the Latest “Sightings”

Martin Marty’s latest Sightings hits close to home. My companion is a seminary professor. She is, in my determination, what was once called a “pastor scholar” an ordained minister who has spent time in local congregational settings and gone on to earn a PhD. She spent a bit of time in the local church as she worked on her PhD in Hebrew Bible and after earning her degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School she has continued to write, research, speak, and on occasion “serve as an Interim Minister” for local congregations. I think it is safe to say that her research interest are more for persons searching or in the pews than for the academy. Her call to ministry is a “teaching” call. I’ve watched as she has lived through one seminary nearly closing and reinventing itself trying to find a way to stay relevant. She could not be part of what was coming as “relevant” there. After a short stint at an undergraduate setting she is now back at a seminary teaching those preparing for ministry in a congregational setting. But, this seminary is struggling to find its way, its identity, and the best practices to teach those preparing for some “kind of ministry” in a context of growing Christian fundamentalism and the ever present “nones.” A core question, it seems to me, is, “How do you educate persons for a vocation that is relational when they are not required to actually relate to their student peers more than 3-6 hrs pers week?” I think a problem for government right now is that we are seeing the effects of hyper-capitalism and “gated education communities.” Part of my own baggage and lens through which I observe America and Christianity is that I am the oldest end of Gen X. I’ve experienced the height of our institutions at their best, early in life, and have spent most of my adolescent and adult years watching our institutions crumble rather than ask the questions and do the things that would evolve them to be stronger and relevant for 21st century life. The good old days were not always good and for some reason we’ve yet to learn the lessons of those days.

As an aside, if there is a sociologists, historian, or curious journalists reading this post here is an idea for you. When you observe the states led by Republican Governors and legislatures and note all the “social engineering” they are doing by limiting voting, legislating discrimination, limiting access to health care options for women, and removing “rights” has anyone looked into their educational experience? How many of them attended private “Christian” colleges that shaped them for the leadership they are currently providing? An example: it is not surprising what the sitting Governor of Virginia has done or is doing when you review where he received his “higher” education. The same is true with the Attorney General of VA. What about the others? Was their worldview, leadership skills, and sense of history shaped by a “christian” perspective that teaches that America was founded by Christians and not diests? Are they operating out of a “divine right” or “manifest destiny” that, when you peal away the media consultants and double speak, is similar to the perspective of the “Taliban” mentality that so much blood and money has been spent to defeat in another part of the world? There was a time when public and private education “educated” people for relationship and community with a shared basic set of facts and history. Given what we are seeing in the halls of government at all levels, at least what gets covered by the Beltway media and legacy media outlets, it seems to me that private and public education no longer works from the same basic set of facts and history. It makes me wonder who “vets” those that “vet” or accredit institutions of higher education? In an online education age that is a very important question. What qualifies as education and “higher” education in this context?

So, after all that dribble, I get to the Sightings article from April 8. Be sure to read the background link at the end.

Seminaries and the Future
by Martin E. Marty

News of theological seminaries does not usually appear in public media unless someone who is part of one of them creates scandal—sexual or financial, since even heresy rarely gets covered in contemporary America—and cannot go unnoticed and not-covered. This week, therefore, this e-column has to take on a different character; for the first time its editors ask subscribers first to read the longish source, the Inside Higher Ed article, “The Struggling Seminaries,” whose link appears at the end of this Sightings, and then read the rest of this effort to provide context.

Why the shuffling of feet, clearing of throat, and doing this explaining? A simple reason: Sightings is devoted to the public faces of religion, and seminaries get dismissed as having effects only on private religious life in sectarian concerns. Such dismissal results from acts of overlooking or mis-defining the roles of theological and ministerial education. Because of denominational divisions, misunderstanding of who seminary graduates are and what they do and where they fit in the public life of a nation described as “pluralist” and “secular,” they can be passed by news analysts and the public.

Then one thinks of this: hundreds of thousands of seminary graduates are priests, pastors, ministers, chaplains, teachers, administrators, and “lay” leaders in crucial places and spaces. As we write this week, some African-American pastors and the Roman Catholic cardinal in our town, Chicago, are forming a coalition to try to stem the tide of support by other clergy and congregations for gay marriage legislation. Other weeks it is the supporters who are central to or at the edge of pro-gay marriage moves. So it is on scores of issues. How these religious leaders are trained—most of them are seminary graduates—has something, usually very much, to do with their exercise of ministry.

Now to the attached source. If its author, Libby Nelson, writes about a “crisis in theological education,” even if it takes off from the story of one seminary, she wisely confers with and cites leaders, such as Stephen Graham, of the Association of Theological Schools. Together, they chronicle chiefly the fiscal dimensions of downturns and changes in the public ethos out of which the cohorts of seminarians traditionally have come. Name anything that hits higher and especially graduation or professional education in most fields, and you will find that it hits all this harder in theological and ministerial education.

We won’t repeat what is in the source. The single purpose here is to try to locate seminaries and graduate divinity schools in the public economy, whether this refers to notice, status, spirituality, politics, or more. Leaders, of course, are asking how to adapt and innovate. As online education increases at the expense of group-“formation” of leaders, as more and more second-career candidates turn to theological education even as the total number of aspirants to ministries decline, they are brain-storming, think-tanking, praying, planning, and hoping. They can point to many positive signs and to the need for ever-better educated and trained religious leaders, even as they have to ask whether the old model (often of denominationally-based) seminaries based on liberal-arts undergraduate training will meet the needs of ministries when science-and-religion, belief-and-unbelief, indifference and “difference,” spirituality and alternatives, are warring for allegiance and commitment among among citizens

Source

Libby Hanson, “The Struggling Seminaries” Inside Higher Ed, March 29, 2013.

Author Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the Divinity School. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com.