Part-Time Is Plenty: Thriving without Full-Time Clergy

by G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Unable to find each other, they don’t learn from one another’s success stories and emerging best practices.

Chapter 2 ushers in the most crucial players: laypeople in congregations. It explores what laity do differently in congregations that saw vitality increase after they went part-time. It offers tips for what to do before, during, and after the establishment of new roles for laypeople. Readers get a sense for denominational variations and how to thrive by adapting in their respective contexts.

The main cause driving the part-time trend is simple: money. Americans aren’t going to church like they used to. In 2007, 54 percent of Americans attended religious services at least monthly. By 2019, only 45 percent did.6

As churches return to Christianity’s long, affordable tradition of using part-time clergy, laypeople must reclaim a larger share of the pastoral ministry at a time when they don’t know how and haven’t been expected to learn. Furthermore, the world has changed. Few have ample time or excess resources to learn lost arts, even if doing so would build up God’s kingdom. Congregations are used to relying on professionals to be at-the-ready providers of religious goods and services that they can no longer afford to commission on such a scale. Like consumers during a recession, they need to figure out how to do for themselves and for one another what’s needed in a new time. Except now they won’t be approaching religious life so much as consumers anymore. They will be ministers.

“It’s up to us to keep the church alive,” says Katie Runde, an artist and musician in her thirties who joined the church a few years ago and is now in training to become another unpaid priest at Christ Church. “In some ways, it’s more alive because every member is active.”

Congregations can develop and share playbooks for succeeding in part-time ministry, even if their judicatory staffers are skeptical as to whether it can be done.

Most transitions to part-time ministry are not well-planned in advance. Bishops, conference ministers and their counterparts have told me that most congregations just sort of fell into it. They pivoted, or panicked, when the money got so tight that a new model was urgently needed. That’s not entirely their fault. As noted above, congregations get bombarded with warnings to keep their full-time pastorate at all costs for as long as possible. They pray God will provide somehow for that full-time position to continue. Believing that planning for part-time would essentially mean giving up on the church, they don’t plan for it. They don’t map out how the congregation’s priorities will be sustained in a new organizational structure.

Congregations that thrive in part-time ministry often dare to think differently. They start by believing, based on biblical revelation and empirical evidence, that part-time ministry doesn’t have to be their downfall. It could usher in a new slate of opportunities for maturity and growth. They envision going part-time before the pressure mounts. Some debate the part-time possibility two to three years in advance. Once they’ve decided to go part-time, they give themselves a good eighteen months to fine-tune game plans and lay groundwork. That provides time for congregational discussion on how best to use the pastor’s time; how pastoral responsibilities will reduce or be reallocated; and how expectations—both in the parish and in the wider community—can be calibrated to support success.

Moving to part-time when the shift can deliver meaningful benefits and before it’s a necessity gives a congregation a sense of control over its destiny. Anxiety is mitigated as the church realizes it has options and can take remedial steps. If fresh vitality leads to numeric growth and the congregation wants to scale up the pastorate, that option is always on the table as logistically feasible. Going part-time need not be a forever commitment, especially if a congregation acts sufficiently early.

Discovering new ministry opportunities can be a powerful antidote to the worry that some churchgoers bring to the transition to part-time clergy. They benefit from seeing early on how the part-time approach can facilitate new impact and how it doesn’t need to be the step backward that naysayers have told them it will be. So here’s a tip: make room for a new initiative that meets a real need in the community.

When congregations transition to part-time ministry, their success depends largely on mobilizing laypeople to share the mantle of pastoral responsibilities.

Sometimes the traditions a church taps when it goes part-time are more ecumenical in nature. Ecumenical partnerships forged among denominations might go underappreciated in full-time contexts but can have much to offer for part-time congregations. That’s because congregations with full-time clergy can often afford to go it alone when funding and staffing their own ministries. But those with part-time clergy are more apt to depend on partners, and thriving can include partnering in ways that build on ecumenical traditions.

Roberts could meanwhile stay within her carefully defined roles: planning and leading worship; meeting with committees as a resource and guide; and representing the church as a presence in the community.

Once the pastor’s role is defined, it might need regular review; what was needed last year or last quarter from the pastor might not be a priority anymore. And whatever gets negotiated must be communicated often to the congregation, lest unrealistic expectations undermine the pastor-parish relationship.

Thriving congregations with part-time clergy design their pastorates intentionally to foster vitality.

Congregations deploy the part-time pastorate like an asset that’s been recovered from a prior mission and can now be repurposed, like a room that once housed small children but now works perfectly as an empty nester’s home office. Recognizing the pastorate as a malleable instrument in God’s hands for today’s mission is a distinguishing trait of part-time congregations that thrive.

Because a thriving part-time ministry needs a pastor with a heart for serving part-time, no pastor should be required to go part-time. A congregation exploring a move from full-time to part-time needs to listen carefully to the heart of its full-time pastor. Does she feel called to go part-time and have more time for other pursuits? Or might such a move cause financial hardship or excessive stress? If the pastor doesn’t want to go part-time, the congregation should explore options. It might establish a yoked arrangement with another church and together cover the equivalent of full-time compensation. Or the church could help the pastor find another full-time position elsewhere and provide ample notice, such as eighteen or twenty-four months.

No matter how a congregation does it, the new pastor needs to be voluntarily part-time, not bitter or resentful over it, if thriving is to be in that church’s future.

If an Oscar were awarded for part-time ministry, the category would be best supporting cast. For pastors who believe in Martin Luther’s notion of the “priesthood of all believers,” part-time ministry can be the right venue to bring it to fruition.

What a pastor relishes doing outside the church doesn’t very much matter, as long as it’s suitable for a man or woman of the cloth. Perhaps a prerequisite for serving a part-time congregation should be a strong awareness of how the position would let you, the clergyperson, flourish as a well-rounded human being who enjoys a robust, meaningful life outside of one congregation. Then, if it’s your calling and you can make the numbers work, a congregation that’s ready to thrive is apt to await you.

In vital congregations with part-time clergy, three pastorate models have emerged: pastor as equipper, pastor as ambassador, and pastor as multi-staff team member. They’re not mutually exclusive; more than one can be operational at once. But the rubrics help nonetheless to categorize how a pastor’s time is used strategically to advance one or more elements that comprise vitality in a congregation.

The ambassador model can feel counterintuitive as a congregation goes part-time. That’s because just as the pastorate is being scaled back, the pastor begins devoting a smaller percentage of her remaining time toward fulfilling congregants’ needs. Yet that’s exactly what enables vitality to emerge in many of the congregations that are thriving with part-time clergy.

2017 United Methodist Church survey of active clergy found that part-time local pastors experience lower levels of stress and hostility in their ministry and occupational settings than do full-time clergy, who also struggle with more depression and less spiritual vitality than their part-time counterparts.

The problem raises social justice issues when one considers that part-timers are more likely, according to the committee, to be racial minorities and people who, in the absence of full-time positions with travel benefits, can’t afford to travel on their own time and their own dime to national church meetings.

Clergy meanwhile need preparation for tasks of equipping, evangelizing, and guiding to a degree and in a style that aren’t required of full-timers. In short, all who comprise the local church have a lot of new learning to do as we recover proven pathways and blaze a few new ones in a still-untamed wilderness.

As former ATS Executive Director Daniel Aleshire told me, prospective MDiv students increasingly can’t justify borrowing tens of thousands of dollars when the jobs they’d be training for are part-time. Because the entire system is predicated on demand from students who foresee full-time careers as clergy, the theological education industry is undergoing massive disruption. “The Industrial Revolution really produced the professional guild that we call clergy, and that’s actually the thing that’s breaking apart,” says Cameron Trimble, chief executive officer of the Center for Progressive Renewal, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that does consulting for mainline churches. “The industry of paid clergy, and all the institutions that produce these paid clergy, are collapsing under their own weight because the financial model is so broadly broken.”

Laypeople pursuing graduate-level education at ATS schools tend to be in master of arts degree programs. These saw an enrollment increase of 18 percent from 2012 to 20173, but these are stepping stones for professional careers in such areas as academe and social work. What remains largely foreign in traditional theological schools is the phenomenon we need to see much more frequently: laypeople seeking proficiency in areas of ministry, not new careers.

In congregations where I’ve served, the view is that theological education is something pastors get, and it prepares them for the diverse responsibilities that fall on their shoulders alone. This vestige of the full-time bias colors laypeople’s low expectations for themselves as ministers. It helps explain why those with abundant gifts too often believe that mundane tasks are all they’re able to do in the church. It also illuminates why laypeople often think that if they’re going to make a higher-level contribution, then it must involve analyzing the church’s problems as if it were a troubled for-profit business in need of a turnaround solution akin to what they’ve witnessed in their own respective industries. They don’t always appreciate how the church is unique among institutions and in need of distinct solutions because they haven’t been taught to think theologically. They’re doing the best they can, but they’re like house painters without ladders: their lack of appropriate equipment is severely limiting.

Online learning must also continue its trajectory as an ever more viable way to get an ordination-track theological education. Online-only degree programs are now offered through about seventy of the 270-plus graduate schools accredited by ATS. Like other distance learning models, they would ideally be augmented by face-to-face interactions for the sake of spiritual formation in community.

A third pathway to ordination has been gaining traction and warrants scaling up: customized learning. In these systems, a layperson discerning a call to ministry works with judicatory authorities to come up with a program that builds uniquely on what she already knows. Someone with an associate degree from a Bible college or a bachelor of arts in religious studies won’t need the same Bible basics as a person with no such background. Advanced training in areas such as history and counseling can be leveraged, too, until it’s clear exactly which gaps the candidate needs to fill academically and via field work.

Church leaders in training need to begin broadly by letting their minds be stretched. Hued by the full-time bias, many will bring part-time ministry stereotypes that need to be unlearned. They’ll need to stop thinking of part-time as synonymous with half-assed or half-dead. Isaiah 43:19, “I am about to do a new thing; . . . do you not perceive it?” could be the tagline verse for this part of their educations.

leaders-in-training to reflect upon what it means that the pastorate won’t be theirs alone to administer but shared among the many who have also been gifted by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12). This can involve introducing part-time ministry models that facilitate thriving, such as the ambassador, equipper, and multi-staff-team-member models from chapter 3.

asset mapping works.

That’s how Tuttle Road United Methodist Church in Cumberland, Maine, managed to add impactful new outreach ministries without overburdening its already-dedicated volunteers.

The part-timer has a particularly compelling need to spot underutilized spiritual gifts and help congregants do likewise. Blessings that might be taken for granted elsewhere can’t be neglected or squandered in their settings. In settings where resources are contracting, every gift is too valuable to overlook.

For the equipping model, a pastor needs to learn pedagogy. At the heart of the model lie three assumptions: the pastor is competent in several ministry areas, congre-gants are willing to learn those ministry arts, and the pastor is capable to teach them. For this last assumption to hold up, theological educators need to include pedagogy so that tomorrow’s pastors have skills to teach what they know.

Congregations that strategically leverage their pastor’s time to make her an ambassador in the community need a pastor who knows how to be such a presence. An ambassador becomes a vicar of Christ and his church, and while every pastor plays such a role, the ambassador model requires a strategically informed intentionality.

Pastors need to hone skills in a third area, colla-boration, if they’re going to be well-positioned to contribute on an increasingly part-time landscape.

facilitating side-career pathways for tomorrow’s part-time clergy to follow. This approach would add a third way beyond today’s two most prominent models, which either (1) train a person for full-time ministry or (2) equip a second-career mid-lifer/retiree to add ministry to an already-rich repertoire of personal and work experience.

One might ask: why would anyone interested in a trade career bother to get trained in ministry? Because God still calls people to ministry, just not always as a full-time career. Young adults still feel called to ministry, but their generation has a strong pragmatic streak. They won’t borrow heavily to launch a career that doesn’t make economic sense. What’s more, those drawn to the trades are not one-dimensional people. Many crave to use another side of their brains or use another part of themselves that doesn’t get much chance to blossom in the workplace or in the home.

When a church provides enough income to give a creative cleric a running start financially each month, it relieves much of the pressure and is in effect commissioning his art. Though the church officially compensates only for work done on behalf of the church, it is also enabling a way of life by limiting how much time is expected for ministry and freeing up the part-time pastor to serve the world in other ways.

This workforce environment is great news for congregations with part-time clergy. It means their clerics will likely come from the growing ranks of skilled people who now have an art, craft, or trade that they practice independently.

Skilled amateur musicians can find the best of all worlds in congregations led by part-time clergy.

In Newport, Rhode Island, St. John the Evangelist Church does not utilize a part-time priest, but the church needed revitalizing after a period of conflict and used an innovative model that might work in certain settings that need a boost while adjusting to part-time. The congregation launched a professional children’s choir.8 Part of a choir school initiative with two other Newport-area churches, the young choristers are called “professional” because they get paid a modest $15 to $30 per month.

That congregations with part-time clergy must come out of the shadows and be counted is essential. As discussed above, they need a catchier label for their category, but that’s not all. They also need to own the fact that they’re a different kind of church with distinct experiences to offer. Currently, it’s almost impossible to identify which denominational churches in a given area have part-time clergy. That’s not because they’re rare—they’re not rare at all. It’s because they hide their status as churches that use part-time clergy. Nothing on their websites, bulletins, or social media posts indicates that their clergy are not full-timers. These churches might not think such information is relevant to post, but more likely, they’re ashamed. They might think part-time means the church is financially poor or has less to offer to a consumeristic world than a church with clergy on call 24/7. They’re thinking in worldly, not godly, terms about wealth as being indicative of worth. We must break free from this trap. Just as many long-marginalized people are refusing to be shamed anymore for their disabilities or body types, congregations with part-time clergy need to be proudly acknowledged for who they are.