Episcopal Press and News
A New Era In Clergy Recruitment
Episcopal News Service. December 10, 1987 [87246]
Linda M. Logan, Diocese of East Tennessee
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (DPS, Dec. 10) -- The Church should recruit its clergy -- identify the persons it wants and go after them -- not just sit and wait to see who walks in the door.
That is the recommendation of the Board of Theological Education and the Council for the Development of Ministry.
Meeting here Nov. 12-13 to review its work for the Triennium, the council made it clear that it is not recommending business as usual as regards the recruitment and training of persons for the ordained ministry. Both in the report of the theological Board and in the work of the committee charged with revising the canons on ministry, the Council underlined the need for the Church to turn anew in its approach to raising up the leadership of the Church.
In a 31-page report presented to the council by the Rev. Preston T. Kelsey, executive director of the Board for Theological Education, the board's strategic planning committee asserted that the recruitment and screening processes used by the Church need serious attention.
"If theological education is education for mission," the report states, "then the Church needs actively to recruit the best prospects for such education."
The Future of Theological Education in the Episcopal Church represents two years of study and research developed by the Hartford Seminary Center for Social and Religious Research. According to the findings of that study, "the Church has been overly concerned with problems of over-supply and preoccupied with those who present themselves to commissions on ministry." What the Church needs to ask itself, the report says, is if it is "mobilizing for the mission needs of the Church, actively recruiting persons for mission in the present age."
Certain kinds of ministry are not being adequately developed, the report states, citing ministries in the inner city, small church ministries, rural and ethnic ministries, and institutional ministries in particular.
The report also addressed itself to the process of screening and evaluation from pre-postulancy through ordination, recommending that the overall process be simplified and that consideration be given to a one-step affirmation of vocation, "perhaps at the time of postulancy, with the rest of the process designed to assist the postulant in preparation for ordination."
The present system, the report asserts, "unintentionally but systematically hinders leadership development of candidates for the ordained ministry," tending to "damage some, either arousing unresolved anger or causing persons to say and do whatever is needed to make it through the process... In many cases," the report stresses, "we are sowing the seeds for eventual clergy burn-out."
The report also called to task both the seminaries of the Church and parishes for theological education that is deficient at the congregational level and of questionable focus in the seminaries.
Pointing out that theological education of the clergy is a three-stage process -- only the middle stage of which occurs in seminary -- the report points to the "paucity of such education" in the parish congregation, calling it "a major handicap for our seminaries" which "constitutes a serious weakness threatening the effectiveness of the ministry and mission of the Episcopal Church at large."
Seminaries, the report says, are faced with the "serious challenges" of a "fragmentation of theology into separate disciplines, devoid of meaningful contact with one another," and a "weakening of scholarship" and "the lack of incentives for scholarly research...among those who constitute our theological faculties."
Are the seminaries preparing "for maintenance or for mission? Are they providing an atmosphere conducive to growth in discipleship or are they encouraging cultural elitism and upward mobility in worldly terms? Are they preparing students to be faithful servants in God's ministry of Word and Sacraments or are they preparing them to be therapists, managers or professional specialists?"
"Such questions," the report states, "points to some real... problems not only in the seminary but in the Church."
The Title III canons -- those dealing with the ministry of the Church -- occupied most of the second day of the Council's meeting. The revisions represented three years of work ordered by the last General Convention to bring the canons into line with the theology and language of the 1979 prayer book.
Introducing the proposed revisions, the Rt. Rev. Robert C. Witcher, bishop of Long Island and chair of the council's committee on revisions, said the committee approached their task by developing principles of revision and by setting out "what we believed was the normative," noting exceptions, but basing all on "the history and theology of apostolic ministry."
One of the basic problems, Witcher said, was reducing and clarifying the 12 different routes to ordination found in the present canons -- a situation described in the council's Blue Book report as "a series of exceptions layered on a basic process, often without regard to one another."
The proposed canons seek to correct this confusion by a large number of changes, among them, shifting the emphasis from that of an "individual pursuit of a personal course to a reemphasis of the Church's calling (of) those to be ordained."
In all, about half of the canons of Title II were revised and entered in the Council's Blue Book report to the General Convention -- a "monumental task," according to the Rev. Canon Robert Tharp, vice-chairman of the Council and a member of the Title III committee.
According to Tharp, one of the "greatest changes" reflected in the revised canons is the statement of theology now put forth in Canon 1:
'We now say very strongly in the first canon of Title III that there is ministry of all the baptized."
This was, Tharp pointed out, where the revisions started. From a canon which previously stated that in every diocese there would be a commission on ministry -- "which pointed only to the ordained ministry," he said. The canons have now been changed to point first to the ministry of all baptized persons and to the responsibility of the diocese to help develop that ministry.