Clergy: Shopping for Preachers

When the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., accepted a call to a bigger parish in Texas last winter, the seven laymen on the pulpit committee had to find a new preacher. It was not easy. During the next nine months, First Baptist’s committeemen checked out more than 100 prospects in 16 states, spent three Sundays out of four listening to sermons of possible candidates, traveled as far as Texas and Florida before deciding on the Rev. J. T. Ford of Atlanta’s Wieuca Road Baptist Church. Last week, after weighing the committee’s offer, delivering two trial sermons and meeting about 600 members of the congregation, Ford took the job. “I came to work Monday feeling quite a load lifted from my shoulders,” said Charles P. Little, the exhausted chairman of the committee.

Not since the days of the itinerant frontier preacher have so many Protestant ministers been afflicted with wanderlust, and for many churches the problem of replacing a departed pastor is infinitely more pressing than what to do about integration or support for the missions. In Houston, 40 of the city’s 187 Baptist churches have changed pastors during the past year, and about 10% of the 1,500 Congregational churches in New England are now without a fulltime minister. In Winston-Salem, N.C., the First Presbyterian Church spent 13 months looking for the right man; one committeeman traveled 12,000 miles on scouting expeditions.

“Challenge & Opportunity.” Like the competition for good corporation presidents or college football players, it’s all a matter of supply and demand. Wealthy congregations in the cities and suburbs of both the East and West coasts usually have more eager candidates than they can easily screen. When California’s Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church went minister hunting recently, the pulpit committee received an avalanche of messages from out-of-state pastors-some offering to take a salary cut to move to an area with growth possibilities. Rural areas of the South or small Midwestern towns have to take potluck.

The game of musical pulpits has a protocol as rigid as that of court tennis. Ministers never publicly announce that they are ready to move elsewhere, generally let the word filter out through clerical friends. As a rule, pulpit committees play up “challenge” and “opportunity for service” rather than salary, insist that a minister dispose of any other offers he has before considering theirs. Under the rules of the game, an out-of-town candidate is seldom invited to preach directly to an interested congregation; instead, pulpit committeemen drop into his church to hear him unobserved. But most committeemen are about as conspicuous as FBI agents at a Communist rally: they come in twos and threes, sit nervously on side aisles, usually fail to sign the visitors’ book or stand when newcomers are introduced.

Stuck with the System. U.S. Protestantism actually has more unemployed ministers than unfilled pulpits. For most pulpit committees, the problem is simply finding a capable administrator who can preach well. Churches that offer impressive material as well as spiritual benefits set their standards higher. Everybody seems to want a nondrinking, tolerant intellectual who does not talk down to his flock—a man who is not too young, not too old, who is interested in the choir, is good at raising money, and who has a charming but unobtrusive wife.

Says the Rev. Walter Wagoner, executive director of the Fund for Theological Education: “These committees are looking for God Jr., and no one—living or dead—meets their requirements. Much of the problem results from a Horatio Alger complex, a belief that you can go out and buy a good minister the way college football coaches buy a 250-lb. tackle.” Wagoner thinks that the churches could stem pulpit jumping by setting up denomination-wide salary scales (today the pay runs from $3,600 to $20,000 in the major churches) that reward ministers on the basis of length and standard of service.

But many committeemen believe that pulpit turnover prevents both preachers and congregations from growing stale, and that the present method is the only one compatible with the policy of churches—such as Baptists, Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ—opposed to a strong central authority. Argues New York Lawyer Arad Riggs, a committeeman of the Bronxville Reformed Church: “It brings the leaders to the top. It brings out the best in the ministry and the best in the churches.”

Lacking any plausible alternative, most churchmen conclude that preacher shopping is likely to go on forever. As the chairman of a pulpit committee for a Presbyterian church in New York put it, “I don’t know if it’s the proper way, but it is the Presbyterian way, and I’m stuck with it.”