The majority opinion among those under the age of 50 is that traditional seminary education is broke (monetarily and otherwise). It is part of an earlier time. Its structures best meet the needs of a Christendom church, a church that is slowly dying.
I’d be a fool to disagree. Yet I think the case is often overstated. Smaller seminaries are often among the most innovative and experimental educational institutions. They are trying all kinds of things. It is true that bigger schools tied to traditional paradyms and older faculty can be rigid. But for many facing the budget crisies of the past five years, who are facing declining enrollment, who are facing the changing nature of the ministry student – what we need is not more inventiveness, we need to think more carefully what we’re doing and why.
This Thursday at Northern we have an evening set aside to discuss these issues – it’s a free event and anyone is welcome to attend and contribute – register here. JR Rozko has spent time in this area and he has written some observations on his blog. He’s presenting a paper on the subject at Northern Seminary Thursday nite along with responses by Mike Breen and other people who have a stake in the subject. Since I won’t be able to get there until late, I thought I’d put a few thoughts out there. Maybe progress will be made on these issues just to name a few.
Seminary Education rightly gets a Bad Rap. Traditional seminary education is out of step. It teaches one person to do everything in the church as a professionalized clergy person. It is heavily cognitive. It trains people to be experts. It takes leaders out of their contexts to learn information. None of this works when the church finds itself largely dis-established, i.e. when the church is in a missionary situation. Here ministry must be organic and contextualized. Here ministry must be sustainable through being entrepreneurial in order to survive. As a result of all this, it is best done as shared ministry within multiple teams. It must be nurtured out or everyday life. Spiritual formation is therefore important. Seminary cannot be built of the model of a graduate school training for well paying jobs. (The thing that most irritates me is that seminarians often come out of seminary unable to think of life as anything but inside the four walls of a church building studying all day.) It must become more like a part time adult learning center training hundreds for the ministry one night a week/ plus a weekend a month (to name one option).
We Should However Not Throw Out The Baby With The Bathwater!
With all these problems, we must be careful to nuance Christendom and the various cultural conditions that have played into “professional” school type training. We must be careful not to throw everything out. I am positive leaders need to be grounded in the historical study of Scripture, history and doctrine. I’m telling you, I HAVE SEEN THE DIFFERENCE! To not be, eventuates in a pragmatized pastorate who has no sense of the depths of God’s movement in the world and in history. He or she will end up reducing the gospel to whatever cultural expediency presents itself. Lack of theology, history, context, and Scriptural integrity is one of the primary reasons the church has died in the past thirty years. It is also one of the main reasons any missional pastor survives. He or she is grounded in deep and gets what is at stake and how to navigate culture via the Scriptures within history.
Seminaries are a superior place for training in these ways. Yet we must make it affordable
We Need To (Can) Find a Way
We need then to find a way to morph seminary education into another form beyond the residence seminary 3 year M Div. It must be portable or at least doable without leaving your context. It must fit as a sustainable life rhythm within one’s already established work/ministry in context. It must be affordable. It must provide an education that shall ground someone in the very center of God’s mission so as to engage culture with gospel in integrity and social presence. It must teach the how’s and why’s of contextualization without itself becoming subverted by contextualization (i.e. overly pragmatised, diluted via the internet, etc). It must create places of conversation. It must be communal. It must be monastic without cloistering students away from his or her context (I know this sounds oxymoronish).
There are great programs already at work in seminaries. Check out Biblical Seminary’s Leap program and Tyndale in Toronto has the In-Ministry M-Div. We are working at Northern on a program launch here shortly.
All this is what they’ll all be talking about Thursday Night (See here for details – Come on over if you’re nearby) J.R. will be presenting his paper (He talks about it here). Some of our faculty/ staff will be responding. Mike Breen will be there. I’ll be coming late (sorry I can’t get there earlier.) If this is of interest. COME ON DOWN! And there’s still time to sign up for the Missional Learning Commons this weekend. I will be there!! Looking forward to meeting “the revolution.”
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David,
I think that you are right in that there are certainly seminaries that are getting it right and thriving right now. I went to Denver Seminary a decade ago and even then they were leading the way with intentional mentoring models of training pastors that were really excellent. Since then they have gotten better at it and the seminary continues to set records for enrollment. There was a spirit there that was open to approaching seminary in some different ways and it showed in the results in the practical preparation of pastors for ministry.
What was missing at the time institutionally (I can’t speak for it today) was a more robust gospel perspective. It was there amongst the faculty, but the grip of mid-twentieth century evangelicalism still had control of the institution when I was there.
The seminaries that lead the way going forward are going to be incarnational. Everything they do will be rooted in an embodiment of the gospel, not merely a teaching of the gospel. Students will emerge from these experiences changed from the inside out not from the mind on down. The trickle down spiritual formation of the past is not going to get it done for today.
I am not a professional minister. I certainly am not a Pastor, but I am amazed at the people who come out of seminaries who essentially never learned how to listen to the Holy Spirit. They do much in their own strength and do much based on what other “successful” pastors are doing. Seminaries should train people to hear the voice of the Lord.
Yep!
I agree that there are things that seminaries are uniquely offering folks. But there are whole areas that seminaries have generally sucked at: contextualized ministry skills, group facilitation, discernment, radical discipleship, and others. Most of these things I’ve learned by diving in. I’m working on educational endeavors that can shore this up and integrate with some classic areas of learning that folks need to learn from scholarly folks–church history, languages, hermeneutics, theological traditions, etc. But the big challenge at the end of the day is $. Seminaries can get away with charging a lot of money. I honestly wholeheartedly believe that if I had a fraction of the money that seminaries had, I could come up with a much richer learning experience, but it wouldn’t be accredited.
Seminaries could prove to be amazing resource providers through research and development, especially if they offered facilities and opportunities to those studying issues outside the scope of modernist philosophy and Christendom models. Some already offer great programs/systems for accessible and local leadership development, whether through degree programs or not. And there are some categories of experts usually at seminary that it would be difficult to find in any local church. They could potentially partner in this changeover time with non-Christendom paradigm disciples to help rethink theology in a narrative framework, or offer linguistic insights on emerging questions … all kinds of technical things where having an academic approach will still be a plus for the coming years.
However, I agree with you, Mark, that there are essential ministry skills and life skills that seminaries don’t seem to do well. I’d suggest most of these aren’t learned through conventional models of theory-into-practice, but more through action-reflection. But, since most training programs I’m aware of don’t seem to have a grasp on customizing the training for people with different learning styles, they’re stuck.
Anyway, in addition to your list, I’d say there’s also a definite need for learning and practicing skills that fit more with an emerging/intercultural paradigm: communal decision-making and social development skills, balanced approach to discernment and spiritual warfare, case study skills (we can’t contextualize well if we neglect the discipline of social-historical observation and interpretation), staff and volunteer management, organic systems thinking and sustainability practices, comprehensive strategy and planning that doesn’t revolve around a visionary leader, new ministry development and general entrepreneurial start-up skills, intervention into spiritually abusive relational styles and toxic organizational practices, and training in theories and techniques of creativity.
Everything is accredited if you know who the kind of training you are offering matters to
(I know what you mean though).
To put it in crass terms, the issue here is demand. “Accreditation,” as it is commonly understood, only stands because there is a demand for “accredited” leaders. I am more and more convinced however, that, on the one hand, there is actually far less demand for this sort of leader – one trained in traditional paradigms of seminary education – than one might think and, on the other hand, that there is far more demand for a different kind of leader – the sort of leader I imagine you would seek to train and equip, than most of us realize.
My prediction? Someone, in an organized and strategic way, is going to really step out in faith and put these theories to the test and if/when they are shown to be correct, most seminaries are going to be left in the dust. People will flock to those who are offering alternative versions of theological education, which are more in touch with the realities of Post-Christendom (and a pricing structure to match) and an entirely new vision of accreditation will be born.
Ya think?
I suspect you’re on to something major, JR. The paradigm has been shifting, but educational and religious institutions are among the slowest to change. Put those two together in a seminary, and it’s even slower.
I have to wonder if, at the very least, institution-focused *accreditation* must be matched by student-focused *certification* in the near future. I’ve seen accredited seminaries graduate students who did not show the practical skills and personal character needed to start, serve in, and/or sustain a healthy church or ministry. Some kind of system for helping students/apprentices grow through ongoing evaluation and mentoring is needed. Traditional theological field education/practicum for one or two semesters is hardly enough.
Perhaps the time will arrive within a few generations when men and women who have undergone some rigorous and transparent “certification” processes will find it easier to get positions with their ministry and mentoring portfolios than those with theological training from “accredited” seminaries find with their diploma and professorial recommendations.
Ohhh . . . this is sticky/tricky stuff, isn’t it? I certainly felt these tensions when I was a seminary student 20 years ago and have been greatly encouraged to see new paradigms and models breaking out since then. What I fear is this unshakeable feeling that “all progress isn’t necessarily progress.” What I mean is what are the “gains” and what are the “losses.” Maybe I’m a bit “old school” here, but there is something about being tossed into the deep end as I think Mark may have been alluding to. Traditional seminaries required one to pick up and physically move in order to be completely immersed in the seminary (literally seedbed). It helped to create (naturally or artificially) one of those required “markers” that sociologists talk about as being required for adulthood (though this is changing as well). Again, I am encouraged by some new and incredibly creative and flexible models. I am not an advocate that everyone should be required to have an M.Div, however, I have also heard a lot of lame excuses and whinning by people who have used this to justify their own laziness and fear. This may be akin to what some sociologists call the “emerging adulthood.” Can a person learn to use a samurai sword by practicing a couple of nights a week . . . sure . . . it will take a long, long time though. Better yet, study night and day under an authentic master for “three” years and become the sword itself.
I know, I know all these ideas break down and again, I’m not saying everybody should do it “old school,” nor is it an either/ or situation, but the question that I’m really interested in is . . . what do we gain and what do we lose. And if we think that we can have it all . . . then we are just being silly and spoiled little Americans.
Jim, interesting point.. and if I hear you right, tending toward the “surrender” mode. In other words, both the separation, and the choice to pick up family and sell all, were part of a formative experience that one doesn’t get when one remains in the familiar and comfortable of home.
JR, the “organized and strategized way” could be something like FORGE is attempting, but for some reason are having difficulty getting traction.
Dave, “monastic but not cloistered” or isolated or insulated from context. I am guessing this is a reference to “ordered” in the sense of living by a rule or under an Order. I had a good evening near Winnipeg talking with some young leaders and arguing for a rule of life. (They didn’t like the term “covenant” though). I think the proposition is appealing, but I think many are looking for, or waiting for, examples..
I’m in a program at Rochester College (north of Detroit) that is doing some pretty cool things in training missional leaders. It’s cohort based, so there’s communal learning. It’s online/intensive based, so we aren’t uprooted from ministry contexts. In fact, a church context is required for the program. We have a rule of life, so its monastic in that regard. It’s affordable, and robust historically and theologically.
i would like to put a plug in here for international seminaries. I got a perfectly wonderful mdiv in nairobi (negst.edu) for $1500/year that deeply immersed me in the concepts of reconceptualization and orthodoxy, suffering and hope.
Dave,
Your insights and ideas have tremendous credibility and creativity. Yet to move in the direction will also demand several others elements, including but not limited to the following:
(1) Openness and progressive thinking on the part of accrediting agencies. (2) Institutional boards that support a radical paradigm shift. (3) Donors who are willing to consider entrepreneurial approaches to theological education that is absent of demanding “bottom line results”. (4) Leadership that is willing to take God-led risks in the name of doing something grander for the Kingdom.
Chuck
thanks Chuck, I agree!!
Great ideas David, but I do wonder where it puts those of us still considering Seminary and weighing our options.. Is it still worth it? I tried to develope some of my thoughts a little more extensively for those who are interested: http://utterlyunqualified.blogspot.com/2011/11/does-it-make-sense-to-go-into-seminary.html
[...] of the people from Northern Seminary makes a good case that we should be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bath water” but that [...]
Church based theological training.
http://antiochschool.edu/
Thanks for the article, good stuff.
It has never been proven that traditional seminary education is bad for ministers in a post-Christendom setting.
It has never been proven that highly congnitive training is a bad thing.
It has never been proven that removing seminarians from a “real life setting” for training is not good for them.
Let’s look at these one-by-one:
Traditional seminary education makes a minister who is a “jack of all trades”. He knows a little about everything. In a post Christendom setting, ministers will take on a wide variety of responsibilities–an MDiv, with a sound curriculum prepares them for all of this.
Highly cognitive training is a good thing. We cannot duplicate the field situation in the classroom. We can do, in the classroom, what the classroom is well situated to do–train them how to think, deeply and seriously, about the Scriptures, about the person and work of Jesus Christ, about the great doctrines of the faith, etc. etc. Ministers–especially in small churches, church plants, etc. are looked to for leadership–they need to know the stuff. If a minister plants a new church he has many “baby” Chrsitians–new believers–who know nothing of the faith. He cannot lead them with a half baked, poorly thought through kind of faith. (Remember that the medieval Catholic church became morally corrupt, spiritually bankrupt and doctrinally unsound because they trained clergy in the “how-to” of ministry but gave them little training in Bible or doctrine. They had priests who could not read, conducting services by rote. If we do not emphasize “cognitive training” we will end up in the same situation.)
Removing Seminarians from a “real life setting” IS a good thing. Seminary becomes a “laboratory” where they can experiment with all kinds of ideas and doctrines. It is a safe place where no one’s spiritual life is on the line. They can explore Calvinism, Pelagianism, Preterism, etc. etc. etc. under the guidance of wise professors who should encourage and guide the students in all of this, challenging them to return to the Scriptures as they think all these things through. Churches have been torn up because a poorly educated pastor gets ahold of a book, or has an “experience”, and takes off with a list of “new and revolutionary” ideas that leave the congregation bewildered and divided. Better for him to have discovered all of these things, at least lightly in survey courses, in Seminary. They won’t throw him off kilter some years later. Also, and at least equally important. In traditional Seminary settings, students are exposed to “the problem of evil” as a theoretical problem and an existential one, but all of this in a classroom. They are encouraged to consider the options, the theodicies, etc. and to work them through in their minds. (This will happen in apologetics, theology, and even pastoral ministry classes). The result is a minister, some years later, who can offer words of comfort to a grieving couple who have lost a child, but words that have the mark of conviction behind them. That grieving couple will be comforted, certainly, but they will sense almost subconsciously, that their pastor “really knows what he is talking about” even if he doesn’t use the “big words” he learned in school. He worked through the problem in his head–now he can offer real heart-felt ministry to this family, ministry that means something–something more than just “nice” but hollow words. Do you really want a minister to go out there and consider the problem of evil for the very first time in his life, when a grieving couple are sitting in front of him and asking “Why?”–when their whole spiritual future is on the line, in this crisis? Of course not! Let’s keep the “safe place” removed from real ministry–the Seminary–and be glad our next generation of church leaders have it available to them.
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