Tomorrow’s Clergy Will Find a Complex Mix of Spiritual Seekers

While attention is riveted on the controversy over construction of a new Roman Catholic cathedral to serve Los Angeles into the next millennium, another issue with implications at least as profound has yet to be addressed: What sort of priest does the future require?

For that matter, how will tomorrow’s Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis differ from those of today?

You don’t have to be a prophet, leaders at seminaries say, to know that societal, cultural and scientific changes sweeping the nation will continue to influence not only the gender and ethnic makeup of seminary student bodies, but also the kinds of challenges the students will face once they are ordained.

“In the old days, the pastor was seen primarily as a person who preached and prayed for the sick and the elderly and performed certain sacramental functions,” said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Not any more.

To put it bluntly, the market has changed. And if organized religion is to maintain or expand its market share, tomorrow’s clergy will have to be equipped with the usual skills essential to sacred calling--and then some.

Nowhere is the challenge likely to be more daunting than in Southern California, a region rich in ethnic and cultural diversity. It is also a place where hedonism and holiness intersect and spiritual seekers are as apt to fashion their own private gateway to heaven as to walk through the door of a neighborhood church or synagogue.

“Americans are increasingly convinced that it’s perfectly possible to be religious entirely on your own,” Barbara G. Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, lamented in an interview. “You don’t need a community of people. You just need the right books and artifacts and time by yourself and maybe some classes.”

More than ever, she said, the clergy of the future will have to demonstrate the importance of becoming involved in a religious community. The task is complicated, she said, because many of the people who shop for a church or synagogue do not share a common background.

“We’ve become a nation of switchers. We don’t stay in the religious community we grew up in. That means we don’t have a kind of common religious culture and tradition,” Wheeler said.

The Very Rev. Mary Jane Nestler, dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont, said seminaries must do a far better job of training clergy to address that need.

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Southern California’s cultural and ethnic diversity will require other clergy skills as well--not just the ability to speak a second “ministerially useful language,” a skill required by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles for the last five years.

Better skills in cross-cultural counseling are needed, Nestler said. “You may have to deal with problems with a Chinese family in your office very differently” from those in an African American family or a white family, she said.

Changes within ethnic groups also will require new insights and pastoral sensitivity.

“Various subgroups in the congregations in the past were ignored or maybe weren’t there--singles; divorced or separated, blended families; women who are professionals,” Fuller’s Mouw said.

“Those pose special challenges. A lot of new attention is paid to questions like power relationships in general and gender relationships in particular. . . . All those complications mean training for ministry is a whole new thing.”

And there are whole new things on the science and technology front that are challenging clergy as never before.

Their spiritual forebears were never asked for advice about the ethical and moral implications of the life-and-death choices posed by genetic testing. What is a couple to do if they find that their fertilized egg, if carried to full term, would produce a child afflicted with multiple sclerosis, sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis? Is the egg or zygote to be treated as defective biological material to be disposed of, or as sacred human life?

To deal with these kinds of issues, biomedical ethics courses have been added to the curriculum at some seminaries, such as the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont.

How does a priest, minister or rabbi advise family members confronted with an elderly loved one who is dying a slow, painful death?

Roman Catholics and Protestants have said it is morally permissible to withhold heroic medical efforts that would artificially prolong life. But now two federal appeals courts have taken the issue a giant step further by approving physician-assisted suicide. It may be legal, but is it moral to hasten a loved one’s death by asking a doctor to administer fatal doses of pain-killing drugs?

“Among key areas we are constantly facing is advising families about withdrawal of life support,” said Father Jeremiah J. McCarthy, rector of St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. “The whole world of health care today, with all the changes in managing care, present tremendous challenges for pastoral care. There is an increasing need for priests to develop those skills.”

And in the future, those offering pastoral care and counseling are as likely to be women as men. Seminaries have long noted a trend of increasing enrollments of women, and it’s only a matter of time before more women begin filling the pulpits of Protestant and Reform Jewish congregations.

That is, in part, because of the struggle by women to break through the “glass ceiling” everywhere in society. Many, but not all, Protestant denominations, as well as Reform Judaism, have struck down bars to ordaining women. In the last five years, for example, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has ordained about as many women as men, according to Nancy Larkin, associate for vocations.

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And around the country, fewer men are entering seminaries because, with high-profile scandals and low salary levels, jobs in the clergy are not considered as prestigious as they once were. In fact, Nestler said, salary levels among professional clergy may decline as more women enter the ministry, if it comes to be perceived as what she called a “pink collar job.”

One career preference study of seniors who belonged to the national university honor society Phi Beta Kappa found that after World War II about 7% said they would enter the ministry--about the same percentage as chose health professions. By the late 1980s, 15% were choosing medicine and fewer than 1% the ministry.

But “the decline in interest in the ordained ministry in these schools’ traditional male constituencies--younger white men--has not been obvious because of the dramatic advent of women into the profession,” Wheeler noted in a paper delivered early this year to the American Theological Library Assn. Institute.

In 1972, women accounted for 10.2% of enrollments in 225 Protestant and Catholic seminaries that belong to the Assn. of Theology Schools in the United States and Canada. Last year, women made up 31.6% of the 66,000 students enrolled, said association spokeswoman Nancy Merrill.

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Tomorrow’s clergy may be different in another respect: They are far more likely to be engaged in interfaith activities and to understand and appreciate others’ faith traditions.

This results in part from a trend toward ecumenism within denominations. But it is also a result of changes in ministerial training.

“The seminary is no longer a monastic enclave,” said McCarthy, St. John’s seminary rector and a member of the accrediting commission of the 225-member Assn. of Theological Schools.

Increasingly, seminaries exist in clusters, called graduate theological unions, where libraries are shared and classes are open to all. For example, a Baptist seminarian can take a course in Christian meditation from a Roman Catholic seminary across the street and an Anglican can learn Hebrew in a class taught by a rabbi.

This kind of cross-religious pollination will broaden understanding among tomorrow’s clergy, said Father Thomas P. Rausch, chairman of the theology department at Loyola Marymount University. “It is a kind of model for the future of theological education.”