Ministers: Second calling sometimes leads to clergy career


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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — One of the Rev. Jay Anderson's most vivid childhood memories involves lining up his stuffed animals on the family couch before tipping an ottoman on its side as a makeshift altar and preaching to the fluffy faithful.

He used a hymnal as his scripture while his mother cooked Sunday dinner in their Madison, Indiana home.

Fast-forward about five decades, and Anderson, 55, is now pastor of Crossroads United Methodist Church on the West Side.

But he didn't take a straightforward route to get there. He's one of many clergy members who have chosen the ministry after years spent in other careers.

Anderson entered the Methodist Theological School in Ohio when he was 45, after successful careers in both retail management and real estate.

"It was a calling that I had probably first felt when I was a child, and I had put off for the better part of 40 years, deflected it, deferred it, denied, did everything I actively could as a layperson," he said.

But the persistent voice pushing him toward ordination didn't go away. "It was like God said, 'OK, you did all this other stuff, now I want you to do what I want you to do.'??"

In 2013, 42 percent of students who reported their age at U.S. graduate schools of theology in the U.S. were 40 or older and another 27 percent were in their 30s, according to data collected by the Association of Theological Schools.

Theology professor Jason Lee has been teaching for 16 years and said the average age of people doing master's work in ministry has continued to rise.

He serves as dean of the School of Biblical and Theological Studies at Cedarville University in western Ohio, where educators kept older students in mind when they created their new, intensive one-year master of ministry program.

He said older students primarily fall into two categories: people who have had a military career or are taking an early retirement from a business, and people with other careers who have been consistently plugged into their local congregations and decide they want to spend their full-time hours on ministry.

Many people come from service careers, including those in which they have helped the unemployed find work, and social-service industries, such as assisting the elderly, Lee said.

About half of the students at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Bexley have had previous careers, and the average age of the 2014 entering class was 31, said the Rev. Rick Barger, president, who worked in construction engineering and business before being ordained.

"We have people who come in their 30s and 40s with previous careers. We even have a student who's in his 60s," he said.

"We've had lawyers, physicians, businesspeople. They decide that God is calling them and they come."

Trinity student Karyn Kost, 31, had felt a calling since middle school, but she had gifts in math and science. So she studied engineering and went to work for a company that makes flexible packaging, all the time volunteering at her local church in Wisconsin and with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's area synod.

One day, she was involved with a project at work that she enjoyed but was distracted thinking about the things she wanted to do at church.

"Maybe it is time to finally answer that calling," she thought.

She quit her job, sold her house and moved to Ohio to start seminary. She's the one person in her class who appreciates spreadsheets and gets excited about balancing budgets.

Other second-career students have different skills. For example, one student, a former Spanish teacher, was able to teach a session on Hispanic ministry.

"A lot of students have unique perspectives because they've experienced so many different things," Kost said. "They all have stories from what they've accomplished, what they've worked on in the time since college."

The Rev. Victor Wesolowski, pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Coshocton, was in his 50s when he became a Catholic priest. He previously worked at a Mount Vernon law firm performing title searches and real-estate closings and managed a public defender's office. He had considered being a priest since he was a child, thinking the Catholic Mass, then celebrated in Latin, was beautiful.

When a co-worker asked him for the name of a priest to perform rites over his dying mother, Wesolowski began to reconsider his career path.

"I said to myself, 'My church needs men to be priests. I need to look at this seriously,'" he said.

He attended a seminary in Massachusetts and was ordained in 2008. Though he had resisted the calling, he realizes now that God had prepared him to respond: He had never gotten married, he had survived the foolish antics of his youth.

"I have had to look into my soul many times," said Wesolowski, 58. "If he thinks this is who I should be, who am I to say he's wrong?"

While he may not have the vim and vigor of priests who start out in their 20s, he has life experience and wisdom that help him understand the day-to-day challenges faced by members of his parish.

He tells others considering the religious life as a second career to go to a chapel, church or other place where God invites them to open their hearts.

"Never give up listening to God," he said. "In today's world, we are so tied up in electronic gizmos, we are scared to be alone or by ourselves. ... God's voice is a little, still voice we hear in the depths of our heart and soul, and we've got to be quiet, we've got to be attentive to it."

It's never too late to take the step to enter ministry, said the Rev. Virginia Lohmann Bauman, senior pastor at St. John's United Church of Christ, a Downtown congregation that shares its space with the Open Shelter.

Bauman, 53, grew up the daughter of an Episcopal preacher and swore she'd never do the same work. Instead, she went to law school and was a corporate trial lawyer for 15 years at the Columbus-based Porter Wright firm.

It was a rewarding profession, she said. But as she did pro-bono law work and devoted time to community nonprofit groups, "I began to sense that my skills and gifts were to be used for something different."

Bauman felt like a "reluctant seminarian" when she first started at Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She wondered, for example, if she was taking the right path to leave a lucrative career for one in which compensation is not always counted in dollars. But she found that she loved every class and that everything she had done so far had prepared her for her new life.

She encourages people considering the same to visit seminaries and churches, to talk to pastors who've left other careers, to pray, to discern and to follow God's lead.

"You can't go wrong if that's God's purpose for your life," she said. "It's never too late to be what you might have been, to do what God's called you to do."

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Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com

Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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