Your Religion Is False

Times aren’t just tough for mortgage brokers and incumbent Senators. No, the economic downturn has hit closer to home (assuming you live near a church):

According to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, there are more than 600,000 ministers in the United States but only 338,000 churches. Many of those are small churches that can’t afford a full-time preacher. Among Presbyterians, there are four pastors looking for work for every one job opening.

It’s got to be difficult finding out that your once-lucrative “divinity” degree now isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, and that you’d probably be better off if you’d taken fun classes about Judge Judy and “Star Trek” instead of all those seminars on “homiletics.”

But the even worse part is losing your “calling”:

says Proctor, “It’s hard for any man who is called to preach to sit in the pew.”

And here I’m not without sympathy. After all, I was called to be a Superbowl-winning-quarterback-turned-movie-star (you can’t prove I wasn’t), but every Sunday during the NFL season I also find myself sitting in the (metaphorical) pew. In fact, this year the Seahawks wouldn’t even let me into their so-called “open” tryouts.

Yet I made the best of God’s bad advice, and so I have confidence that these struggling would-be clergy can do the same.

Hopefully their divinity skills like “New Testament Greek” and “Denominational Polity” and “Biblical exegesis” will transfer to some of the more in-demand jobs right now, like oil-spill-scrubber and national-debt-counter and census spy.