How did we end up with "Search & Call"?

A glimpse at Disciples of Christ history in a particular vein

This began as a reply to a post on a Facebook board for Disciples of Christ clergy, asking in effect “why is our Search & Call system the way it is, especially when other denominations I know of do it so differently?” It went to 4,000 words, and so I made it a Substack post — but if you’re interested, here’s my take on our process of vocational placement and relocation, today called more generally “Search & Call.” It’s an overview, and I oversimplify a few things, and hey, it’s too long as it is but here you go.

In the 1980s when I first encountered the process, it was called “Relocation” as in “have you filled out your Relocation forms?” In the 1990s the push was, for understandable reasons, to call them “Search & Call” as we went from paper packets to floppy disks to the online platform we have now; there’s a better theological understanding to what we’re doing in saying one is entering “Search & Call” than simply relocating . . . but therein lies a tale, and some history. It may not help many in their immediate contexts, but it may be useful as we keep working on how our clergy placement processes work, especially as de facto and potentially effective mergers with other processes take place in coming years.

As is relatively well known, Alexander Campbell was not big on a clerical role, or “the clerisy” as he said more contentiously in his earlier, “Christian Baptist” years (1822-1830). Clerical prerogatives and status were for him part and parcel of his contempt for hierarchy. There’s probably a story behind his forbears in the Anglican Church, and how father Thomas became a Seceder Presbyterian pastor, but one with some early “ecumenical” interests even in Northern Ireland in the 1790s. Hierarchies were not kind to Thomas, in Ahorey or in North America, and like father, like son, they both saw in the insistence of Synods as having control over latitude shown by local clergy a truly un-Christian tendency.

Alexander Campbell as portrayed in 1850, his published debate with Rice.

What this ends up meaning by 1811 is a form of Presbyterian congregationalism, with Alexander ordained by the plurality of elders in the Brush Run Church, without recourse to any Synod or Presbytery. Barton Stone & David Purviance had gone through a similar evolution in 1804, but they did much less to establish norms than the Campbells, so I’m going to stay focused over on their side of the American frontier.

Alexander, like most of us, had a tendency to see his own experience as ideal, and replicable. In his Buffaloe Seminary years, he hoped to train young men for preaching and teaching eldership, if not ministry as we might understand it today; this period from 1818-1822 ended with a fair amount of frustration. He didn’t take the lesson that it was hard to generally raise up good preachers and church leaders from his failures in those years; he assumed he was being sent the wrong candidates, but decided not to retool his school, but to shift to publication and a periodical “to advance the Reformation” as they often referred to the Restoration Movement at the time.

Campbell continued on for the next few decades, as the highly educated and well trained Walter Scott went out as a sort of district evangelist, founding new churches up and down the Ohio River, thinking each new church would first discern within itself a plurality of elders, and those elders would from among their body discern who had a gift for preaching. In the rapidly growing context of new communities, mostly rooted in farming and small shopkeeping, there was not much education to go around. This is why in 1840 he starts Bethany College — not to train ministers, but to train church leaders, again “from whom” the preaching office would arise. It’s worth noting that while early Campbell clearly didn’t envision female elders, he did say against no small amount of opposition that he thought women of the church should have the right to help vote or otherwise decide on who elders would be, and Bethany was second only to Oberlin as a college admitting both women and men on an equal footing. Women had leadership gifts in Campbell’s early vision of the local church, if not preaching, though the case has been made that he did affirm women preaching for a season, but retrenched in old age and as the Civil War loomed, yet never made an absolute ban in print on women in that role.

Campbell and Scott had supported a district level “School of Preachers” model for what we might call ministerial formation; in the 1830s they met once or sometimes twice a year in a barn or large venue of some sort where all the regular preachers in a district would take turns preaching, then sitting under review as the others commented on the sermon — and these gatherings drew crowds, though only the preachers were given standing to speak on each other’s work. There’s no formal status given in what notes we have on this model, so it seems to be an assumed “we know who our local preachers are” designation of who is. 

“The School of Preachers” model peters out and in the 1840s we have district events evolving into national and state missionary societies with collections and projects determined by assembly votes and officers installed; the American Christian Missionary Society in 1849 followed shortly by Indiana and Kentucky and in 1852 the Ohio Christian Missionary Society. These societies become more influential in the wider life of the local churches, but the challenge of finding a good preacher if yours left for a further frontier (or to illness, or age, etc.) only grew.

The state societies, which ultimately will become regions, aren’t the next step though. As churches grew, built buildings, and wanted to call an excellent new preacher, the default contact person was the nearby Disciples college president. In point of fact, even in the post-Civil War late 1800s, this was often a staff person, a role we came to know as Church Relations directors. But whether the president, a provost or dean, or an executive secretary, it was the college or school nearby to which a local church president or elder would write a letter, saying “we have a need, and no one here who can fulfill it” and the college president would respond with either suggestions or further questions.

Moving into the early 1900s, this role was shared more and more between the corresponding or executive secretary of the state missionary society and the college presidents . . . but it was shaped initially by that kind of “who do you know?” and “here’s whom I would recommend” model. Our polity never embraced in the first century a placement model, such as we saw around us with Methodist itineracy, and often this was held up as a Disciples distinctive: “we don’t send you a minister from the bishop’s list!” was up there with “we own our own property.” 

The question we asked editors and most often college presidents was “can you help us find someone who would be right for here?” A recommendation and referral system was our first semi-pseudo-formal method of matching new and younger preachers with locations out and away from population centers, and that defined the developing state society process. “Mandatory minimum” compensation guidelines or defined benefits weren’t in the mix; the question was more along the lines of figuring out who could or would accept and be able to live on what a particular church was offering, and it was taken as a given that to increase compensation, a minister would need to move on. Local churches were seen as fixed in their resources.

None of this accounts for the relocation function, or how a minister would become aware of an open pulpit any more than the local church (especially a larger and better established one) would know who was looking, or would match the changing circumstances in growing settings.

Before I open up the relocation function can of worms, we have the cautionary element of how the wider church handled, well, problems. You actually see this play out in Campbell’s “Millennial Harbinger” in the 1830s and after: how does a local church identify wandering train wrecks, emotionally unstable individuals with personal problems, or financially untrustworthy characters (or some mix of all three)? Letters would appear in the “Harbinger” and other publications of “the Brotherhood” (as we self-referenced ourselves up into the 1960s) naming names and warning other churches about predatory preachers, often in the context of questions of Bro. Campbell about how to properly check up on and handle questions of previous malfeasance. If that seems a risky way to do business, you’re right, and after the Civil War you don’t get that as much with names and accusations in print.

But Dr. William Allen, former West Virginia regional minister, has written about finding in the archives letters of this sort from local church leaders about various ministers, in the first two decades of the 1900s, asking the state society if it was true that Bro. So-and-so had a wife in Paducah, or had stolen the missions offerings in South Succotash. It was assumed that the state society would keep track of such things, even though they had even less to do with who hired whom in those days. And if in 1914 they had already hired Bro. Rascal, asking after the fact if they’d made a mistake, the next question was asking if the state secretary would come help them sort out a separation. The societies had the back end of the process, in other words, not the front end. Not yet.

Relocation was infamously the reason we loved and promoted our International Conventions and State Conventions. From the years just before the landmark Centennial Convention in 1909 on into subsequent years — and some would argue right on down into the turn of the current century — if you had some experience and were ready to move, or “relocate,” you went to the Disciples conventions and made contacts and had lunches and cultivated opportunities. I’m not saying this is entirely unique to the Disciples of Christ, but in our history we developed the “I’m-not-looking” style of looking to a fine art. There was some role for the growing staff of the general units here, because they traveled and knew more than just the Yearbook data; after 1920 and the merging of boards into the United Christian Missionary Society, many of the Homeland Mission staff helped with referrals and recommendations and relocation for larger church pulpit committees.

Jumping back to those first placements of new preachers, W.E. Garrison observed in his brief history of our movement: “In 1897 there were forty-five educational institutions, including five “universities” and twenty-five colleges; and the total of their endowments was $1,177,000. Six years later this amount had been doubled. Thirty years after that, these doubled endowments had been multiplied by ten—and seventeen of the forty-five schools had disappeared.” That takes us to 1933 if you’re following the math.

The heads of Schools of Religion at places like Butler, Drake, Missouri, along with college presidents of schools like Hiram or Culver-Stockton or of course Bethany were instrumental in helping match local churches and clergy seeking a call. But it was the Great Depression that really shifted the calculus to the increasingly pivotal role of state society staff. Colleges retrenched on one hand, and expanded beyond sectarian appeal on the other — and they didn’t really have the time or motivation to put major time into answering letters or now phone calls from tiny churches wanting a fine young preacher to work for housing and vegetables, et cetera.

Meanwhile, state societies had been incorporating state Sunday School societies into their own organization (often becoming Christian Education associates), Christian Endeavor state organizations were also enfolded into a state society structure, especially as through the 1920s the Young People’s Conferences — on which I’ll write more soon — expanded into essentially every state and many districts around the United States. A burgeoning state society staff was out preaching across their area, knew the churches and leaders, and quickly became the new default contact for a pulpit committee looking to fill theirs. “Call the state secretary!” replaced “write the college president.”

So what do we have by the end of World War II? We have half of our clergy with seminary degrees, half with bachelors or less; we have a network of seminaries coming into their own and Disciples Divinity Houses at other larger ecumenical seminaries, and we’re entering a period of demographic expansion, the Baby Boom, which had local churches building education wings from 1947-1968 as fast as possible and what was about to become regions establishing their own camp and conference facilities, having in most cases rented YMCA and other camp locations in the decades before 1945. Churches were hiring staff, and seminaries were turning away applicants, and Restructure was in the air, from the Panel of Scholars in the 1950s to the final steps leading to The Design and General Assemblies and our modern concept of regions as “middle judicatories” by 1968.

The “Relocation Paper” system just grew, in other words, through the post-war expansion. It began as a recommendation and referral system on one hand out of our educational institutions, but not tied to our theology or practice of ministry (the Congregational polity of the UCCs, for instance, requires you have a call before you can get ordained, so the formation and self-understanding around employment and ordination is much more closely tied in their church structures — not so for us Disciples). On the other hand, the state societies, now regions, were expected to handle problems, and ideally to prevent them by forewarning churches while not doing anything actionable. If you have occasion to read old personnel files of regional ministers, you’ll notice immediately how cautiously everyone speaks; there’s a published paper about the execrable Gerald L.K. Smith from the late 1920s, early in his dreadful career, that quotes letters between regional officials about placement which spend a great deal of time trying to communicate issues without saying anything actionable.

This all changes dramatically after Jim Jones. November 1978 marked an end to laissez faire handling of clergy misbehavior. I do not want to say no region had tried or even succeeded in managing clergy standing processes before 1978, or that we had no General Commission on Ministry until after 1979, but effectively every region in the U.S. and Canada acknowledged after the horrors of Jonestown, and the knowledge that officially both Jones himself and People’s Temple as a church were in the Yearbook of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) even if they hadn’t filed any reports for the last couple of years, it was now time for the Disciples of Christ to add guardrails and outline specific ethical expectations for clergy, and to a lesser degree to churches (we only changed The Design to allow regions to de-list congregations for cause in recent years).

You may notice that while I would trace the current “Search & Call” general outlines to this sea change in how Disciples define who has standing and who doesn’t, it’s mostly to ensure we protect the wider church from rogue clergy, and local churches from the same, at least to the degree that they consult with their region in a search or pulpit committee process. If a local church doesn’t check, there’s no consequence or penalty other than the outcomes that can happen with a rogue minister. The burdens, I would humbly suggest, are almost entirely on the minister, for seeking ordination, to get standing or to maintain standing, and the consequences are clear and emphatic onto a minister for non-compliance.

The long-standing mystery is how our “Search & Call” system helps ministers find churches. In theory, it replaces the old desk drawer of a college president filled with notes and names which can be pulled out to pass along recommendations to inquiring churches. In practice, the goal is for the regional staff(s) involved to match clergy and churches, so if you are looking in Arcadia you won’t get bombarded with calls from Vandalia, and if you need to make at least the equivalent of twelve pizzas a week you won’t end up going through a whole song-and-dance with ten pizza a week or less congregations. The common complaint is if you say on your forms “I will not go to the State of Zenith for love or money” you will, indeed, get calls on Sunday nights from pulpit committee chairs out of Zenith; even more common is how you can say as kindly and clearly as you can “Not a penny under a thousand a week given my household bills and student loan payments” yet still end up speaking only to churches offering less than that . . . much less.

This is already a long answer to a simple question: how did we get here, and why is “Search & Call” a process that seems so punitive and unhelpful? The ultimate answer, as I hear regional folk talk over the last two decades, is that there’s a massive and tragic mismatch between what churches are asking for, and what clergy seeking calls need. If you are a regional minister and you have twenty churches open, with fifteen of them stating they can only muster a total compensation package of $50,000 (and that includes Pension Fund dues), and you receive out of the “Search & Call” system twelve candidate profiles from clergy, of whom all say they need at least $65,000 in salary, housing allowance, for insurance coverage, and of course Pension Fund dues, how do you sort that out? It’s a game of Solitaire with very few people playing their hand out.

Congregational autonomy precedes sacramental authority is one pivotal issue here. We split off and built the rationale for the Restoration Movement on the primacy of the local church, and affirmed what most other Christian traditions call “lay presidency,” or the fact that baptism and communion are valid and can be practiced without an ordained person (let alone a minister with standing) present. If you don’t have to have a validly certified person to conduct the service, you will end up with some churches opting out. It’s either a strength or a flaw, but it’s who we are.

In the Catholic Church, you can’t have sacraments without valid clergy officiating. So you also have most or all of the ordination process funded by the wider church, not the candidate, and there is a key role for placement by the diocese, or “middle judicatory” in order to facilitate access to the sacramental life of the church. Our Methodist cousins tend to restrict officiants to those with a fairly direct line of authority from the bishop to the local church communion table (not to mention baptism or confirmation), but they are wrestling with a looser orbit of officiants to include local pastors, and possibly backing away from itineration and obedience to the bishop’s placement by clergy and churches alike.

We have effectively privatized both the calling and the certification processes in many ways for ministry, even as we have indirectly devalued the necessity of ministers in church life, which in our semi-sorta kind of market system for seeking “relocation” or “Search & Call” means practically speaking a reduction of potential income. If it feels as if the deck is stacked against clergy, vocationally speaking, you are correct. And it’s why the Disciples among the old “Seven Sisters” of the Protestant mainline tend to fall at the bottom or just above the American Baptists on ministerial compensation — the ABC-USA shares much of our history, theology, and polity around how ministry is regarded and how their placement and relocation systems developed.

The Presbyterians have a better history and higher compensation level around how they handle ministers and the work of ministry, but they have two things going for them we don’t: their particular Reformed history elevates sermons to a near-sacramental level, as the anchor and engine of regular worship, with an expectation that to be a minister you will have an extensive and expansive education including Hebrew, Greek, and a range of wisdom, and their presbyterian (small-s) system means in personnel matters around ministers there’s a three-legged stool of clergy, congregation, and presbytery. The synod is made up of multiple presbyteries, and in any case while neither can force a local church to take a minister, a local church can’t just tell a minister to walk without the presbyter’s involvement.

Before you say “well, that would be a great help, we should do that!” keep in mind it was presbyters telling local ministers what they can and can’t do — like opening communion to people not members of the local church in good standing — which is why Stone and the Campbells parted ways with their respective presbyteries. You lose the limitations, but you also separate yourself from the protections those limitations can help provide.

There have been complaints that in recent years some regional ministers have confused themselves with presbyters or bishops, and have tried to order certain ministers to certain churches, or commanding congregations to accept who they want to place there. All I can say is I know some have tried. It doesn’t work well in our system, but I can’t deny based on what I’ve seen and experienced that it has probably been tried and succeeded. I can see the appeal, and not out of cynicism. Some regional ministers undoubtedly are frustrated by seeing churches or clergy make matches they know won’t work, and can’t figure out how to stop, and if they wish they could I can’t blame them for wishing.

A harsher complaint is that there’s an in-group, and an out-group, and the regional ministers favor whom they would favor. This gets tricky, because in my own Ohio, it was legendary and undenied that there were “Herald’s Boys” and if you weren’t one of them, you didn’t move towards Cleveland. The in-group would steadily move from the rural Ohio River hollers up through county seats and suburbs toward Terminal Tower, or Elyria in later years of that era, or so the legend went. Again, it was essentially admitted: Herald played favorites, and said so, and you came up to scratch by Herald’s lights or you stayed in South Succotash Christian Church for all your days. So we have some history around the in-group thing.

But I would also note in closing that, it’s been said about conspiracy theory in general that if you don’t understand how something works, it’s easiest to accept a conspiratorial mindset to explain what you don’t know. And I do think there’s some history and understanding about why Disciples do things the way we do that end up looking like a plot to help one person, or group, and disadvantage another person or cohort. Herald’s Boys are no more, and it’s simply not even true that you need to be a camp counselor if you want to get a good recommendation in Ohio for a new church. Today’s reality is more as I described with thirty openings, twelve applicants, and a major mismatch on what’s on offer versus what is needed by applicants. Let’s just say you don’t see me offering to help my regional minister match up options, which has to be a nightmarish challenge of tic-tac-nope.

I hope this has helped a bit, though, to outline how we never had a placement system of any sort, started with a recommendation “program” which was more academic and occupational than vocational, tacked on a backhanded quality control expectation placed on state societies that didn’t even start with any actual authority, and got used to working without it, then merged the whole rodeo into a single “Relocation” system which still didn’t well serve newer preachers, that was transformed by a chaotically evil person who managed to evade any oversight to the bitter end, forcing us all to accept a level of oversight that frankly was counter to most of our original self-understandings, and so had to be cobbled together from bits and pieces of pastoral oversight borrowed from traditions which developed them out of very different theological self-understandings.

And we’re still working on it.