New Rules

In his classic study The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, H. Richard Niebuhr suggested that entering the ministry is something like joining the army. You don’t know if you’ll be firing a gun, driving a truck, or peeling potatoes, but whatever you do, you will be a soldier in the U.S. Army. There was a time, a half-century ago, when recruits to the ministry cheerfully accepted the analogy, knowing that the actual practices of ministry did not greatly differ from church to church or community to community. The stability of ministry was rooted in the theological markers and fixed polity that identified the mainline denominations and the Catholic church. You may have joined the army, but you had already learned in seminary that every duty you performed could be connected to the authority of the Word of God and the administration of the sacraments. Recruits to the ministry assumed that they would be called on to perpetuate the same quality of life that had nurtured them and invited them into its service. They were confident that their fellow soldiers would look like them, act like them, and share a common set of cultural values. Recruits to the ministry could count on the homogeneity of the ecclesial landscape in America. You knew what you were getting into when you entered the ministry.

Today, most clergy-watchers would admit that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. As the demands of ministry have outrun the terms of their call, contemporary ministers are facing challenges and frustrations they never anticipated. That is the message of two books about the clergy, Who Shall Lead Them?, by journalist Larry Witham, and Faith of My Fathers, by emergent church pastor Chris Seay. They have written books that could not be more different from one another in style and purpose but whose bottom lines are remarkably similar. Witham’s book is filled with fascinating statistics documenting the crisis in church leadership across several denominations. It is a valuable resource for those who care about the church. Seay’s is the highly personal record of a lengthy conversation on ministry between three generations of ministers in his family, including his father (Dad), grandfather (Papa), and his brothers. Both books reflect great respect for the ministry, and both project a sense of crisis about its future.

Apparently somebody changed the rules for ministry without announcing it in advance. Older clergy especially are a little perplexed at Christianity’s loss of cultural privilege, the explosion of religious pluralism, and the demand for spiritualities unrelated, or only tangentially related, to the authority of the church. While the nation in which they minister remains aggressively Christian in its rhetoric, its actual policies and institutions are guided by something nearer to practical secularism. Some ministers are buoyed by the return of “God” to the public arena; others feel used.

Mainline ministers face the reality that they are no longer feeding the main line of religious vitality in America. Unlike their colleagues in the evangelical and emergent churches, they seem unprepared for the shift from a theological to a market-driven model for ministry. Most of them entered the ministry wholly innocent of the entrepreneurial skills necessary to survive in this culture. If the old authority symbol was the preacher safely ensconced in an elevated pulpit, the new one is a roaming facilitator with a remote in his hand. Some ministers, however, have the uneasy feeling that the word of God—so rich in narrative, metaphor, and paradox; so demanding of time and community for absorption; so alien to any culture’s cherished values—doesn’t match up well with its current market.

Little Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches that once constituted the community’s memory and anchored its values have been swallowed up by the religious Wal-Marts of this age. More and more consumers are being served by fewer and fewer clerks. While many ministers still confess to satisfying relationships in their parishes, 74 percent of them say their biggest problem is communicating the gospel to their very own culture. From Witham’s book we learn that ten percent of the clergy report persistent depression, 67 percent are either obese by medical standards or overweight, four in ten acknowledge “inappropriate sexual behavior for a minister,” and another four in ten have “doubted their call.” Nearly a third have “considered leaving.”

Witham peppers the reader with lively analyses of Catholic priests, women in ministry, Baptists, burnout, and purpose-driven churches. Like a good journalist, he does so without allowing his own agenda to intrude. In his introduction he promises only to take “a descriptive look at ministerial variety.” The absence of a thesis turns out to be both a strength and a weakness. To impose a plot on the chaos of American religious life might have been viewed as a falsification; yet a plot is what we crave in order to understand the ministry as something more than a succession of vexing issues. For all the richness of their data, the landmark sociological studies of religion, such as Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart or Jeffrey Hadden’s The Gathering Storm in the Churches, achieve greatness by coming clean with a plot. It may be an imperfect or controversial thesis they present, but their willingness to risk an argument poses a genuine challenge to the reader and creates a greater possibility for dialogue.

At the other end of the spectrum from Witham’s carefully researched study is the Seay family’s conversation on pastoral ministry. It nicely supplements Witham’s statistics with a “for instance” drawn from the personal experiences of three Baptist preachers. The book is a quick read with big print, a lot of annoying head-shots of the participants, too much banter, and too many incomplete thoughts. Which is to say it would have benefited from some disciplined editing. And yet, if you listen carefully to what the three preachers are saying, you can discern some important changes and tensions within the evangelical ministry. The grandfather, Papa, talks about how expectations for ministry have changed. His comments provide evidence of the shift from what he calls “hard” preaching to the teaching-sermon so prevalent in contemporary evangelicalism. He also traces the evolution of worship from old-fashioned hymns to the entertainment-style praise service and to sanctuaries so littered with amplifiers, speakers, and mixers that they look more like Wayne and Garth’s basement than houses of worship.

The tensions are most vividly revealed in Dad’s hardline approach to homosexuals in his church and his son Chris’ loving outreach to them in his Ecclesia, an experimental community of Christians in Houston’s inner city. Dad (Ed Seay) draws heavily on James Dobson’s “war” on homosexuality and understands a welcoming attitude toward gays as the moral equivalent of the reintroduction of slavery. Dad’s sons, Chris and Brian, reject that analogy, as well as Dobson’s notion that the church requires a morally purified culture in order to preach the gospel successfully. As much as Papa, Dad, and Chris differ on many specific issues, they hold in common both a sense of loss and a profound sense of hope for the church’s ministry. They pose superficial questions to be sure, such as, what kind of music do seekers really want to hear, but they also wrestle with P. T. Forsyth’s deeper dilemma: how is the Christian gospel to take its age seriously?

Each of the three members of this family has been an entrepreneur in ministry—each organizing or guiding independent congregations. Interestingly, it is the more flagrant entrepreneurial spirit in the church that the three criticize most robustly. Chris puts it this way: “I am amazed by how many jerks there are in the pulpit … who see the church as a means to build up their egos.” Nearly a century ago P. T. Forsyth made the same observation: “Nowhere has mediocrity its chance as it has it in religion… . Nowhere has quackery of every kind such a field and such a harvest.” These observations beg for a discussion of how ministers are formed and deformed, but none is forthcoming.

What the reader misses in the Seays’ informal musings is also absent from Witham’s statistics, and that is any sense of the plenitude of the church. At times it appears that the church’s memory is limited to three generations of preachers in one family. The journalist’s statistical analysis and the Seays’ spirited arguing around the dining room table, for all their insights, tend to obscure the larger picture of a church that is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” whose truth therefore often confounds its own limited prospects for success. I would like to hear more about the Catholic parish in my town where Anglos and Latinos in equal numbers defy the church-growth crowd’s law of homogeneous units; where people of all social classes share in the richest imaginable mixture of eucharistic worship and social justice; where the congregation has roots in something older than the latest fad; where the church represents something larger than the sum of its problems; where the priest is both prophet and poet without hitching the ministry to his personal style.

Of course, I am asking for something more than these books were meant to deliver. But there is a reality about the church whose height, breadth, and staying power eludes all the savvy thinking about hot-button issues and other ephemera of ministry. C. S. Lewis described the church as “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” These two books are written by people who know the church and love it deeply. If what they report can turn our eyes to an even larger vision, they will have succeeded indeed.

Richard Lischer is James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor of Preaching at Duke Divinity School. His most recent book is The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Eerdmans).