From a pastor-friend:

Hi Rowland,

Putting this questiont to you because I believe you have some experience in the area…

Do you know the figure for the current number of ex-clergy and a feel for how many of them are “ex” because of negative treatment by a congregation?

Just curious,

~~~

My response:

First, semantics: for various denominations ‘ex-clergy’ and ‘ex-pastors’ are not the same. You can have a Baptist ex-pastor, but Anglicans and Catholics do not revoke a clergyman’s license (unless in very unusual situations they’re very mad/bad, and even then…)

How many people were in parish/pastoral ministry, and remunerated for it, and who are now doing something else – driving trucks, doing cross-cultural missionary work, teaching in seminaries, having a break, contemplating suicide etc. etc.? About the same number as there are clergy licensed to be marriage celebrants and who serve in a local church/parish… When we started John Mark Ministries there were 10,000 of each. See the URL below to see how I arrived at that figure… Don’t know the latest statistics – but it would be roughly 1:1 still – maybe 13,000 of each.

‘Negative treatment by congregations’? That’s a complex call to make. If a pastor does something like defraud people in the church financially, and subsequently had his ‘license’ to practise as a pastor revoked, and the congregation, say, mutinied, could you say the folks engaged in – your words – ‘negative treatment’? Sure.

However, (and I’m thinking of a particular case here of a Baptist Church in another state), if a ‘permission-withholder’ in the church did not like something the pastor preached and labeled him a heretic, and visited everyone in the congregation and convinced enough of them to have him voted out…. ‘negative treatment’? Sure.

I have hundreds of stories, but most of them are shades of grey between these two black-and-white situations.

See http://jmm.org.au/articles/8061.htm for my rationale about the number of ex-pastors, and http://jmm.org.au/catalog/section/xp1.htm for 91 articles on the subject! (Get some sleep 🙂

Rowland Croucher