The Vanishing Middle Class Clergy

So as a follow up to my blog post of saving the Seminary:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/07/save-our-seminaries.html

I came across this article in The Atlantic about the vanishing middle class of clergy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/higher-calling-lower-wages-the-collapse-of-the-middle-class-clergy/374786/

Much of this article hit very close to home and has really made me think about what the future of my ministry life might look like, and what the future of professional clergy in general might look like.

As I reflect on my Seminary career, I certainly don’t regret the experience and all that I learned, but it has certainly lead to frustrations, both in the amount of debt that I took on for the degree and the lack of options that followed it for a stable, decent paying job. I have seen some articles like this in the past, but I thought this particular article did the best job of articulating what exactly is happening to Seminary grads, with perhaps some unspoken assumptions of what it might mean for the church going forward.

I’m going to take some select quotes from the article and add a few comments to them.

Barringer’s story is becoming increasingly typical as Protestant churches nationwide cut back on full-time, salaried positions. Consequently, many new pastors either ask friends and family for donations (a time-honored clerical tradition) or take on other jobs. Working two jobs has become so common for clergy members, in fact, that churches and seminaries have a euphemistic term for it: bi-vocational ministry.

This paragraph does an excellent job of speaking on some of the options that are now available for those that are called into ministry. The amount of positions that are available are shrinking, while there is at least a holding pattern, if not increase, in the number of Seminary grads in the aggregate.

The options that are listed are to either ask for donations, in a sense to be a missionary within the church, are to work a second job while being a pastor, bi-vocational ministry, or what we also like to refer to as tent-making ministry (an allusion to Paul in Acts supporting his ministry by working in a trade). This are certainly worthwhile options, but would, in my mind, change the very nature of the church, which is something I will touch on in a second.

When I graduated Seminary in 2011 the job placement of Bethel said that it was the worst job market they had seen in over 50 years. I know that this has somewhat loosened, but I do have a theory as to what happened. For starters, churches saw a massive decrease in giving. The article states the following:

Not only is church attendance in long-term decline, but financial giving by church members is at Depression-era lows.

So there is two factors going on, church attendance and membership are decreasing (for all the reasons I have written before), while giving by those members is on the decline. This is not a huge surprise, as giving often mirrors society at large, and 2008-9 was the start of the worst recession since the Great Depression, it would make sense that churches would be impacted by that. Church budgets, in my experience, seem to lag the economy by about two years. They attempt first to make due with what is given, then adjust finally two budget periods after the economic reality.

So, this meant that 2011 church budgets finally felt the full brunt of the recession that started in 2008/2009. Add to this two other factors – pastors did not retire at the same rate. The recession and stock market dip hit them and their retirement plans, so they did not leave as expected. Also, like most advanced degrees, Seminary degrees so something of a bubble in the 2000s (as all jobs were a little harder to come by), so there was an excess of labor supply heading into the market. So, to summarize, there was:

1.     A huge financial hit that caused churches to decrease (or at least dramatically slow the growth) church budgets. Jobs were cut, new jobs weren’t created, and jobs of pastors that left were not filled.

2.     Pastors that would normally retire (or move into another field) did not do so. This left countless jobs occupied that might have been open in normal times with a normal stock market.

3.     There was a excess of Seminary grads across the country relative to previous eras.

Doesn’t take much of an understanding of economics to see the problem here. Add to that the fact that, as the article mentions:

Meanwhile, seminary students are taking on ballooning debt for a career that may not exist by the time they graduate. This trend began before the Great Recession, and has only worsened since then.

And this is the recipe for a huge problem, one that I personally am in the midst of. This is why I get to be a stay at home dad, write this blog, and figure out a way to pay off Seminary debt that didn’t lead to a job that I had hoped for.

This is also leading to the crisis that I talked about before with the Seminary. The old model is now dead, no longer can students attend, take on way too much debt, and expect there to be a job on the other side. There needs to be a new model for the Seminary and for the church in general.

I strongly believe that there is still a need for Seminary educated members within congregations and within the church as a whole. But how are we going to pay for them? And what are the jobs that they will have when they are done? And how is this going to impact the church and the mission field? How is this all going to work together?

The era of the professional Christian might be nearer an end, but what will this mean for the church? While addressing all the problems that I have been talking about before, is it possible that we, as a church, might be missing one of the most fundamental issues that are right in front of our faces? Surely there will be several churches that will survive (and even thrive), but there will be many, many that do not. What is the kingdom impact of that?

I wonder if we are seeing the earliest stages of the church going full circle and returning back to the models of the first churches. Leaders that are not professional clergy, meeting in places that are not permanent buildings, and engaging in ways that are contrary to the establishment. The church always struck me as being strongest when it was an insurgent church instead of an established church. Maybe the models that we humans created and that are slowly being chipped away at, are once again leading us back there.