Why Are They “Running Out of Ministers”?

Today there is a shortage of ministers, clergymen in Christendom, even in lands enjoying a “boom” in religion. Why this paradox?

“WE’RE Running Out of Ministers!” So warns a leading United States Protestant monthly, The Christian Herald, in its issue of December, 1957.

And it gives some impressive figures to back up that statement. It shows that of some 308,000 congregations in the United States nearly one fourth are without local pastors. The Methodist Church leads, with a shortage of almost 16,000. The Southern Baptists are nearly 6,000 short. The Disciples of Christ lack more than 3,700. Other Baptist groups, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Seventh-day Adventists also have serious shortages. In a number of denominations upward of a hundred more ministers die, quit or retire each year than enter the ministry.

Nor are the Protestant churches the only ones affected by this problem. The same issue of the Herald told that the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has a shortage of more than 5,000 parish priests. Neither is its shortage limited to the United States. According to McManus of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there is a worldwide shortage of priests. In some sections of South America Roman Catholics see their priests only twice a year, when he visits them at fiesta time. Indicative of the shortage in such lands is the situation in Venezuela, where there is but one priest for 11,000 Roman Catholics.

Turning to Europe, we find that in France, largely Roman Catholic, many thousands of parishes are without local priests. Even in Italy the situation is getting serious. There, during the past eighty-five years, the ratio of priests to Catholic population has shrunk from one priest for every 175 Catholics to but one priest for more than 1,000; a drop from 150,000 to 47,000 during that time.

Why this widespread decline in the number of Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen? And especially why in the United States, where organized religion currently boasts of an all-time high as regards numbers, wealth and prestige? From the facts at hand it is apparent both that less young men enter the theological seminaries and that more preachers quit for some other vocation. But why?

WHY CLERICAL CAREERS NOT CHOSEN

Why do less young men today take up the career of minister or priest? The Christian Herald blamed the “laity” and in particular the parents. It quoted one clergyman as saying: “My people are willing to have young people go into Christian work, but no one wants his own son to do it.” It also told of students getting discouraged because of lack of interest on the part of their religious friends.

While some would thus blame the parents for not fostering interest in the career of a minister, others blame the youths themselves. They charge that modern youths are too materialistic and selfish to dedicate themselves to such a career.

Then again some youths are turned against the ministerial career, we are told, by the example of the clergymen themselves. This was noted in the article “Strengthening the Ministry,” written by one Robert Rankin and appearing in The Christian Century, April 27, 1955. After blaming lack of information, misinformation, feelings of unworthiness and too high standards for many youths not entering the ministry, he continues under the heading “Can He Keep His Integrity?”

“Others are turned against the ministry by the ministry. No doubt some of their judgments are unfair and naïve, but whatever their quality I have been persuaded reluctantly, that some of our fine young people do not respond to the vocation because they believe they see hypocrisy, arrogance and incompetence in the pulpit. Worst of all, some are under the impression that such characteristics are essential for success in the ministry.

“One lad told me,” Rankin continued, “that he would be interested in the vocation if he could be convinced that he would not have to act like his own minister. He announced emphatically that he abhorred the high jinks and pulpit tricks he had witnessed in his own church and which, in his judgment, are required to ‘hold’ the people. A career in college teaching was much more to his liking and for him this seemed to promise not only professional satisfaction but also a good chance to maintain his integrity.”—New York Post, March 8, 1958.

Surely this confession or admission on the part of a religious leader is the height of irony. Here is the one vocation above all others that is ostensibly dedicated to teaching men and women high principles of morality, sincerity and the keeping of integrity.

WHY THEY QUIT

A Roman Catholic spokesman, Godfrey Poage, C.P., was quoted in the American press not long ago as stating that in the United States there are some half a million ex-seminarians. A seminarian is one who attended a theological seminary for the purpose of becoming a priest. The fact that there should be so many ex-seminarians proves that the shortage of ministers is not only because youths fail to make the ministry their career but also because so many become weary of that career and drop it for another kind. Why?

Are they materialistically inclined? Then the salary they received could well have caused them to quit. Are they idealists? Then disillusionment, discouragement and frustration may have caused them to leave the ministry. They may have found themselves in the same quandary in which Ogantz, an Indian chief who lived in Quebec some 150 years ago, found himself. He had been reared from infancy by a French Catholic priest and was sent as a missionary to his people. Said he to a friend:

“In my heart I have never been a good Catholic, though I tried to be a good Christian. I found it, however, much easier to make Catholics than Christians of other Indians. What I mean is, that they were much more willing to observe the forms than obey the laws of Christianity, and that they grew no better under my preaching. I became discouraged, and feared that my preaching was an imposition and I an impostor.”—Historical Collections of Ohio, Vol. 1, Frank H. Howe.

And what about the problem of trying to harmonize the evolution theory with the plain words of Moses, Jesus and his apostles? Or trying to reconcile what one’s creed says with what the Bible teaches? And what about the dilemma in which a clergyman finds himself because the high principles of the Bible are so flagrantly violated by his flock, obliging him to choose between telling them the truth and a full collection basket? And what about the preaching activity of the Christian witnesses of Jehovah, which is like a hailstorm sweeping “away the refuge of lies” taught by professedly Christian ministers?—Isa. 28:17, RS.

The fact of the matter is that the very profession or vocation of a Christian clergy is without Scriptural foundation or precedent. The clergy-laity distinction was wholly unknown by Christians of the first century. They heeded Jesus’ instructions: “Do not you be called ‘Rabbi’, for one is your teacher, whereas all you are brothers. Moreover, do not call anyone your father on earth, for One is your Father, the heavenly One. Neither be called ‘leaders’, for your Leader is one, the Christ.”—Matt. 23:8-10.