Ministry Study Recommends End to Guaranteed Clergy Appointment

March 27, 2012

2:44 PM

United Methodist News Service Photo by Mike DuBose

Williams Choi Gearhart

The Revs. Jay Williams, Tom Choi and Amy Gearhart (left to right) listen during a panel discussion about clergy effectiveness at The United Methodist Church's pre-General Conference news briefing at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida in January 2012. They are members of the Ministry Study Commission.

This United Methodist News Service story was originally published in 2010. It has been edited to reflect the passage of time.

A United Methodist commission charged with developing ways to improve clergy effectiveness has recommended the elimination of guaranteed appointments.

In a joint meeting in 2010 with the Committee on Faith and Order, members of the Ministry Study Commission raised concerns about the practice of promising some clergy lifetime jobs.

“We decided that the system of guaranteed appointments has created mediocrity, an expectation that clergy will have a job no matter how effective they are and that churches will get a pastor even if they are not functioning in a healthy way or participating in living missionally,” said the Rev. Amy Gearhart, an elder in the Missouri Annual (regional) Conference and a commission member.

The ministry commission and the Committee on Faith and Order met and shared their work as both prepare reports for the 2012 General Conference, the top legislative body of the denomination.

The joint meeting was to share and get “push back” on some of the issues both groups are grappling with, said Bishop Alfred Gwinn, chair of the ministry study group.

The Committee on Faith and Order was given leadership in reflecting on matters of faith, doctrinal teaching, order and discipline in the church.

The ministry commission has named the major issues they are working on “big rocks.” The team is focusing on recruitment, discernment and formation for professional ministry; ordination and sacramental authority; and clergy appointments.

“We want to concentrate on the big rocks in the jar and not get overloaded with the sand and small rocks,” Gwinn said.

Historically, biblically and theologically, The United Methodist Church has practiced itineration, Gearhart said. Having bishops assign clergy to churches has been a tradition in United Methodism dating back to John Wesley.

However, clergy need to understand itinerancy is not something they do in exchange for a guaranteed appointment to a church, she said.

“We have heard pastors say, ‘I will give you the practice of itinerating my family and my life and my household if you give me a guaranteed appointment.’”

The two are not meant to be used against each other, she said.

“Itinerancy is effective and a response to covenantal obedience to a particular call from God,” she said. “Itinerancy is not just about moving.”

The Rev. Jay Williams of the New York Annual (regional) Conference said the church’s fear of not having enough young clergy and the assumption of guaranteed appointments also has resulted in a cumbersome and often lengthy process to entering ministry.

“The 2004 and 2008 General Conferences have done strong work in streamlining the process so we are already under way,” he said. “I personally have experienced that the process is extraordinarily difficult to navigate. Even with my extensive and intimate knowledge, it is still too difficult.”

There needs to be a paradigm shift to a "culture of call" during the candidacy stage, he added. “We need to deploy those who are called into ordination quickly.”

Ministry Study Commission Report

Kathy Gilbert writes for United Methodist News Service in Nashville, Tenn.

Comments (1)

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An Episcopal Polity Cannot Live without Guaranteed Appointment

What has been neglected in all this discussion is the reality of economic necessity. A clergy who is left without an appointment, but told that if he can hold on for another year (or two), "there might be" an appointment for him/her, has to survive. So does his/her family. Such a clergy, who took a vow to devote his/her life to serving Christ and the church, will do one of two things: take a secular job, or start hustling to get a call to a church with a Congregational form of polity. If s/he does the latter, and his/her bishop subsequently says "I have an appointment for you," what is in it for that clergy to take that appointment and put his/her family back into the realities of itineracy again? Likewise, a church which is angry at its Bishop, or which loses its pastor but is asked to wait until Annual Conference to get anything more than a string of weekly pulpit supplies, will quickly learn that there are unemployed, members-of-Annual-Conference clergy out there. They could simply decide to hire one, ostensibly on a "temporary" basis, and then refuse to accept a new appointment the Bishop might offer, because they like the pastor they chose.
It would not take very long for the time to develop in which those whom a Bishop wants to appoint will not take appointments, so they don't go through the risk of unemployment created by lack of a guaranteed appointment, and for churches to decide that they can look for "free agent" clergy to be their pastors.
Does anyone remember the "third restrictive rule" in our church constitution, the one that says we can do nothing that will destroy our form of Episcopacy? If ever there were anything that would create such a destruction, the lack of a guaranteed appointment would be it.
Guaranteed appointment is the price we pay to allow Bishops to try to appoint the kind of clergy with the gifts and graces needed by any particular local church, so that church can carry on with its ministry without the one to two year wait endured by churches on a "call" system with a congregational polity. Guaranteed appointment is the flip side of the same coin as having an appointment system. Economic necessity, if nothing else, creates that link.
The sad thing is that those who wish to do away with guaranteed appointment think this will be a way to weed out "ineffective pastors." There already is a way to do that, and it is being done in one or two conferences: Administrative Location procedures. I've done 20 of those in the last 3.5 years in my Annual Conference (California-Pacific) as defense advocate. We've worked out win-win solutions for church and clergy, in every case.
What it takes is to have bishops and superintendents willing to gird their loins and to file complaints, with the understanding that issues can and should be worked out. It is the fear of the hierarchy to file complaints that allows the retention of "ineffective clergy."
Why should all clergy have to pay the risk and price of their fear?

Tom Griffith more than 12 years ago