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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Can’t we simplify? Andrew C. Thompson, Sep 9, 2009
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series.
In the early days, answering the call to Christian ministry was easy. Jesus just stopped by your boat and said, “Hey you! Come and follow me.” You dropped your nets and went. End of story.
Things aren’t so simple now. Jesus still does the calling, but he’s using his church as a central part of the process.
And bless our hearts, we have this bad habit of making things more complicated than they have to be.
I often hear depressing stories about young adults’ experiences with the ordination candidacy process. From the point of view of the individual trying to answer a call to ministry, the biggest obstacle is often not a personal challenge, financial situation or educational need.
It is, ironically, the church itself.
Spend some time with young adults on the front end of the ordination process. The consistent attitude you’ll find is anxiety over the layers of structure and mountains of paperwork involved. The process laid out in our Book of Discipline can seem positively Byzantine.
Candidates tell horror stories of required forms disappearing after they’ve been turned in. And each time candidates pass a new stage in the process, they don’t sense affirmation for their calling but instead relief that they’ve survived.
It’s like fraternity hazing, except it lasts a lot longer and there’s no meathead upperclassman shouting insults at you all along the way. Like so much of the church’s dysfunction, we’ve brought this on ourselves. But then again, if we broke it, we can fix it.
There are two main ways to reform the ordination process for the better. One is structural and the other is personal. Pursuing both will give us a process that truly affirms those called into ministry every step of the way. Over time, I believe it will also have a positive impact on the number and quality of those pursuing ordination.
The structural path to reform involves legislative change at both the General Conference and annual conference levels. The good news here is that there seems to be some momentum behind such reform.
For instance, the 2008 General Conference in Fort Worth altered Par. 311.1a of the Book of Discipline to make the initial steps of candidacy easier to take. Before, a candidate had to be a member of a local church for two years prior to beginning the ordination process. So a long-committed Christian, compelled by the Wesleyan vision of ministry and transferring membership to a United Methodist congregation, would find himself hamstrung by that two-year membership requirement.
If two years doesn’t sound like a long time, imagine you are 22, about to graduate from college and enter seminary to pursue ordained ministry. The seminary itself (or outside scholarship foundations) might view your application differently because you were not an official candidate for ordination. You could even finish a three-year Master of Divinity degree before you had passed the district-level certification process.
Your entire sense of calling—planted in you by the Holy Spirit—would be compromised by the very United Methodist Church where you wanted to serve God in ministry.
General Conference wisely changed Par. 311.1a last year. Both the time requirement and the understanding of membership now give more room for the Spirit to work. It doesn’t mean we have to be any less rigorous in examining candidates for ministry. But it does mean we can lean less on rigid structure and more on the careful and intentional discernment of gifts.
Generally speaking, the ordination process will work better with fewer Disciplinary requirements. We should exercise rigorous discernment of our candidates, just as we expect them to exercise rigorous discernment of their own sense of calling.
But relying on structures to do our discerning for us is wrong-headed. We need instead to rely on people: the pastors, youth ministers and other mentors with a responsibility to help the young find their way along the path God is calling them to travel.
That means new personal attitudes to go along with structural reform. And that’s the topic of my next column.
Andrew Thompson
