I did it much faster than some).

I don't know how to untangle this knot. But for starters, if a candidate's bishop, district superintendent, and clergy mentor were trained to understand their roles in the ordination process differently, perhaps the whole thing could be 'humanized' or 'personalized' to a greater degree. That would seem to get us closer to the supremely important spiritual formation aspects that need to be a greater part of our ordination process in general. I am a clergy mentor to an elder candidate right now, and I am trying to be as 'hands on' and supportive as I can. Of course, all mentors, bishops, and district superintendents have to do their best to work in the present (dysfunctional) system.

As a sidenote, I have always suspected that our fears of being personally responsible for telling anyone 'no' has led to our willingness to hand over the ordination process to a bureaucratic system. Our present American conception of individual liberty has led us to never want to presume to tell anyone 'no' in any instance. That is particularly the case when it comes to discerning a calling from God, which each 'called' person believes is authentic. So by handing over ordination to a bureaucratic system, we can be relieved that we don't have to ever say 'no' and hope the 'problem candidates' get weeded out in an impersonal way. This is, I believe, exactly an area in which we need to be countercultural. We have a responsibility to God & the church to say 'no' when 'no' needs to be said, and ultimately that is a much more pastoral attitude to have toward candidates anyway.

What a week!

It's Friday evening, and I am finishing a 7-day period where I preached at a blessing service for a friend's child, attended the Arkansas Annual Conference, worked like crazy to get caught up on all the Latin work I missed while I was away from Durham, and logged about 2000 miles in travel. It's good to be home!

Since this was the year we elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences, it was an interesting annual conference session. I'll share a few thoughts:

-- As always, it is really good to attend annual conference just to see friends and colleagues in ministry. That was especially the case this year, since I am now living in North Carolina and haven't gotten to see those folks Emily and I have missed over the past year. I also had a lot of people express the desire for us to return to the conference when I finish my Th.D., something that I hope God provides a way for us to do.

-- This year marked the third year in a row that Eric Van Meter has organized a Gen X clergy supper. We had 30 or so clergy and clergy spouses who gathered in the Arkansas Tech University Wesley Foundation building on Monday evening for good ol' Arkansas barbeque (this is a noun rather than a verb for those of you not from the South). Eric does a good job of resisting the temptation to set an agenda at these gatherings. And so the conversations just naturally flow from what our concerns and hopes happen to be. This year, we focused on the need to keep in touch with young seminarians while they are in school as well as talking about how to get better involved in connectional conference structures such as the Board of Ordained Ministry and other appointed bodies. We believe this is important to add our voices to conference leadership. This year, we made the firmest commitment yet to keeping in touch and making progress throughout the year. We had some volunteers offer to serve as 'point people,' and I think we are going to use the new 7 Villages website to build an online connection. Kudos to Eric for all his work in this area. He has shown real leadership. And good luck to him as he starts a new appointment in campus ministry at Arkansas State Univeristy in Jonesboro. The Gen X clergy gathering is, by the way, something I would highly recommend for other annual conferences to do.

-- Billy Reeder and his group Sanctus led an emergent-style worship service outdoors following regular worship on Monday evening that was pretty well attended. The Holy Spirit was obviously in attendance, which was awesome.

-- This was the first conference session that I have attended where we have elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. For all the horror stories I have heard about how nasty elections can be, I think this one went pretty well. We ended up electing a balanced group including Conservatives, Liberals, and Moderates. I think that is important, since it reflects the makeup of our annual conference. For the record, I personally voted for people who would generally be categorized in all three groups.

-- Kudos to Revs. J.J. Whitney and Aubrietta Jones, who were elected as General and Jurisdictional delegates, respectively. They are both Gen X'ers and help to bring a young clergy voice to our delegations. Sarah Steele, a Millennial teenager, was also elected as a lay delegate to General Conference. And Jay Clark, youth ministry guru who has held positions in the Arkansas Conference, New England Conference, and the General Board of Discipleship, was elected as a Jurisdictional alternate. Jay is soon moving from Nashville to become the minister of youth at Pulaski Heights UMC in Little Rock, and my only regret is that he was not elected as a General Conference delegate in his own right. But then, there's always 2012!

One final note: In her e-mail recap of annual conference, SMU professors (and Arkansas Conference elder) Rebekah Miles wrote, "There is nothing like the sound of a group of preachers and lay people singing hymns loudly and enthusiastically at annual conference." Amen to that! "And are we yet alive?" You bet we are. And the work of the kingdom goes on.