By Elizabeth E. Evans
If you are on a search committee in a mainline Protestant church looking for a new pastor, or a denominational administrator trying to find Sunday pulpit-supply clergy, you probably already know this:
The clergy job market is a train wreck.
A wave of older clergy will retire in the coming decades, with fewer seminary students in the pipeline to replace them. Those students are likely to find few churches that can afford a full-time pastor of any kind.
Add that the religious landscape is changing and facing serious challenges — where young Americans are increasingly losing interest in organized religion and the majority of believers of all ages, if they go to church at all, are drawn to large congregations; the fallout from polarized politics and a world-wide pandemic — and these are complicated times for aspiring clergy and the people who train them.
To meet the needs of churches, often ones that cannot afford to pay full-time clergy, mainline denominations are adjusting their strategies for recruiting and training leaders. They include providing lay leaders with more training and authority, encouraging more clergy to have day jobs that support themselves — a trend known as bivocational ministry — or revisiting the way they view ministry itself.
Among those helping train new leaders is Nandra Perry, director of the Iona Collaborative, a mostly online training program based out of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest.
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