The adjustments are going well.
After years of wearing button-downs, Rev. Alan R. McLean has mastered the intricacies of the clerical collar.
He feels almost no self-consciousness anymore when addressed as ”Father McLean.”
He`s comfortable preaching and celebrating the eucharist, even though he is certain he will fall some Sunday in front of God and the congregation.
He knows what he will say when he does. You plan for such things when you`ve lost both legs in combat and get around on prostheses that make managing stairs and steps difficult, including those that lead to altars and pulpits.
Don`t misunderstand. What happened in Vietnam on Feb. 22, 1967, has helped to shape his views about the fundamental questions of life, but it has nothing directly to do with his decision to enter the clergy.
He was 24 in 1967, a Marine lieutenant. He had been ”in-country” less than two months. The platoon he commanded was in ”a clearing operation” in an area of rice paddies near Da Nang.
Other Marine units were flushing out Viet Cong guerrillas and forcing them toward his platoon. He and his men were in a firefight with the enemy when he stepped on the Viet Cong mine.
”I remember sailing through the air,” he says, ”and I remember it hurt like hell.” His legs were blown off. He was evacuated by helicopter.
”I was close to death on the chopper,” he says. ”What came over me was the realization that God loved me and you and all of us, that God loved every person in the world.”
The thought was miraculously calming. He felt absolute peace. But again he insists, being terribly wounded in Vietnam wasn`t a conversion experience. He sees life as a journey, and getting where he is today was a gradual process rather than the consequence of a single, transforming moment.
These days, a lot of middle-age men and women are making radical career moves, and a sizable total-enough to make it a trend-are switching from secular to religious vocations.
The first time McLean spoke about the possibility was 20 years ago, when he was with Pillsbury Co. in France.
He and his wife, Betsy, pregnant with their first child, were leaving a service at the American Cathedral in Paris when he said to her, ”You know, some day I might like to work for the church.”
Intrigued, she asked in what way. By using his business skills, he replied. He wasn`t considering ordination then. That came later.
Betsy was enthusiastic when he finally made up his mind, but it took a while for their three children to come around.
”When I first told them, the kids were honest enough to say it was a lousy idea,” he says. ”Now in a way they`re pleased to have a father crazy enough to do what I`ve done,” he says.
What he has done has been to leave a successful career as a business executive to become an Episcopal priest.
Today, this Vietnam veteran, graduate of Harvard University and recipient of an MBA from Stanford University is a part-time, unpaid associate pastor at St. Matthew`s Episcopal Church in Evanston, which entails visiting and counseling parishioners, delivering sermons, assisting in sacraments.
His full-time position is vice president for finance and administration at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school also in Evanston. McLean attended Seabury-Western for one of the three years of study that are required for ordination. The other two years he was at Christian Theological Seminary, a United Church of Christ school in Indianapolis, the family home when he began his preparation for the ministry.
Bonjour, Doughboy
Two decades ago, Alan McLean would have been something of a curiosity at most seminaries.
”One of the most significant developments in the seminary population has been the arrival of increasing numbers of second-career and older seminarians in the 1980s,” said an article published this year in Christian Century, a Protestant weekly headquartered in Chicago.
The ordination of females by most Protestant denominations, a relatively recent policy shift, has led to a dramatic surge in female students. Many are older women, which accounts for much of the increase in older seminarians, though males still make up most of this group.
A result, of course, has been a marked jump in median and average ages in Protestant seminaries, where the second-career phenomenon is most pronounced. The Christian Century article says a 1988 study ”calculated the median age of seminarians was 25.4 in 1962, 26.0 in 1975 and 31.1 in 1985.”
At Chicago`s McCormick Seminary, allied with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 97 of 175 students are 35 and older.
Rev. William Haugaard, academic dean and professor of history at Seabury- Western, says, ”Older students bring a great variety of experiences, skills and perspectives, and that changes the classroom.”
Statistics and generalities about second-career seminarians are incapable of exploring the introspection and prayer that go into each individual`s decision to enter the seminary.
”I did not leave business because I was unhappy with business,” McLean says. ”I enjoyed business. I had success and fun in business.”
He began in the international division with Pillsbury Co. ”I spent half my first year in Latin America. It was a great time.”
”In 1970, we were sent to France, to a small town near Paris. I helped introduce refrigerated dough and the Pillsbury Doughboy to the French. We had our first two children there. It was extremely challenging and enjoyable.”
In 1975, he was Pillsbury`s director of international finance, planning and control in Minneapolis. In 1978, he joined an international trading company there. In 1980, he became vice president of Hurco Manufacturing Co. of Indianapolis, which made computer-controlled machine tools.
”Hurco is a wonderful success story, one of the few this country has in machine tools,” McLean says.
Financial descent
Wherever they lived, the McLeans were active Episcopalians. ”I served on church committees,” he says. ”I taught a confirmation class one year. I participated in Bible study groups.”
The same thought kept popping up. ”I knew for a long time Alan was probably going to change directions,” says his wife. ”Every year or so we`d talk about it.”
In the end, he says, ”I felt called.”
Those who enter the clergy invariably speak of ”the call,” of being called by God to the ministry. Sometimes the call is described as occurring with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Sometimes it involves a period of doubt, resistance, struggle.
Seminary officials say they try to ascertain that a person is advancing toward God`s call rather than retreating from failure.
”People sometimes think they can do better as ministers,” says Rev. Richard Tholin, academic dean of the United Methodist Church`s Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston. ”We may get a CEO or someone who`s been fired from a job. Before we accept someone, we evaluate that person`s character, we seek recommendations, we look at the circumstances that brought the person to us.”
The reflection that accompanies middle age plays an influential role.
”The reason we choose careers in our 20s are not always valid when we hit our 40s,” McLean says. ”Some fellows wind up dancing on tabletops in bars, and some go into the ministry.”
Not everyone shouts hallelujah.
Betsy recalls: ”When they heard that Alan was going to seminary, people I knew would say to me, `Oh, my God, you`re letting him do that?`
”Our older kids both said, `Oh, are we going to be able to go to college?` What`s fascinating is they very quickly got this pleased aspect that their father was doing something he wanted.”
Still, their initial anxiety was understandable. Going into the ministry is almost always a financial sacrifice. Alan`s income today is one-fourth what it used to be.
Betsy became the principal breadwinner as a high-school teacher, her first permanent job since her marriage.
They now live in a condominium. ”As a minister, you don`t buy a house in Evanston,” McLean says.
”Many more people who`ve done what we`ve done have a much harder time economically,” Betsy says. ”We sold our big house in Indianapolis, bought one half the size and used the difference as a college fund.”
The eldest children, Margaret, 20, and Robb, 18, are now using that fund. Mary, 16, is a high-school sophomore.
Betsy says an unexpected family crisis made the subsequent changes easier by providing a lesson in what`s really important. ”I got cancer seven years ago,” Betsy says. ”The prognosis was negative.
”But being as sick as I was is a very useful exercise. It gets your priorities straightened out. You realize that material things are nice, but they don`t stick with you.”
Her illness prompted her husband to delay his plans for the seminary.
”There was a tremendous amount of stress, but today the prognosis is good,” he says. ”She`s made it past five years. She`s well again.”
”For Alan to be a minister is like having your cake and eating it too,” Betsy says. ”I`m glad he waited. I think if you go into the ministry young, it`s harder. You don`t have the experience that Alan had as a businessman to size up things and act decisively. He`s a good pastor. He listens, and people listen to him. He`s had a foot in both worlds.”
Nevertheless, going from one world to the other was a giant step, one McLean certainly wasn`t prepared to take when he was recuperating in Philadelphia Naval Hospital in 1967.
He was angry then, especially at opponents of the war. ”I would go to bars in the evening, words would be exchanged, and sometimes there would be a brawl. I used my crutches to make my point.”
He met Betsy during this period. They were married in 1968, when he was in Stanford. It was there that he began to reconcile his feelings about Vietnam.
”I had a classmate from rural Texas who was a conscientious objector. He helped me understand there were many sincere people with deep moral convictions that the war was wrong. He helped me see I needed to respect their convictions.”
Search for truth
McLean had quit attending church regularly in college, but he became an Episcopalian after Vietnam, attracted by the church`s ”inclusiveness,” what he defines as its acceptance of the sincerity of other faiths.
”I`m a firmly convinced Christian,” he says, ”but it is not for us Christians to try to limit God`s grace. I believe people of all faiths have a part of the truth and are striving to know God and to know God`s will for us.”
To a great degree, he says, the search for truth is the most fulfilling part of his new work. ”I thought there would be more excitement and challenge in the ministry, and I was right. The excitement is being with people as they make discoveries about God and about their journey in life.”
