We're all 'specialty ministers' now
The intersection of traditional congregations and entrepreneurial ministers
There’s two facts about today’s church that roll around in my head pretty much constantly:
More and more congregations are struggling to find (and afford) clergy leadership.
More and more ministers - lay and ordained - feel called to serve ministry outside of the traditional congregational context.
These two facts are interrelated, of course: clergy and lay ministers feel the burden of the declining church, which makes serving in traditional ways difficult. A lot of full-time work for (very) part-time pay; a lot of aging congregations that aren’t very interested in doing new things; a lot of administrative and organizational work that doesn’t feel spiritually fulfilling.
Clergy want to be able to share the Gospel in new ways, and create new kinds of communities. The biggest obstacle: getting started, and developing their ministry in real time.
On the congregational side, the exhaustion of trying to continue to do church ‘the way we always have’ with fewer people and resources; the sadness and grief of thinking they may have to close their doors; the struggle to find even supply clergy for worship and spiritual care, and because of this, not feeling spiritually fed at church in ways they may have in the past.
Congregations want someone to lead worship on Sunday, be with them in spiritual need, and lead their faith community. The biggest obstacle: they cannot find and/or afford this leadership.
The declining church is driving congregations and clergy in different directions, seeking the same thing: growing in the faith, connecting with God and creating community with others, serving others in Jesus’ name.
What if we could find ways that they could support each other?
In 2022, the Church Pension Group (Episcopal Church) put out a webinar on the state of clergy in the church, and I was personally thrilled to see that 14% of clergy were serving as ‘specialty ministers’.
As a Free Range Priest, I’m one of those specialty ministers, and I was so excited to see this statistic that I wrote a whole blog post about!
14% isn’t a lot - but it is about 840 of the approximately 6,000 active Episcopal clergy. Add deacons and lay ministers, and I am willing to bet the number is about 1,500 - 2,000, just in the Episcopal Church.
At the same time, I pulled this from Facebook where it was circulating widely, showing the wide gap between congregations searching for clergy, and clergy looking for new congregational positions (again, this is the Episcopal Church).
It makes me think….
Can traditional congregations - and dioceses - work with ‘specialty clergy’? Can this be the basis of re-imagining the kind of work that clergy and lay ministers do with congregations?
And at the same time, can ‘specialty’ clergy work with multiple congregations, across dioceses - and even denominations - creating new kinds of community that exist both online and in-person?
For that matter, what if we were all ‘specialty ministers’?
Some of us called to sacramental ministry, some to congregational administration/organization, some to pastoral care or formation, etc.? And this was the practical basis for supporting both emerging types of ministry and congregations together?
You know I think this is possible!
My whole ministry is about re-imagining how we might look at how we do church - the ways we organize and create community, the ways we’re stuck in 20th-century models of administration that can stifle the emergence of new ministry (and how to get out of them!).
I also think that utilizing today’s technology for administration, organization, and communication can help make it reality.
That’s my specialty ministry. What’s yours? And how can we build the church of the future together?