Dear Sir or Madam,
I’m a Presbyterian minister who has served two churches, both of which have seen growth and increased giving under my leadership. I am currently serving a congregation with more than 500 members. I am in my mid-thirties and have a beautiful spouse and a young daughter. I come from a long line of ministers. I am a graduate of a prestigious seminary. I can tell a joke. I am white and I am male. Chances are I’m just what you’re looking for.
What a shame.
The fact is, you could do a lot better. Given the needs of the Church today, I’m probably too old, too out of touch, too stuck in my ways to effectively minister to your congregation in the coming years. I’ve lived a fairly privileged life, sheltered from the pains many of your congregants will experience. I am not proficient enough with modern communication methods to engage the generation(s) quickly turned off by monthly church magazines, stodgy worship bulletins, lame overhead projections, and simple one-dimensional Web sites. I don’t twitter. I don’t blog. I don’t even have a cell phone. You probably want someone who can relate to your youth; I don’t like teenagers. So just because I look the part doesn’t mean I fit the bill.
Not all Pastoral Nominating Committees will be guilty of this, but too many of our PNCs will turn down better candidates because those men and women don’t look like me. Consciously or not, most of us in the PC(USA) picture a man in the pulpit, a person of our own ethnicity as our pastor, and a married couple at the head of our church family. But it will become increasingly difficult to find someone who ticks all of those boxes and happens to be the prophetic, resourceful, inspiring choice God has specifically in mind for you.
Simply put: if you want the best candidate for your position, you should be concerned if in the end your selection’s profile doesn’t surprise you.
Not that someone like me would be a horrible choice. I have some gifts. And I actually did pretty well in seminary. But I didn’t have to. There was always going to be a job waiting for me at the end of school. I didn’t have to prove myself and I never had to defend my decision to go into ministry. I just had to show up. That sort of security is nice, but it certainly doesn’t demand much.
The women in my seminary class, however, were constantly being scrutinized. At some point in their discernment process, they were going to have to actively defend their call to a classmate, or a presbytery, or a session — perhaps even to their own family. Because of this, they had to think about their vocation a whole lot more, reflect on it much more deeply, and wrestle with it all the more honestly. And, on the whole, they had to be tougher and more prepared and more articulate than the men. They had to exhibit their potential for success every day.
Despite all this, my female classmates didn’t have the guarantee of a position waiting for them upon graduation. They had to hope that enough ‘liberal’ churches would have openings to accommodate them, or wait for a more desperate congregation to “take a chance” on a female pastor. From my vantage point, it looked as though the best and the brightest from our seminary were taking what they could get while the Average Joes were taking their pick.
Having sat on a Committee on Ministry for a few years, I’m still surprised how many churches opt for the Older White Male again and again and again. There are also alternative ruts in which to get stuck. Congregations with an African-American or Korean majority may feel obliged to call someone from a particular ethnic community; churches that have successfully called a woman to ministry in the past may worry that they would be “back-sliding” if they didn’t do something equally progressive now. And it’s true that women find positions every day in the PC(USA). But it’s seldom the high positions, or the head-of-staff positions, or the best paying positions.
I now live in Northern Ireland, serving in a denomination that is in many ways more conservative in its attitudes towards women. Yet once they are ordained, women in ministry here are given more of a comparable level of respect with male peers than in the U.S., are expected to be heads of staff, and are always paid at an equal rate.
It’s not just a gender thing; it has to do with all the ways we categorize people: race, education, background, hometowns. It certainly ends up being a lot about age. For one thing, our denomination’s selection process implies that everyone with a few years’ experience is better than anyone without. So instead of choosing an extraordinary prospect coming straight out of seminary with new ideas and the freshest approaches, congregations limit themselves and extend calls to candidates who have, in the words of one of my colleagues, “proven through experience to be mediocre.” Of course, not all of the newly graduated are going to be stellar, but surely it’s worth taking a look at the best of this year’s class to see if he or she should be considered.
The parameters PNCs set for applicants are no doubt derived through prayer and from a thoughtful analysis of what the particular congregation needs at a given time. Even so, it seems fairly odd to steer God’s Spirit away from the unexpected choice by setting explicit demands for minimum years’ experience (“At least 8 years, please”), implicit desires for titles (“We want someone with a D.Min. It looks good to have a Rev. Dr. on the notice board!”), and a subconscious leaning toward candidates who look the way we want them to (Oh, he reminds me of my pastor from back home). The right person rarely fits the mold.
Jacob, Moses, Deborah, Ruth, Samuel, David, Esther, Jonah, Mary, Paul. Not too many white men with years of experience on that list. Yet those are people God chose to do extraordinary things. So please, if you are chairing a PNC, make sure you don’t just look for guys like me.
Alexander Wimberly is pastor of McCracken Memorial Presbyterian Church in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
