He had grown up in an every-Sunday-in-the-pews family — he even served on the session of his congregation when he was in high school. But then, like practically everyone else he knew, Daniel went off to college, “and never once thought about faith or God or going to church.” It took a question — from John Kuykendall, who asked Daniel if he’d ever considered going to seminary — for things to start to change.
Daniel said his first reaction was that he needed a career in the ministry “about as much as needing a hole in the head.” But Kuykendall talked to him about seminary in a way he’d never considered — as a place “where you go to explore God and truth and the Bible” — exactly what they’d been doing in that religion class at Davidson.
It took some time, including two years teaching English in Japan, and an intense faith experience at a house church there started by two Norwegian Christians. But the question that Kuykendall asked and the encouragement he offered stuck with Daniel. He’s now 28 and about to graduate from Columbia Seminary in Georgia.
So when Daniel heard about a new initiative to identify young people who might have talents for ministry and to encourage them to consider becoming pastors, he knew he wanted to be involved. It’s called the Presbyterian Pastoral Leadership Search Effort, or PLSE, and it’s the brainchild of a make-it-happen, problem-solving lawyer from Atlanta named John Aldridge.
Aldridge is an elder at Peachtree church and a board member at Columbia Seminary. As a lay leader in the church, Aldridge became aware of statistics involving the shortage of Presbyterian ministers — almost 4,000 of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 11,500 churches don’t have pastors, many of them small congregations. Those numbers “were very alarming and concerning to me,” Aldridge said, “and I believed should be of great concern to the broader church.”
As a lawyer, “you see how the business world approaches recruiting,” he said. “We can’t recruit ministers, because God calls ministers . . . But the church needed an organized way to create an environment for young people to hear the call and, if it comes from God, to respond to the call positively.”
What Aldridge envisions — and he’s already raised considerable funding from the Lilly Endowment and from other sources — is establishing a database of young leaders who’ve been identified by congregations, and using that database as a way to nurture systematically in those people the possibility of a career in ordained ministry.
Congregations, some of which haven’t sent anyone into the ministry for many years, would be asked to do something to help fix the problem, and people from each church would be asked to keep their eyes open for high school or college students who might have gifts for ministry, and to talk to them about the possibility of a life spent serving the church. Young people would give permission for their names to be added to the database, and those who are identified could be invited to youth conferences, to exploratory weekends at seminaries, to lunch with others who are also considering the idea, to participate in internships or mentoring programs that might give them a taste of what the ministry is all about.
The focus is not technology, but on building relationships, on giving young people a community of people to talk with about what a career in ministry would be like, said Beth Godfrey, a third-year student at Princeton Theological Seminary who’s also involved in the effort. “You can have all those names. You can have 10,000 young active or identified Presbyterian youth in whome people in the congregations have recognized or see those gifts or talents,” Godfrey said. But “we have to have programs to bring them together to talk about what theology is, what would a lifetime in ministry look like,” what they’re looking for from life.
“That takes a lot of time,” she said. “It takes the larger church’s devoted time to mentoring and shepherding the people we put on the list.”
But Aldridge is convinced that that’s what it takes — because, he knows, for many young adults entering the ministry is not something that’s ever crossed their minds. Other careers, in law, medicine, technology or business, are seen as more lucrative and more prestigious. Many young people are skeptical of organized religion. “There are career options like we have 150 breakfast cereals,” said Marcia Clark Myers, associate director for Churchwide Personnel Services for the PC(USA). “And ministry isn’t even on the shelf.”
There are many factors, but statistics tell at least part of the story. Only seven percent of PC(USA) pastors are under 40 years old. More than 4 of every 10 pastors serving the church are more than 50 years old. Many seminary students are second-career students — meaning they’re older when they get started and have fewer years left to give to the ministry. And many students who go to seminary don’t choose to work as pastors in churches.
Young Presbyterians need to be given “a vision of ministry,” Godfrey said — an idea of how they might serve the church in a way that seems exciting and enticing, that goes beyond the image of the grey-haired, do-it-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it type of pastor that may be all they’ve ever known.
And she says young people considering the ministry need a place where they can talk honestly about their doubts or concerns about whether this is the right path. She has a Methodist friend, for example, a single woman who’s just been assigned to a solo pastorate in a small conservative church five hours from anyone she knows. And “by far and away the biggest concern seminary students have,” Daniel said, “is the fact that we’re being ordained in a denomination that feels and looks like it’s dying. Why are we reserving rooms on the Titanic is sort of the sentiment” or “Why am I casting my lot here,” in a church that’s losing members by the thousands but seems to use more of its energy in the fight over ordaining homosexuals than on evangelization.
Part of the process, Aldridge said, would be for experienced pastors to talk to young people about both the blessings and frustrations of the work — to say why they’ve chosen the work and why they’ve stuck with it.
Being a pastor involves what Myers calls “the exegisis of life,” that uncharted place where faith and the Bible and the hard and the tender spots of life come together, where a pastor sees the undersurface of people’s lives and is invited into the most private and intense moments, where God is at work and nothing could be more real than what happens next. “It’s the best job in the world,” she said. “I love it.”
Yet a career in the ministry barely registers in the minds of many young people today, even if they’ve grown up in the church.
Godfrey and Daniel said the impact of having other Presbyterians reach out and suggest to a young person that he or she might have the gifts to become a minister, to plant the seed of the idea, is immeasurable — as Godfrey put it, “that for me, was huge.”
Godfrey was in college in Arizona when, “out of nowhere,” she was asked to be a youth advisory commissioner to the 1996 General Assembly in Albuquerque. She decided to go, and doing that “brought me back into the larger church.” After the Assembly, when she came back and spoke to her home congregation in Arizona about her experience, people who had known her as she grew up began to say they saw gifts and talents in her for ordained leadership.
After college she went to work in Washington D.C. for an office design firm. Godfrey was a member of Georgetown church, but was also attending a nontraditional Christian outreach some friends had started. Members of her church and the outreach program “encouraged me to be discerning vocation and call, and they let me know what kind of gifts for ministry they believed I had been given.”
“It was half my opening myself up to what God was already doing in my life and half their encouragement,” said Godfrey, who’s now 28. “It affirmed what I already kind of knew,” but had never seriously considered. “Having the community call . . . that gave me the courage to open up.”
Another seminary student, Mary Ann McKibben, said on a video explaining PLSE that “I had in my head an image of pastors as holy people who had all the answers, had it all figured out, and I didn’t. I just knew what I loved to do. And so to have someone say, `I see these gifts in you and you can do it and keep exploring this and keep following this path that God has put you on’ — it was an amazing gift to be told that.”
Not all who become involved in the PLSE program will end up going to seminary or becoming a parish pastor. But they would become involved in what Myers calls a true process of discernment, one in which an individual’s sense of call is tested and verified by the broader church. Too often, Myers said, people end up at seminary because of their own instincts, and not until they’re well into theological training do they begin a conversation with the rest of the church.
Aldridge is building the infrastructure of PLSE on his own. His plan is to set up an office with a full-time staff member at the Fund for Theological Education in Atlanta. But he also determined early on that “the PC(USA) is our church, our denomination, and we needed to work within the system. That’s the best decision I ever made,” Aldridge said, because the denomination’s leaders “have been with us all the way.”
From the beginning, “the support we’ve gotten for this has been unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve never felt as led by the Holy Spirit in doing something as I’ve felt in doing this. Every door I’ve knocked on has been open. It’s just been a joy.”
Myers said that while she’s enthusiastic about PLSE, she has heard some concerns.
Some want to make sure that the young people identified are inclusive of racial and ethnic diversity, that those whom congregations identify as potential leaders aren’t all bright young white men, and that women — many of whom come to seminary as second-career professionals — aren’t forgotten.
And there are different ways to interpret even the basic statistics about the pastoral shortage in the PC(USA). Not all congregations that are without a pastor can afford to hire one full-time. Myers said she’d welcome more discussion, for example, about nurturing tentmakers, people who serve the church but also have another way to make a living.
“Numbers can be spun in lots of different ways,” Aldridge said. “You will hear people say the issue is not whether we have enough pastors, but misallocation,” that not enough are willing to go to small towns or rural areas. (“It’s amazing,” he said, “how many people God calls to warmer climates.”)
But Aldridge also said “I look at empty pulpits. I believe if you’ve got 4,000 empty pulpits, you’ve got a problem” and something needs to be done.
PLSE will be introduced to the 215th General Assembly in Denver in May through a videotape. Host churches are being set up in each of the 173 presbyteries, to educate others about the idea and about what Aldridge calls “the depth and breadth of the problem.” And next fall, a copy of the videotape and packet of information on PLSE will be sent to each PC(USA) congregation.
“We’re not creating a program as such,” Aldridge said. “Programs kind of come and go — there are many good ideas that are bright stars that fizzle out.” But he wants to “lay pipes and wires and an infrastructure” through the database — so what some are calling a “virtual community” of young people who want to talk about the idea of going into the ministry can be created, and can be shaped in whatever direction those involved see that it needs to go.
However it works out, Godfrey said she’s been encouraged by what she’s already seen, and that someone who doesn’t work professionally for the church would come up with an idea and find a way to make it happen. “It’s not the denominational headquarters, but people identifying the needs of the church and just pushing and pushing and pushing the church to do something,” Godfrey said. “That’s been a great witness to me. Great ideas have come from a crazy meeting where people are just pushing ideas forward.”
And Godfrey challenged congregations to get past the hesitancy of seeming too pushy, to look for young people who seem to have gifts and to start the conversation. It can be one person, she said, offering to pay for a high school student to attend a youth conference, taking that student out to lunch for a conversation about the possibilities, keeping in touch. Even if the young person doesn’t become a pastor, she said, the church might gain a great elder. And she has found that God speaks not just through one person’s heart, but through the community, through what many people see and what they open their hearts to say.
