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Note #7977 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Lucky number 7(%)
03441
October 17, 2003

Lucky number 7(%)

Young clergy get a little R&R a little TLC, let the good times roll

By John Filiatreau

NEW ORLEANS - It was the 7% Event for under-40 Presbyterian ministers,
sponsored by Youth and Young Adult Ministries.

Not to be confused with the .7% Initiative, which has a decimal point and has
to do with AIDS and is supported by International Health Ministries.

Nor to be mistaken for the 7+ Reasons to Support Ecumenical Ministries, a
scheme promoted by the Department of Ecumenical and Agency Relations that
uses the plus sign to represent the cross-denominational synergy lifted up in
chapter 7 of the Shorter Catechism.

Not to be confused with these, perhaps. But to be confused, yea, verily.

First of all, the 7% Event, which sounds like a singular sensation, actually
was a series of events held over parts of three days.

In the 2003 renewal of the 7% Event, about 200 young ministers from the
Presbyterian Church (USA), some accompanied by spouses and children, gathered
about 7 blocks from Bourbon Street, the birthplace of Dixieland jazz and of
the 7 deadly sins, for a few days of post-modern, Gen-X renewal.

Post-calculational, too: One might reasonably guess from the name of the
event that the percentage of PC(USA) ministers under 40 is roughly 7. That,
after all, is the "startling statistic" highlighted in the promotional
materials. But how startling the figure really is depends on how you define
"roughly" (and what "is" is).

The math is almost enough to turn the Big Easy into the Big Hard:

In 2000, the Board of Pensions had age data for 8,282 PC(USA) ministers, and
1,558 of them were under 40. That's about 18 percent. However, another 12,783
ministers weren't included in that reckoning, because the Board didn't have
their ages. If you add them in, the percentage drops to a little over 7.3,
which seems promising until you reckon that about 7,000 of the grand total of
21,065 ministers were retired - very few of them, one assumes, under 40.
Exclude them, and the young-whippersnapper category takes in about 11
percent.

The office of Churchwide Personnel Services says its own calculations, based
on "the most accurate data" available, indicate that (not-so-) roughly 15.18
percent of PC(USA) pastors are under 40. But its survey included only men and
women in parish ministry, so a lot of ordained people were left out.

The PC(USA)'s Research Services office says its data "suggest" that the
actual figure is 14 percent.

Here's the thing: You can look at it 7 ways from Sunday.

Any way you look at it, it has got to be the most misleadingly and least
helpfully named occasion on the Presbyterian calendar.

That alone could account for the fact that only about 12 percent of eligible
7%-ers showed up for the 7% or 11% or 14% or 15% Event(s) of Oct. 6 through
Oct. 9.

It attracted a computer-savvy, techno-capable group that might well have
wondered why you can't just make a phone call and get the correct percentage,
down to the thousandth of a point. Or why the Board of Pensions wouldn't have
"age data" on all its members available at the push of a button. Or why
nobody in the denomination maintains a list of birth dates of ordained
persons, which would make it way easier for the 7% Event promoters to reach
their (moving-) target audience.

But here's a figure you can stake your heart on:

These fresh-faced, energetic, ambitious young ministers, collectively the
future of the PC(USA), were joined at their conference by exactly 0% of the
national leaders of the denomination.

What fun.

This didn't look much like a typical Presbyterian group. Almost nobody had
white or blue hair. More than 7 percent had smiles on their faces at any
given time. Nobody over 7 was angry or bitter or hurt. The male-female split
was about 50-50. Worship was loud, energetic, jazzy and joyful. And amid the
praise music was often heard the soul-soothing song of babies in their
mothers' arms.

One of the most popular "workshops" was day care.

One member of the planning committee was introduced with the comment: "Next
year he's going to be too old for 7% - and he's the youngest member of his
presbytery."

This was the third 7% Event. (We could call it the 21% Event.)

The first, held in 1999 at the Stony Point Conference Center in upstate New
York, was billed as the "first annual Young Pastors Gathering." It was
attended by about 60 young men and women lured by the promise of a nighttime
visit to New York City. The second (catchily re-named) Event, also held at
Stony Point, took place just a month after the terrorist attacks of
9/11/2001; it featured a far more subdued visit to Manhattan, including a
tour of what one participant called "the open grave" of the World Trade
Center.

At all such Events, the big draw is the opportunity for young ministers to
spend time with their peers, reconnect with long-lost classmates from
seminary, engage in some intense networking, get and give support,
commiserate, gossip, admire each others' babies, enjoy a respite from their
elders, and enjoy a respite from their other elders.

The theme this year was "Formed and Forming," a variation on the familiar
Calvinist rubric, "Reformed and Always Reforming." In the words of a program
note, the Event is intended specifically for clergy who are "still forming as
disciples of Christ, learning how to walk the path Jesus walked, but with our
own gait."

For the next 25 years or so, the PC(USA) will move at roughly that same gait.

Worship for the conference was conceived as a "return to the foundational
elements of our faith: baptism, scripture, prayer and the Lord's Supper,"
with music by Warren Cooper of Philadelphia, the Presbyterian host of a
National Public Radio gospel-music program, assisted by a combo of contract
musicians from New Orleans. The music included both "Wade in the Water" and
"Oh God Our Help in Ages Past," but did not extend to "Laissez Le Bon Temps
Rouler!"

The opening-night preacher, the Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, of Liberation
Community Church in Memphis, TN, exhorted his listeners to remember that he
and they are a company of "fault-filled leaders trying to lead fault-filled
people," who are often overworked and always subject to burnout and could
easily "become as cynical as the rest of the world," but "are not called to
be the janitor and everything else" at their churches.

What they are called to be, he said, are "resident theologians" serving
congregations of suffering people who "need to know what God says, and who
look to us to tell them just a little something about Jesus."

Herbert told the young pastors that God is the only reliable source of the
strength they will need when a session meeting gets out of hand, "and the
people get cantankerous and think they own the church and the checkbook and
the organ and everything else."

It was during such a meeting, he said, just after a disheartening
conversation about financial setbacks, that a not-always-observant member of
his flock reminded him sharply of his calling with the prophetic words: "Rev,
I hear all this about the money - but you still a preacher, ain't you?"

When times are hard, Herbert concluded, a pastor must take comfort in being
"still a preacher," and go on and try to tell the people a little something
about Jesus.

The 7% Event events included workshops titled "Electronic Ministry"
("Remember that folks are not there to watch a movie"); "Savvy Financial
Sense" ("Get wise to the ways of the world of finances"); "The Church Around
the Corner" ("Ecumenism is a way of living that dares to visualize the future
of the Kingdom of God"); and "Emerging Worship" ("Include the (baptismal)
font in your worship space - with water in it!")

Among the most widely acclaimed parts of the schedule were "Sabbath Keeping,"
from 1:30 to 4:30 Tuesday afternoon; and "Free Time," which started after
lunch on Wednesday and lasted until Thursday at 9 a.m. (by which time many
had their Sunday sermons written, and others - 7%, maybe - were pie-eyed and
lassitudinous because they'd stayed up later than it their custom at home).

On the last day, the Rev. Philip W. Butin, the president of San Francisco
Theological Seminary, talked with the young ministers about their "Top Ten"
"questions/challenges/blessings" relating to church work.

Top Ten included about 30 items. Naturally.

Among them: "the issues of credibility and authority that arise when most of
your congregation is twice your age"; how to deal with "the sense that
everyone's hopes are focused on you"; finding time to devote to "your own
struggles of placing your own trust in God"; how to keep from responding in
an un-Christian way to "people who pat you on the head and tell you, 'You'll
be a good pastor someday'"; and what to do about this pesky "tendency to keep
on deconstructing, when people's lives are already totally deconstructed."

Many commented on the myriad ways they were ill served by their seminary
training. "I learned a lot about culture and where the culture is moving,"
one said, "but very little about practical day-to-day ministry." A husband
complained that he'd heard "not one lecture about marriage" before his
wedding. One observed that seminary students in ministerial internships are
often just "cheap labor" for pastors who put them to work "Xeroxing." One
asked whether the seminaries couldn't do something for "pastors who are
really on the edge of burnout." Another suggested requiring seminary
professors to serve stints in parish work.

Butin said there are limits to what seminary leaders "can pull off with a
tenured faculty," but said he would share the young ministers' concerns with
his colleagues.

(The web version of this story contains pictures
http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/03441.htm).

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