By the time she graduated from Vanderbilt Divinity School in May 2009, the Rev. Kara Hildebrandt could translate a passage from the Greek New Testament with relative ease, write a sermon like a pro and pass her ordination exams with flying colors.
Finding a job as a pastor?
That was a bit more difficult.
A combination of many preachers, too many small churches and a bad economy have led to one of the worst job markets for ministers in decades. That has led to the so-called clergy glut. According to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, there are more than 600,000 ministers in the United States but only 338,000 churches. Many of those are small churches that can’t afford a full-time preacher. Among Presbyterians, there are four pastors looking for work for every one job opening.
That has left many good pastors out in the cold, waiting before finding a new job or finding alternative employment, denominational leaders say.
Interesting that this article’s example is a woman. If not for WO, perhaps there would be no glut. And, without WO, which represents a fundamental break with the Christian Sacred Tradition, perhaps Christians would be less willing to so facilely break with other aspects of Sacred Tradition such as Gay Ordination and SSB’s. So many who call themselves “orthodox” are willing to go to any length to avoid this straightforward insight.
My vocation had nothing to do with a job- if I could not be paid I would do it in my spare time fir free
The trouble is the disconnect between seminaries and churches. There are lots of small churches (especially in TEC) with an ASA of 15 who have no pastor. They can’t afford a full time, seminary trained graduate who has 80 thousand in student loans to pay off. What they need is a part time priest to preach on Sunday’s who has a regular job during the week and no student debt. Seminaries and dioceses should be focusing on in house training/apprenticeships, and on-line learning to master theology etc, with oral and written examinations to ensure competance.
The same could be said for other vocations. Most of what is important in medicine is learned on the job as an unpaid apprenticeship during 3rd and 4th years, and on the job as a paid journeyman position during residency. There is no reason why medical school should graduate folks 160,000 in debt. It should be possible to learn anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, etc. on line cheaply, and to then take a test to ensure competance to begin your apprenticeship. Then physicians would graduate with minimal/no debt and (assuming liability/hours were reformed) it could be run either part-time as a ministry, or full time at a modest income.
This does require taking on the government/university complex, however. The universities like their monopoly on certification of all professionals, and the government likes the taxes generated by so called “high income earners”, (which generate high taxes, despite the fact that a large majority of those “high incomes” are used to pay off professional-entrance debt.
The federal government is complicit in the rising costs of education. As tuition and fees rise, the response of the federal government is to accommodate these increases by increasing the amount of federal loan funds available (and, to a lesser extent, grant funds). If the federal government stayed out of it, and put the burden on institutions of higher learning to justify price increases to the tuition-paying public, those institutions would be more reluctant to raise prices…or might not raise them at all.
Congressional subcommittees go after Big Oil…Big Finance…Big Pharma…but never after Big Education. The amount of money that some of these universities are sitting on is unconscionable. The colleges with the top ten or so largest endowments could literally run in perpetuity and never charge tuition again, merely by using the income from their endowments. I went to a state college with a modest endowment, but I can’t understand how alums of places with eight or nine figure endowments can justify continuing to funnel money into these institutions’ bloated bank accounts, with the poor to be fed, and the naked to be clothed. Another $5,000 in Harvard’s endowment won’t change anything…$5,000 to a diocese in Uganda will improve countless lives.
In any event, as a conservative, I certainly would not support Congress telling these universities what they have to do with their endowments. That should be between the institutions, their trustees and donors, making decisions to which the tuition-paying public may appropriately react. But I do wish that the federal government would stop acting in ways (using my money) that mute, and sometimes eliminate, appropriate market responses.
What happened to all the articles just a few years ago talking about an upcoming clergy shortage?
Besides – in many cases the smaller parish MIGHT be able to afford a priest EXCEPT for the 18% tacked on for clergy pension fund!
There is a “clergy shortage”. However only at less than the cost of the price of a seminary education which is why instead of the four unemployed preachers each taking a teeny tiny church there is one “full time” priest running around 4 churches, who can barely cover his/her wage. The priest can’t afford to work free or just Sundays because he is 80 grand in debt. The churches feel that the pastors insistance on a “big salary” puts their ability to hang onto their tiny, usually antique church in jeapardy, and wonder why priests can’t work for free.
Similarly there is a “doctor shortage”. However again, because Medicare’s fees are less than the cost of liabilty insurance, office overhead, and medical school loans, doctors have to work 80 hour/week and see lots of non-Medicare patients in order to pull in the “big salary” that will pay the overhead. In the meantime patients complain that doctor’s “big salaries” are bancrupting them and wonder why doctors don’t work for free.
It is the debt that is killing all the professions. Nor is there a good reason for it. Before the government got involved in licencing physicians, (ie before Flexner) physician training was entirely via an apprenticeship model and doctors had no debt. Ditto with priests.
All that’s been said above may be true, but there are more aspects to the complex problem of the clergy glut as well. One easily overlooked piece of the puzzle is that the opportunities are almost endless in America for the minority of clergy who might be effective church planters. To paraphrase the Master, “[i]the harvest is plentiful, but the church planters are few.[/i]” IOW, one of our problems is that we’re training or expecting too many clergy to be maintainers of today’s churches, rather than recruiting and training those who could plant the new, flourishing churches of tomorrow.
Second, most “mainline” Protestant churches may have a “glut” of ministers in their 50s or older, but at the same time they have a genuine shortage of ministers in their 30s or even 40s. That shortage of younger clergy may be due to all sorts of reasons (and there’s much debate about that), but the shortage itself is undeniable, and getting worse. The whole clergy recruitment, training, and deployment system is broken in many denominations and badly needs fixing. But that will take some creative, radical thinking. And churches are seldom noted for that.
David Handy+