WHATEVER IT TAKES
Annual Conference Recruiters Discuss What Works in Developing Young Clergy
By Vicki Brown, associate editor and writer, Office of Interpretation, General Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
Forty-four annual conference represent-atives who work with young clergy candidates spent three days sharing what they have done that is successful – from candidacy summits to vocational mission trips.
“There is no magic answer to the question of how to encourage and develop young clergy, but the annual conferences have so much influence over what happens in the life of young candidates. And they are trying new things that work, so we wanted to offer a chance to share ideas, discuss potential roadblocks, and look at what resources might be shared,” said the Rev. Meg Lassiat, director of Student Ministries, Vocation, and Enlistment for the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
During the Dec. 2-4 meeting organized by GBHEM, the group heard from the Rev. Dr. Lovett H. Weems Jr., executive director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary, about gains shown in his 2008 Clergy Age Trends Report. For instance, the actual number of young elders increased from 876 to 910 from 2006 to 2007 and the actual number of young deacons increased from 64 to 69 during the same time period. The consistent decline in under-35 clergy as a percentage of all clergy hit its low point in 2005. Weems said that figure has held relatively steady with slight increases in the last three years. In 2008, under-35 clergy (deacons and elders) reached 5 percent of active clergy for the first time this century.
Recruiters talked about changes they have made, met with seminary admissions staff, and heard a presentation from a regional director of the Fund for Theological Education about calling congregations.
The Rev. Carol Bruse, director of the Center for Clergy Excellence in the Texas Annual Conference, said one of the things annual conferences must do is teach local churches how to emphasize call.
“Most of the future clergy of The United Methodist Church are sitting in the pews today. If we don’t teach congregations how to encourage them, we won’t have them,” she said.
She said many changes made in Texas are included in the Best Practices documents posted on GBHEM’s Board of Ordained Ministries Community page at www.gbhem.org. One of the best, she said, is the college pastoral leadership internships, in which two college students considering ministry intern at a church that is supportive. “Almost 100 percent went from ‘I don’t know,’ to ‘I’m going into ministry,’” Bruse said.
New innovations in Texas include the candidacy summit and group mentoring. The first candidacy summit got 80 candidates together as they started the process, with all the district superintendents and the clergy who had been identified as the best mentors in the conference.
Mentoring in groups allowed candidates to build relationships with each other as well as the mentor, she added. “People shouldn’t have to walk it alone and they shouldn’t fall in a ditch,” she said.
Group mentoring provides a self-monitoring to the process, too, she added. “We had one mentor who got off track and the group kept going without him. Plus, they were willing to say the mentor was checking out, which is harder for a candidate working one-on-one to do,” she said.
The Rev. Malcolm Frazier, UM campus minister at Howard University and chair of the recruitment committee for the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference, said the first change in his conference was adopting the mindset of cultivating a culture of call.
“We have a pre-ministry club for students who are really discerning a call,” he said. He also leads vocational mission trips with a focus on vocational discernment. Those trips can be life-changing for college students, Frazier said.
In addition, students regularly attend Student Forum, the annual leadership development event for college students sponsored by GBHEM. Frazier said regular district gatherings for youth are held and that young adults from the conference attend EXPLORATION, a national event for young people considering ordained ministry also sponsored by GBHEM.
“Half our students who went to EXPLORATION are in the candidacy process now,” Frazier said.
The Rev. Jack Terrell-Wilkes, coordinator of Recruitment and Nurture, Oklahoma Annual Conference, said the need for young people in ministry should be reframed as an opportunity for where the church is going, not a crisis that we must fix.
To learn more about young clergy development visit these web sites:
- ExploreCalling.org, GBHEM’s Web pages aimed at candidates, youth, and young adults who are considering ministry.
- Read the Lewis Center’s Clergy Age Trends report.
- The Texas Center Conference Center for Clergy Excellence.
- The Fund for Theological Education at www.thefund.org