The Pulpit Squeeze

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church faces a shortage of new priests, and Jewish seminaries are just managing to catch up with the demand for rabbis. Yet at many Protestant seminaries across the nation, this year's graduating seniors are finding that even though jobs are available, the clerical market is showing signs of softening. Not too long ago, many newly minted ministers could expect to pick and choose among "calls" from four or five churches. Now they are receiving fewer offers and having to campaign more aggressively even for what were once considered less desirable positions: assistantships or pastorates at small rural congregations, with salaries of, say, $7,000 a year.

At Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, at least nine of the 63 graduates receiving the basic ministry degree are still looking for jobs, and those who have them, notes a placement worker, had to do "a great deal more footwork" than their predecessors. Adds the Rev. Harry Adams, associate dean at the Yale Divinity School: the days are gone when seminary seniors could sit back, "dream up their own things, and find someone to fund them."

First Decline. The supply of pulpits is becoming tight because, while seminary enrollments are holding steady, Protestant church membership is shrinking. The latest edition of the authoritative Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports that U.S. membership in religious bodies slipped last year to 131,245,139. Though the decline was slight (about 180,000), it was the first that the Yearbook has recorded in nearly three decades, and reflected eroding membership in the mainstream liberal Protestant denominations: the United Methodists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). In such groups, jobs are lacking not so much for new graduates as for mid-career preachers seeking better churches.

Not all aspiring Protestant ministers are hurting for jobs. Evangelistic, Bible-oriented denominations like the Southern Baptists are still growing steadily. In more liberal denominations, with their tighter job market, congregations are hiring a different sort of pastor. Too many churches, says the Rev. George Hunter of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., "got burned during the '60s by angry young men," and hire graduates who want to perform in the pulpit rather than in the streets. When a congregation offers a "call" nowadays, notes the Rev. Vinton Bradshaw of the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, the message is that "they do not want a social activist."

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