The photo above: The Rev. Kimberly Culp, left, is joined by Nebraska Bishop Scott Barker and members of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Alliance for a May 1 installation service. Photo: Diocese of Nebraska, via Facebook
BY DAVID PAULSEN
[Episcopal News Service] Episcopalians in Alliance, Nebraska, know how hard it has become for many congregations across The Episcopal Church to recruit priests to serve their communities – the result of what some have labeled a churchwide clergy shortage.
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Alliance, a rural city of about 8,000 people in western Nebraska, spent three years without a priest as they struggled through a protracted leadership transition. Their long search ended in success this year with the hiring and installation of the Rev. Kimberly Culp as rector of St. Matthew’s and of a smaller, partner congregation, Calvary Episcopal Church, about an hour to the east in Hyannis.
“I don’t think any parish in this diocese has faced a greater challenge than St. Matthew’s and Calvary have over the extended three-year period that it took for us to find you a new rector,” Nebraska Bishop Scott Barker said May 1 in his sermon at a joyous installation service. “You all never gave up the spirit of determination and optimism that is such a magnificent part of your DNA.”
Diocesan transition ministers and other church leaders, in interviews with Episcopal News Service, described a challenging landscape for recruitment churchwide, with exponentially more open priest positions than there are priests available and willing to fill them. Despite long-term denominational declines in membership and attendance, The Episcopal Church still has nearly 7,000 congregations. The number of active Episcopal priests, on the other hand, has fallen over the past 20 years to fewer than 6,000. Their tenures can range from short periods to decades of service at the same parish, though local leaders say parish priests in recent years are less willing to relocate to new dioceses to start new positions, often referred to as “calls.”
Church leaders also say recent seminary graduates typically prefer full-time parish employment, at a time when about half of all Episcopal congregations offer only part-time calls, often because of financial constraints. Recruitment is particularly difficult in rural communities served by small congregations, which are the majority across The Episcopal Church. Dioceses are increasingly relying on retired priests to help fill parish vacancies and interim roles, and some congregations have looked outside The Episcopal Church to hire ordained ministers from denominations that are in full communion with the church. Neither is seen as a universal or sustainable solution to the church’s local leadership needs.
Other mainline Protestant denominations are experiencing their own clergy shortages, though the trends haven’t dashed hopes for The Episcopal Church’s continued capacity for local mission and ministry. Presiding Bishop-elect Sean Rowe, in his June 26 speech to the 81st General Convention, pledged to reorient the church to support dioceses and congregations – “on the ground, where ministry happens” – and some diocesan officials are touting fresh approaches to congregational leadership. They point to more flexible models of discernment and training, the expanded role and importance of bi-vocational priests, creative partnerships that allow clusters of congregations to share full-time priests and an increasing churchwide emphasis on local empowerment in lay-led parishes.
“I’ve personally not liked the term ‘clergy shortage,'” the Rev. Jason Alexander, canon to the ordinary of the Episcopal Church in Arkansas, told ENS. As his diocese’s transition minister, Alexander assists Arkansas’ 54 Episcopal congregations when they are calling priests, and some of those congregations are finding success trying new ways of being the church in their communities.
“I’m hopeful in all this, and one of the reasons I am hopeful is because we are allowing ourselves to be a little more flexible,” Alexander said. “We have so many options now that we didn’t in the past.”
The Rev. Liz Easton serves as Nebraska’s canon to the ordinary and transition minister. “We, along with the rest of the entire Episcopal Church, have seen a dramatic shift in how [parish] transitions are completed, particularly how many people make themselves available to discern any particular position,” Easton told ENS. “It doesn’t mean that the church is dying. … But some of the things we’ve come to rely on are falling away.”
Like Arkansas, Nebraska is a mostly rural diocese, where more than half of its 53 worshipping communities have fewer than 20 people worshipping on a typical Sunday. Two-thirds of its congregations are not staffed by full-time priests. Its larger, urban congregations are more likely to attract priest candidates from outside the diocese, Easton said, while calls in smaller congregations are typically filled by active or retired priests from within the diocese.
In Alliance, St. Matthew’s had been searching for a new priest since October 2020, when its previous rector of six years retired. Lay leaders formed a search committee to call a new rector while also maintaining the congregations’ worship schedules and outreach ministries.
“Everyone stepped up. It was wonderful,” Bill Reno told ENS. A longtime member, Reno chaired the St. Matthew’s search committee, which soon realized that the congregation’s energy and dedication were selling points for its priest search. “We rediscovered our strength,” he said.
They worked with Barker and Easton to recruit rector candidates and remained hopeful, but the search produced only one applicant, who wasn’t a good fit for the church.
“For three years, that’s a long time to be without a priest,” Bill Cody, St. Matthew’s senior warden, told ENS. And yet, “the majority of the congregation stayed with us through the whole thing, and that’s really been a blessing.”
Then in 2023, Easton pitched the role of St. Matthew’s rector to Culp, who was serving part time at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Blair, on the other side of the state about a half hour north of Omaha. Culp, 60, said the timing was right. Her husband had recently retired, and their children were through college. They were open to moving to a more remote city like Alliance, and she felt drawn to the full-time role leading St. Matthew’s. After interviewing there, the congregation offered her the position and she accepted, starting in January 2024.
“They had a very strong and committed lay leadership. That kind of kept things going,” Culp told ENS. “It’s a great little parish.”
Changes in priest deployment landscape seen in range of metrics
St. Matthew’s experience both exemplifies common facets of the broader trend while also proving to be an exception, as many congregations in similar circumstances find themselves unable to recruit full-time clergy or even a part-time priest. If there is a priest shortage, those congregations’ experiences suggest the impact is serious and widespread.
The priesthood is one of four orders in The Episcopal Church, in addition to bishops, deacons and the laity. Each has a leadership role, and priests’ traditional role has been central to a congregation’s vitality – providing pastoral care, Christian formation opportunities, administrative leadership and guidance on ministry priorities. In addition, a priest, unlike deacons and laity, can celebrate Holy Eucharist, which the Book of Common Prayer denotes as “the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.”
Parish parochial report data show clear churchwide declines in baptized members and Sunday service attendance, but there is no single conclusive metric for understanding the evolving difficulties in priest searches and deployment. Instead, ENS analyzed readily available data from three main sources: the General Convention Office’s summaries of annual parochial report data, clergy deployment data that is reported by Church Pension Group, or CPG, and the less-formal tallies of congregations’ priest searches that diocesan transition ministers share at regional conferences.
The scope of these challenges is most evident in the numbers shared by transition ministers on the front lines. In spring 2024, transition ministers from dioceses representing eight of the church’s nine provinces reported an estimated 527 open priest positions, of which about half were full-time openings and half were for part-time work.
At that time, the estimated number of potential candidates for those open positions was 122.
At that time, the estimated number of potential candidates for those open positions was 122.
Froehlich isn’t involved directly with matching priests with parish calls, though she supports dioceses as they adapt and improve their call processes. “Diocesan transition ministers, along with other leaders, are engaging challenges and innovating in many ways, including how parishes live out leadership roles,” Froehlich told ENS. She also praised local leaders for “increasing collaboration between dioceses and with ecumenical ministry partners, sharing and tailoring best practices to local contexts and partnering with local communities.”
Froehlich has teamed up in recent years with two other church experts on data trends for joint presentations to various church groups, from a June 2023 meeting of Executive Council to CPG’s Episcopal Business Administration Conference in April 2024. Froehlich shares the transition ministers’ tallies, and the Rev. Molly James, deputy executive officer of General Convention, provides an overview of churchwide parochial report data, while Matthew Price shares information he has gathered as CPG’s senior vice president for research and data.
“This time of decline can be an opportunity for transformation, particularly because we have such tremendous resources – financial, material and human – to meet the needs of communities in which we are already present and those in which we don’t yet have an Episcopal presence,” James said during last year’s presentation to Executive Council.
Data from 2022 parochial reports is shown on one slide from an April 2024 presentation to the Episcopal Business Administration Conference.
One of James’ key statistics relating to priest deployment is congregation size. Although a large majority (71%) of Episcopalians worship in larger churches (those with average Sunday attendance of 51 or more), smaller congregations of 50 or fewer worshipers make up most of the church’s congregations (55%).
Parochial report data also showed that in 2022, 12% of Episcopal congregations were served by a priest who is retired. That same year, 54% of priests were listed as part time, more than double the 26% from 2010.
Although the General Convention Office has released certain categories of parochial report data to the public, detailed information on congregations’ clergy leadership was not immediately available for this article, James told ENS. More may be released in the future as the office’s staff conducts further analysis.
The clergy trends tracked by CPG tell another part of the story. Active priests, or those whose employers are actively contributing to the church’s clergy pension fund, peaked in 2004 at 7,886 and have since declined to the current 5,614. During that time, the number of retirees has increased. Retirees first surpassed the number of active priests in 2011 and now total 8,320.
Even so, CPG continues to record hundreds of new ordinations every year, and the combined number of living Episcopal priests – both active and retired – has remained steady for the past 20 years at around 14,000, according to the data tracked by CPG. And contrary to common assumptions, Price emphasized that the number of priest retirements in recent years has slowed rather than sped up.
“A notion of a rush to the door has not occurred,” he told ENS.
Congregations, dioceses experiment with diversified leadership models
Several of the diocesan leaders interviewed by ENS were grateful for the continued service of retired priests in many of their congregations. Priests are required by Episcopal Church Canons to retire by their 72nd birthday; some retire earlier. Whenever they retire, they are allowed with permission of a bishop to continue serving in parish roles for a year at a time.
“Almost all our retired clergy are working, a lot,” Easton said of the Diocese of Nebraska. “They bring all of their wisdom, maturity and experience to bear on a church in transition for a period of time.” The redeployment of retirees isn’t itself a cause for alarm, she added, but for now it may be masking some of the broader shifts in priest deployment.
About a third of the 61 congregations in the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania are led by retirees, according to Bishop Audrey Scanlan. Another third of the diocese’s congregations are arranged into eight clusters, with a shared full-time priest serving each cluster.
“There has been a marked decrease in the number of applicants for open positions, both full-time and part-time,” Scanlan told ENS. “We’re no longer able to support what we used to call the one-parish-one-priest model.” Instead, congregational collaboration is becoming the norm.
Scanlan gave the example of one small Central Pennsylvania church that had advertised for a half-time priest position. It received zero applicants. That congregation decided to shift gears and is partnering with another small church nearby to share a priest.
Central Pennsylvania is now in talks with the neighboring Diocese of Bethlehem over a possible merger, part of a churchwide trend toward inter-diocesan partnerships that offer the potential for pooling resources to assist struggling congregations. Scanlan’s diocese also is among the many taking diversified and often collaborative approaches to priest discernment, training and ordination.
Historically, most Episcopal priests were ordained after attending a three-year residential seminaryand earning a Master of Divinity degree. Attending one of The Episcopal Church’s eight seminaries remains a common path to the priesthood, though many aspirants are now following alternative paths through diocesan-based training programs and collaboratives. Those programs still meet diocesan requirements for ordination but are more economical and less disruptive to aspirants’ daily lives.
Central Pennsylvania provides its own training at the Stevenson School for Ministry. Nebraska is one of the numerous dioceses training future priests through the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry, based in Topeka, Kansas. Culp, the priest in Alliance, attended the Kemper School.
Another popular option is the curriculum offered by the Iona Collaborative. It is based at the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, but offers courses on Zoom to train clergy and lay leaders from 36 supporting Episcopal dioceses, with a particular emphasis on bi-vocational priests, those who will serve as part-time parish priests while also working at secular jobs.
A Master of Divinity program is The Episcopal Church’s “gold standard” for training new priests, but dioceses have always had many other paths for training and ordaining priests, the Rev. Nandra Perry, the Iona Collaborative director, said in an interview with ENS.
“I think there’s increasing awareness that dioceses need to be more proactive about raising up leaders for the next generation,” Perry said, and she doesn’t sense much angst over a potential priest shortage. “When I have conversations with dioceses, they’re usually in a space where they’re ready to be creative and practical. They’re looking at their congregations and thinking about the future and just sort of rolling up their sleeves.”
And as central as priests have been to congregational life, the future for some churches will depend on lay leaders stepping up and filling new roles. For some Nebraska congregations, Easton called lay leadership “part of our gift as a diocese,” and those gifts are hardly new.
“We have had congregations that have been lay-led and clergy-supported for a really long time,” she said.
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Crossett, Arkansas, is one small congregation that has shifted in recent years to a lay leadership model. The last time it had a full-time priest was about two decades ago, though for years afterward, it continued to be served by a visiting priest from a larger congregation in El Dorado, who would celebrate Holy Eucharist at St. Mark’s once a month on a rotation with three other small congregations.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. The initial suspension of in-person worship disrupted the priest’s regular visits, and her visits ended altogether a little more than a year ago when she and her husband relocated. Since then, the congregation’s 20 or so members have maintained a schedule of lay-led Sunday worship services while also developing opportunities for fellowship and Christian formation.
Vershal Hogan, a vestry member, regularly serves as a lay preacher at St. Mark’s Sunday services, which follow the Holy Eucharist Liturgy of the Word, after which the congregation shares pre-consecrated Communion elements. The priest they see most often now is Alexander, the diocese’s canon to the ordinary, who visits a few times a year.
“We have done what we can to step back from this idea of scarcity and embrace the resources that we have and, within that, try to be as vital a congregation as we can, recognizing our limitations but not seeing them as failures,” Hogan told ENS.
Alexander said he encourages that kind of attitude. “There is good Christian community beyond full-time clergy leadership,” he said. “Our job as Christians is to see what God is doing new, and I see God doing new things in some of these small places lately, with this different style of leadership emerging.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.