The ministry is the best occupation in the world, partly because it’s the last real profession.
This may seem like an odd thesis. For one thing, a debate has run for more than a century as to whether the ministry is a profession at all. Compare the titles of two books, one I read as a seminarian long ago, James Glasse’s “Profession: Minister” (1968), and a more recent one by John Piper, “Brothers, We are Not Professionals” (2002). In an earlier post, I said that Jesus berated scribes and Pharisees as mere professionals serving institutional interests and called for a new order of “scribes trained for the kingdom.”
Theological seminaries pioneered the development of post-college professional education in the early 1800s. Donald M. Scott’s history, “From Office to Profession” (1978), shows how denominations arose as gatekeepers for the profession, ecclesiastical counterparts of state bar associations. In the late-nineteenth century, seminaries embraced the new social sciences to train ministers with technical knowledge and skill to address modern challenges. These developments aimed at preserving the ministry’s status as a “learned profession,” along with law and medicine.
Throughout American history, others insisted that ministry is a spiritual vocation for which academic training is unnecessary, even detrimental. Religious upstarts resisted vocational conceptions like both “office” and “profession.” Ironically, with their “more spiritual” posture, such ministers often adopted another model from the culture -- that of business entrepreneur with some fresh innovation to succeed in the unregulated free market of American religion.
Meanwhile, the very concept of “profession” expanded, then exploded, over the last century. Work associated with the trades or avocations of educated elites developed training and licensing programs of their own. Soon, the word was applied to anyone with special skill paid to do a job -- beginning in the early 1900s with professional baseball players.
Despite its diluted meaning in common usage, the classical sense of the word “professional” retained some validity. When teachers and social workers protest cuts in state budgets and the threatened curtailment of collective bargaining power, their actions may appear “unprofessional,” but are actually strident assertions of professional status.
A column by a physician in the “New York Times” employs the word in both its traditional and diminished meanings. The author laments the passing of medicine as a profession in the classical sense. With the advent of managed care, “Medicine is just another profession, and doctors have become like everybody else: insecure, discontented and anxious about the future.” Managed care, however, “did not create this crisis. It originated from the abandonment of ideals that made managed care necessary in the first place.” In essence, doctors became more engaged in the business of making money than in the practice of medicine.
The economics of service delivery has transformed every profession into a business and every professional into an employee. Social workers are accountable for units of service, teaching is reduced to the metrics of learning assessment, lawyers are chained to their desks by the need for billable hours, and so on. The “Times” column quotes sociologist Paul Starr that for most of the 20th century “medicine was ‘the heroic exception that sustained the waning tradition of independent professionalism.’ It is an exception whose time has expired.”
Not true. There is still the ministry.
Ministers are, to be sure, employed by local churches to fulfill certain responsibilities. We are accountable to our people to perform them diligently and well. But we enjoy extraordinary freedom in how we manage our time. Every day is different, and our days typically include half a dozen different tasks requiring different kinds of skill and wisdom. Moreover, our work is not keyed directly to those who fund our salaries. The church supports us financially so that we can minister without regard to whether those we serve give to the church or not.
This is why I call ministry “the last profession.” And the best occupation in the world.
Charles Hambrick-Stowe is pastor of the First Congregational Church, Ridgefield, Conn. He was formerly an academic dean at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.
