Posted on 04/01/2013 9:23:05 AM PDT by JerseyanExile
America’s mainline Protestant seminaries are in crisis, but so far they seem to be spending more energy dodging tough choices than preparing for the future. A recent article at Inside Higher Ed describes the enrollment collapse at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. Luther is one of the most important Lutheran seminaries in the country, but its status wasn’t enough to insulate it from the forces upending seminaries everywhere. Enrollment fell off sharply, and the institution ”was running multimillion-dollar deficits, spending down its endowment and relying on loans.”
The seminary’s response? It’s making some painful cuts, letting go of some staff and reducing the number of degree programs it offers. Luther isn’t alone; seminaries all over the country are facing tough choices.
In many cases, survival has required selling off property or losing independence. More seminarians enroll later in life than in the past, meaning that seminaries often don’t need buildings filled with dorms and apartments. Others have worked to develop online programs, requiring less of a physical footprint, and selling or leasing their additional facilities.
These may be steps in the right direction, but they are baby steps at the beginning of a very long march. Higher ed is in trouble in every branch of learning, but the crisis facing seminaries is worse than that facing any other professional degree program. Seminaries, and especially those serving mainline Protestant denominations, have to change faster than law school or PhD programs if they want to survive. And selling some property or firing some staff, though sadly necessary in many cases, is just the start to a wrenching period of transformative change.
In effect, these churches are clinging to the ministry model that dominated mainline churches in the 20th century. Seminary leaders act as if the average seminary grad will still earn an average salary in an average church, that that salary can still support the loan payments that keep tuition levels high enough to support a traditional seminary, and that denominations or rich believers can and will make up the difference between tuition and cost. These assumptions are almost certainly false.
As noted before, the modern American church, especially among mainline Protestants, but also to some degree among Catholics and evangelicals, got mixed up in the blue social model. The clergy became a ‘profession’ like the others. People pursued careers in the ministry, complete with grievance procedures and pension programs. Denominations built up regional and national organizations that were staffed with professional staff. Progress was seen as replacing volunteers with certified, graduate educated professionals: Directors of Sacred Music and Directors of Christian Education. People built lots of buildings they couldn’t afford to maintain. From an organization perspective, denominational bureaucracies were like GM and IBM in the 1950s and 1960: hierarchical, growing every year, and offering employees jobs for life.
Neither Jesus nor any of the twelve apostles could get a job in any self-respecting mainline church in America today; none of them had a degree from an accredited seminary.
So part of America’s contemporary religious crisis has to do with the decline and fall of this blue model church, and any solutions to that crisis need to involve creative ways of transitioning to a post-blue era. More and more mainline Protestant ministers can expect to be part time or volunteer. The traditional denominations (each with a network of expensive seminaries and bureaucracies) will have to consolidate. Church bureaucrats will largely need to disappear.
This means that seminaries will have to change much more fundamentally than firing a few professors or selling off some dorms. Christianity is going to have to be more of a mission and less of a profession in the future. It may be that future ministers will learn the trade the way Peter learned from Jesus and Timothy from Paul: they watch the masters at work, and start their own pastoring careers under the supervision of someone they respect.
It’s not surprising that most seminaries and denominational bureaucracies would rather think about anything than the collapse of their business models. But rethinking the way the churches work is an essential part of the mission of Christian leaders today, and their failure to engage bespeaks a much broader failure to grasp the challenges of our times.
Pivoting off of the Inside Higher Ed piece, Rod Dreher asks about possible solutions to the wider troubles facing US seminaries. He writes:
What liberal Christians will say is, “Be more liberal!” What conservative Christians will say is, “Be more conservative!” Neither strategy seems suited to the nature of this crisis.
Dreher is completely right that the problems facing seminaries aren’t just theological. And it’s more than a question of budgets; penny-pinching won’t see them through the storm. It’s time for new leaders with vision and imagination to take the church beyond the blue. Since the colonial era, the genius of American Christianity has lain in the ability of new generations of Christian leaders to reinvent institutions, find an authentic theological stance and voice that appeals to each new generation, and put Christianity in the forefront of individual lives and social challenges from age to age.
Theology can be debated; liberal, conservative, protestant, catholic, fundamentalist, modernist. There is much to be said for each of these positions, and the debates need to continue.
But there’s a much more critical difference: the difference between life and death. There is a lot of dead wood in American Christian institutions today, and the carters are coming to clear it away.
He wanted to go, and got his wish.
In mortal life he was, among other things, a sea-going sailor and master of celestial navigation. I hope and pray that he now sees "his Pilot, face to face."
I just miss him: He and I were very close.
But God willing: I'll see him again later on, in due course.
Thank you dear YHAOS! May God ever bless you and your dear ones!
I imagine he's joyous where he is now, now knowing the fullness of God's peace and love; finally seeing "his Pilot" face to face....
Mom is doing well; the rest of us are doing well (except my brother. I can't imagine his status. He was AWOL throughout these last days. May God have mercy on his soul).
Thank you, dearest Alamo-Girl, for invoking God's blessing on my father and family!
A seafaring man and master of celestial navigation . . . Wow!
I understand your dad’s thinking. I’m not there yet. But close enough to get it.
Thank you for all your good wishes.
Truly, your father knows the peace, joy and love of God now that he has gone home. He is an amazing man I look forward to meeting "on the other side."
Dear ‘pipe, Daddy (the “rider” in your usage) “fired” his donkey; or put him out to pasture whichever you prefer.
I prefer out to pasture... for its merely a little old donkey..
others prefer put out to stud... but those are riders being ridden by their donkeys...
Well Boop its indeed a Donkey Rodeo out there..
with clowns and everything.. even comedians..
This might cheer you up somewhat....
https://vimeo.com/channels/hosepipe
I am so sorry to hear of your dear Father’s passing, BB. May God comfort your spirit.
“While I honor Bishop Fulton Sheen as a great theologian and evangelist, I’d give him a grade of “F” for his knowledge and understanding of American history, particularly of the Founding Period.”
You’re in over your head in lack of study of Blessed Fulton Sheen ,Dear Sister
A few quotes from Blessed Sheen...
“What men do not see is that the fracturing of the spiritual community means the loss of inclusive and unifying moral sanctions over the whole of man’s activities. The modern world has no cement to bind together personal morals and the morals of political and economic life. If a time ever comes when the religious Jews, Protestants and Catholics have to suffer under a totalitarian state denying them the right to worship God according to the light of their conscience, it will be because for years they thought it made no difference what kind of people represented them in Congress, and because they never opposed the spiritual truth to the materialist lie.” - Fulton Sheen
“Never will we be able to understand our times if we naively ‘think’ of this system of self Government as the work of a few gangsters or the creation of a pack of criminals we call a political party. The appeal of Socialism, Fascism and communism was principally negative; they were protests against a live and let live anything goes liberalism, a spineless indifference to causes, a failure to recognize that nothing was evil enough to hate, and nothing was good enough to die for.” — Fulton J. Sheen
“Just as is the subject of property, so, too, in the subject of liberty, the Christian position steers a middle course between extremes. Freedom for Christianity means neither the right to do what you please, nor the right to what you must, but rather the right to do whatever you ought. Ought implies order, law and justice. Liberty by definition is an attribute which belongs only to a person. It cannot be attributed to a collectivity or totality whether be a nation, a state, a race or a class. The basic fallacy of communism on this point is the transfer of freedom from the person to the collectivity.” — Fulton J. Sheen
BB-”You suggested that “self-evident truths” could be anything at all, whatever man says they are. But if you say that, you miss the point of what Jefferson was referring to as “self-evident truths”””
Here is what Jefferson thought to be self evident regarding Black people.....
From Thomas Jefferson regarding Black people.....But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.....They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour....They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation-Thomas Jefferson
I did not miss the point,and you should be ashamed of Jefferson!
I clearly see the error of Jefferson’s self evident truths
BB-”What exactly is your beef against Calvin?”
The same as it is with satan, nero, hitler and others.
Just as St. Hilary of Poiters pointed to Constantious as an Anti Christ due to grave error , Calvin’s error is anti Christ as well.
Perhaps you should realize that Christians condemn heresies and love the sinner and would not be a pluralist to accept
grave error
FWIW,
I won’t be able to respond for a week or two
In ending , what this world needs is heroic faith in spite of persecution , not faith in the error of those ho promoted error like Jefferson and others
.. And notice one more thing that shows a sign of weakness,dear sister...
I don’t need to have a long ping list like you do to make me feel accepted by the crowd.
Love wins even when everyone disagrees with it
I wish you a Blessed week!
It makes no ultimate difference in Jefferson’s unfortunate choice of terms when he wrote of a “separation of church and state” rather than using the more accurate terms the Founders wrote into the Bill of Rights, when they wrote Congress “shall make no law” respecting an “establishment of religion.” Everyone ~ EVERYONE ~ knows that what the Founders were speaking of, when they used the expression, “separation of church and state,” was the prevention of the ability of the any religious organization to have authority over the management of state affairs and of its people, particularly the governmental enforcement and support of a specific structural religious doctrine.
That the religion haters have used the expression “separation of church and state” as an excuse to attempt to drive the Judeo-Christian Tradition entirely from public view and hearing notwithstanding, the fact remains they have to deal with the actual constitutional phrase that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That they cannot deal with it at all becomes conspicuously obvious when we observe that all they can do is ignore its meaning ~ nothing more.
Now we see irony piled upon incongruity when we witness the advocates of state imposed religious doctrines joining forces with Atheists and other Judeo-Christian antagonists, giving new life to Jefferson’s old grievance that those who advocate religion’s freedom are accused of having no religion at all.
But the Founding Fathers were made of sterner stuff than many of today’s Americans. From the day the first of their signatures were put on that document with the words “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator . . .” the howling storm of scandal and controversy has not ceased, but it has not stayed their determination to stand firm against both the “princes” of state and church, and other tyrants bent on destroying human liberty, for it is not just religious doctrine against which we must stand today, but social doctrines equally inimical.
Thank you betty, for your posts; they are an unfailing blessing.
My ping list is long because I wanted to share a story with you and the other pingees.
When word got out at the assisted living community where my Mom and Dad resided (Mom is still there and coping well), one of the residents — Barbara, a beautiful woman in her mid-'80s — took me aside to comfort me on my loss. This is what she told me:
Barbara is a registered nurse (retired) acting at the time of her tale as an ICU head nurse. She had a patient, someone known to her prior to his hospital admission (I don't recall what the illness may have been). When his cardiac monitor flat-lined one night, there was no doctor present. She was quite alone. So she took out "the paddles," applied them, and got his heart restarted again.
The next day, this patient said to Barbara: "Barbara, I know you had to do what you had to do. But I wish you hadn't done it. Where I was, was so full of peace and love that I didn't want to come back."
Barbara added that, later on, this patient developed cancer (which in due course killed him) — but he never again had any fear of death.
[In northern Maine I am told that the "old-timers" refer to death as The Great Change. The point is: LIFE goes on....]
Just wanted to share this with you, and other dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
God has comforted me. My family and I are all well. Thank you again for your kind condolences.
That’s a wonderful story, Sister Betty. Thank you.
Why is it that the fans of "separation of Church and State" almost always omit the second clause [in bold-face above]?
And yes, everyone — at least anyone who knows the spiritual/philosophical background of the Declaration and the Constitution — "knows that what the Founders were speaking of": as you nicely put it, "the prevention of the ability of any religious organization to have authority over the management of state affairs and of its people, particularly the governmental enforcement and support of a specific structural religious doctrine."
And the reverse is also true: that the government is constitutionally prohibited from taking upon itself the status of a religion to which all citizens must conform.
[I don't know about you, but it seems to me that our faux President right now is trying to "establish" a religion — a thoroughly despiritualized, desacralized, "secular" State Religion. And he proposes himself as its "pope."]
Again I note the Words of Christ Jesus: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God, what is God's." Clearly the Son of God instructs us that it is NORMATIVE for God ("religion") and Caesar ("government") to "stand apart" from each other.
I call this the "REALIST" view (for the Logos of Christ is the foundation of Reality (the Creation) and all things in it, preeminently man); and I do believe the Framers — all Christians to a man — were of this realist persuasion.
I do not believe that the Founders/Framers were "evil," dastardly people. They were REALISTS who knew that NO man and/or human institution of any kind can instantiate the Kingdom of God on earth. Indeed, such cannot be instantiated even in a monastery, let alone a vast, diverse, complex society such as what we have in the United States of America.
Such an expectation is the dream of an ideologue, of a denizen of a Second Reality....
It's clear to me that all the problems we suffer today in our society are fundamentally spiritual and cultural at their source — not "political." Thus there are NO political solutions. JMHO FWIW.
It seems we are a nation divided. We are divided into two main groups: Those who love and thankfully praise God for His blessings and try to live in His Law; and those who believe God is a total fiction than can be safely dismissed from consciousness and experience. I really do think it's just that simple.
But if we as a Nation do not go down on bended knee and pray God to help us, surely only the prospect of ruination extends before us....
Pray to God that He may heal our land, and restore it....
Thank you so very much, dear brother in Christ, for your beautiful, insightful essay/post. And for your very kind words.
I intended this for you, too: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3002966/posts?page=131#131
Dear bother in Christ, I am not running for a popularity contest here, merely trying to tell the truth as I see it. My "pingees" are long-time FRiends, not all of whom always agree with me....
Truly, you are right about this: "Love wins even when everyone disagrees with it."
I wish you a blessed LIFE: May God be with you and your spirit, and bless you always!
Surely a rhetorical question. Yes?
It is because “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is not to be mentioned lest Liberals and Progressives should burst into flames (oh my!). It is because the pretense that “Separation of church and state” is completely exposed by “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” whenever it is proposed to mean anything other than “Congress shall make no law . . . “
0bama’s clumsy attempt to introduce the spiritual dry rot of Socialism and Materialism into our society by force is one of many such attempts, and may not have been a form of “Establishment” anticipated by the Founders, but it represents no new challenges to our understanding of the malice of tyranny’s evilness.
I could complain that you are getting a little ahead of me, but I think the more likely account is that we are once again engaged in completing each other’s thoughts as we occasionally are given to do.
Yeppers! :^)
Dear brother in Christ, I don't have the sense that we "compete." I think we just stimulate each other. You already know (or should know) how very much I admire the way you analyze questions, and your extraordinary knowledge base regarding American history and the Constitution (among other things).
I hope I haven't been misbehaving....
Please check, but I think the word I used was "completed."
And, no, you haven't been misbehaving. ( ^ 8 }
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