The word vocation, let us never forget, comes from the Latin vocare, or voice, and I remember the voices, the multitude of voices, through which I gradually heard a primary Voice urging me into the vocation of ministry.
These voices first spoke on my behalf when I was just a few months old in the sanctuary of First church, Orangeburg, S.C. A guest minister in a black robe — the same man who had baptized and confirmed my father, married my parents, and then baptized my older brother — read from the 1937 edition of The Book of Common Worship. “Do you acknowledge your faith in Christ and therein consecrate your child to him?” And the voices of my parents said, “I do.” “Do you promise,” he went on, “to instruct your child in the principles of our holy religion, as contained in the Scriptures, to pray with him and for him, and to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?” And again they said together, “I do.” There was an additional question which, in effect, asked the gathered congregation if they would serve, in a collective sense and on behalf of every other congregation to which I might belong, as my godparents, and they lifted up their own voices: “We do.” Then, after splashing me with water, the old man spoke to my first community of Christian nurture. “This child, thus acknowledged as a member of Christ’s church, is commended to your love and care. Whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.”
Over the years, and in a number of different communities like this, the Church of Jesus Christ found its voice, over and over again, to challenge me to listen carefully for God’s Voice, and for the claim which that Voice might make upon my life. I remember the grandmotherly voice of Ruby, with whom I often sat in church as a child. During the sermon, she let me play with a fox fur wrap she always wore around her neck in cold weather, and I never tired of making the mouth of one fox move at about the same pace and cadence of the words spoken from the pulpit. Ruby, to be honest, was a terrible singer. Her voice sounded like the croaking of frogs. But, at the time, standing next to her during the singing of hymns was, in my childhood imagination, akin to singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And I remember, like it was yesterday, what she said to me once: “Teddy, I hope you’ll think seriously about being a minister someday.”
I remember the voice of a man whose name I have now forgotten, who taught me in Sunday School when I was in the seventh grade. I remember that, Sunday after Sunday, in his opening and closing prayers, he always lifted up “our boys in Vietnam (he pronounced the word with a long ‘i’),” and it was only later that I figured out that one of those boys over there was his. Nonetheless, with all that he must have always had on his mind, he came prepared every Sunday to that seventh grade classroom. And he found the time to tell me once, “Son, I think you’ve got what it takes to be a preacher.”
As a senior high student, I remember presbytery youth camps, and the opportunity of serving on my presbytery’s youth council. Two things stick out about that experience. The first is that I learned at least a street-level sense of my denomination’s organizational life as it was rendered both locally and globally, so much so that I suspect I could have passed the polity section of the ordination exams on my first afternoon of seminary. The second aspect of that experience was the privilege of encountering a number of pastors and laypeople who simply loved their own vocations as servants of the church, and it showed. Their voices, too, chimed in: “You seem to have gifts for ministry!”
In college, as I pondered the culturally obligatory considerations of law and medicine, this or that professor or chaplain would speak a word on behalf of the church. Once, in my political science professor’s office, as I was asking about which law schools he would recommend, the man — an Episcopalian and a vestry member in his parish — said to me: “God knows we need good lawyers, but we also need good pastors.”
So many other voices. The voice of the admissions director at Union Seminary in Virginia, the voices of a couple of handfuls of professors there, the voice of a particularly pivotal minister and subsequent friend whose ministerial example during an intern year practically turned me and my pastoral priorities upside down. And then, at my ordination, the voices of another community of Christian nurture. From the 1970 edition of The Worshipbook, the question was put: “Do we accept Ted as a minister of the Word, chosen by God through the voice of this congregation, to lead us in the way of Jesus Christ?” They answered, “We do.”
So many voices still. The voices of friends and fellow pastors in a cohort group to which I have belonged for over 20 years now, meeting annually to study and share and pray together for a week — voices that have often challenged me, inspired me, nurtured me, and held me accountable to my vocation. The voices of family members — my father’s and mother’s voices (now silenced by death but never forgotten), my brother’s voice, my wife’s voice, my daughters’ voices — often calling upon me to remember, or to clarify, or to question, or to reaffirm my own sense of vocation. The voices of various colleagues in this or that church or presbytery in which I’ve served, the voices of fellow pastors from other traditions, the voices of parishioners whom I have been privileged to know. How could I have been nurtured in the ongoing, sometimes tedious and occasionally even majestic, life of service in the church without such voices? They formed, for me, a sort of heavenly chorus. They embodied the church — militant and triumphant — and, taken together, they functioned as an ecosystem.
Reduced to a simple diagram, this ecosystem began with the congregation, and connected in a kind of circle to certain other nurturing, or “feeder”, institutions — the higher judicatory, the denominational college (or, perhaps, a denominational fellowship or para-church organization on the campus of a secular college), and various other communities of faith. Ultimately, when one felt led to follow that Voice of God — mediated as it was by the voice of the Church — he or she found the way to seminary and, more often than not, back to service in the congregation; and the circle was completed.
I remember that ecosystem. It was real. It nurtured me, through countless voices, to an encounter with the calling Voice of God.
I offer this memory out of the strong hunch that you, too, are likely to remember this ecosystem. People and churches, and the institutions charged in part with their formation, were bound together by sinews of denominational relatedness that were stronger then than they are now. The same voices speaking at a child’s baptism, or their surrogates elsewhere in other congregations when that child moved, seemed, to me at least, more accountable to that child then, than perhaps now, as he or she grew up — accountable enough to risk encouraging him or her to consider the call to leadership in the church. It was possible for that child, moving from one developmental juncture to another, to hear many voices of encouragement within an ecosystem that still worked, and to be cheered on into the formal embrace of theological education and consequently a lifetime of service in the ordained ministry. Or, as an alternative, it was also the case that that same child might be encouraged by the positive example of a functioning ecosystem into a conscious decision to embrace, as a disciplined layperson, the life of service in a congregation as an elder or deacon or committed church member. In that time, which many of us can remember well, it was not at all likely that that child could grow up in and around the church without hearing some voice, or some chorus of voices, expressing tangible interest in his or her faith development. The ecosystem I’m speaking of was real.
Some Contemporary Challenges
Yet many would conclude in our time that it is all but gone, or, at the very least, is suffering serious stress. In an Alban Institute Special Report from a couple of years ago entitled The Leadership Situation Facing American Congregations, James P. Wind and Gilbert R. Rendle list three indicators pointing to diminished vitality in established American religious institutions (including the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant “mainline”, and American Judaism). These three indicators, which I believe are inter-related at many critical points, are (1) a shortage of clergy, (2) a decline in the quality of pastoral leadership, and (3) a problem retaining women in ministry. Bad news bleeds across every page of this report and appears to be borne widely across the shoulders of many different religious traditions, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is certainly no exception.
With respect to the shortage of clergy, Wind and Rendle note the smaller number of Presbyterian church professionals entering congregational ministry (50% to 60% of seminary graduates in 1999, compared with 15 years earlier when the norm was between 80% and 90%), the retirement of clergy (8,800 out of 10,300 retiring by 2025), and shorter clergy tenures (almost 20% of those entering the parish ministry will leave it within five years after ordination, and the average tenure of Presbyterian pastors in parish ministry is only 17 years). More ominous still, they note the dearth of clergy in the PC(USA) presently under the age of 35: 7 percent in 1999, compared with 24 percent in 1975. “Whatever the long-term effects of these changes may be,” say Wind and Rendle, “… it is clear that many of the assumptions about clergy leadership in congregations require reexamination. Not so long ago, some denominations urged candidates for the ministry to get ‘real world’ experience before ordination; today, they decry the paucity of young clergy.” It is worth noting that the average age of seminary st udents today is much older than the average ages of students entering medical and law schools. In addition, African-American and Hispanic students tend to be underrepresented in seminaries, compared with their presence in the general population.
The decline in the quality of pastoral leadership, another problem which the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) shares widely with other traditions, is hard to analyze apart from a consideration of what is often the treacherous and sometimes toxic atmosphere in the contemporary church itself, from denominational headquarters down to the partaicular congregation. Common concerns such as these cut across the various religions and denominations: the unmanageable nature of service in a congregation; the difficulty of establishing boundaries between personal and professional time; the variety of roles a minister must fill and the unreasonable expectations and confusing standards of evaluation that often come with this variety; and an absence of efficient and effective models of decision-making, communication and leadership.
Wind and Rendle note the general sense in the church that the competence of people now entering the ministry has slumped, that new clergy do not have in sufficient numbers the talents, skills and knowledge they need in order to be effective leaders, and that students are entering seminaries “with low levels of religious literacy and with high personal and therapeutic needs.” They note, as well, the breakdown, in terms of recruitment, of the old “feeder system” of church-related colleges; the pattern of high acceptance rates, implying that theological schools are not highly selective (a quite different pattern from, say, medical and law schools); the presence of greater degrees of denominational strife; and mounting evidence that there is great pain in the clergy systems of many denominations. They cite an article in The Outlook lamenting poor performance on standard ordination exams, which listed such alarming attitudes and behaviors as “inability to analyze and understand congregations as systems, poor interpersonal skills, poor leadership skills, lack of maturity, failure to keep ethical norms and boundaries, and failure to take responsibility for self, including personal health;” and which concluded that the time is now for the denomination to raise its standard and recruit “the brightest and best.”
With respect to the problem of retaining women in ministry, Wind and Rendle note that women are leaving local church ministry at far higher rates than male clergy, and that factors include sick denominational systems, compensation inequities, inappropriate congregational expectations, and abuse of hierarchical power. “It is clear from this evidence,” they conclude, “that while clergy supply is a very pressing reality, we must also attend to the systems to which we are trying to recruit clergy.”
Indeed.
An Appeal for a New Ecosystem
I am very interested these days in the systems — to put it broadly, the ecosystem — to which we are endeavoring to recruit clergy. I am interested enough, in fact, to want to argue, first of all, for new attention to be placed upon revitalizing this ecosystem, at many points, because in many ways it has served us well. In spite of an essential congregationalism that has always been at the root of virtually every ecclesiastical polity in America (and which has been the source, in fundamental ways, of the American church’s health), and in spite of the weakening in our time of so many aspects of the old denominational systems; the Church — capital “C” — that nurtured me in so many of its forms could not express its own richness and potential for nurture and formation if reduced to the level of an individual congregation. Not even a very large individual congregation, by the way.
H. Richard Niebuhr’s words, written almost 50 years ago, still have great power in their vision of an appropriately large vision of Church. In his provocative mid-20th century study of American and Canadian theological education entitled The Purpose of The Church and Its Ministry, Niebuhr wrote:
“The Church is one, yet also many. It is a pluralism moving toward unity and a unity diversifying and specifying itself. It is, in the inescapable New Testament figure, a body with many members none of which is the whole in miniature but in each of which the whole is symbolized … Without the members there is no body; without the body no members. Schools cannot prepare men [and women] to work simply in the whole Church but must equip them for particular service; yet they cannot do so unless they keep them mindful of the whole and loyal to it.”
How can we keep present and future generations of aspiring pastors and other full-time servants of the church “mindful of the whole and loyal to it”, without not just remembering, but also re-membering — becoming members of, yet again — an ecosystem of nurture and formation that both assumes the local and implies the universal? After all, as Niebuhr goes on to say, “Jesus Christ cannot be there [in the Church] without bringing with him the whole company of his brothers [and sisters], who have heard the Word of God and kept it, who were not created without the Word. He is never present without the company of the apostles and prophets, the patriarchs and singers who speak of him; nor without the least of his brothers [and sisters] of whom he speaks.” In the grandest and most faithful vision of Church, they, too — these apostles and prophets and patriarchs and singers — join their voices to the chorus of voices so many of us have heard over the years of our own journeys, encouraging us into an enterprise bigger and older and more purposeful than we are.
One of the great challenges of our time is that of reviving this splendid chorus once again for the sake of the Church. At regional and national levels, such a vision requires, for sure, much energy and attention given to inventing new models of denominational life and relationships. It calls for new infrastructures and peer-group programs that can more effectively nurture and mentor would-be pastors, and pastors themselves, through many of the predictable critical junctures of ministry. It certainly demands that we rethink such persistent problems as inadequate salary levels for servants of the church. It compels us to find more effective ways of responding to dispiriting levels of toxicity and conflict frequently apparent in congregations and judicatories that distract members and leaders from the church’s mission and often promote their premature exits. It suggests that, for the sake of the church both local and universal, sufficient attention be paid to removing the obstacles that so often discourage talented men and women — young, middle-aged and older — from even considering a church vocation.
But, above all other needs, the vision of a re-membered ecosystem depends, for God’s sake and for the church’s, upon new voices — in Sunday School classrooms, in college classes, over lunch, on a weekend retreat, or almost anywhere — assisting in someone’s discernment process by speaking out a Call that is hardly ever heard apart from a “caller.”
The closest we will ever get to touching the future, I believe, is through the privilege of lending our own calling voices to the encouragement and cultivation of a potential future pastor — and through being open, by the grace of God, to those moments when we, too, are the ones who are called.
Four years ago, on the last Saturday before Lent, I took my two daughters — one ten years old and the other seven — to a morning-long, pre-Lenten fellowship and learning event for the children of the urban church I was then serving as pastor. A throng of children was there, buttressed by a nice cadre of volunteers who flipped pancakes and cooked sausages and staffed various learning centers spread throughout the fellowship hall. The highlight of all this was a period of time that we all spent in the sanctuary, where the children had a chance to tour the vast room that houses the organ pipes and to hear various staff members wax eloquent about the formational power of the various components of our Sunday worship experience.
My favorite moment was when one of my pastoral colleagues interpreted the meaning of baptism. She asked all the children to gather at the font, much like they do whenever there is a baptism, and then she talked about the meaning of that sacrament, that rite of initiation. At the end of her presentation, she invited the children to come forward if they wished, and to place their hands in the water of the font and then to sign the cross on their foreheads as a way of remembering that they are baptized — that they are known to God and marked for life as the peculiar people of God. Boys and girls crowded in, eager to get their own turn with the water. It was a powerful moment for us parents and other adults sitting in various pews and watching the whole thing.
Both of our girls, at different times, took a turn at the font. Each signed herself with the water, and then this is what happened next: they each of them, unbeknownst to the other, cupped some of the water to bring back to where I was sitting. Each of them splashed water on my forehead, too, signing the cross there and speaking to me the reminder that I, too, am baptized. “Remember your baptism, Daddy, and be glad.” It wasn’t rehearsed. It was a spontaneous act, and neither girl had the benefit of noticing the other’s action. So, luxury of luxuries, I — who spend so much time thinking and worrying, even, about touching the future — experienced a moment in which the future touched me. The truth of the matter is that my future, and theirs, and yours, belong to God.
My prayer is that they and all those other children will not stop splashing around in that baptismal water and then extending its power out into the world that they know, to make the claim that that world and its inhabitants are signed and owned by God. My prayer is also, of course, that they will all continue to have a church, and certainly to be the church.
My prayer, finally, is that, in that huge ecosystem which supports the church and which the church in turn supports, people will continue to call and be called. People will continue to acknowledge their thirst to know and then to tell the Good News which the world needs so desperately to hear. In a re-membered ecosystem, which the Church is at its very best, new generations of leaders, persuaded of their vocations as servants of Christ, will themselves hear an ancient question: “Do we accept this person as a minister of the Word, chosen by God, through the voice of this congregation, to lead us in the way of Jesus Christ?”
Then will come the answer from a chorus of voices: “We do!”
Theodore J. Wardlaw is president, Austin Seminary. This article first appeared in the faculty journal Insights which is published by the seminary.
Send your comment on this guest viewpoint to The Outlook.
Please give your full name and hometown.
