Notes
from the Field…
Reaching
the “Tipping Point”: Fostering a
Culture of the Call in the United Methodist Church
David McAllister-Wilson
“How Little
Things Can Make a Big Difference.” The subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The
Tipping Point,[1] describes a
certain kind of change. A system has
reached a “tipping point” when: movement is dramatic instead of gradual, the
force is contagious behavior, and little changes produce big effects. Tipping points depict everything from
Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium to the jump in sales of Hush Puppies
in 1995.
Why
should seminaries be interested in tipping points? Because we sense the need for systemic change: we are all boats
lowering on the ebbing tide of mainline Protestantism; we experience the
growing disenfranchisement of graduate theological education; we are small
institutions who yet believe we serve the church in a big way. And because we feel the church is, itself,
approaching a tipping point as the gradual erosion of money and members becomes
an avalanche into a generational gap of retiring clergy and empty pews.
What can
seminaries do to turn the tide? We
prepare men and women who master the subjects of divinity. The faculty
assembled for that purpose provide scholarship. As we put it, “we provide the leadership of the church and we are
a theological resource for the church.”
The problem is it hasn’t worked or hasn’t been sufficient. During the 20th century, the
graph of the line showing the increase of the M.Div. as the standard for
leadership crosses the line showing the decrease in membership. There may be no causal link. But even if we can convince the church that
we are not part of the problem, it is difficult to show how we can be part of
the solution.
It is no comfort that
theological educators have been studying this issue for some time. From Robert L. Kelly’s, Theological
Education in America published in 1924,[2]
to Daniel Day Williams, James M. Gustafson, and H.
Richard Niebuhr’s study in 1956,[3]
and Warren Deem’s work in the late 1960s, culminating in Edward Farley’s Theologia
in 1983,[4]
all have observed the decline of the church and its ministry and have been
increasingly pessimistic in their predictions, and radical in their proposals
for systemic change.
At Wesley Theological
Seminary, we began our own soul-searching in the late 1980s. The faculty studied Farley’s book and we had
established a dialogue with the leadership of the four surrounding United
Methodist annual conferences. Our
attention focused on the presenting symptom of the church’s disease: the
decline in the number and quality of candidates for ordained ministry.
Ultimately, our 1997
strategic plan set the course for a major change in institutional
direction. The plan proclaims: “Our
vision is to play a key role in the revitalization of the church in our region
as we move into the new millennium.”
Two of the four goals of that plan required some sort of systemic
change: “to strengthen our relationship with the church,” and “to enlist high
quality candidates for ministry.” These
goals were the basis for Wesley’s proposal to The Lilly Endowment.
It is strangely
appropriate that our effort is being funded by The Lilly Endowment because much
of the literature describing systemic change draws on analogies to the
medicinal arts. Gladwell himself uses
the phenomenon of an epidemic both as an example and as a primary metaphor to
describe the development of tipping points.
In our case, the
infectious agent is a phrase: “culture of the call.” Over several years of
research, we determined that one of the reasons young people are no longer
entering the ministry is they are not being encouraged to do so. In the past, the church fostered its future
leadership in Sunday School, in worship, at summer camp, and in college. Now, the church had stopped talking about
the “call” to ministry. In order to
describe the remedy, we borrowed from contemporary language about “corporate
culture” and proposed to “seek systemic change by first re-instituting a culture of the call in the church to
encourage men and women to consider their call seriously.”
Tracing the spread of
this phrase in the denominational programs, we see a small example of the
tipping point phenomenon, which may be useful to others in contemplating how a
seminary can effect change in the church. Gladwell describes “three rules of
the Tipping Point” which help categorize the forces at work in our programs:
the “Power of Context,” the “Law of the Few,” and the “Stickiness Factor.”
The first rule to
consider is the “Power of Context:” “epidemics are sensitive to the conditions
and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” The primary context for our work was set by
the 1996 and 2000 General Conferences of The United Methodist Church.
The 1996 General
Conference produced several significant changes in the process of
ordination. The candidacy process was
made more rigorous and the length of time spent in candidacy was lengthened
such that a student now has to graduate from seminary before becoming a
probationary member of the annual conference, and must spend at least three
years in that state before ordination.
This means that seminary students, who were often under the care of
conference boards of ordained ministry, are now under the jurisdiction of the
local district committees on ordained ministry. The distinction is important because it means that Wesley, which
once saw its chief partners to be the four surrounding conference boards, now
has 38 local district committees with which to relate.
Wesley took advantage of
this new context in the design of our culture of the call programs. We implemented a three-year study of the
culture of the call working with the district committees of the Central
Pennsylvania Annual Conference. The
study gathers information on how candidates are being identified and
encouraged. The data is interesting,
but equally important has been the way the study connected district committees
together, and they with the seminary.
This study model is now being made available to other conferences. Wesley also designed a web-based program for
the continuing education component of the new probationary process which is now
being used by several annual conferences.
The changes in the
ordination process occurred in the context of a long debate in the church about
the meaning of ordination and the status of ordained clergy relative to other
forms of ministry. The 1996 General
Conference established a separate and
distinct order of deacon and created a structure to strengthen the vocational
identity of the deacons and the elders. An educational requirement for the
order of deacon opened up the potential for a new market for graduate
theological education. But perhaps the
most significant effect is that our whole connectional system is working out
the new philosophy and the new programs associated with ordination. (And it now seems the debate will
continue.) This means that seminary
personnel are in demand as consultants and service providers.
These debates about the
ordering of ministry are themselves symptoms of the larger issue: the
widespread perception in the church that something is fundamentally wrong. The political class of United Methodism is
characterized by a psychology of decline.
The 2000 General Conference evidenced two manifestations of that
psychology. First was the highly
publicized and ongoing fracture over the issue of the ordination of
homosexuals. The second was an
ambitious proposal, ultimately defeated, to re-organize the denomination.
The power of this psychological
context cannot be overlooked. As Wesley
began to unroll our programs to foster a culture of the call, we were working
within the context of a demoralized denomination facing a shortage of clergy
because our young people are no longer entering the ministry. We encountered leaders at every level from
every political faction who desperately wanted to change the subject and find
some new way to conceptualize the issues and attack the problem.
All of these
developments in The United Methodist Church created the necessary context for
tipping point change. They established
lines of communications – “vectors,” to use the language of contagion – and a
heightened degree of susceptibility to our message about the culture of the
call.
The second of Gladwell’s
rules to consider is “The Law of the Few:” “Any kind of social epidemic is
heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set
of social gifts.” Gladwell describes
three kinds of people who accelerate a message through a complex system:
“connectors,” who are in positions to connect smaller conversations with larger
ones; “mavens,” who collect and actively pass on new ideas; and “salesmen,” who
have the ability to persuade others.
Each of these types can be implicated in the spread of the culture of
the call.
The United Methodist
Church prides itself on being a “connectional system” with carefully proscribed
committees and functionaries. In our
project, the newly enhanced responsibilities of the district committees made
those groups particularly important “connectors,” who have adopted the language
of the culture of the call. Also,
Conference Boards of Ordained Ministry invite us to consultations on the new
processes of ordination, providing us quality time with key clergy connectors.
Equally important are a
variety of mavens and salesmen who travel throughout the connectional system
like bees pollinating a field of flowers.
In the way one traces a piece of mail through the postal system, we have
been able to identify the relatively few people (consistent with Gladwell’s
model) who were responsible for spreading the use of the phrase “culture of the
call.” There have been several bishops, a couple of administrators from other
seminaries, a conference lay leader, some college chaplains, a fundraising
consultant, several chairs of conference enlistment committees, and a
denominational agency executive. In all
these cases, their occupational position was helpful, but the important factor
was their individual interest in the concept and their personal tendency to
“gossip” an idea.
Congregations can be
important connectors, mavens, and salespeople.
The net decline in the denomination hides the fact that many
congregations are thriving and growing.
These congregations are trees showing the promise of bearing fruit and
who are already sending people into ordained ministry. Consequently, Wesley has established a
“Partner Church Program” whose primary aim is to foster the culture of the
call. We have prepared a video,
liturgical resources, and response devices to assist churches in the conduct of
a “Ministry Sunday.” Our targets are
those few in every congregation who can act as Eli in the lives of others. We say that the call to ministry is a
“voice-activated system,” and that a responsibility of each generation is to
encourage potential leaders in the next generation to consider their call to
ministry.
Finally, in order to
reach high school-aged people, Wesley has partnered with Salt ‘n Light Youth
Ministry, a small team of dedicated specialists in youth ministry who have a
tremendous multiplier effect through their training of youth workers, their
rallies and special events, and their leadership in summer camps. They now emphasize God’s call to ministry
in all of their programs.
All of these
programmatic initiatives meet two of the conditions in Gladwell’s prescription
for reaching a tipping point: they follow the natural grain of the context, and
they target the few who can leverage the efforts of a small staff. His third rule has less to do with
programming and more to do with the nature of the message: “The Stickiness
Factor.” Here, the most helpful analogy
is to advertising, where the question is, “what will stick in the mind of the
consumer to form an association with the product?” As Gladwell says, “Ideas have to be memorable and move us into
action.”
The phrase “culture of
the call” is sticky. No doubt, part of
its appeal is the simple alliteration.
It gains currency from contemporary interest in “culture” as a
sociological concept. The “catchiness”
of a phrase is critical for reaching a tipping point because it must be easily
transmitted by a number of people from a few connectors.
“Culture of the call” is
also a serviceable title for a speech or sermon because it is iconic: both the
word “culture” and “call” can be unpacked with meanings stored neatly in a
phrase. To put it another way, culture
of the call will preach. We benefited
from the fact that our context relies heavily on the spoken word, transmitted
by people who are ravenous for talking points and memorable phrases.
With Gladwell’s three
factors accounted for, did we, in fact, reach a “tipping point?” Our only real evidence is anecdotal. The people that talk with us are
enthusiastic about the concept and ask about the programs. Many of those now contacting us did not hear
the phrase from us, and some are unaware that we were the source. When we hear the phrase second and third hand,
we realize that the thing has taken on a life of its own, a critical indicator
of the tipping point phenomenon.
Recalling that a
seminary’s mission is twofold, to prepare the leadership of the church and to
be a theological resource for the church, we are gratified with our success on
two levels. First, we have identified
many people in the course of the last three years who are now thinking about
ordained ministry because of our work.
But we are also pleased that we were able to be a theological resource
for the church by helping to change the terms of the conversation about the
“clergy supply crisis.”
“Call” language is
theological language and has proven to be a useful antidote to the tendency to
talk about ministry as “job” and “profession.”
Consider, for instance, the ecclesiology implied in the phrase “culture
of the call,” which suggests the work of the Holy Spirit and the abundance of
God’s grace. By contrast, a document
recently produced by one of our denominational offices defined the clergy
shortage as “rusty pipelines.” As
Methodists, we believe in the active work of God’s sanctifying grace. In a post-Christian environment, use of the
language and logic of grace is an important means of grace and providing that
language is a particularly appropriate role for the seminary. It has been part of our contribution to the recovery
of “theologia.”
At the same time, we
recognize that this was not a controlled experiment. There are other forces of renewal at work in the church, many of
them now using call language. What is
undeniable is that the program has changed Wesley’s position within the
church. Because we were able to change
the subject, Wesley is now seen as part of the solution to the problems facing
the denomination. That itself was a tipping
point in the reputation of the institution.
Therefore, this project
may be useful to other seminaries as they consider change strategies in the
life of the church. But there is a
final word of caution. We often use
another metaphor from chemistry to describe the role of the seminary in the
life of the Body of Christ when we speak of being a “catalyst.” A catalyst is an agent that instigates a
significant chemical reaction but which is not itself changed or depleted in
the process. That metaphor of the
catalyst is not completely accurate in our case because we have been changed in
the course of the “treatment” and we must now wrestle with the question of
whether we can support the changes necessary to continue to nurture the culture
of the call.