Clerics get the `call' later
Divinity students are older as they make move into the pulpit

By Gayle Worland
Tribune staff reporter

April 8, 2004

T. Michael Nisbet is a man of the cloth, though he used to be a patent examiner in Washington. Rev. Claire Tenny treated cancer and soothed the dying. Bob Bryan ran a warehouse.

But today they are among Chicago-area pastors--known as "second-career clergy"--who have hopped off the career ladder to land in a Christian pulpit.

And there are plenty more to come: As they head to church Easter Sunday, nearly half the U.S. and Canadian theology students planning to become ministers and priests will be 35 or older.

In recent years, national churches have launched an all-out blitz to recruit more young people for congregational or parish ministry. But many rookie Protestant pastors continue to be Baby Boomers, like Tenny, Bryan and Nisbet, or Gen-Xers--people willing to uproot families, take pay cuts during their prime earning years and sign up for long workdays in a decidedly unglamorous career.

"Pastoring is one of the last great generalist professions where you're supposed to be good at a lot of things," said Nisbet, 39, as he races his battered 12-year-old Acura Integra through his Southwest Side Lutheran parish. "There are a lot of people out there with very successful careers who in a heartbeat would give it up if they could find something a little more meaningful."

Nisbet's mission--it is literally called a "mission"--is to revitalize a once-shuttered house of worship at 8600 S. Kilpatrick Ave., now called New Spirit Lutheran Church.

The decor is dated, the basement needs a new floor and meeting rooms await a coat of paint. But as Easter approaches, New Spirit is a fitting place for Nisbet: Both are beginning afresh.

"I found my government job unfulfilling," said Nisbet, although he often speaks nostalgically of his former $60,000 salary. The father of newborn twins now makes a little more than half that, one of the reasons he traded in his Jeep Cherokee for the aging two-door.

Nationwide, 56 percent of senior or sole pastors of congregations arrived at their post after serving in another career for at least five years, according to Pulpit & Pew, an interdenominational research project at Duke Divinity School that studies pastoral leadership issues.

"They come from all over the place: social workers, firefighters, accountants," said Pulpit & Pew director Jackson Carroll. "But the largest number of second-career pastors are schoolteachers or [retired] military."

Among many in the Jewish faith, "the trend is the same: More people are coming back to clergy study after having lived a different life," said Adina Newberg, a professor at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pa., who has interviewed dozens of rabbinical students on their vocational change.

An Army veteran who later worked in social services, Damon Jones, 35, is an associate minister at Calvary Baptist Church of Chicago, 2309 E. 80th St., and working on a second graduate theology degree.

"I was one of those persons who had their midlife crisis at 30," Jones said. "I bought a new car--and that didn't help."

Although he qualifies as "second-career," Jones is younger than many students at Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox seminaries across the U.S. and Canada, according to a 2001 study by the Association of Theological Schools, the accrediting agency for 243 graduate schools of theology.

From 1991 to 2001, students in their 40s constituted the fastest-growing age group among Christian theological students, the study found. In the current academic year, 25 percent of male students and nearly half of female students pursuing a master's of divinity degree, the preparation for a career as a pastor or priest, were 40 or older.

The trend has its advantages: Older students tend to have more experience working as lay people in their churches, experts say.

Yet many denominations have become concerned by the graying of their newest leaders. Those who don the clerical collar later in life have fewer working years ahead of them, which can mean higher costs for churches that subsidize seminary tuition and underwrite pensions.

Second-career types insist they can relate better to others because of their life experience.

"I know what it's like to punch a clock or get laid off," said Bryan, 49, a warehouse manager in Champaign for 21 years who will graduate from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in May.

"I know what it's like to come home and drink a six-pack and eat a can of cashews and wonder if there isn't something more," he said. "I know what it's like to not believe and think I'm the center of the world--and find out I'm not."

In her survey of Jewish students at Reconstructionist, Conservative and Reformed seminaries, Newberg found that second-career rabbis often come with high-powered professional skills.

"Most of these are very successful people and they have confidence," she said. "They become leaders very quickly in whatever they're doing."

In the case of those heading for a Christian pulpit, the No. 1 motivation for career change is "a call from God," according to surveys by the Association of Theological Schools.

"I often have applicants tell me that they have experienced a sense of call for many years and have ignored, disregarded, dismissed that inkling for one reason or another," said Rev. Alison Buttrick Patton, director of admissions and recruitment at Chicago Theological Seminary in Hyde Park.

Tenny, 44, was a Denver oncologist and directed a hospice program for the terminally ill for most of her working life. In November she became rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Grayslake.

Raised Roman Catholic in Queens, N.Y., Tenny, who is single, left the Catholic Church during college and later "church-shopped" until she joined the Episcopal Church in her mid-30s, she said.

As for many women of her generation, "being a priest wasn't something that was in my mental vocabulary as a career option," she said.

This year, however, nearly a third of students pursuing a master's of divinity degree are female. In the 50-or-older age group, female students outnumber men.

"For many people, their second career is the career they feel most comfortable with," said Tenny, known to the children in her congregation as "Mother Claire."

"You think, `This is what I was meant to do.'"

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