Growing Phenomenon at Seminaries : Older Men Trade Jobs for Career in Ministry

Although moving ahead in their careers, their economic security solid, they still feel they aren’t tackling the real stuff of life. So they shift directions, take a new tack.

That’s the story of a growing proportion of older, experienced men going into the nation’s seminaries to study for the ministry.

Most haven’t been disenchanted with their previous work, feeling rather that “it had its good points, but it didn’t deal with values and the solid issues of people’s lives,” says a scholar who has broadly examined the phenomenon.

They felt limited, in a sense, to relatively surface matters and “wanted to get where they could deal with the tough issues,” added the scholar, the Rev. Ellis L. Larsen of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

“They wanted to deal with people about the meaning and purposes of existence, about life and death and the significance of it.”

Larsen has completed an extensive survey of the nation’s new surge of older, work-tested seminary students, including detailed interviews with many of them.

More than two-thirds were highly educated, he says, working as doctors, lawyers, teachers, airline pilots, social workers or scientific researchers before opting for seminary.

“Delayed vocations,” they’re called, or “late vocations.”

The swift increase in them has come only in the last 11 years. In 1975, the average age of seminarians was 26, but it has risen to 31, Larsen says, with the proportion of older students doubling in that period.

They now make up 44 percent of the nation’s 52,335 seminary students, he says, with 30 percent aged 30 to 39 and 14 percent more than 40, with the other 56 percent younger than 30.

Before the recent shift, almost all seminarians were in their 20s, and now just slightly over half.

Larsen, who still is collating his findings for later publication by the Assn. of Theological Schools, said in a telephone interview the older students weren’t leaving previous careers in disillusionment.

“Most of the men had sensed a calling to the ministry early in life, but for some reason, weren’t able to follow it then,” he said. “But their opportunities have changed and they now can fulfill that youthful calling.

“They wanted to contribute in some more meaningful way. They wanted to get away from high-paying jobs where that was not the focus.”

For women, whose numbers in seminary have nearly quadrupled since 1974 to 14,900, the transition for older ones has been different since they generally were barred from ministry in their youth.

Most mainline denominations, such as Lutheran, Episcopal and Presbyterian, have joined other Protestant bodies in opening their doors to women’s ordination, although Southern Baptists still are feuding about it.

“Now that women had the same oportunity as men in most Protestant bodies, they said, ‘yes,’ that’s where I really belong,” Larsen said. “They sensed that ‘late vocation’ call.”

He said improved economic conditions and decreasing age discrimination had eased the trend toward shifting careers.

Sixty percent of the older students plan to go into parish ministry, he says, with the rest aiming for other ministerial jobs such as counselors, teachers or chaplains.

The Rev. William Baumgaertner, associate director of the Assn. of Theological Schools in Vandalia, Ohio, said career mobility in which a person serves in several professions in his lifetime has become acceptable.

“It wasn’t accepted 20 years ago,” he said. “But it doesn’t raise an eyebrow now. There an openness to it.”

He said most of the older seminarians “have had a good experience in their other profession, and now want to go on to something more. Usually, it’s something that’s been in the back of their minds.”

Even though they found good in their previous profession, they had come to consider it “insufficient for the whole purpose of life. They want to make a contribution of a different kind than before.”

For the older women, he says, many already have raised their families, and with the widened opportunities now open to them in the ministry, have headed for it in growing numbers.

The association’s annual report says overall seminary enrollment held generally steady in 1986, edging down about 1 percent, but the number of women kept rising, going up 2.2 percent to 14,900, now 26 percent of the total.

In l972, it was 3,358, 10 percent of the total.

The association includes nearly all Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox seminaries -- 201 of them.