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Little Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches that once constituted the community's memory and anchored its values have been swallowed up by the religious Wal-Marts of this age. More and more consumers are being served by fewer and fewer clerks. While many ministers still confess to satisfying relationships in their parishes, 74 percent of them say their biggest problem is communicating the gospel to their very own culture. From Witham's book we learn that ten percent of the clergy report persistent depression, 67 percent are either obese by medical standards or overweight, four in ten acknowledge "inappropriate sexual behavior for a minister," and another four in ten have "doubted their call." Nearly a third have "considered leaving."
Witham peppers the reader with lively analyses of Catholic priests, women in ministry, Baptists, burnout, and purpose-driven churches. Like a good journalist, he does so without allowing his own agenda to intrude. In his introduction he promises only to take "a descriptive look at ministerial variety." The absence of a thesis turns out to be both a strength and a weakness. To impose a plot on the chaos of American religious life might have been viewed as a falsification; yet a plot is what we crave in order to understand the ministry as something more than a succession of vexing issues. For all the richness of their data, the landmark sociological studies of religion, such as Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart or Jeffrey Hadden's The Gathering Storm in the Churches, achieve greatness by coming clean with a plot. It may be an imperfect or controversial thesis they present, but their willingness to risk an argument poses a genuine challenge to the reader and creates a greater possibility for dialogue.
At the other end of the spectrum from Witham's carefully researched study is the Seay family's conversation on pastoral ministry. It nicely supplements Witham's statistics with a "for instance" drawn from the personal experiences of three Baptist preachers. The book is a quick read with big print, a lot of annoying head-shots of the participants, too much banter, and too many incomplete thoughts. Which is to say it would have benefited from some disciplined editing. And yet, if you listen carefully to what the three preachers are saying, you can discern some important changes and tensions within the evangelical ministry. The grandfather, Papa, talks about how expectations for ministry have changed. His comments provide evidence of the shift from what he calls "hard" preaching to the teaching-sermon so prevalent in contemporary evangelicalism. He also traces the evolution of worship from old-fashioned hymns to the entertainment-style praise service and to sanctuaries so littered with amplifiers, speakers, and mixers that they look more like Wayne and Garth's basement than houses of worship.
The tensions are most vividly revealed in Dad's hardline approach to homosexuals in his church and his son Chris' loving outreach to them in his Ecclesia, an experimental community of Christians in Houston's inner city. Dad (Ed Seay) draws heavily on James Dobson's "war" on homosexuality and understands a welcoming attitude toward gays as the moral equivalent of the reintroduction of slavery. Dad's sons, Chris and Brian, reject that analogy, as well as Dobson's notion that the church requires a morally purified culture in order to preach the gospel successfully. As much as Papa, Dad, and Chris differ on many specific issues, they hold in common both a sense of loss and a profound sense of hope for the church's ministry. They pose superficial questions to be sure, such as, what kind of music do seekers really want to hear, but they also wrestle with P. T. Forsyth's deeper dilemma: how is the Christian gospel to take its age seriously?
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