No pastor? No problem
Churches without pastors still have a surprising number of leadership options
 By John A. Bolt
We just can’t find a minister. What are we to do? It’s a common complaint from congregations in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The Book of Order seems to offer little help: “Every congregation should have the pastoral services of a minister of the Word and Sacrament” (G-14.0501).
But in 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, 45 percent of PC(USA) congregations were without installed pastoral leadership (defined as a pastor, co-pastor, associate pastor or designated pastor). Close to half of these 4,857 congregations are served by commissioned lay pastors, pastors from other denominations, interims, tentmakers and retired or supply ministers. But 2,374 congregations lack any identified pastoral leader.
Yes, although every congregation should have the pastoral services of a minister of the Word and Sacrament, many do not. Yet creative congregations and presbyteries are coming up with a surprising number of alternative leadership options.
© istockphoto.com/ Carol Oostman; Jon SchulteUnderstanding the problem is the first step toward finding solutions. So why can’t churches find pastors? Viewed from one perspective, this question shouldn’t even exist. There are more than seven times as many ministers of the Word and Sacrament searching for solo or head-of-staff positions as there are slots available. And that’s just using the official numbers from the denomination’s Church Leadership Connection system; it doesn’t take into account those who are searching on their own.
The situation only worsens when those in the pipeline to become ministers are added. (And it’s likely to become worse as the economy forces multi-staff churches to start reducing staff.)
Delve a little bit deeper into the numbers, however, and the reasons become clearer: most of the openings are in small churches with small budgets, many in out-of-the-way places, but most of the folks looking want larger churches with healthy budgets, usually in urban or suburban areas. And while many ministers are seeking first calls, few churches are willing to take them.
“On the one hand, we’re faced with all these little churches who can’t find anyone, but tons of ministers who can’t find calls,” says Marcia Clark Myers, director of the denomination’s Office of Vocation.
Ministers leave seminary, saddled with thousands of dollars in debt, and require compensation packages above $40,000–50,000 a year. But about half of PC(USA) congregations have fewer than 100 members, so supporting a minister at that level becomes more and more challenging.
All this analysis brings us back to the question being asked by pastor nominating committees and congregations across the denomination: What are we to do?
“How open are they to different ways of doing things?” asks Carol McDonald, co-executive of the Synod of Lincoln Trails and a veteran of leadership training across the denomination.
Many congregations have a built-in, if sometimes unspoken, idea that somehow they are not a legitimate church — or have failed — if there is not a minister in the pulpit.
“We have downplayed elders and we think that the people who are called and who do ministry are clergy, so if you can’t afford one you’re not a real church,” Myers says.
McDonald adds: “We all need to be reading and studying the book of Acts. It probably should be mandated Bible study” for search committees. The early church “did it themselves. They shared meals, they shared all their resources, and the gospel spread.”
Wonder how? Just ask the folks at Community Presbyterian Church in Reserve, N.M.
Several years ago, the congregation made the intentional decision to embark on life without installed pastoral leadership. The main reason, clerk of session Wanda Baird acknowledges, was financial.
“We have a very small congregation,” she says, “and we flat did not have the money for a full-time pastor.”
So the congregation of some 25 persons has continued life with rotating preachers. Until this year three ministers from the presbytery would rotate the worship leadership; now it’s two, Baird says.
The congregation has remained strong, with a worship attendance of about 35 people each week. Community Church is the only Reformed voice in Reserve, a town of about 400 in southwestern New Mexico, about 30 miles from the Arizona border.
“We’re starting to get ahead,” Baird says. “We’re starting to do some long-needed repairs on the church.”
The church has an active mission outreach, sponsoring several children through Compassion International and supporting Faith Comes By Hearing, an audio Bible program based in Albuquerque.
Members help care for each other’s needs, Baird says. “We’re a very close-knit church family.”
The only drawback she sees is that the congregation sometimes struggles when looking for answers. “With a full-time pastor, we’d definitely have leadership. I feel sometimes we’re kind of fumbling around, groping for answers to questions. We rely on our Book of Order for everything.”
Hundreds of miles away in Lashmeet, W.Va., Grace Presbyterian Church has a similar story to tell of its leadership by Norman Mills, a commissioned lay pastor (CLP).
Lashmeet is a community of about 1,500 persons in southeastern West Virginia, one of the poorest parts of the state. Grace church was once the main church in the area, but now there are about a dozen within a three-mile radius.
The community “is not growing at all,” Mills says, and most of those churches reflect that.
But not Grace.
Between 2002 and 2007, Grace has had the seventh largest percentage growth in the entire denomination — from a membership of 10 to 32 — and the largest of a congregation led by a CLP. There have been 15 baptisms in the last four years, Mills says.
“I just go about being what I think a pastor should be: visiting people and witnessing … just going out and doing what the Lord says to do,” Mills says.
Unlike many similarly situated churches, Grace is not content to just take care of its own, although it certainly does that. The church supports a local Bible literacy program as well as a local radio ministry, and makes donations to “local families in trouble.”
The church has begun sending 12 to 14 children — most, but not all from the congregation — to the Presbytery of West Virginia’s camp each summer.
Grace also works to provide a witness in the community, including sponsoring a monthly ecumenical men’s Bible study.
“We started about three or four years ago, just some men getting together, having a little fellowship and having a meal,” Mills says. “We set a table up in the basement and had a meal and had prayer and a little Bible reading, and one of the guys gave their testimony about how the Lord’s working in their lives.”
This past January, more than 50 men attended, including about a dozen pastors and folks from some 23 or 24 churches, he says.
The church has also sponsored a revival in the community, and attendance grew from the mid-50s at the beginning to almost 90.
The congregation turned to Mills when it found itself without leadership and with little hope of finding any. “There weren’t but five attending church, including me and my wife,” Mills recalls.
Mills was trained as a CLP by the presbytery, which has a long history of training elders to fulfill their duties to “teach the Bible and ... to supply places which are without the regular ministry of the Word and Sacrament” (Book of Order, G-6.0304a).
“I’m sold on the authorized lay preacher/commissioned lay pastor program of the presbytery,” Mills says. “Our church couldn’t afford to pay for a minister of Word and Sacrament.”
Of course, sometimes the difficulty of finding pastoral leadership is a symptom of something else, something not many churches — or presbyteries — want to talk about: Maybe it’s time to dissolve the congregation.
Somebody must be willing to ask the hard questions, McDonald says.
“There are some CLPs who are more than willing to just sort of hang out with a little church. There are some pastors who are that way,” she says. “The advantage to opening up different kinds of leadership is to find folks who have the skills to ask the hard questions they need to ask.”
Presbyteries need to work more assertively with congregations that are near the end of their lives, she says.
“Sometimes they’re family chapels, sometimes it’s the lovely remnant of the five old ladies and the one old man who have been there ‘forever and ever, amen.’”
Here’s the central question to ask, McDonald says: “Is the best use of our money to provide pastoral care for ourselves or to do something in the community and to stop doing this thing we call church?”
The reality is that not every Presbyterian congregation will be able to find a full-time pastor. But by being open to other kinds of leadership, every congregation can follow the example of the early church, “proclaiming the Lord Jesus” through mission and witness.
John A. Bolt, a former commissioned lay pastor and veteran journalist, is stated clerk of the Presbytery of West Virginia.
Tips for filling vacant pulpits
© istockphoto.com/ Ann Marie Kurtz; Andreas Reh Is your congregation having trouble finding pastoral leadership? Marcia Clark Myers and Joyce Lieberman, in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Office of Vocation, offer these suggestions:
- Re-evaluate the Church Information Form which the denomination uses to match candidates with positions. Perhaps the location of your church could be described differently, or the search can be expanded beyond the typical nearby areas.
- If your church is very small, highlight the advantages, gifts and joys associated with being a church of under 100 members.
- Be open to considering all candidates, regardless of previous experience.
- Don’t overload the list of skills you expect a pastor to have immediately. Consider having your pastor, along with a couple of session members, get the desired specialized training after the new pastor has arrived.
- Offer as much compensation as possible to provide for the pastor and to be able to offer increases over the years. If adequate compensation for a full-time pastor is out of the congregation’s reach, consider tentmaking or bivocational pastors, who have income from other employment.
- Be prepared to help the spouses of pastors find satisfactory employment.
- Be open to all kinds of people. Consider women and men and persons of all races. More than half of the people preparing for ministry are women. About 19 percent of persons preparing for ministry are racial ethnic.
- Consider retiring military chaplains.
- Consider an “orderly exchange” with a minister from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, United Church of Christ or Reformed Church in America, the denominations in full communion with the PC(USA).
Based on “Why Can’t Calvin Church Find a Pastor?” Download the full document.  |
