Conference faces potential clergy shortage

By Michael Wacht

ORLANDO — The Florida Conference may soon face a shortage of seminary-trained clergy as the number of young people responding to God’s call into the ministry as ordained pastors continues to decrease.

“The seminaries are full, but not with young people, with people in their 40s and 50s,” said the Rev. Bob Bushong, chairman of the conference’s Board of Ordained Ministry and pastor of Orlando’s First United Methodist Church, Winter Park. “They’re having shorter careers in the ministry, and that’s having an impact.”

Those older students are often called second-career pastors because they enter the ministry after working in other fields.

Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker says the impact to the denomination as a whole is a potential shortage of clergy.

“The church needs to encourage people to respond to God’s call,” Whitaker said. “In recent years we haven’t, and now we need to be more intentional…about helping young people respond to God’s call when they’re young so they can spend their whole lives in God’s service.”

The Rev. Dr. Keith Ewing, the bishop’s administrative assistant, said the conference had enough clergy to fill its appointments this year, but has had to transfer “five or six persons from other annual conferences” in previous years to fill the appointments. The conference has also transferred pastors from Cuba to meet the special needs of some Hispanic congregations.

Uncertainty in the appointment process is an indicator there may be a shortage, according to Bushong. “We may be right on the edge of this becoming an issue, but we’re not where other annual conferences are,” he said. “It is an issue that the board and the bishop are concerned about.”

Dr. Steven Harper, vice president of Asbury Seminary’s Orlando Campus, said the trend toward older seminary students drains the pool of clergy in two ways.

“Second-career seminarians are not going to serve the church half as long, and that means you have to replace your pool faster and shortages come up more often,” Harper said. “Students change their minds along the way, graduate and go into something else…church music directors, administrators or teachers. We’re seeing more of that in second-career students. A lot of them also have specialized callings and don’t ever plan to be pastors.”

Even those second-career people who do go into pastoral ministry can have a varied impact on the quality of pastoral leadership, according to Ewing. He said their impact “depends on whether the second-career persons are relatively new to the church or the church has been a part of their life and they are finally responding to the call to ministry. A number of second-career persons are finding a relationship to the church, a relationship with Jesus Christ and a call to ministry very close together in time frame.”

Ewing said the trend is not limited to the Florida Conference or the United Methodist Church. He said a recent study of congregations by the Alban Institute revealed that 7 percent of United Methodist pastors are age 35 and under and 33 percent are age 55 and older. The same study showed the total number of young Protestant ministers has declined in recent years, but the number of young attorneys has remained the same.

The trend toward older pastors is causing the conference to rely more on local pastors, according to Ewing. “As you have more second-career persons going into ministry, many are opting for local pastor and course of study rather than spending three years at seminary,” he said.

According to an analysis of Florida Conference records completed last fall by the Rev. William Brisbin, a retired local pastor living in Lakeland, nearly 80 percent of the churches in the Florida Conference were served by elders in full connection in 1970. By 2000, that number had dropped to about 56 percent.

Over the same period, the number of supply, retired supply and student local pastors serving churches increased from less than 10 percent to more than 21 percent. Supply pastors are lay people appointed to serve a church, but who are not allowed to administer the sacraments. Retired supply pastors are retired pastors who serve a church part-time.

Bushong said this is not a bad trend. “I do know we are depending more and more on local pastors,” he said. “There are some very good local pastors in the conference who are serving well. I’d hate to see this as a negative trend.”

The Florida Conference is not alone in facing this situation. In an article published April 5 by the United Methodist News Service the Rev. Robert Kohler, assistant general secretary of the Section on Elders and Local Pastors for the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry in Nashville, reported a nationwide drop in seminary-trained candidates ordained as elders from 820 in 1990 to 621 in 2000. He said the number of local pastors increased from 1,413 to 2,096 over the same decade.

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© 2001 Florida United Methodist Review Online