Like their secular counterparts, many clergy who devoted their attention to less temporal matters than financial planning now find themselves amid shrinking church budgets and a poor economy being forced to work beyond traditional retirement ages.
It is an especially critical issue in smaller churches that still do not set aside money for clergy retirement. In a 2008 study of Church of Christ clergy in Texas, just a quarter of respondents said they had plans to fully retire.
But it is also a burden for larger, mainline Protestant denominations. As memberships shrink and many older clergy find it financially untenable to retire, even fewer younger clergy are able to find work.
From the article:
[blockquote] The clergy age gap is particularly noticeable in mainline churches. From 1998 to 2006-2007, the average age of clergy in white, mainline Protestant denominations increased from 48 to 57, the congregations study found.[/blockquote]
Over nine years the average age in clergy in white mainline denominations went up nine years. That essentially means that no young clergy are being appointed any more (or is so small as to be statistically irrelevant, and countered by the addition of clergy older than the average) – the average goes up in line with the aging of the current mob of clergy. That has to be a clear demographic sign of something on the cusp of catastrophic numerical collapse. It’s being kept up by the current people, but there is no future generation to pass the baton onto.
And with the current generation of clergy only 8 years off 65 some four years ago, that collapse is going to occur sooner rather than later. The charge was that evangelicals in the CoE were illiterates generalled by octogenarians. Soon that description is going to be true of revisionists, and it won’t be just generalled by octogenarians – they’ll be the troops on the front line.
When I last had (or cared about) TEC statistics, at the 2003 CG there were less than 50 clergy in all of TEC who were under 30. I’m sure that hasn’t changed much since then. Everybody sent form my old TEC church/diocese in recent years has been 40’s and up.