Divine Callings

Understanding the Call to Ministry in Black Pentecostalism

Richard N. Pitt

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814768761
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

One of the unique aspects of the religious profession is the high percentage of those who claim to be “called by God” to do their work. This call is particularly important within African American Christian traditions. Divine Callings offers a rare sociological examination of this markedly understudied phenomenon within black ministry. Richard N. Pitt draws on over 100 in-depth interviews with Black Pentecostal ministers in the Church of God in Christ — both those ordained and licensed and those aspiring — to examine how these men and women experience and pursue “the call.” Viewing divine calling as much as a social process as it is a spiritual one, Pitt delves into the personal stories of these individuals to explore their work as active agents in the process of fulfilling their calling. In some cases, those called cannot find pastoral work due to gender discrimination, lack of clergy positions, and educational deficiencies. Pitt looks specifically at how those who have not obtained clergy positions understand their call, exploring the influences of psychological experience, the congregational acceptance of their call, and their response to the training process. He emphasizes how those called reconceptualize clericalism in terms of who can be called, how that call has to be certified, and what those called are meant to do, offering insight into how social actors adjust to structural constraints.

PART I
Introduction

Introduction

And He himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.

Ephesians 4:11–12 (NKJV)

Be ready for whatever happens because it’s going to be a long journey, it’s going to be a tough journey, and it’s not going to be easy.

Jeff, Licensed Minister

Consider three professionals:

First, Adam. At thirty, Adam’s youthful indiscretions caught up with him and he was incarcerated. While in prison, Adam acquired something of a layman’s sense of the law by reading books in the prison library. He was able to gain enough rudimentary knowledge to serve as a kind of “jailhouse lawyer,” informally helping other inmates understand basic legal matters related to their sentences. It was there that he began to feel something of a call. As he describes it, “I felt a lot of pleasure in that. Not self-gratification. Purpose.” Upon his release, Adam spent his weekends volunteering at a growing neighborhood law firm. It was there that his decision to practice law matured. He approached the head of the firm with his intentions, arguing that he felt a strong pull to serve men like him: men who had made bad decisions but who deserved a second chance. Adam pursued a part-time apprenticeship in the law firm. Within a year, the head of the firm was delegating significant responsibilities to him. Three years later, Adam was named as chief operating officer at the law firm. The firm’s senior partner presents cases in court, but Adam is trusted with day-to-day mentoring and management of the firm’s lawyers. He holds a key role in the firm, yet everything he learned about law, he learned there; he’s never been to law school. Adam has only a high school diploma.

Unlike Adam, Seth received a considerable amount of formal education. As a young man he had never considered himself a particularly good student. In fact, he joked about the fears he had bringing his report card home to his well-educated parents, a high school principal and an English professor at a nearby historically black college. Upon his graduation from high school he attended the local university to pursue a degree in accounting. After some setbacks in his educational career, in his junior year he took some courses in literature and creative writing at the suggestion of his father. He was surprised at both his interest in and, even more surprisingly, his aptitude for the material. In his words, “things clicked for me there. I probably never realized how much I liked it because, I don’t know, because that’s what my parents did.” After receiving his accounting degree, Seth pursued a doctorate in English but ran into a difficult labor market. Unable to find a professorial position, he sought employment elsewhere. Three years after receiving his PhD, Seth is satisfied with managing a household electronics store, only occasionally guest-lecturing in his father’s English classes.

Eve was also well educated. Unlike the two men, she has always known what she wanted to do. Even as a young girl, her interest in medicine was clear to anyone who knew her well. No one was surprised when she ignored her father’s assertions that “women don’t make good doctors” and became a pre-med major in college. Upon graduating, she pursued a master’s degree in public health while working part-time as a medical transcriptionist. While she considered staying in the public health field, she felt that God had something different in store for her: “I began to hear a voice in my spirit. The voice said, clearly and simply, ‘heal.’” She enrolled in one of the top medical schools in the country, earning accolades from her professors for her strong work in their classes and her obvious talents with patients. She passed her exams with flying colors, scoring higher than any of the men in her cohort. Today, Eve is caring for patients as a licensed nurse-practitioner because of a long-standing belief in her religious community that only men can be physicians.

The stories of these legal, educational, and medical professionals may puzzle us because we expect professionals to have significant levels of professional training, to actively seek and gain employment in their chosen field, and to be able to be credentialed regardless of ascribed characteristics like gender. These three accounts are meant to offer insight into the unusual status of many members of a different profession: the clergy.¹ In fact, Adam, Seth, and Eve are three clergy members in the African American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Their true stories reveal a problematic set of facts for any scholar seeking to understand this vocational identity.

Adam felt a call to ministry while assisting with prison Bible studies. He is now ordained and serves as an associate minister in the COGIC. He holds this position in spite of the fact that he has never been to seminary or taken even one college course. He learned to operate in ministry under the tutelage of his church’s senior pastor. The well-educated son of a pastor, Seth received his call to ministry in college. Seminary-trained, ordained, and licensed as a church elder, he cannot find employment as a pastor or even as an associate pastor in the denomination. Instead, he works full time as a social worker, hoping a clerical opportunity will present itself. Eve has felt a call to ministry from childhood, maintaining that interest through her years in college as first a religious studies and then divinity school student. She serves as an unordained lay-minister in the denomination, which bars women from ordained leadership. She is surprisingly content with her status, indicating no interest in a higher formal position.

Even without seminary training (Adam), clerical employment (Seth), or ordination (Eve), these three ministers describe themselves as “the elect,” as “the called,” and as “clergy.” One of the black boxes plaguing religious, occupational, and identity scholarship has been the idea of a “divine calling,” which distinguishes clergy, both at the vocational level and at the identity level, from other professionals. It has become an accepted premise that people often feel a particular pull (or push?) into ministry that is different from the forces that lead people into other professions. As the theologian William Myers points out in his study of the call to ministry among some African American clergy, “This may be one of the important differences in how churches view the call as a vocation when compared to other secular vocations. Whereas one may choose—for economic or other reasons—other secular vocations, one is chosen for the ministry.”² But how do these men and women know they’re chosen? And once chosen, how do they maintain a sense of themselves as “the chosen” in the absence of the most conventional markers of the clerical identity: religious training, employment, and credentials?

This book draws on a series of more than one hundred in-depth interviews with Pentecostal African American ministers to examine how these men and women defend their identities as clergy in light of the educational deficiencies, constrained labor market, and gender discrimination that threatens both the legitimacy and the pursuit of those identities. I argue that defending unconventional expressions of an identity—in this case, the clergy—requires two activities. First, the claimant must stake a convincing claim to at least one recognizable marker of the identity. For clergy, that marker is the “call to ministry,” a phenomenon explained in great detail in this book. Second, the claimant must exploit the gaps inadvertently left in institutionalized understandings of these identities. In spite of layers of organizational meaning and mandate, enough ambiguity exists to grant these men and women the space to find their own understandings of what clergy need, what clergy do, and who clergy are.

We’ll see that ministers use the following strategies to negotiate the aforementioned structural handicaps: claiming a different source for clerical knowledge, embracing a different look and location for clerical work, and choosing to recognize a different standard for clerical legitimacy. These strategies not only produce opportunities to meaningfully inhabit the identity of a cleric, but they also produce new understandings of the forms that identity might take.

Understanding the Clergy: Why It Matters

Both scholarly and popular interest in the clergy has always been high, but lately we have seen a surge in curiosity about the clergy prompted in great part by clerical malfeasance,³ and clerical involvement in secular and political arenas.⁴ A clergy shortage in Catholicism and major mainstream Protestant denominations has served as a catalyst for another trend in scholarly examinations of the clergy. Recent books have taken readers inside churches to show how organizations that license and employ religious professionals are beginning to rethink who these professionals might be. Most book-length treatments on the question of calling reflect scholarly interest in the question of the congregational call to ministry, probing institutions to determine who can be called, what claimants are called to do, and how that call is to be certified. Most of this interest has centered on the ordination of women⁵ and the Roman Catholic Church’s formal recognition of unordained “lay-ministers.”⁶

This book emphasizes the agency of religious professionals themselves in reconceptualizing clericalism in terms of these same dynamics of “who,” what,” and “how.” This emphasis allows us to extend established scholarly approaches to understanding the clergy and the clerical identity by forcing us to reconsider (1) some methodological, definitional, and theoretical dilemmas posed by narrow preconceptions about who the clergy are, (2) what matters along the way to that identity, and (3) what we can expect to see from those who claim it. With these reconsiderations in mind, there are three questions that serve as a framework for this book. Who are the called? What is a calling? How is the called-identity defended in the absence of professional knowledge, professional employment, or professional credentials?

Who the Called Are: A Methodological Problem

Of the four characteristics—altruism, authority, autonomy, and abstract expertise—that social scientists use to separate professions from other occupations, none has survived empirical scrutiny better than the last of these: professionals’ almost monopolistic control of abstract knowledge.⁷ Many occupations require proficiency in a set of skills or procedures as a condition of entry into their trade. Both professionals and other workers in the fields of law, medicine, and divinity share this characteristic. Lawyers and paralegals must be able to draft contracts, physicians and nurses can systematically obtain medical histories, and priests and deacons serve as administrators of congregations. But what separates the professionals from what might best be described as “paraprofessionals” is the claim that the professionals have mastered a body of esoteric knowledge, knowledge to which neither clients nor paraprofessionals are privy. While medicine and law have settled on an expectation that this competence in esoteric bodies of knowledge can be gained only in formal institutions of learning, there has been and continues to be considerable disagreement about the source of this special competence for clergy. Yet, when scholars seek samples of those who are in pursuit of clerical credentials, they almost always approach what seems to be a logical source for data: seminaries and Bible colleges. This approach enables us to only partially account for the role training might play in the strength of one’s sense that one is equipped to “do ministry.”

Second, while research on religious professionals has been a staple of occupations research since the 1930s, relatively few studies have explored the subjective meaning of religious work for those who, while licensed/ordained, don’t practice their craft in pastoral offices. This book disrupts that meme by focusing on ministers who, for a host of reasons, are not serving in a pastoral or priestly office. It also explains how the “called” frame their clerical aspirations when institutional and personal characteristics hinder their access to professional positions. As licensed and ordained ministers, my respondents see themselves as much a part of the clerical “profession” as any church pastor or other presbyter. That said, very few of them currently hold or are likely to ever hold full-time pastoral appointments. Nevertheless, they maintain a vocational identity even as they express it in what a scholarly observer might perceive as avocational behavior. Adding these voices to the literature affords us a better understanding of the way in which clerical identity might inhabit a different space from other professional identities, as something other than just a vocational or occupational title.

Finally, previous research on what I term “new clericalism” suffers from a too-narrow focus on the issue of ordaining and placing women in full-time clerical positions. While ultimately feminist in its origins, this line of inquiry privileges paid labor as work in a way that countermands a feminist theory of labor, one that seeks to include unpaid labor and labor not located exclusively in the public sphere as part of our understanding of work. Much of this emphasis is based on the essentialist assumption that all male clergy either work or seek work as paid professionals and, therefore, so must all women who are drawn to religious labor. This book overcomes the problematic tendency of much feminist scholarship on the clergy to assume a priori that discrimination in terms of ordination processes denies women in some denominations access to both the work and the status of clergy. With rich empirical data on the thoughts and experiences of women who are called to, operating in, but not formally ordained for, ministry, we find empirical support for claims that meaningful variation exists in how women make sense of, justify, and value other approaches to religious labor.

What a Calling Is: A Definitional Problem

In his classic definition of the call to ministry, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr speaks of the call as a “secret.” Niebuhr, best known for his serenity prayer, describes the call as “that inner persuasion or experience whereby a person feels himself directly summoned or invited by God to take up the work of the ministry.”⁸ This call is not the general call to discipleship that all Christians might claim or the ecclesiastical (or congregational) call that serves to confirm, rather than initiate, one’s belief that they are to engage in the work of the ministry.⁹ The “secret call” is a crisis moment where the response is unrelated to the promise of either future benefits (e.g., eternal life) or current ones (e.g., a paycheck). Instead, the response should be one of obedience and a spirit of duty to God—the source of the charge. Is this an accurate picture of a call? What are people called to do? What form do these callings take?

How one finds entry into ministry as a vocation and what one understands that vocation to be is as much a sociological question as a theological one. In the stories that people tell about how they came to be “chosen” for this particular vocation—a story that few people outside of a religious context ever feel compelled to share—can be found a description of and an accounting for the social action and social identity that is born from this experience. A phenomenological perspective suggests that religious communities are embedded in the common everyday society, but that they have their own meanings, which are not shared by other people and other circumstances. This idea of a calling to a kind of labor (i.e., ministry) may be both defined by and limited to this social microcosm.

Most Protestant denominations affirm the idea that there must be a specific encounter with God that leads people to devote their lives to ministry. This moment, the “call to ministry,” is essential to many ministers’ beliefs that they are legitimate vessels for God’s work. Unlike ordination processes, which are explicitly social in nature, call-experiences are almost always described as a personal journey where the only other participant is God. Most studies of Protestant clergy recognize that the call-to-ministry is an important part of the credentialing process, but they tend to gloss over it, focusing instead on the more easily analyzed institutional processes. Yet this moment is the foundation for everything that follows it. The call-experience is more than a catalyst for the pursuit of a professional credential; it is an essential plank in the argument for legitimacy, especially when other more verifiable evidence is in short supply. Therefore, comprehending the call-experience is a critical component of understanding its impact on both the decision to pursue and the decision to embrace a ministerial identity.

How a Called Identity Is Derived and Defended: A Theoretical Problem

As a graduate student, I taught undergraduate courses. In order to make a point about the power of expectations and symbols, I would occasionally come to the first day of class dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sit near the back of the sixty-student classroom, notebook open, and wait for students to file in. We’d sit there for the customary ten-minute window that students have been primed to wait, and then I’d watch as the first few students looked around and started making their way to the exits. On...