Initiative To Encourage Young People To Be Priests
Episcopal News Service. January 27, 1999 [99-2296]
(ENS) Citing the need for more young priests in the Episcopal Church, a group of three bishops, eight clergy and one layperson has launched the Young Priests Initiative to support young people who feel they have a call to ministry.
The initiative, announced after the group's meeting last December in New York City, will begin with three pilot programs to be run concurrently starting next fall in the dioceses of the three bishops who attended the meeting: Peter Lee of Virginia, Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh and Thomas Shaw of Massachusetts.
"The church needs young priests," said Lee. "I hope the Young Priests Initiative will encourage a climate in which the Holy Spirit's call to young people may be heard more clearly and that more young people will find that a vocation in holy orders is deeply rewarding and challenging."
The fact that many young people have not been seeking ordination in recent years was what spurred a conference last June called "Gathering the neXt Generation," which resulted in the December meeting and the Initiative. More than 130 young clergy and others at the June meeting concerned with adding more to those ranks acknowledged their shock that out of the church's more than 8,000 active priests fewer than 300 are younger than 35. This is at a time when a significant number of clergy are nearing retirement and the average age of seminarians is hovering around 40.
Calling those "frightening statistics," Christine McSpadden, associate rector of St. Bartholomew's Church in New York, which hosted the December meeting, said that those numbers "would lead to an extreme shortage of experienced priests in the near future."
The seeds for the new Initiative were planted early last year when, in the weeks before he retired as dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Very Rev. James Leo set aside $75,000 from his discretionary fund in an account administered by the Association of Episcopal Colleges, on whose board of trustees Leo sits. The money was to be used to advance the cause of young vocations in the church. Upon hearing of the success of "Gathering the neXt Generation," the Rev. Canon John Powers, executive vice president of the association, contacted conference organizers to see how he might help. Funds from the Leo account will help launch the diocesan projects.
The Initiative aims to:
- seek to increase the number of priests under the age of 30;
- place people into the ordination process, although it will not mean that the program will have failed if a person participating discerns that he or she does not have a call;
- require each participating diocese to articulate ways it can change (or provide an alternative to) the ordination process, particularly the structure of the Commission on Ministry and the criteria employed there to discern a vocation to ordained ministry.
- discuss and share all efforts to change the prevailing culture that discourages young vocations, even though the currently available funding will cover only projects that are part of the pilot programs, and;
- focus recruitment on the young people of the participating dioceses, with a special appeal through the chaplaincies at institutions belonging to the Association of Episcopal Colleges.
The group at the December meeting agreed to meet again next December to examine and discuss their new programs.