Having a full-time paid priest serving one congregation used to be the norm in the Episcopal Church, but not anymore. Sixty-four percent of Episcopal congregations don’t have a paid, full-time priest. That’s up from 40 percent in 2015, according to the most recent Office of General Convention data from 2022.
This massive, cost-lowering shift is having far-reaching ripple effects on congregational leadership, including who practices it, how leaders train, and what forms leadership takes.
“This is really of earthquake proportions,” said the Rev. Canon Doris Westfall, Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Missouri. “That’s part of what anxiety is coming through. The earth is shifting underneath our feet, and we don’t know where we’re going to land. We don’t know what’s going to shake out, what’s going to collapse, and what’s going to survive.”
It’s an unnerving time, yet amid this shakeup, new spiritual fruit is growing. Transition officers, who support congregations in search of clergy and clergy in search of new positions, are seeing models emerge that strengthen capacities among all types of believers.
“Many of our congregations we would consider lay-led and clergy-supported,” said the Rev. Canon Liz Easton, Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Nebraska. “The lay leadership in those congregations is so mature and authentic that there is sort of an innate understanding of roles. There’s not an expectation that the priest comes in and does everything.”
Such models are providing hope in the many regions where priests are scarce. Contributing factors include low levels of interest in vacant clergy positions of various types, especially the part-time roles that comprise the majority of listings churchwide. For every cleric in search of a new position, approximately eight vacancies await, according to data from the Office for Transition Ministry.
Concurrent trends are powering the tectonic shift. For congregations, declining worship attendance and rising maintenance costs have squeezed budgets, resulting in part-time salaries instead of full-time packages. For priests, relocating can become less attractive, partly because in these times of rapid change, many find security where their spouses or partners already have stable employment and where they have networks of friends, family, and supportive cultural environments, said the Rev. Meghan Froehlich, director of the Office for Transition Ministry.
“In some areas, political and cultural violence is on the rise,” Froehlich said. “It may or may not be a safe idea for either a clergyperson or a member of their household to be in a particular location. The political context over many years has increasingly affected people’s ability to serve in a particular place.”
Challenges notwithstanding, congregations are adapting to the lack of mobile priests by mobilizing more of the baptized for ministry. They’re also drawing on relationships with the wider church to share priests and provide local training for new leaders to rise, according to transition ministry officers.
These adaptations are bringing spiritual gifts from more parts of the body of Christ, observers say, and fostering vitality in settings where it wasn’t necessarily expected.
Consider what’s happening in the hills of Southwestern Virginia. Four congregations — St. Mark’s in St. Paul, All Saints in Norton, Christ Church in Big Stone Gap and Stras Memorial in Tazewell — were out of options five years ago. None could afford a full-time priest. And recruiting part-timers to small, rural settings in Appalachia can take a long time, said the Rev. Canon John Harris, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.
“A key aspect has been when a lot of these places realize they need to do something. Otherwise, they’re not going to exist,” Harris said. “Then they’re more open to ideas. A lot in the Appalachian region have realized they had to be open to an experiment.”
The four congregations responded by creating the Appalachian Alliance, which involves sharing one priest as well as teaming up for mission projects, programs, and occasional joint worship services. Last year, Christ Church in Big Stone Gap withdrew from the Alliance; another congregation, Christ Church in Marion, took its place.
Each contributes 25 percent of what’s needed to fund a full-time equivalent position for the Rev. John Church. He celebrates Eucharist twice every Sunday — once in the morning and once at 5 p.m. — which allows him to visit each of his four congregations every two weeks. On Sundays when he’s elsewhere in the Alliance, parishioners gather for lay-led Morning Prayer.
The partnership has energized the congregations, Church said. The three original member congregations have grown average worship attendance by more than 20 percent since the alliance was formed four years ago. As more lay leaders fill gaps, Church sees them becoming confident witnesses and evangelists in their communities.
Vesting laypeople with leadership roles “encourages the growth quicker,” Church said. “I’m not saying they wouldn’t develop those same skills if I were there all the time. But I think the added pressure of me not being there twice a month increases their ability to see what is possible and follow in the Spirit.”
Priest-sharing among congregations is also reinforcing habits of catholicity. In the Diocese of West Missouri, for instance, priest-sharing is the norm even for the largest congregations, such as St. Andrew’s in Kansas City. That’s because those with multiple priests on staff believe it’s part of their mission to provide “clergy care” for those who have none, said the Rev. Chas Marks, missioner for transitions.
Almost every Sunday, a priest from St. Andrew’s makes the 112-mile round trip drive to celebrate Eucharist at Christ Church in Lexington, Missouri. When no priest is available, a St. Andrew’s deacon brings the reserved sacrament to Christ Church.
“That’s something they do on their own,” Marks said. “It’s just become part of their ministry of giving back to the diocese. We’ve really been trying to live into this idea of the diocese being the church of the whole. … What’s good for Lexington is good for Kansas City and vice versa.”
Now that most clergy positions are part time, vocations still happen but the approach is changing. Many future priests are agreeing to local, video-based training if it means they can keep their homes, learn in local cohorts with in-person peers, and maintain much of what already fills their lives.
One indicator is the popularity of cost-effective, local training programs. For example, the number of dioceses that are members of the Iona Collaborative has soared from 11 in 2017 to 35 today. Most have organized diocesan schools to work with video-based curricula from the Seminary of the Southwest, which runs the collaborative.
Such schools are educating not only bivocational priests but also deacons and laypeople. For the first time this year, most continuing education offered through the collaborative is order-neutral. That means people from all three orders can sign up for a course and study in cohorts alongside people from other orders. Now a layperson might be studying preaching or pastoral care alongside an Iona-trained priest and discussing what authentic, Christlike witness looks like for both.
“For small church leaders, having a community of peers that’s in mixed orders is really healthy,” said Nandra Perry, director of the Iona Collaborative. “They understand their roles really well when they are out in ministry together. They work together with a lot of respect and synergy. We consider that, pedagogically, actually a value.”
Not all that’s emerging on today’s shifting landscape speaks of spiritual fruitfulness. In Southwestern Virginia, for instance, congregations that can’t afford full-time priests are encouraged to share priests so that a cleric can receive full-time equivalent compensation. But even those arrangements can be a hard sell.
“There are not that many clergy who are willing to work part time or even do a sharing relationship” that adds up to a full-time equivalent, Harris said. “Some are [willing]. But I think a lot of priests, if they want a full-time job, would rather just have one church.” One reason: they fear that in a two-point charge, they will end up doing double the administrative work, such as attending two vestry meetings rather than one, and therefore carry more of the profession’s burdensome aspects.
As challenges get sorted out, the great adaption continues — as does the joyful work of keeping alert for new spiritual bounty. In Nebraska, whenever Canon Easton visits a congregation, she looks for a particularly engaged child, pulls that child aside and says, “I think you’d make a great priest.”
“One of the delights of this transition in ordained ministry right now comes when that child says to me: ‘I do love church and I would like to be a priest, but I really want to be a pilot,’ as kids do,” Easton said. “I can say to them: ‘Oh my gosh, you can be a pilot and a priest! Just look at Mother So-and-So over there. She’s a this and also a that.’ So there is an imagination in how we understand priestly ministry that’s going to change and will just continue to evolve. As it always has.”
