While sitting through
several sessions at Annual Conference last week, and listening to reports, some
of the numbers began to nag at me. I am
an engineer and numbers mean something.
In particular, as I listened to our bishop, Bishop John Hopkins, as well
as visiting bishop, Bishop Janice Huie from the Texas Conference, speak about
the age of our clergy members; the numbers told me something about the future. What they told me is this:
In ten years, our church will
be very different.
I admit, you may still have
a human pastor, but maybe not, and maybe not in the way you are accustomed to
having one.
Here are the numbers. In East Ohio, we have 748 churches with 586
pastors. At present, 60 percent of our
pastors are 55 or older, and 6 percent are under the age of 34. Nationwide, those numbers aren’t much
different. According to Bishop Huie, 54%
of all ordained elders are age 55-72. In
2000, that number was only 30 percent.
For the last ten years we
have ordained, between five and seven new elders annually. This year we had the largest class in a very
long time, and there were thirteen.
During those same ten
years, we have retired between twenty and thirty five pastors every year.
To be fair, the number of
ordinations and the number of retirees is not an accurate comparison because
the retirees include many local pastors as well as ordained elders. Even so, it seems to be a fairly visible hint
of things to come.
These numbers were
announced and displayed for everyone at Annual Conference, so what has me so
convinced that we are about to witness a major change in ministry?
Think about it. If 60 percent of our pastors are 55+, that
means 60 percent of our pastors will retire within the next decade. If the pastors of 60 percent of 748 churches
retire, that means that 448 churches will need a new pastor. Sixty percent of 586 pastors is 351. If we also assume that we can somehow
duplicate our efforts this year, and ordain 13 pastors every year for the next
ten years instead of only 5, we will ordain only 130 new elders.
We will ordain 130 elders to
fill 448 empty pulpits.
Of course, this doesn’t
count the addition of local pastors.
This year we elected 44 new candidates for ministry, discontinued 6
candidates and also discontinued 16 local pastors and 2 provisional elders. If we assume these numbers as averages for
the next ten years and also remember that those ordained (13) must also come
from the ranks of the candidates for ministry, in the end we gained 7 local
pastors.
Over a decade, that gives
us 70 local pastors to add to our 130 elders for a total of 200 pastors.
That still leaves us 248
pulpits short.
Unless every pastor
fills two or more pulpits.
If the math holds, in the
next ten years, we will bring in 200 new pastors to replace 351 retirees.
Of course there are other
factors that will play into this. Our
conference (and others) has expended considerable effort to attract young clergy,
but in the last decade we’ve managed to raise the percentage of young (under
35) clergy by only 2 percent. Even if we
continue to improve, this alone isn’t going to fix the problem.
Currently, to fill the existing ‘clergy
gap’ we’ve invited more than fifty retirees to pastor these churches as well as
18 pastors from outside our conference and denomination.
This means that
our shortfall may not be as bad as the numbers initially suggest, but the trend
tells us something.
In the next decade we will
care for God’s people but to do so will require change. We may well employ more part-time pastors and
student pastors. In addition, more local
pastors and elders will find themselves serving more than one church. But we may also experiment with new models of
ministry. We may try multi-site
churches, where one pastor preaches in multiple locations via video, and we may
go back to our roots and try a twenty-first century version of the circuit
rider. We may try many things, but one
thing is almost certain.
In ten years, our church will
be very different.
