I’m not counting mail order ordinations (I don’t have a problem with them; I’ve considered going that route myself). Any religion, as long as you had to work for it.
I don’t remember ever seeing any Dopers self-identify as clergy, but I do think I remember at least one or two who had been to seminary.
After some searching—I think Alan Smithee is at least one of the ones I’m thinking of.
Define “clergy”.
It’s very easy to get an official, ordained position in the mormon church. I myself have been officially ordained to the positions of ‘deacon’, ‘teacher’, and ‘priest’, by laying of hands and everything. All before I turned eighteen years old. At 18 they wanted to ordain me as an ‘elder’, but I forcefully refused, over their arguments, and never was.
For the purpose of this question, I’ll say someone who has completed at least some training at a seminary/divinity school or whatever it’s called in their specific religion.
Didn’t we have a Friar at some point?
Edit: FriarTed
I spent over a decade attending weekly “sunday school” and for four years attended a daily before-school class called “seminary”.
Seriously, there’s a lot of aspects of mormonism that give off a real “playing house” vibe relating to real religion - the names match up! Which doesn’t mean I didn’t have to sit through thousands of hours of ‘instruction’.
ETA: And it may be worth noting that beyond this, mormonism doesn’t have any additional training for its actual leaders.
There’s Revtim, though I admit I don’t know what his user name actually means.
Okay, that’s a little scary. I’m all for “empowering ordinary folk”*, but it would seem that your chances of getting taught by someone who’d just had a cursory “Here’s the party line of our religion” would approach 100% that way.
Same goes for “Non-denominational Churches”, which a lot of super-mega-churches are. There’s a danger there in that there’s no overall structure that’d say “Watch it there” if a church got too controlling or cultish.
And in a denomination, your clergy have had a lot of schooling… our pastors are some of the most intellectual, open-minded, well-read people I’ve ever met.
*I attended a weird little kinda-denominational church that touted “The Priesthood Of All Believers”. In other words, clergy weren’t any more “special” than anyone else. And anyone in the church could give a sermon. You had to run it by the pastor, but since it meant he could just sit and listen, he was all for it. Until the infamous Sunday when the “Lay Preacher” went overtime, and people started sidling out because there was a Packer game that started at noon. “You just broke a cardinal rule, bucko.” drawled the pastor, and finished up the service pronto: TheLordBlessYouAndKeepYouAmen, we don’t need a closing hymn, Go In peace, Go serve the Lord, Go love your neighbor, Go Green ‘n’ Gold!"
I’ve long maintained that every mormon I’ve met had their own unique personal religion. Though to be fair I wouldn’t be surprised to draw the same conclusion if I interacted extensively with members of any other religion - Christianity in general has rather blatantly demonstrated that not all its members take its teachings the same way by splitting into hundreds of distinct variants over the centuries.
Mormonism tries really hard to standardize its teaching of its members; there are course books that the teachers* are all strictly ordered to follow. This doesn’t stop personal flavor from slipping in, of course. And there are avenues for censuring wild deviants - that’s how we got the mormon split-off variants.
As for being intellectual, open-minded, and well-read… that is nowhere in the set of mormon values.
*Not the same type of ‘teacher’ as I was ordained as - I was in my early teens at the time and never taught anybody anything.
Non-denominational congregations seem to be either storefronts or mega-churches, with little middle ground, and that lack of oversight and hierarchy is why so many of them collapse in scandal.
That statement made me immediately think about the Catholic Church and the “too big to fail” mantra of the Bears and Stearns and General Motors of the world from 2008-ish. So despite MASSIVE scandal, the Catholic Church prevails!
Which reminds me that before having banks that were too big to fail, America had a banking sector that was too big to fail – consisting of hundreds of small banks, and it was the failure of the banking sector that lead to the small banks being regulated out of existence in favour of big banks…
It’s certainly true that characteristic failures of the Roman Church are different from the characteristic failures of the Baptist churches which are different from the characteristic failures of churches like the SDA
I guess you could say that I’m the son of a preacher man: that’s as close as I got.
Depends… I had an English C of E vicar a few years say to me, with a smug expression like this was a serious gotcha; ‘Well, people say you can’t see god, so you don’t know he’s there. You can’t see the wind but no-one says that’s not real. It’s exactly the same thing.’
I’m an “Elder” in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). As begbert2 already pointed out, that’s not any particularly-difficult accomplishment. Pretty much every adult male member that’s living the Church’s standards can become one within a year or so. I did four years of “seminary” in high school, served a full-time two-year “mission” in Chile, took “institute” classes through college, and have been in ~5,000 hours of regular Sunday meetings. Currently I’m one of the minor members of the “Bishopric” (essentially the leadership in a “ward” / local LDS congregation).