Bishop Scott Barker on Curacy Programs Past & Present

In the latest episode of Crossings Conversations, we spoke with the Rt. Rev. J. Scott Barker, bishop of the Diocese of Nebraska and recently announced nominee to the slate for 28th presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. The interview was part of our reporting for the upcoming Crossings cover feature "Early Returns: CDSP-funded curates already adding new life in new roles."

Bishop Barker spoke to us about the clergy shortage in the Episcopal Church, formation models and spiritual priorities for early-career priests, and his excitement about the CDSP curacy program and its potential impact for students from his diocese.

Transcript

Kyle: This is Kyle Oliver at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and I am here with Bishop Scott Barker, who is in his 13th year of service as the Diocesan Bishop of Nebraska. He is a native Nebraskan, and has worked in the Episcopal Church his whole adult life, and so really excited to have this conversation about the CDSP Curacy Program and thinking more broadly about just some of the trends for Episcopal Church leadership that we're seeing right now. Bishop Barker, welcome to the show. 

Bp. Barker: Thanks, Kyle. I am delighted to be with you. 

Kyle: Great. Yes, actually, let's dive in that bigger-picture way, so I'll start with some scene setting. I think it's fair to say we've been hearing a lot recently about a possible clergy shortage, a definite clergy shortage, at least some challenges associated with getting the right candidates connected with the right congregations, according to the sort of wide range of needs that congregations have, different settings, different budgets, all the rest. To start with, I guess I would just want to know, how are you in Nebraska viewing the current clergy deployment situation in Nebraska, and maybe, more broadly, in your role as a bishop of the church? 

Bp. Barker: Great question, and a really hot topic. Yes, you have heard and read of the data that tell the tale of a clergy shortage, and I would affirm that it is real. We have fewer seminarians graduating than we do folks retiring. There is less mobility among the ranks of clergy. The average age of clergy is much older than it used to be. There are other factors too, but for those reasons and a variety of others, there are fewer priests than there are cures in the continental U.S. anyway, and it's just getting more and more and more challenging to find folks who are a good fit for parishes. 

To bring that into bold relief, very recently, in fact, we have an active opening at a cardinal parish in Nebraska in the city of Lincoln, and this was among our largest and most healthy parishes. It's a full-time job with a real staff, a beautiful building, a fantastic congregation. 

Kyle: Cool town. 

[crosstalk] 

Bp. Barker: Nebraska university town, right? It's got absolutely everything going for it. That position has been open for some months now, and we have had a single applicant. That is unprecedented in our experience, but it appears that that's a harbinger of what's to come. For some long time, we've had trouble finding folks who were great matches for half-time jobs and quarter-time jobs and jobs in small places, which can be its own unique challenges, but to have a cardinal parish in a big city that has everything going for it, have a single person apply, is new, and I think it's representative of what's to come. 

I would add one thing about all that, which is that, so the question of discernment on the parish side is changed pretty dramatically. If you're getting very few candidates, then understanding how to be prayerful and discerning in making the decision about who should serve becomes really tricky. If you're getting one candidate at a time, so you have no pool to compare to, that's a tougher, I suppose, more deeply prayerful row to hoe than what was happening just a few years back, where even most any parish could expect a pretty good pool of candidates from which to choose. 

Bp. Barker:  I often say that the future of the Episcopal Church is incarnate in places like Nebraska, where we're far from some of the tradition and the structures of the coasts, where there is more money, there are seminaries, there's a deeper history, there are more Episcopalians. 

Some of the structures of the church are still in relatively healthy shape, whereas in a place like Nebraska, the future of the church actually arrived some time ago, and a lot of the things that can be relied upon to help steer what's been our normal course are disappearing. It's not all bad by any means, but we are having to find new ways to be the church in real-time. This is one of the areas where great change is happening right now. 

Kyle: Yes, wow. You mentioned that there's this new mode of discernment that's necessary in a congregational level. In your position as the bishop, how are you thinking about ways of responding to all this? Have you had any approaches to this that have been bearing fruit? 

Bp. Barker: We're trying a variety of things, some of which are more technical fixes to try to help in the moment. Some of it arguably a little bit more adaptive to try to map out the unknown future. We do have a seminary alternative in Nebraska, the Bishop Kemper School that we've been part of for the better part of a decade. That's fantastic formation, especially for folks who aren't going to make a paid career in ministry, and aren't necessarily expecting to serve in a full-time cure. That's, it's a very localized formation for diaconal and priestly and lay ministry that's attuned to the nuances of life in the middle of the country, our politics, our geography, our churchpersonship. 

That is one way that we're finding great people and preparing them well to serve, especially in small and remote congregations. It's a little bit of the future stumbling to meet the past as we're trying new patterns of church service around ministries where we're collaborating and cooperating, sometimes among multiple Episcopal parishes to put together a really cool job for a person and get parishes well-served, sometimes working across ecumenical borders. We do a lot of work with the ELCA here in Nebraska. That goes beautifully, and we will push the limits to work with other pastors and denominations with whom we might not be in full communion, but we still find we can do great ministry and even shared leadership together. That's a piece. 

We're certainly considering pushing the bounds in terms of lay leadership, and I'm certainly one of those people who says and believes that the future of the Episcopal Church is lay-led and clergy-supported. Our folks in Nebraska have a strong hunger to participate in communion and receive the Eucharist regularly. That's very clear. Priestly ministry continues to be important, but imagining ways to distribute communion that's been reserved from a more traditional sacramental setup and distributed to a wide variety of places is one of the kinds of things we're looking at. 

There's lots more. There's almost nothing that we're not willing to try and experiment with in this moment, and I really feel like we are standing in a moment where we have this wonderful inherited past that's full of beautiful treasure. We have an unknown future that is exciting, and it's where we're headed for sure, and we are just right on the tipping point. We don't know what's going to last from what we've inherited. We don't know what's going to open up by way of what's to come, and it feels like a moment to be deeply prayerful, really brave about personal discipleship, and to be brave about trying different kinds of things to see what works. 

Kyle: Yes. Thank you for that big-picture view of realities in your context, and as you say, in so many contexts, and I think likely more and more each year. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about this new CDSP initiative, which I don't mean to set up as some panacea, but I think falls into that category you say of, there's lots of exciting things happening, lots of experiments, lots of new ways of looking at these old problems. One of them, in the context of people who are being formed for ministry at CDSP, is this incredible opportunity for our alums going forward to have a paid curacy as a part of the benefits of their seminary experience. I guess my first question is, just what came to you as a reaction, as thoughts about possibilities when you heard that this initiative was coming for some of your CDSP students? 

Bp. Barker: Yes, well, it is an extraordinary opportunity and it seemed almost too good to be true, honestly. We've had a curacy program in the Diocese of Nebraska for some time and that's had a meaningful impact here, but it's fairly modest in its scale. We can have one or two curates at a time at best, and we have to pay them at our diocesan minimum. It's a three-year program, and it's been wonderful, but it's been a heavy lift to maintain the resources and to recruit. 

When I first heard the news that CDSP and Trinity were making this available, I called the Dean and said, "I can't believe this is true." I was assured it's real, and I still had my doubts, and I had our present students at CDSP also make inquiries, and they too were assured that it was real. We moved with dispatch to make sure that our folks would be able to participate because it is just a phenomenal opportunity. I really believe that on-the-ground experience in church life remains like the capstone of formation for a priestly ministry. You're just not done when you graduate from seminary. 

You're either going to learn in a structured and supportive environment that's set up for teaching and additional formation like a traditional curacy, or you're going to learn on the fly without support and without structure, and you'll probably learn the same amount of stuff, but it's going to be more awkward and painful, and it's probably going to take a little longer. I'm still a huge fan of curacies. I don't think curacies today can look exactly like they did 20 years ago with an expectation of success, but I still do believe it's a great way to finish formation for priestly ministry. 

Kyle: Yes, I wonder if you might be willing to share some anecdotes or experiences or convictions that have emerged from your experience supporting the program in Nebraska. What are you learning about the continuing importance of curacies? 

Bp. Barker: Yes, I think the central thing to say would be that, as we look towards this unknown church of the future, and trying to figure out how to respond to the rapid change that we're in the midst of right now, it seems pretty clear that nobody is going to be able to acquire the intellectual knowledge that's needed to navigate what lies ahead. Teaching people the traditional facts of seminary, be it the biblical narrative, theology, priestcraft, what have you, I believe that's all still very important, critical grounding. 

The answer is to the challenges of the future, I really don't think lie there. We need to be educating people to be strong and faithful in their personal discipleship, to have real curiosity and courage about trying new things and looking to the future. We need folks who are resilient and emotionally intelligent. Those are things that can be taught a little bit, but also just need to be practiced, and those are the kinds of skills and knowledges that I think you can develop in a real Christian community when you're serving in a structured curacy, that are much harder to develop in the seminary setting. To me, that would be the key piece. 

Kyle: Yes. As you are sitting in your office or your car, or the many places that I imagine you ponder your job and responsibilities and all of that, as you're thinking about, "Okay, so we've been supporting a curacy program in a particular way and this new opportunity is coming along, we want to move on it, we want to make sure that we have the opportunity to participate." From your vantage point in the diocese, what's the work that needs to be done to get ready to host a curate in this model well? What kinds of things are you thinking about as you're starting to do some of that planning? 

Bp. Barker: Great question. Heretofore, we've placed curates in two different settings by design. They've spent the first 18 months in one of our largest parishes where they have an experienced, excellent priest mentor and a lot of structured support from our curacy program to experience the basics of parish ministry day in and day out for about 18 months. Then we've given them the chance to go on a solo venture and care, for another 18 months, for a much smaller congregation. Ideally, though it hasn't always happened this way by any means, but ideally in a smaller Nebraska community. 

It's been great for Nebraska to apply the curates in those two different settings, but really, the piece about sending them to a small place comes from a conviction that most every priest in the future of the Episcopal Church is going to be working in small communities. Not that all Episcopal churches will be small by any means, but even priests who are fortunate to find themselves in large and well-resourced communities, it just seems very likely that in the church of the future, places that are resourced in that way are going to help care for and love small churches that are affiliated in some way, whether by proximity or ministry interests or a historic thing, what have you. There are lots of different models for that, spokes and wheels and chapel setups et cetera. 

Small churches and big churches really are different. We thought, "Wouldn't it be great to design a curacy program where new priests got an exposure to both kinds of Christian communities, and were then a little better equipped for whatever their future might hold?" That's what we did. That worked well in Nebraska. 

In this changing moment, two things happened that made it tough. We don't have as many big churches that are large enough that there was really a full-time job for an assistant. We have so many churches that are small beyond the assignment of a full-time clergyperson whose compensation was going to be coming from diocesan resources. We didn't want to send these wonderful curates who've had 18 months of experience in a thriving church in an urban center to a place that's so tiny that there's not full-time work to do. 

The curacy program that we imagined, and that worked so beautifully for years, we had to figure out a new way to get after it. Part of what seemed like an invitation when we heard that CDSP was providing this possibility was to think, "Well, what would we do if we were trying an entirely new structure?" One of the folks who will participate in your curacy program in the coming months is going to be a church planter, and that had always been their sense of call. Their skills for that ministry have been amply demonstrated during their time before and during seminary. 

Exactly what that might end up looking like is not clear right now. What's wonderful is that with the strong financial and institutional support of CDSP in this program, we can send this new grad into the world to try a thing that otherwise would have been-- it just would have seemed too risky. We wouldn't have known how to support a priest in that setting. With your help, we're going to try that. I'm really excited about the prospect. It's probably just one example of a very different design for a curacy that your program is going to make possible in places like Nebraska and elsewhere. 

Kyle: The whole narrative that you've just traced out for us, I think is indicative of part of what is powerful about this model, which is that each of these roles, each of these cures, each of these periods of time in these students' lives, the intention is for that to be, I guess we might say bespoke or negotiated. That, in a time when we can't take for granted some of the models and some of the economies of scale and all the rest of these things, and at a time when we are in the midst of so much change, it's really powerful to say, "Here are some resources for someone that can be used pretty flexibly, and with that person's skills and the needs of the community in mind. We're not necessarily trying to build the end-all, be-all new curacy factory." Like, "Here's an opportunity to continue the formation of this student in this setting for a period of time with removing some of the structural barriers to how we might pay for that and all the rest." That feels to me really powerful and fitting in with the trajectory of the, quite sophisticated already, thinking about curacies that your diocese has already been doing. 

Bp. Barker: It's exciting because it's leveraging some of these resources, which may or may not be vanishing, but they're resources from the structures of the church of the past for sure. You get all the wonderful-- It's not just about money. It's about the support of a seminary faculty, and all the wonderful history and interest of Trinity Wall Street, and all the excitement that they bring to innovative projects and more. You've got all that stuff that's from our inherited past, but with a blessing and the curiosity about making a way into an unknown future that we're trying to be faithful in. It's great. It's a remarkable opportunity. 

This would be a place to say that I was thinking about this conversation ahead of time. I think it's fair to say that a potential challenge about this program, which we'll see, is that it's precisely, I would say, because of the extraordinary resources that we're able to use to apply here to make this happen. That may create expectations for the participants that aren't entirely in line with the church of the future. They're getting paid off church budget a really exceptional salary with all the benefits, and they're able to experiment, perhaps in the case of our church planter, in a ministry that probably couldn't possibly be self-sustaining. Resources like that are not going to last forever, and they may not be part of the church of the future at all. Helping folks to appreciate what they've got and to maximize that potential while they've got it, and to prepare for a different future than that, because that future is not sustainable in any setting anywhere in the Episcopal Church. That's not how ministry works. 

Kyle: Yes. No, I think that's right. The church planning example, I think, puts an especially fine point on that. It's not atypical for a church planter to have some amount of runway starting out, and then how do you figure out how to fund some things early on? As you say, there's something about the resource differential here between what this program is bringing to bear on a situation and what the norm is, and how do we navigate that? Yes, I think that is a great thing to flag. I don't think anyone's got any answers yet, but you can almost imagine that being a theme of the ongoing programming and what folks are connecting around, is like, "How do you plan for what life is going to be like after this?" 

Bp. Barker: Right. 

Kyle:  As we come in for a landing here, and following up on your previous comment, I wonder if there are other things you've learned as a bishop, as someone involved in this curacy program, what have you, what other advice do you have for us, as we embark on this big experiment? We're going to have these students-- some of them have already started and more coming soon, as you say. From your view, what should we be thinking about and planning for? What are some priorities we ought to be keeping top of mind as we embark on this? 

Bp. Barker: What comes to mind, I'm not sure why, when I visit a church that has a prayer station or a healing station, I will always participate in that possibility. Inevitably, I will ask for courage. I will offer that as the place in my life where I really need healing and I really need God's support. That comes, principally, from my experience of serving as a clergy person in the church, including a bishop, and having learned over time that following Jesus in a meaningfully sacrificial way just requires a lot of bravery, and is genuinely hard and often painful work. Taking up the cross, which is our invitation, is never easy and always painful. I believe you've got a choice about it, but it's no joke. 

I have a sense that all of us in the church, but maybe especially the clergy, would be-- gosh, our ministries would be enhanced so much, and our relationship with Jesus himself would be so deepened, I think, if we could be braver about living into the call that he places on our lives, and especially when we think in terms of church ministry. There are all kinds of ways that might play out in the areas that we've been talking about here over this brief time. 

Whether it's imagining that moving forward in ministry isn't about making a little bit more money with every job change, you're not climbing a ladder. Whether it means going to a place where the politics and the culture of a people are really different than your own, and so being invited to love people across divides that are difficult for you. Whether it means literally taking risks on the part of your family or yourself to be in areas where need is exceptionally great, but there is some physical or emotional danger. I think priests are called to step into places like that. I think that's where we meet Jesus, often in the most profound relationship. 

I'm always praying for courage. I so admire that when I see it in my fellow disciples, lay or ordained. I think that meeting the challenges of the future church and living into the pattern of discipleship and love that Bishop Curry has broadcast so beautifully and invited us into so deeply is going to require us to be brave. That's my prayer for all of us. It's my prayer for the church. I think when we do that, we build an irresistible thing, and we can still transform human lives in the world if we operate out of that kind of boldness. 

Kyle: I think that is a great note to end on, Bishop Barker. Thank you so much for being a part of this conversation, and we are excited to see how a couple of our first few curates in this program, what the Spirit is doing with them, and with the people of the Diocese of Nebraska. Thank you so much for being a part of this. 

Bp. Barker: Yes, check back with us, Kyle. I hope I have great stories to tell in a year's time. 

Kyle: Will do that for sure. Thank you so much.