The obvious one is that very nearly half of the clergy are over 55 years old. If a significant portion of those folks take 30 year early retirement, that could cause a serious drop in the number of active clergy. On the other hand, fewer and fewer congregations can afford full-time clergy.

There is still a substantial lack of clergy under 35. That lack hasn't changed in more than a decade.

The similarity in distribution is interesting, but troubling in light of the gender inequity when looking across the ranks (and associated salaries). However, 66.6% of clergy are male and 33.3% are female. 82% of senior clergy are male and 66.5% of solo clergy are male. In the associate/assistant ranks, the numbers are about equal. (See Table 3).

So, we have not achieved gender equity as yet.

Regarding gender and salaries there's not enough information to tell why the wage gap exists. Is it that congregations pay women less (or don't hire them for better paying jobs), or is it because women and men both have choices and women choose jobs that don't pay as well but have offsetting benefits they tend to value more than men?

Gender equality? How about quality clergy that live out the Gospel in public and private, be it a man or a woman...gees...

I believe this age distribution is not like university faculty or government employees. The high proportion of older clergy includes a lot of people who heard, or who responded to, a call later in life.

Of the people over 55, I would bet that a greater proportion of the women than of the men are second career people, partly because many of these women, in their youth, found or felt the priesthood to be off limits for them.

So I wonder what the data would look like if we could include years since ordination as another variable.

One thing to note: people enter ordained ministry in their 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, so you're always adding more to the older pool, if that makes sense. If you were ordained in your 20's, you become one of those older clergy; the ones in their 50's may be brand new.

Each age range almost doubles the number of clergy, it looks like: from 7(ish) to 14(ish) to 28(ish)...no insight into that; I just find it interesting. Adding to my comment above, I'd love to see that tracked alongside how many of those in each bracket had been ordained while in the younger cohort vs. how many were newer ordinands.

I do wish there were more information on why the disparity in pay for male and female clergy. It's depressing as all get-out, looking at it, that's for sure.

Laura Toepfer

The wage disparity is because women are paid less across the board - even in positions of similar responsibility- if they can even get an interview for the job. They will take marginal paid positions and rarely advocate for higher salary. The reason is sexism. And it is worse in the church than in any other segment of society. The only place you can still exercise your prejudice and not be taken to court.

Gender equality? How about quality clergy

Why in the world, Richard J, would you look at that as an Either/Or?

JC Fisher

Putting on my statistical pointy hat:

If we assume that the flow of people is constant, then we get some interesting results. First, the men: 15% are ordained before age 35, 13% in the next decade, 33% in the next decade, and 39% over age 55. The message in that is very clear: the clergy is not a first career, by and large.

The pattern for the women is more exaggerated: 15% again before age 35, 9% in the next decade, 38% in the next, and 38% over 55. Again, there's that second career thing, but here we can see the difference between the sexes most strongly: the percent of men ordained in the 35-45 range is 50% higher than that of the women, but the women catch up with the men in the 45-55 range. The obvious speculations are that (a) women don't get ordained when there are youngish children in the house, and/or (b) women resist abandoning their careers at this stage of life more than men do.

How much of this is policy-directed, in one manner or another, is a good question. The dimorphism in numbers of senior clergy is, I would guess, explained partly by the ramp-up in ordination of women, but also by the tendency of women to be ordained later. The difference in compensation for similar positions is more puzzling, especially as to why there isn't a difference at the curate level. My suspicion is that there is some other difference that allows vestries to come up with different numbers. (For instance, why are assistants in Province VI paid so poorly?) I find the age numbers more interesting for what they say about the attitudes newly ordained clergy bring with them.

Sure is a lot of speculation based on little statistical evidence. What is gender equity? 50% men, 50% women? How much more do men make than women for similar positions? Has any diocese ever lowered its bishop's salary because it elected a woman rather than a man? Or are averages skewed because, there still being more men, more men hold higher paying positions such as bishop, dean, and rector? Seems we need a lot more information and fewer agendas.

What I find interesting is that it is not just that nearly 50% of active clergy are over 55 but that 79.4% are 45 and up. I wonder how many of these 79.4% were born before 1960 making them of the Boomer generation. I would guess a larger portion of those between 45-55 are 50-55 than 45-50, meaning there are even more pending retirements coming.

I would suggest, as I have for many years, that we have absolutely dropped the ball in recruiting young vocations. Gone are the days when someone is ordained bishop with 25+ years of parish ministry experience. I don't know hard numbers on this, but I know several bishops that were ordained having less than 10 years of ordained life under their belt.

Another issue has to do with seminary professors. It is virtually impossible for someone over 40 to go to seminary, then serve a parish, then go and get a PhD or ThD, and then serve as a professor in one of our seminaries. There simply isn't time.

A final issue is compensation. It costs a whole lot less (obviously) to have a priest under 35 than it does to have a priest over 45.

I would argue that it is time for Bishops, COMs, parish clergy, laity, and all of us to actively recruit the brightest and best young people under 30 to be clergy in our church and back away from the "waiting for 2nd career folks to present themselves" model.

Tangentially, it is likely most useful with the male vs. female ratio in these numbers to look at the percentages of males and females in seminary. When I graduated some 11 years ago now, numbers were equal of male and female in seminary as I recall. Now that doesn't speak to deployment, but it does say something important about what the percentages of male and female clergy should be in the not too distant future.

The Rev. Sean Ferrell

Sean: Good points. The difficulty is that if you recruit "young vocations," you may very well not have jobs for those folks when the leave seminary, so (in the current model) it is a difficult "sell" to say "We'd like you to go through the (often challenging) ordination process, pull up stakes, spend three years in seminary, but we have no idea whether we'll have any sort of position available when you graduate. In fact, odds are we won't, or we'll stick you in a small, rural congregation that can barely afford you." Gee, where can I sign up?!

One key thing: we have no model for training, deploying, and supporting bi-vocational clergy. Whatever skills I had prior to seminary are WELL out of date by now, so there is a huge gulf between my ability to get a secular job before seminary and my ability to do anything besides full-time ministry now. If that continues to be the case, and the job situation doesn't get better, we are essentially training people for unemployment or underemployment. Been there, done that. No fun.

Tom and Sean both have good points. Thank you to Sean for a strong support of young vocations. I certainly experienced some significant push-back due to age in both the ordination and the BCC processes. Typically, I was asked why I was rushing so much, why I had hurried everything along. In response, I can only wonder why God called me as young as I was. God calls when he calls. Sorry, guys, not my fault!

However, Tom's point is excellent. We do a very poor job of supporting bi-vocational clergy. It IS extremely painful to go through all those years of discernment and school and then get to a "lack of jobs" state. I'm very lucky to have my BCC so I can work in parish or chaplain positions; but the sacrifices I made were tremendous. I would not wish the last three years of my professional life on most of my colleagues. On the bright side, there are some awesome, energetic, young priests hiding out here in CPE residencies. The "regular jobs" that get these people as they graduate will be lucky places, indeed.

I wish I had easy answers, but sadly, I don't. I have ideas for what we could implement. I think we could make great strides, but I also think it would take a close collaboration between local and national church offices.

Peace,

Betsy Tesi