More Clergy, Fewer Church Members: A Good Thing?

Teachers prefer small class sizes, investment firms tout portfolio managers with caps on their number of clients, but should Christians cheer clergy with shrinking congregations? A blogger with the Religion News Service is arguing that they should.

RNS’ Corner of Church and State blog has a data-rich entry this week by Tobin Grant examining decline in the Mainline Protestant churches.

Grant claims that while these establishment churches have seen a drop in membership, the churches themselves—as institutions—remain strong with more clergy today than ever before:

“The mainline’s share of the ‘religious market’ is now 60% lower than it was in 1970. But the drop in membership does not mean that the mainline churches are necessarily in decline. As institutions, as organizations, these churches have grown. We can see this in the number of clergy in mainline denominations. Data for clergy can be tracked consistently since 1950. Over the last half of the 20th Century the number of mainline clergy increased year after year. It has only been over the past decade or so that the number of clergy has leveled off.”

Grant’s reasoning isn’t new – several institutions, including the U.S.-based Episcopal Church, have touted the ordinations of new priests as a sign of vibrancy. The RNS blogger explains:

“We often think of religions as vibrant if they have more members. But quantity isn’t always the same as quality. Indeed, in other organizations we often value a low staff-to-client ratio. Schools brag about their low faculty-to-student ratio. Social service agencies complain that they don’t have the staff to give people enough attention. The low clergy-to-member ratio in mainline churches likely means that these churches are better able to provide for their members than in years past—more programs for youth and the elderly, more social services, and more local pastors.”

Is a lower clergy-to-member ratio equivalent to a lower teacher-to-student ratio? Small congregations certainly have their advantages, but it seems difficult to defend that pastors have healthier flocks while at the same time they are shrinking. If Grant is asserting that the number of clergy is more important than the number of congregants, he would be upholding a view consistent with clericalism, the policy of maintaining or increasing the power of a religious hierarchy — a view not typically cheered in Protestant Christianity.

There is also the issue of who is pursuing ordination to full-time ministry and how many churches can support these new clergy persons.

The average age at ordination in the Episcopal Church is now 44 (up from the early 30s in 1970) and the average age of active Episcopal clergy is 58. Additionally, fewer clergy are in full-time stipendiary positions: 2013 statistics (the most recent reporting year) show that 33.2 percent of Episcopal Church congregations have only part time or unpaid priests, while 12.3 percent have no clergy at all. An excess of 45 percent of congregations without full-time clergy is surely a cause for concern.

Some churches are reliant upon second-career clergy who can draw upon spousal support or another profession. This isn’t inherently bad (Saint Paul was a tent maker, and the much-touted church planting movement in Evangelicalism relies upon bi-vocational pastors) but it does show that the church is less able to provide for fulltime clergy positions as it did in past decades.

Grant is correct to note that a relatively stable number of potential clergy find the institutions of the Protestant Mainline to be appealing platforms from which to do ministry. But if laypersons are dwindling in number, so too will opportunities for full-time ministry in these denominations.