Retirement

Principle

The work ends and the call does not. Retirement is the end of appointment, not of orders, and the retired relation is the church’s own annual confession that it never employed a call in the first place.

Background

The Torah has a retirement paragraph, and it draws the line this document has been drawing.

“This is that which belongs to the Levites: from twenty-five years old and upward they shall go in to wait on the service in the work of the Tent of Meeting; and from the age of fifty years they shall cease waiting on the work, and shall serve no more, but shall minister with their brothers in the Tent of Meeting, to perform the duty, and shall do no service” (Numbers 8:24–26).

At fifty the service stops. The ministering does not, the duty does not, and the man does not leave the Tent. He is there with his brothers, no longer doing the work, still belonging to the company that does it. Three thousand years before our Discipline invented the phrase, that is the retired relation, and it was written into the law of a people who understood that the God who takes up a life does not put it down when the body tires.

Paul states the principle without qualification: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Our own polity has already conceded the point in the one place it costs us something. We do not ordain anyone twice. ¶ 303.5 forbids repeating the act, which is a confession that the first act did something that cannot be undone and therefore need not be redone. A church that will not re-ordain has no principled way to say that a birthday un-ordains.

And the creature God calls is a creature. The section on anthropology said that a human being is the kind of thing God can address, answer, and send, and that this is a dignity and not a resource. Then it follows that a body giving out is not a defect in the image of God. It is the condition of the being God chose to call, chosen with that condition known. Wesley wrote The Ministerial Office at eighty-five.

Scripture even gives the end of a ministry its proper content. “Even when I am old and gray-haired, God, don’t forsake me, until I have declared your strength to the next generation, your might to everyone who is to come” (Psalm 71:18). The Psalmist does not ask to keep his post. He asks to keep his testimony, and names an audience he will not live to see finish. Luke gives us the figure. Anna was “of a great age,” a widow of eighty-four years, “who didn’t depart from the temple, worshiping with fastings and petitions night and day,” and when the child came she “spoke of him to all those who were looking for redemption in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:36–38). She holds no office we would recognize. She is simply always there, and she is the first person in the Gospel to preach Christ in the temple. And Paul, at the end, describes an ending as a finish rather than a lapse: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).

Now ¶ 358, which runs to fifteen hundred words of ages, thresholds, votes, annuity claims, actuarial reductions, and the Comprehensive Protection Plan. It contains one pastoral sentence, which is that the Board of Ordained Ministry “shall provide guidance and counsel to the retiring member and family as they begin a new relationship in the local church.” It contains no theological sentence at all.

A pattern has now appeared three times in this document and can be named. Our Discipline is theological where it describes an office and administrative where it changes a person’s relation to it. ¶ 303 on the purpose of ordination is genuine theology. ¶ 315 on licensing, ¶ 344 on extension appointments, and ¶ 358 on retirement are procedure and benefits. The moments that matter most to the person, the beginning of authorized ministry, the sending beyond the congregation, and the end of the work, are written in the language of plan administration. Whatever the church believes about those moments, it has not told the people passing through them.

And there is something worse in ¶ 358 than silence, which is that retirement is where the church grades its orders.

Read the four provisions side by side and ask a single question of each: what survives the end of the work?

For a bishop, everything. “A retired bishop is a bishop of the Church in every respect and continues to function as a member of the Council of Bishops” (¶ 409), participating in the council and its committees, though without vote.

For an elder or a deacon, a relation. Retired clergy members “have been placed in the retired relation” (¶ 358), remain members of the annual conference, keep a seat in a charge conference, report their marriages and baptisms, and may be appointed again if the bishop asks.

For a licensed local pastor, nothing that the church holds. When a local pastor retires, “license and credentials shall be surrendered to the district superintendent,” and the person shall “designate the local church in which membership shall be held” (¶ 320.1), in the same clause that governs those who are discontinued or who sever their relationship with the church. One who has completed the Course of Study and wishes to go on baptizing must annually request a license to do so in the congregation where they now hold membership, a license that “does not constitute an appointment and does not provide vote at the annual conference session” (¶ 320.5d).

For a provisional member, not even that. “Provisional members may not be retired.” Those who reach mandatory retirement age “shall be automatically discontinued” (¶ 327.7).

How much of the office survives the end of the work descends in four exact steps, and the steps track standing in the church’s hierarchy rather than anything the church teaches about ordination. If ordination effects something, as this document has argued and as our refusal to repeat it concedes, then what survives should be constant among the ordained. It is not.

This is the strongest form of the difficulty raised in the section on bishops, and it comes from a direction that section did not use. The evidence that we materially operate an episcopal order apart from the presbyterate is not only the separate fund, the separate complaint track, and the life tenure. It is that at the one moment which tests what an order is, the moment when the work stops and only the standing remains, a bishop’s office is untouched and an elder’s is converted into a relation. We say the episcopacy is not a separate order, and then, when we ask what a person still is after they stop working, we answer differently for bishops than for the elders they were ordained among.

Two provisions of ¶ 358 deserve to be named on their own.

The first is mandatory retirement. “Every clergy member of an annual conference who will have attained age seventy-two on or before July 1 in the year in which the conference is held shall automatically be retired” (¶ 358.1). This document’s central exhibit was the front door: the church replaced Wesley’s question about fruit with a forecast, a “promise of future usefulness,” and moved its judgment from evidence to prediction. Here is the back door, and it is the same failure in a plainer form. An attribute, age, ends effective standing automatically, with no inquiry into grace, gifts, or fruit, and with no one required to look at the ministry at all. A church that will not stop asking for a forecast at the gate does not ask for evidence at the end.

The honest case for a terminus should be put, because it is a real one and it is not usually stated. An age rule protects congregations from a tenured ineffectiveness that the church has shown, over and over, that it lacks the nerve to confront by name. It protects the officer from an office that can consume a person who no longer knows how to be anything else. It makes room for those coming after. And an impartial rule is harder to capture than a judgment, which matters in a system where judgments about effectiveness have often fallen hardest on women, on ministers of color, and on the inconvenient.

Each of those is an argument about the church’s ordering of its work. None of them is an argument about the call, and the distinction is the whole point. An age rule is defensible as a rule about appointment and indefensible as a verdict on orders. Our own paragraph half knows this, since it does not defrock anyone at seventy-two; it places them in a relation. The change needed is small. Say so, in the paragraph, in a sentence: that the church ends the appointment and does not end the ministry, and that what it is doing here is ordering its work rather than judging a life.

The second is involuntary retirement. “By a two-thirds vote of those present and voting, the clergy members in full connection may place any clergy members in the retired relation with or without their consent and irrespective of their age” (¶ 358.3), on recommendation of the Board and the cabinet, with fair process.

There are cases where this is the kindest instrument available, and the fair-process protections are real. But it costs something. The church’s honorable ending has been made to carry a disciplinary function, and the church has other instruments for that: the supervisory and complaint processes, involuntary leave (¶ 355), and administrative location (¶ 360), which exists precisely for the case where “a clergyperson’s effectiveness is in question.” When the honorable ending also serves as the quiet exit, the honor is no longer legible. Everyone in the connection knows that some retirements are what they appear to be and some are the resolution of something else, and no one outside the clergy session can tell which is which. The cost falls on the faithful. A minister who finishes forty years and is received into the retired relation has that moment shadowed by an ambiguity the church created for its own convenience.

That is the same charge this document made about vagueness at the front of the process. A church that will not say plainly that a ministry has failed will find an administrative category to put it in, and the category it chooses will be one that belonged to someone else.

A further word, and a pointer to work not done here. Retirement is one of a family of relations by which the Discipline moves a person out of the appointment cycle: honorable location (¶ 359), medical leave (¶ 357), sabbatical (¶ 352), voluntary and involuntary leave (¶¶ 354, 355), administrative location (¶ 360), and the trial and complaint processes that end in the surrender or removal of credentials. Our Discipline files them together under changes of conference relationship, and the phrase is more accurate than the treatment. Each is a moment when the conference assesses one of its members apart from the ordinary business of sending, and each is written almost entirely in procedure. They cannot be evaluated one at a time, because what is at stake in every one of them is the same thing: what an annual conference is such that it can hold, examine, release, restore, and bear a person. They belong to the theology of conference that the earlier section says we do not have and I have not supplied. I raise them here so that they are on the list, and so that whoever writes that document knows that trials and retirements are the same question asked at different temperatures.

Practice

Say in ¶ 358 what retirement is. One sentence at the head of the paragraph, before the ages and the annuities, stating that retirement ends the appointment and not the ordination, and that the church is here confessing that it never employed a call. The paragraph will be no less administrative afterward. It will simply have a reason.

Give the retired relation its content. Our polity already assumes there is a ministry to account for. Retired clergy “shall have a seat in the charge conference,” and “shall report to the charge conference and to the pastor all marriages performed, baptisms administered, and other pastoral functions” (¶ 358.5). The church still receives an account, which means it still believes there is something to account for. Psalm 71 and Anna say what it is for: the declaring of God’s strength to the next generation by those who have the longest evidence of it. A conference that wants to know whether a ministry bore fruit has, sitting in its own retired ranks, the only people who can say what forty years of it looked like, and it mostly asks them to stand for applause.

Make retirement a relation for the licensed as well. The section on licensing argued this from the other end, and this is where it gets its doctrine rather than its evidence. If a licensed pastor’s ministry is real enough for the church to authorize the sacraments through it, then it is real enough to survive the last appointment, and the surrender of credentials should mean what it means for everyone else, that something went wrong.

Ask the going-on-to-perfection question again at the end. Our ordinal puts the sharpest theology we possess to candidates at the beginning: are you going on to perfection, do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life, and the prescribed answer is “I am, by the grace of God.” That is a question about a whole life, put to someone who has not yet lived it. Retirement is the one moment when the church could put it retrospectively to a person who has. It asks about the annuity instead.