Ministry Challenges
There is a place for visionary leaders and wise guides in both very large and very small communities. But the bifurcation of congregational sizes creates a world in which a small number of ministers have great autonomy, financial security, and even celebrity, while a large and growing number of ministers serve in precarious and part-time ways. These conditions press more and more ministers to become either stars at the top of the pyramid, entrepreneurs who try to start ministries in which they will star, employees of organizations that have already achieved a certain scale, or tentmakers who pair ministry with other work that can pay the bills. Stars, entrepreneurs, employees, and tentmakers can all be faithful ministers of the gospel. But none of them are professionals, at least in the sense ministers enjoyed in the age of voluntary associations. In a dynamic that parallels dynamics in other parts of the economy penetrated by neoliberalism, dwindling numbers of mid-sized congregations make for a dwindling middle class in ministry, as well as dwindling numbers of full- time ministers who exercise relative autonomy in their work. A congregation of about two hundred members was in many ways the natural habitat of ministers as professionals. It was large enough to provide a full-time, middle-class salary with benefits, some staff to do work labeled as outside the profession, and resources for professional projects. But this mid-sized congregation is exactly the kind of congregation that is disappearing. As it does, the space for ministry as a profession is contracting.
Congregational structures are an important part of the story.
The polarization of congregations into very large and very small sizes diminishes the number of openings for full-time, fully credentialed pastoral ministers. Very large congregations depend on economies of scale, employing fewer full-time ministers per member. Like hospitals and law firms, they also achieve savings by unbundling the profession and assigning specific tasks to paraprofessionals like youth pastors, worship leaders, and pastoral caregivers. To say that these ministers are “paraprofessional” is not to diminish their excellence or faithfulness. It is just to acknowledge that they are often credentialed and compensated in different ways, that they usually function more like skilled employees than like autonomous professionals, and that their lives often take different arcs than those promised by a profession in its classic form.
Working in a very small congregation can be very different from working as a member of a large staff at a megachurch. But this, too, is increasingly something other than the kind of full- time, MDiv-certified, pension-earning professional ministry that distinguished the era of voluntary associations. More small congregations mean more pastors who lead congregations on part-time salaries, often without full participation in denominational pension and benefits plans. Fully one-fourth of the congregations in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) can no longer afford a full-time pastor with full benefits. A similar ratio holds in the nation’s Catholic parishes, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Almost half of Episcopal parishes are led by part-time priests, supply priests, or laypeople. The numbers of small congregations served by people Catholics designate as lay ecclesial ministers, Methodists call local pastors, Presbyterians call commissioned lay pastors, and Disciples of Christ call commissioned pastors are all increasing. Congregations of diasporic communities and charismatic/Pentecostal communities have long been led by teams of bivocational leaders who blur the lines between lay- persons and ordained professionals. These pastors often provide wise and faithful leadership. Indeed, they frequently live out their ministries at personal cost that puts to shame those of us who can’t imagine ministry as anything but full-time work with middle-class salary and benefits. My point is not that ministry is declining in quality, but that ministry is functioning less and less like a profession.
The unraveling of ministry as a profession has a significant financial component.
Salaries for ministers have been declining relative to other professionals for decades. In 2020, the average annual salary for a full-time clergyperson was $56,650. Others classified as “religious workers” were paid substantially less, averaging $40,070. Of course, amounts vary widely according to denomination and kind of placement. Salaries are further distorted by systemic racism. A 2003 study found that 41 percent of Black pastors received less than $13,000 per year. On average, Black pastors make about two-thirds the salaries of their white counterparts. And pastoral salaries continue to vary by gender, as enduring sexism in the church drives dynamics in which women pastors are systematically paid less than men. Although the gender gap has been slowly closing in recent years, this is attributable less to female clergy being paid higher salaries and more to male clergy being paid lower ones. As in professions like teaching and social work, greater access for women has led to a decline in relative wages for the whole field. Systemic racism and sexism are like accelerants for all the other forces that already consume the professional status of ministers.
The extent and significance of the decline in clergy wages come into focus with comparisons over time. When the political economy of the nineteenth century opened up space for professionals as a distinct class, mainline Protestant clergy offered a paradigmatic definition of that space, along with physicians and attorneys. The average salaries of doctors and lawyers soon out- paced those of clergy. But education, benefits, social status, job security, and quality of life allowed clergy with MDiv’s to remain in roughly the same professional class as doctors and lawyers. Now, though, lawyers average about three times the salaries of full-time clergy, while physicians average around four times as much. Individual outliers aside, it strains comparison to include clergy as part of the same class. Closer comparisons for clergy today are to teachers and nurses. Elementary and middle-school teachers averaged $65,300 per year in 2020. Registered nurses averaged over $80,000, while licensed practical nurses made just over $50,000. This is good and honorable company. But it represents a significant historical shift. In 1890, pastors made about three times as much as schoolteachers and nurses. Now they often make less. If ministry is still a profession, it is a profession of a different kind.
The unraveling of professional status also reflects deep shifts in the culture of ministry.
In the constellation of voluntary associations, professional clergy were authorized especially by their connection to a network of institutions that included congregations, denominations, and seminaries. Seminaries and denominations each played a role in certifying ministers to assume an office in a congregation. That office was the real source of authority.
Now, though, as the social power of all these institutions erodes, authority flows more from a minister’s ability to dis- play authenticity. Surveys underscore authenticity as the quality people prize most in a preacher. Shifts in practice also manifest the shift in authorization. Preaching that displays authenticity tends to feature practices that present a private self. It features not only more self-disclosure but also more casual language, gestures, and spaces. Distinctively clerical garb like a collar, robe, or stole might mark the authority of office. But the authority of authenticity comes through clothing or accessories that display individuality, whether that is a Hawaiian shirt, statement eye- wear, or skinny jeans with expensive sneakers. Even distinctly clerical clothing can become expressive. Especially when worn by those in traditions for which it is not a norm, a chasuble on Sunday or a collar at the march is more an expression of identity than a badge of office. And pastors within traditions that re- quire distinctive clothing have more and more options at their disposal. Expression can come through the cut and cloth of what seems like a uniform. Through all these tropes, the authority of authenticity plays with or even actively subverts older norms of “professionalism.”
The deprofessionalization of ministry is part of a much broader unraveling of the professions from the classical form that emerged in the nineteenth century and solidified in the first two-thirds of the twentieth. That classical form stressed the self- directedness of a credentialed professional in a skilled practice that was oriented to the common good. The specialized skills of professionals have only grown more formidable. But finance capital has penetrated spheres of medicine, law, and accountancy, transforming more and more of the institutions in which highly skilled work happens from practices owned by the professionals who worked in them into corporations owned by and accountable to shareholders. The shifts are perhaps clearest in medicine. Physicians are increasingly likely to work in a practice in which they do not have an ownership stake. In 2018, for the first time ever, the number of physicians who were employees passed the number who owned part of the practice in which they worked. The number of women who worked as employees was even higher. And the direction of the trends is clear: fully 70 per- cent of physicians under forty worked as employees of practices they did not own. These numbers describe changes at the top of the old professional pyramid in health care. Employee status is even more powerfully enforced on nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, technologists, and other health-care workers. As professionals become employees, they exercise less power to direct their practices to- ward the common good, in accord with the older professional ethos. They also enjoy less autonomy in their daily work. As the distinctive space apart from both labor and capital that defined professional status erodes, professionals in every field are increasingly pressed to become either entrepreneurs or employees. Finance capital has not played the same role in church life. But ministry emerged as a profession alongside other professions, and their erosion decreases the social and economic space in which ministry might operate as a profession.
These structural shifts have been accompanied by shifts in the ethos of professionals.
Strong institutions have the power to shape the characters, habits, dispositions, relationships, and worldviews of individuals. But individualization rewires the relationships between individuals and institutions. Now, as social critic Yuval Levin has argued, institutions that once formed individuals become platforms on which individuals perform. The dynamic is visible across multiple spheres. Fewer politicians are formed by their parties as they rise through the ranks; instead, they treat their parties as stages on which they can perform. In an ironic transfiguration of their own value, universities establish standards for tenure, promotion, and salary that encourage academics to neglect schools as formative institutions that they help govern and to regard them instead as places to stand as they cultivate their individual brands, which then contribute to the cultural capital of the school. Similar forces invite pastors to shrug off the discipline of denominations to create congregations that serve as platforms. Pastors who make these moves might become not just entrepreneurs, but stars. As stars, they can attain greater prominence than the leader of a voluntary society ever could. But they start to look less and less like professionals.
There is meaningful emancipation in this dynamic, as people systemically discounted by networks of voluntary associations can gain leverage on and apart from them. Rachel Held Evans, for instance, would not have been ordained to significant pastoral leadership in many white evangelical traditions, but her virtuosity in displaying authenticity let her speak good news through other means to people in and on the edges of those traditions. Her ministry thrived not in spite of her lack of professional status but because of it. At the same time, there are worrisome elements in this dynamic, as star systems disproportionately reward the already advantaged and congregations that serve as platforms for stars boom and bust, leaving spiritual body counts in their wake. Mars Hill Church, for instance, hitched itself to the bro-gospel of Mark Driscoll, rode his stardom up, and crashed as he came down, all in less than twenty years. He, too, was not bound by norms of professionalism within a strong institution. Indeed, for his followers, his transgression of those norms provided proof of his authenticity.
The mixed quality of these developments should make us wary both of calls to restore professionalism and of celebrations of its unraveling. But even if we hold on to professionalism as an ideal, the large-scale social and economic forces at work in these changes mean that calling individuals to regain a professional ethos is unlikely to restore professionalism as a norm. Even ministers with a strong professional ethos will find themselves caught up in these dynamics. They will be hard pressed, for instance, not to engage in practices that display their authenticity, whether in the pulpit or on social media. This is the disciplinary apparatus that operates most powerfully today: not the discipline that forms a person for leadership in a voluntary association, but the discipline that drives a person to display expressive identities that transcend institutions. This unraveling of professional ministry is neither simply progress nor decline. It is the ambivalent space in which we live.
Ministry Challenges
