Abolish All Vicars!

Abolished Vicar

Disclaimer: I had a wonderful vicarage at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Lincoln, NE, under Pastor Clint Poppe (now retired). Nothing that follows is a reflection on that experience.

For a few years now, this idea of abolishing all vicars has been bouncing around in my head. It’s not that I think the vicarage program is bad. Actually, it’s a great program that has served the LCMS well for many years. (I’m not a scholar of American Lutheranism. How long have we been doing this? Eighty years? One-hundred? Since the founding of the LCMS?) But I think we could do better by returning to a more historic model of pastoral training and mentorship.

Here is what I propose:
·         Three consecutive years of residential seminary training (without the interruption of vicarage)
·         Ordination
·         Three years as a deacon (associate pastor)
·         Eligibility to receive a call as a sole pastor

There are bound to be some problems with this model, but I think it would solve more than it would cause. Let’s start with some of the problems with our current system:

Vicarage Model

Expense

Seminary students (excepting special circumstances) must move three times before receiving a call. This is a huge financial burden for young families to bear. Many congregations and individuals give generously to mitigate some of this burden, but not all. Eliminating vicarage would mean a single move to seminary before being called and ordained.

Article XIV

According to Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, “no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called.” Thankfully, most of the pastors and congregations that expected their vicars to administer the Lord’s Supper have been weeded out of the vicarage program, or so I’ve been told. That’s a step towards faithfulness. But according to AC XIV, vicars really shouldn’t be preaching either. These men are not “regularly called,” and yet, they are expected to preach and teach in public. We get around this by saying, “The pastor is actually the one publicly teaching because he reads and approves the vicar’s sermons.” Maybe that’s the best answer we can give with our current model, but it’s still a bad answer that opens the door to all sorts of nonsense. What’s to stop the D.C.E. from preaching? (I’ve seen it done.) And couldn’t the same weaselly language be used to justify putting a woman in the pulpit? “She’s not publicly teaching in the Church because the pastor reads and approves her sermons.” Ordination is not a matter of degrees. It’s a binary thing, and though a vicar is necessarily a man, he is no more ordained than a woman. (For the record, I think there is a distinction between a vicar who writes his own sermons and an elder who reads a sermon written by the pastor. Once I came down with food poisoning mid-sermon, and my elder had to take over. I am confident that we did not violate AC XIV, but I can’t say the same for my vicarage and fieldwork sermons.)

Pastoral Experience

The Rev. David Petersen once remarked that only 10% of congregations call from the seminary because they trust the Holy Spirit to send them the right pastor. The other 90% do so because no pastor with a choice would ever take that call. New graduates don’t have a choice. And so, every year we send our least experienced pastors into some of our most troubled parishes. By God’s grace, many of these baby pastors are granted wisdom beyond their years, and against all odds they succeed. But in too many other cases, young men who would otherwise have grown in wisdom, stature, and favor with men, are forced out of the ministry. This is a serious problem with the current model. True, these men have the “experience” of vicarage, but nothing short of ordination can fully prepare a man to be a pastor.

Diaconate Model

In the model I propose, we would not send our men out as vicars during Year III of seminary, nor would we send newly-ordained pastors out on their own. (Not even the apostles were sent out by themselves, but always two-by-two.) Instead, after three concurrent years of residential training, seminary graduates would be ordained and then serve for three years as associate pastors before becoming eligible to receive a sole pastorate. The idea of ordaining a man who then serves under an experienced pastor for a few years is not new within the history of the church. We even have a title for a man in such a role: a deacon.

Historical note: There is only one office of the holy ministry. But within that one office, ordained men have served the church in different roles: deacon (associate pastor), presbyter (senior or sole pastor), and bishop (overseer of pastors). In the LCMS we seem to be allergic to using historic titles, preferring the language of corporate America instead: hence, associate pastor and district president. But functionally, I fail to see much difference between the historic role of deacon and what we now call an “associate pastor.”

There are a few hurdles that would need to be overcome:
·         The importance of weeding out men who should not be pastors (vicarage helps with this)
·         Lost opportunity to reflect on vicarage during classes in Year IV
·         The need for three times the number of participating congregations (compared to vicarage congregations)

Gatekeeping

Vicarage serves to weed out some men who may have exceled at studying theology but are not apt to teach it, or otherwise have character flaws or physical disabilities that render them unfit for the office. In times past, we have sent such men out to “see if they pass vicarage.” It’s a crude way of gatekeeping for the pastoral office, and it has worked to some extent. But why should the guy with severe Asperger’s who can’t operate a tooth brush or an alarm clock be sent out to fail vicarage? He should never have been admitted to the seminary in the first place, and that would have been obvious to all within the first quarter of Year I. By the end of three years, the seminary professors (all of whom are pastors) come to know the students far better than the vicarage supervisors do within a single year. We don’t need vicarage to tell us what is already known.

Post-Vicarage Classes

After returning from vicarage, Year IV seminarians take one or two classes that reflect on the vicarage experience. Theoretically, this is a good idea, but in practical terms, the expense and trouble of two additional cross-country moves far outweighs the benefits of a few exercises in class. (I’m interested to know if other pastors agree. Was the net gain from these post-vicarage classes worth it?) The same material can still be covered, even without the experience that would have come from vicarage. Then these men will have three years to apply what they’ve learned in class under the mentorship of an experienced pastor.

Diaconate Congregations

For this model to work, we would need buy-in from our congregations. I estimate that we have about 100 vicarage congregations. We would need to triple that number for a three-year diaconate—a tall order, but we could get there in stages. For starters, all the vicarage congregations would be converted to deaconage congregations. The first deacons would serve for a single year before being eligible to receive a call as a sole pastor. Meanwhile, we would work to recruit more congregations to the program, adding the second and third years as soon as possible.

Any congregation with an associate pastor position could be eligible to join the deaconage program, but it would require a shift in thinking. By calling a deacon and providing him the opportunity to be mentored by an experienced pastor in a healthy and stable parish, the congregation would be serving the deacon’s future parish. And however beloved the deacon might become, just like a vicar, his time of service would necessarily come to an end.

What about the money? Wouldn’t ordained deacons (brand-new associate pastors) need to be paid more than vicars? How could existing vicarage congregations afford to make the switch? A good chunk of change could be recouped from moving expenses. Instead of paying for six vicarage moves every three years (there and back each year), a congregation would pay for a single diaconate move every three years. The savings would naturally be passed along to the deacon who would be performing greater service than a vicar.

Conclusion

Historically, newly-ordained men served as deacons for a few years under a more seasoned pastor. There was great wisdom in this model. Young pastors gained much-needed experience before being sent out as sheep among wolves. Congregations were more likely to respect a pastor with a few years under his belt. And first-time sole pastors would have been less prone to rookie mistakes. It’s true that not every man who entered the diaconate progressed beyond it. Some would serve out their days as a deacon, while others might find themselves unsuited to the office and withdraw. But the majority of these men would progress from deacon to presbyter (sole pastor, in American lingo).

I believe that a return to this model would be of great benefit to the church. First, it would allow us to adhere more faithfully to Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, closing the door to a lot of shenaniganry that happens within our churches. Second, we would have better trained and more experienced sole pastors, even though the seminary program itself would be a year shorter. Third, the financial burden on seminary students and their families would be significantly reduced. And last of all, we might finally answer a question that has stumped our brightest theologians for a great many years: What is a deacon?