Wanted, a Chair of Tent-Making

THE modern divinity school is not up to date. It is out of step with the age. It is still teaching theology, Hebrew and Greek, church history, homiletics, elocution, and here and there sociology. Strangely enough, it overlooks the most conspicuous and most urgent demand of our time. What is needed is a brand-new chair: call it a Chair of Tent-Making, for that is Pauline. The need is especially apparent in the Baptist and Congregationalist bodies, but even Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism would hail the new departure here proposed.

Unrest is everywhere, — fickleness, insincerity; criticism, short pastorates. Men now living easily remember the days when a pastorate was accounted a life position, and when, in a New England Congregational church, three pastorates might span a century. In some of the leading denominations, three years are now counted as about the average term of a pastorate.

Over against this class of facts place another class. The number of theological students in our great universities is steadily and rapidly declining, even while the universities themselves are rapidly growing in attendance, and while the number of churches in nearly all denominations is also growing. Universities which were founded primarily, if not solely, for the education of ministerial students, having existed for one or two centuries, and having grown to an attendance of 1000, 2000, and even 3000 students, count less than a score, sometimes less than a dozen candidates for the ministry in a class of 200 or 300. The Harvard catalogue recently issued shows 551 students in the law school, 560 in the medical school, and only 26 in the divinity school. Thus, in what used to be termed the three learned professions, there are 21 students in law and 21 in medicine to one in the ministry.

But Harvard is hardly a fair representative of New England orthodoxy. Let us turn to Yale. When President Dwight resigned, after an administration of extraordinary progress, it was announced that the single department which had declined during his term of service was the divinity school. At the end of the first century of Yale’s history thirtynine per cent of her graduates turned to the ministry ; and the average for the entire century had been forty per cent. During the last decade of her second century the number of ministerial students is seven per rent. The decline has been comparatively steady, but most rapid during the past twenty years. Yet in law the decrease has been only from forty-two per cent to thirty-five per cent ; and in medicine the percentage at the end of the century is precisely what it was at the beginning, namely, eight. Here are startling facts as related to the church and its ministry.

Is there any traceable relation between the two classes of facts already noted ?

Let us be concrete. Here is a conscientious young man who feels impelled toward the ministry. But he is cleareyed, and can read the signs of the times. He may say, and with reason : “ At the point of adjustment of demand and supply between church and pastor, the economy of great denominations is breaking down. Under present conditions, no young man should enter the ministry of these communions without possessing some secular trade which will support him when he gets beyond midlife. Paul knew the art of tent-making, and worked at his trade with an enviable sense of independence when the heathen peoples would have none of him. But to-day I note: (1) that few men enter the theological seminary with a secular trade ; (2) that none learn such there ; (3) that multitudes of theological students, within twenty years, will have need of the trade which they have had no chance to acquire. Have I any right to give hostages to fortune ; unfit myself for all lines of work except one ; fling myself into that, with bridges burned behind me, knowing that at the caprice of any temper, or set of tempers, I and the hostages may be set adrift in a cold world, penniless, helpless, hopeless, branded with that fatal stigma in the ministry, ' Without charge ’ ? ”

It is a fact that the crime of embezzlement in a cashier or bookkeeper is hardly more fatal or more final than the misfortune of being “ without charge ” in the ministry. This the student well knows. He may also have the sagacity to discern that, though young to-day, the years will make him older.

This very week, the most prominent organ of one of the two largest denominations in the country prints an advertisement calling for an assistant pastor to a large city church. In this frank paragraph two cardinal points of qualification are mentioned : The man for the place must be already in a place. The man must be young.

Stand far off, you men who have sacrificed self and dearer selves to high ideals for sweet peace’ sake, for love’s sake, for Christ’s sake; and have left your pastorates lest some root of bitterness springing up might excite tumult in the church of Christ. You we do not want. Give us the man who sticks to place and salary, no matter at what cost of spiritual integrity. His restive church may long have wished him out of it; but he has had the transcendent merit of having looked out for his own advantage, and he has held on. Such as he are eligible to the vacancy in the great city church, — eligible, that is, if young. If you have a few gray hairs, if you have been in the ministry long enough to know what not to do, there is no place for you here. You have learned patience, steadiness, effectiveness. Obviously, this is final. Sorry for you, but you were born a generation too late. Our age cannot use you. We want boys.

A man is a lawyer. At forty-five he is counted as just ready to enter upon the best period of a life of strenuous, telling service in his profession. Or he is a physician. We do not send for boys to trifle with us, in hours of grave physical crisis. Plunge into your arduous profession, young men, if you can ; but do not be discouraged if the men of experience are chosen before you. It will take you years to win a foothold ; but by the time you are forty, if you have the right stuff in you, you may be heard from. There are still thirty good years ahead of you ; and riches and honor may increase.

A man is a banker, an editor, a manufacturer, a professor, a technician, a merchant. His youth may be full of promise, but the actual and cumulative strength of his powers shall reveal itself after he has passed the equator of life.

But a man is a minister of Christ. He has espoused the loftiest of callings. He has to do, not with men’s perishable bodies, but with their immortal part. He is to speak to the human soul,—to interpret God, life, death, the eternal mystery. Surely this man must be no newcomer in the field of life. He must have dwelt long in the presence of the Deity. He must have studied ceaselessly and profoundly upon the truths of a divine revelation. So one would reason.

But what is the fact ? An utter reversal of all the conditions of professional demand and usefulness ; a denial of all the laws which elsewhere hold sway. Is this perchance the realm of faith, where the ripest reason is discarded ? Experience, elsewhere the indispensable qualification, is in the ministry fast becoming a disqualification to any position of large influence. While we will not trust our bodies or our business in the hands of callow youth, to youth we insist upon intrusting the care of our spiritual being, the handling of the divine revelation, the building up of the body of Christ in the most holy faith.

Again, let us be concrete, exact, nice, definite. A promising student, fresh from the divinity school, will be allowed to try his apprentice hand on a church of moderate pretensions. If by any means he shall come into the public view in this pastorate, he will be in good repute and eligible to the larger churches for a period of about ten years, — from thirty to forty. From forty to fifty he is respectfully regarded as not wholly ineligible, but still at a disadvantage as compared with younger men, unless he has acquired an exceptional name, — such a name as is too often won by sensational success. From fifty to sixty his case is pitiable, unless he be fortunate enough to find some comfortable professorship or secretaryship, or some modest parish into which he can judiciously retire. From sixty to seventy he is superannuated.

This is to say that a man of good average ability, contemplating the ministry as a calling, and not aspiring to a place among the first twenty-five or thirty of his sect, may count in a general way on five years in which to make his name; ten years in which to maintain his rank; ten years in which he may hover on the borders of ministerial usefulness ; and twenty indescribable years beyond the border of public usefulness, but this side the border of life.

Who shall say that it costs nothing of self-sacrifice to enter the ministry today ? Grant that the truest men are readiest for self-sacrifice; but this is not that kind of sacrifice that appeals to heroic souls. Many a young man, full of noble purpose, would rather know that he must die at the close of the period when he could work according to the power which was working in him, than know that he must live on twenty or thirty years after the larger activities of his calling had ceased.

Who shall blame the young man if he draw back, believing he can better serve God and mankind in other professions, where he can do a man’s work through a man’s lifetime ?

But here it is that the prudent, the politic father of the church steps in with his incontrovertible wisdom, and seeks to save the young man to the ministry by two axioms or maxims : (1.) A pastorate held is never to be relinquished until another is secured. (2.) A prominent pastorate, affording a comfortable income, should never be relinquished after the age of forty.

Ay di me, we sigh with Carlyle. Alas for the nobler ideals of youth, — the strange old paradox that the man shall lose his life to gain it, which the boy, in his boy’s enthusiasm, has still dared to cherish ! They pale and fail in this breath of wisdom. Yet some undaunted lad, who still believes nobly in truth, flushes hotly, shamed for his mentor, and says inwardly : —

So he goes forth to meet “ the world’s slow stain.” Will he “bring back at eve immaculate the manners of the morn ” ?

How shall we explain these singular conditions, — to be in demand in the ministry, one must be in a pastorate, and he must be young ?

The explanation of the first condition is not difficult. It is found in the coarsely obvious consideration that the rank and file of men do not want a tiling unless others want it, too ; in the desire to bear away the prize which others covet ; in the shallow conclusion that if a man were capable he would surely be at work. The consequence of this attitude on the part of churches reacts disastrously upon themselves, while the distress which it brings into the ministry is profound and far - reaching. By reason of it, many men stay on till the pastoral relation becomes sorely strained, till congregations are decimated, membership disintegrated, and faction rife ; being too timid or too prudent to hazard an entrance into that realm of inoccupation from whose bourn so few return. Both pastor and people are embittered, humiliated, and harassed, perhaps through years.

The second condition indicated is more difficult to explain. Until these last times, the favorite pastoral figure in classic poetry and prose and in the popular imagination has been the venerable and saintly man, rich in years and in ripened graces. Why then this present passion for youth only in the ministry? Doubtless the rise and rule of young people’s organizations have something to do with it. But is there not beyond that a certain subtle psychological consideration ? The preponderance of women in our churches to-day is a fact too familiar to require comment. By the side of this put another fact, indisputable though unconsidered : that womankind is attracted by the romantic and the picturesque. The Hon. Mrs. Chapman, in a recent article in the Nineteenth Century, says, ” Religion assuredly has its emotional and passionate side.” Dimly perceived and acknowledged though they are, the mysterious links which connect the passionate and the religious nature are no less real. In short, the young clergyman appeals to the emotional, hero-worshiping side of human nature in a far greater degree than do his elders. It cannot be denied that the ardent, highly endowed youth, with his future all before him, untrammeled and undefined, stimulates the feminine imagination as the sober, middle-aged man of family never can do.

Another reason for the craving of churches for young clergymen in our age of unrest is this : the youth still believes in the impossible. He has not discovered the limitations to which older men have sadly adapted themselves. He stirs the hope anew that here at last, at the hands of this young knight, Apollyon is to receive that mortal thrust for which the whole creation has waited, groaning.

It will have been noted that the sects suffering most from the conditions under discussion are those which have no cen-, tralized system of church government; no body, as in the Methodist church, determining the relations of ministerial supply, no bishop, no synod. The Congregationalist and Baptist churches, eschewing all forms of hierarchical government, are the most truly American in their genius, of all sects ; the most thoroughly liberal and democratic ; the freest from politics, wire-pulling, and placeseeking. The great Methodist body, with its highly organized political system, frankly grasps this matter of pastoral adjustment with both hands, and regulates it with despotic authority. Among bodies of the Congregational order, such attempt at regulation would be promptly rejected. There still obtains, perhaps as a survival of a more pietistic age, a vague underlying notion that there exists an immediately supernatural and divine factor in ministerial adjustments. This conception is not unapostolic, but little emphasis is laid upon it in church business meetings at the end of the nineteenth century.

It will be seen, however, that, with this prepossession in mind, men are chary of anything like a fixed systematic businesslike machinery for the supply of their pulpits ; and, unhappily, we find in the sects named, and to some extent in others, a singularly accidental and undignified method of ministerial supply, which all condemn and nearly all employ. It is known by the objectionable phrase “ the candidating system,” and to it undoubtedly is due much of the existing confusion and disaster. This system involves a keen competitive contest among rival candidates for a pulpit. In this contest, the determining factor is commonly the immediate personal impression made by the preacher upon a critical congregation.

Here is a simple account of the working of this system in a recent authentic instance : The pastor of a leading church in one of our Western cities resigned. A committee was at once appointed to secure a list of eligible candidates for the pulpit soon to be vacant. When the pastor’s work was closed, two months later, the committee held the names of a hundred aspirants for the vacant place. These names had come directly from the candidates themselves or from their influential friends. The men appeared in the pulpit in rapid succession. Naturally, the congregation soon became divided into numerous small factions. One was satisfied with the straightforward sturdiness of Paul; another could be fed on nothing but the eloquence of Apollos ; while a third saw in the impetuous enthusiasm of Cephas the only hope of a downtown church. No one man could possibly be expected, on a single trial, to win the unqualified approval of all.

It is a fact that the strongest men in the ministry are often — yes, generally — the weakest candidates. They are frequently men of rough-hewn features ; of quiet, or reserved manner ; not fluent, not flattering; with careworn faces and gestures ungraceful; inapt at making the pulpit a stage for the display of personal advantages; ill at ease, because all the manhood in them is in revolt at the humiliation to which, by force of circumstance, they submit. The successful candidate, the man who easily secures calls, is of quite another sort.

In the case of the church in question, one of the latter class at last appeared. The new man was tall and graceful in figure, irreproachable in person and attire. He was perfect in his self-confidence and poise ; amazing in fluency ; flattering in conversation, especially with women ; and bowed his well-shaped head in tender reverence before the elders. Above all, he was young. With easy grace he mentioned to the committee the call which he had just received to a metropolitan pulpit ; he would doubtless accept it within the week, but really longed for a less exacting field, etc.

The result can readily be guessed. It was not necessary to inquire into the nature of his work elsewhere, for his frequent allusion to his intimate friends of high repute in the denomination was sufficient guarantee. The matter must be decided at once, or the opportunity would be lost. The committee and church, alike desperate and worn out, could find no fault with this man. He was called at once. Sheer exhaustion was responsible for the call, and the visitor’s shrewd art was responsible for the reckless haste. In two weeks the church had for its pastor a weak, frivolous man, a clerical adventurer ; and in two months the church was filled with confusion and dismay.

The pastorate was soon over, of course, but the penalty of folly is not yet fully paid. Among the men who had been heard and rejected were not a few of high spiritual quality, intellectual power, and proved wisdom. But they could not show all these qualities in the service of a single Sunday, and they would have scorned to attempt it. The young man who was called could easily show all his qualifications in one service.

This is a typical case, but it is by no means asserted that the system now in vogue always results so badly. It is mitigated by the efforts of sagacious men, who bring forward no candidate until his past record is thoroughly known. But even so, the danger of division and discord in the church is not averted.

Here, now, is the other side: The preacher is a man, say, in the forties, at his best physically, intellectually, spiritually, full of executive force and ability. He has a half dozen children. For ten, fifteen years he has held a prominent pastorate, and has done strong work in it. But, under the restless spirit of the age, his congregation begins to long for a new voice and novel methods. A man who appeals to the craving for sensational preaching comes into his neighborhood. His congregations diminish. His people love their pastor, but they become uneasy. He learns the fact; fears to bring dissension into the church that he loves ; and, with fine disregard of all personal interest, and with the spirit which impels a man

resigns, without awaiting or looking for a call elsewhere.

For some months he is able to live and to support his family on what has been laid aside for such an emergency. Believing that his own shall come to him, he scorns to advertise himself, or to enter his name as a competitor in the mad race for empty pulpits. He has the vague sense of the supernatural agency in these matters. When he resigned, a theological professor said to him, “ Don’t you know what a risk you are running ? ” He knew something of the “risk.”Had he known it all, he might have chosen no different course. He preaches here and there, but always finds that other men have been heard before him or are to be heard after him, and that the church is not ready to reach a decision. When the calls are extended, he notices that they go to younger men, and generally to men who have won immediate and showy results by artificial methods. He perceives that what is wanted is, not wise leadership of a church, but short cuts to large congregations. A few months of this, and the preacher suddenly awakens to find that he is no longer sought by pulpit committees. His name is no longer considered, because he has been out of a pastorate for several months.

Now to his tent-making, or to the piteous humiliation of a man without a life work, with his family scattered, the plans for his children’s education unrealized, his self - respect tortured, his heart broken. In the battle of life, the brave man and the true has lost the day. He is accounted a failure at the very hour when he has reached the full height of his capacity and power. What a pathetic anomaly ! “ What shipwreck ! ” men say. Yet who shall affirm that he has not pursued the only manly and unselfish course, fatal though the result has been to himself and his own ? This bit of biography is continually being written in the ministry to-day.

It will not do, however, to overlook the fact that the beginning of existing conditions is to be found in the general and increasing restlessness among pastors as well as among congregations. Here is a force which acts and reacts. The church cultivates rather than represses its own craving for variety, novelty, excitement, change. The church becomes restless, and the pastor is quick to feel it. If his is a fine-spirited, sensitive nature, his position grows increasingly embarrassing, and he is tempted to seize any means which will secure swift release, even though it may involve compromise of his principles and a lowering of self-respect. Or, on the other hand, the pastor himself is restless, aspiring to a prominent position (this possibility must be admitted), a place-seeker. To such a man the practice of preaching before various churches is not without a piquant, personal stimulus. He is by no means averse to it.

But from whatever cause, short pastorates have become the order of the day. A man knowing that his time is brief is sorely tempted to turn his energies toward the production of showy results, and thus to attract the attention of pulpit committees. Here is in part the explanation of a growing tendency to factitious methods in the ministry.

Thus, at the end of the century, there is an ominous combination of causes working to the weakening of the moral fibre of the ministry and to the deterioration of the highest of callings. At the same time all the standards of the church are being brought low.

What can be done? Is the Chair of Tent-Making inevitable, or can the Christian ministry yet be made a vocation for life ?

Alfred Brown, Layman.