It Should Be Really Difficult to Be a UMC Pastor: Bad Ideas for the Next Methodism
Bad Idea for the #NextMethodism #1: “It Should be really hard to become a UMC clergy person…but…”
What if the United Methodist Church only accepted about 7% of the people that applied to be a clergy into the denomination? That’s about the average acceptance rate for undergraduate admission at an Ivy League college this year.
“That’s stupid,” you’d say. “That’s a fast way to kill your church! We already have a clergy shortage! It would be ecclesial suicide to reject over 90% of our applicants!”
Yeah, you’ve probably got a point…also, I’m not suggesting the Ivy Leagues should be the model for our ordination system, but what if…
In this installment of Bad Ideas for the Next Methodism, I submit that it should be really hard to become a United Methodist clergy person.
I hear some saying already, “but it’s already too hard!”
In case you’re not up on our current ordination standards in the UMC, the minimum requirements look something like this:
· Spend 4 years earning an undergrad bachelor’s degree.
· Spend 2 years earning a Master’s degree (to be a deacon); or 3 years earning a Master of Divinity degree (to be a deacon or elder) from an accredited school of theological education.
· Complete a year of certified candidacy that includes some paperwork, a psychological test and interview, and an examination by your District Committee on Ordained Ministry.
· Complete paperwork answering questions on theology, doctrine, and practice of ministry (ranges from about 40 to 70 pages of type-written work)
· Write a bible study of publishable quality (mine was about 30 type-written pages)
· Preach and record a sermon in front of a live congregation/audience
· Complete interviews with Conference Committees on Ordained Ministry.
That’s what you have to do to be commissioned. Then, spend two or three years in “provisional” status (limited ministerial authority) and then do the paperwork and psychological exam and interviews with the Conference Committee on Ordained Ministry all over again.
And then…only then…will you be ordained and considered in “full connection” in the United Methodist Church.
Is that hard enough?
Yeah, actually, now that I think about it, that was fairly difficult and time-consuming. So, let me phrase the question in a different way…
Are our current standards for commissioning and ordination difficult in the right way?
I’ve got several friends who teach, or who once taught, in public education, and there’s a fairly common complaint that I’ve heard from them for the last ten or fifteen years, ever since the “No Child Left Behind” standards were implemented and then codified: the goal of education in our country has been to teach towards the test. Education has become a one-size-fits-all commodity that’s quantified and measured, and yet our educational results haven’t seen much improvement.
Teachers say it’s because they’re handcuffed to teaching towards the test — everything comes down to those scores, and so there’s no incentive (or available resources) to contextualize education towards adaptive learning.
Learn the names of the state capitals but don’t worry about what makes those places actually important. That’s teaching towards the test.
I am positive that the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, who sets and maintains the ordination standards and processes for the global denomination per General Conference’s directives, has nothing but the best intentions in recommending and writing our ordination standards. But I wonder if, when it comes to ordination, we’re basically just teaching towards the test.
What if ordination isn’t difficult in the right way?
I think we get it half right — our provisional process means that you can’t just memorize the correct Wesleyan answer to questions of theodicy and eschatology and other ten-cent seminary school words. You’ve got to prove you know how those heady answers translate into practical divinity, and if you can’t do that we give you time to learn through deferments, mentorships, study groups, and any number of remedial resources.
Even the action of the 2012 General Conference mandating a “fruitfulness project” seems to have been a nod towards higher accountability in ordination standards, although I’d argue to anybody listening that the implementation of that standard was so poor it would have made the Hindenburg designers feel better about themselves.*
But I worry that the pressing needs of our denomination have outpaced our well-intentioned ordination standards. As we decline in membership, face a schism over theological and ethical issues of sexuality, and become older and whiter in a nation becoming more diverse, our publishable bible studies aren’t going to dig us out of the hole we’re facing.
I think our ordination standards have to be high…very high! But in the right way.
In the spring of my final year at Harvard Divinity School, not quite knowing which direction I was going to take in ministry (I’m an occasional late bloomer), I attended a non-profit career fair out of curiosity. Most of the mainline denominations were represented, as well as numerous national and local non-profit orgs, but out of the dozens of tables and booths at that career fair, only one booth that day had a long line.
In that long line were numerous Harvard undergrads, students from Harvard Business and Harvard Law (places not especially known for sending their students into non-governmental benevolence work), as well as students from the schools you’d expect — Education, Public Health, the Kennedy School, and the Divinity School.
This intrigued me, because it’s rare enough to find a long line of applicants for non-profit work, and it’s especially rare when the line is filled with Ivy League young people who probably have a number of lucrative career options (the year I graduated, over half the Harvard undergrads took “consulting” jobs on Wall Street). What was the org with the long line?
What does Teach for America do? Does it send talented young people into six-figure administration and policy jobs in our petite bourgeois capitals of D.C. and Brooklyn, NY? Does it offer cushy internships with social power brokers? Do you get unlimited lattes and a pension at the end?
Nope. I asked a friend of mine where he served and what he did when he served with Teach for America. He told me that, for the $17,000 yearly salary he earned those two years, he taught second graders in a small town on the Texas-Mexico border, an hour from a drugstore. Most of the students didn’t speak English and most were illiterate and over half were Dreamer kids from one parent homes (usually moms who took their kids over the border illegally while dad took field work wherever he could).
And the acceptance rate for Teach for America? They take about 15% of those that apply. My friend said he’d do it again in a heartbeat.**
Getting into Teach for America is hard, but it’s hard in the right way and for the right reasons. The people who apply for Teach for America do it because they have a deep passion for public service and have become convinced that public education is worth investing their time and energy into.
Also, Teach for America looks good on a resume. Let’s be real.
So, let’s flesh out this bad idea of more difficult ordination standards further. What would it really look like to have Ivy League standards to become a pastor in the UMC?
What I think it would mean is that we tailor commissioning and ordination standards to meet our most pressing needs as a Church. Some of those things might be:
· Ability to preach a sermon that gets rave reviews from a 15-year-old and an 85-year-old and makes them both want to come back to church next week.
· Ability to share the gospel effectively in two modern languages.
· Successfully plan and complete a yearly stewardship campaign that increases the year-over-year giving of a congregation by 3–5%.
· Successfully plan and complete a capital campaign that either a.) pays down congregational debt or b.) raises funds for a specific missional need.
· Complete a “fruitfulness project” that increases weekly church attendance by 10% in a year-over-year four-month comparison.
· Lower the average age of a congregation by three years.
· Perform six adult baptisms in a 16-month span.
If I had been judged by any of these standards when I was up for ordination, I would have been deferred. And yet, when I look at the tools that I’ll actually need for my next 34 years, all of these will likely apply.
My careful readers will likely object: “but doctrine!!!!”
Yes, I agree. Doctrine is super important and I agree with some of our best Methodist thinkers that doctrinal amnesia is a major cause of our theological and ecclesial mess of today.
But orthodoxy, I think, is best worked out in an educational context (which I’ll get to later), and besides, as I read Titus 1:6, it seems to me that the qualifications listed for elders all seem to serve the purpose of encouraging and organizing the fellowship, not just for the sake of doctrinal integrity in and of itself.
Maybe a better way to put it is that ordination should serve the church. The church shouldn’t be a slave to its ordination standards.
Will more difficult ordination standards save the UMC? Probably not by itself, but if you keep doing the same things you’ll keep getting the same results.
Maybe it’s a bad idea to make it more difficult to be a UMC pastor. Maybe that’s exactly what we need.
*The Fruitfulness Project was an ordination requirement that the 2012 General Conference wrote into the discipline. The goal is to create a new project or ministry that creates “fruitfulness.” The idea is good — it’s testing the entrepreneurial abilities of our prospective clergy; but my argument is that the standard on which that project is judged is so undefined as to be basically pointless. Standards without measurables aren’t helpful in my humble opinion.
**I also understand that Teach for America isn’t a perfect organization and has its detractors. See this as suggestion as a limited metaphor.
