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.
Your summation covers the subject very well marron, save I would take some small exception to the Court's use of "separation." There are those who will take (with malice, we must think) that word as an invitation to drive religion generally, but the Judeo-Christian Tradition particularly, entirely from the public common, when the obvious intent was to place entirely the onus on the State to make no law "respecting an establishment of religion," followed immediately by a "Free Exercise Clause," as a reinforcement of the point. Even without the First Amendment the Constitution offered no authority to regulate religious thinking, nor the regulation of thought on any subject, for that matter.
Thanks for the comeback.
BEEP!
I don’t see much difference between the american liberal who holds up Obama , Clinton and Carter as divinely inspiresd and the american conservative that holds up Washington , Jefferson and Madison as divinely inspired. Niether can or did build a political or moral system of anything great that will stand the test of time.
Proclaiming something as self evident truth and Liberty in pursuit of happiness with no set laws of dogma that can’t be changed only can lead to, for example.. A gay person saying they have a right to marriage in pursuit of happiness and a pornographer saying his happiness is the ability and free right to be protected by law to produce pornography for his happiness
You can show speeches of men who spoke about Christian values, but they did not have the backbone to define them into something that could never change. Thus, we are we we are today because of their weakness
These ff’s did not share a united faith, they had many different beliefs with different set of moral beliefs about things like slavery and many other things.
We are less than one generation away from complete moral failure where the next group of WE THE PEOPLE will accept every moral atrocity there can possible be.
This experiment has failed!
The only moral truths that can’t be changed exist in Catholic/Orthodox churches - The Church Fathers are the real hero’s to be looked up to for a better society , not Jefferson, Clinton, Obama, Washington
Separation of Church and State was the death blow to this country
A country that could never have the ability to allow or abortion, pornography etc...
A country that makes such things punishable by prison
The States and localities did prohibit them prior to 1973. Only an authoritarian government of force could impose them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3005522/posts
It’s better to have individual states decide, but if you live in a liberal state like NY(where I live) you still end up having moral atrocities forced in your face.
Even worse, is a crazy system where the US supreme court gets to play God and decide right and wrong and what they believe is freedom
From the words of the late Blessed Bishop Fulton Sheen...
“The State Becomes a nurse only in those civilizations in which citizens have lost a knowledge of Divine Truth and love. Sick of constantly making choices that never perfect or bring peace to their hearts and souls, they surrender their choice to a dictator. Communism is the tragedy of freedom. A false liberalism, which leaves a man free to choose anything without a standard of right and wrong, eventually produces a chaos. Along comes communism to organize that chaos.”-Bishop Fulton Sheen
More from The Late Bishop Sheen -who saw the moral demise we now live in
“What Nietzsche once said as an individual has become true of a world power: “Evil, be thou my good.” By becoming indifferent to the hard, fast line which divides justice from injustice, right from wrong, the Western world has ceased to be militant about those political virtues
When all these evidences of a broken dream are upon us, some try to drug the public conscience by telling them that Progress is still with us provided: First, we get rid of God; second, we preserve the right to climb into any bed; and third, that we be allowed to make money by pornography.”
-†- Fulton J. Sheen D.D., Ph. D., ‘Bishop Sheen Writes’;November 1975.
The Holy Spirit inspired the Holy Bible - it is the Word of God. If you could succeed in declaring the Bible null and void you would also succeed in eliminating Christianity imho.
Your argument is completely senseless, every belief system has founding documents. The more profound ones provide more and more depth and nuance of meanings throughout one’s life.
Jesus first act at age 12 was to show the leading ‘expert’ theologians more profound understanding of the Old Testament than any of them had ever dared dream.
I do not wish to misunderstand what you say, or, as they say, “put words in your mouth.” So is it your assertion that you see no material difference between the phrase “Separation of Church and State,” and the Constitutional phrase, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”?
“This experiment has failed!”
I take it that by this, you refer to what has widely been termed “The Great American Experiment.” Strangely enough it is 0bama that would agree with you on this assertion. And we must assume Clinton and Carter as well, although I am not aware of a statement declaring so from either of these worthies as categorical as 0bama’s flat statement in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech of 7 December (of all days) 2011, that the “Great American Experiment” of free markets has never worked. Jefferson, or none of the others I mentioned (Adams, Washington, Franklin, Coolidge, even Paine, or many another) would agree with 0bama, but apparently you do. It’s true that 0bama has simply declared that this government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed has never worked ~ he has not called it a “Protestant botch.” But then, I can’t say that you have either (see Is America Just a Protestant Botch?, Crisis Magazine, or a discussion is to be found in Free Republic), 12/16/2011).
We are all familiar with the “failures” of the government our Founding Fathers put in place (God knows, they have been discussed enough), both real and fabricated. Likewise, we are also familiar with the manifold failures of various Socialist governmental systems or of various Theocracies that now exist or have in the past existed.
“The only moral truths that can’t be changed exist in Catholic/Orthodox churches - The Church Fathers are the real hero’s to be looked up to for a better society . . . ”
Fine. I’ve not before enjoyed a discussion with you, but I’ve had the privilege of perusing very interesting and valuable conversations between you and boop, so I know that you are a serious-minded Poster, interested in pursuing only matters of importance. But, I asked you a question (see #38, this thread), can you “advance and defend an alternative?”
I’m waiting.
The Holy Spirit inspired the Holy Bible - it is the Word of God. If you could succeed in declaring the Bible null and void you would also succeed in eliminating Christianity imho.
I see you’re a Bible worshipper.. different strokes for different folks I guess..
Remove the bible or even the authority of the bible and it removes your God..
I know many others with a very small God.. some even worship their church..
I do not deny “them” the freedom to worship pretty much anything.. and most do..
However being the scissorbill that I am,,,,, I grade them.. and You..
Dear Friend, Te point I was making is there are people of extremes on both american liberalism and american conservationism who look up to political figures as almost messianic figures in a historical fashion and a modern fashion.
I was not saying you are one of these people, but these people with these views have, and have had influence society.
There are 2 very important people that had influence in early american culture in a very negative way, I would go a far to say these 2 people were demonic.
The first was vile anti Catholic called Voltaire out of the Enlightenment, the second was John Calvin from the reformation with his horrific idea of total depravity- that actually lead more people into atheism that is immeasurable even to this day.
Many of the ff’s of this country were brought up through this influence, so I actually don’t believe they are as much at fault , the influence of Voltaire and Calvin had began the great rot of society by there true liberal
philosophy that they carried into a false version of Christianity that was never historical in REAL Christian beliefs
A real Christian Democracy would be attached to the Dogmatic Morals of the Catholic/Orthodox Church.
This Democracy we have has had the gates of hell prevail against it because of liberal pluralism with no set teachings on morality
You said..” can you “advance and defend an alternative?”
Easily. A true Christian democracy would look to the Natural law that is built up and defined in the Catholic /Orthodox Church and the state would never be allowed to separate themselves from those DEFINED teachings on Morals.
Gay Marriage , pornography etc.. would be crushed to never gain any ground because they would be crushed by the state grounded in true morality that is unchangeable
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Simply put... The Muslims make more mother’s
In ‘Christian’ America... It’s September 11th every day in our abortion clinics with nearly 3000 babies losing their lives.
Ministers have a choice they can preach about porn, contraception and abortion... Or they can mourn when they have to close their schools.
It appears many of our brothers and sisters have determined that he dead children don’t complain nearly as much.
No actually I read and study the Bible so that I can be more discerning to see where and whenever leadership/authorities are ‘off the reservation’ [i.e. the Sanctity of Life vs abortion 1973 and now lo and behold 40 years later the Sanctity of Marriage].
But I fear I’m just casting ‘pearls before swine’ with folks like you who quickly label and name-call - is that all you got?!?!?
So you claim Calvin as a right leaning fundamentalist/extremist - huh??? Who else do you judge so quickly and harshly, last I checked everyone has free-will so you can make your claims all day long, but all too often folks like you never truly back them up with historical facts.
Everyday I hear the news paint folks on the right as ‘extremists’ and everyday I see them fail to back up there claims. I’m getting quite tired of this hyperbole - so please back it up bub!
But I fear I’m just casting ‘pearls before swine’ with folks like you who quickly label and name-call - is that all you got?!?!?
Swine!?.... Calling a name-caller a name is name-calling.. and is duplicitous..
Some might say I’m casting demons INTO “swine”..
You could say “Brining” with a good “Rub” rubbed on for the “Smoke”..
you know..... for good “pulled” porcine “Goodness”..
I’m just here to serve..
“Me thinks, just mebbe, you doth protest too much!” :’)
“Me thinks, just mebbe, you doth protest too much!” :’)
Forsooth barren-spirited knave.. I protesteth just enough thither anon.. d;-)~......
No, I actually make the claim Calvin was an extreme liberal compared to historical traditional Christianity as seen through the consistent writings of those like the Early Church fathers ,such as...Saint Irenaues, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Athanasius etc.. And Calvin was a liberal compared to later Church Doctors, such as... Saint Aquinas, Pope Leo XIII and others
Calvin was closer to modern Manicheanism with his dualistic idea of God than he added the dark idea of total depravity to boot.
Perhaps you need to do some study of Christian history,dear friend, and you will find what I just wrote is backed up rather easily
I wish you a Blessed day!
“there are people of extremes on both american liberalism and american conservationism who look up to political figures as almost messianic figures in a historical fashion and a modern fashion.”
I rejoice to know that you do not necessarily regard me as one of those “people” of extremist American “Liberalism” or American “Conservationism” (?) who look up to political figures as almost “messianic,” but I must confess to some confusion as to whom it is you are referencing.
The only genuine American “Liberalism” of which I am aware would be the Jeffersonian liberalism (also called “Jeffersonian republicanism”) of the late (very) 18th Century and the early 19th Century, most eloquently explained by Jefferson and Madison. By the second quarter of the 19th Century, the party of Jefferson and Madison had been entirely hijacked by Jackson and the “Jackass” party, later identified as “Democrats,” so as to be rendered worse than useless. For a considerable time following, Democrats continued to identify themselves as “Liberal,” attempting to expropriate the exemplary reputation enjoyed by Jefferson and Madison, so that they (the Democrats) might attach their corrupt and immoral practices on the backs of these two worthies. Democrats have been expropriating anything of value ever since.
Finally, Democrats had so fouled the term Liberal, that it no longer meant anything of worth, necessitating the switching of terms, compelling them to now call themselves “Progressive,” which they stole from a movement of Socialists that might be best described as “Western European” and perhaps best exemplified by Robert “Bob” La Follette of Wisconsin and Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt of New York State (ironically enough, two Republicans). Democrats have ever since been busily engaging in fouling the term “Progressive” as badly as they had formerly fouled “Liberal.”
Similarly, I am completely unfamiliar with the term “Conservationism,” the closest term I know being “Conservationist,” a noun meaning a person who advocates or acts for the protection and preservation of the environment and wildlife (not to be confused with modern Algoresmic “tree huggers” or other environmental tyrannical “Progressives”). I suppose it could be said that a genuine “Conservationist” is someone who practices “Conservationism.” I would understand the term in that context.
But, I assume you refer to “Conservatism,” as in the Conservatism of Edmund Burke, who was repelled by the extremism of the French Revolution, and whose ideas closely paralleled the ideas and ideals of Washington and Adams, and were not too greatly removed from the “republicanism” of Jefferson and Madison. Correct me if I am mistaken.
Rather than deal with a load of terms that have varied meanings as they are understood by diverse personalities, or are nothing more than glittering generalities, perhaps we, might approach the proposition in a different manner.
We are familiar with the philosophy of the Founding Fathers because they actually put their political beliefs into practice when they expressed their philosophy (as best seen in the Declaration of Independence) and as they implemented with the Instrument of governance (the Constitution) they devised. We may have a widely different views or understanding of what the Founders wrote, but we all have a general understanding of what they did. So, why don’t you explain, in some small detail, with what you propose to replace their work (rather than the misanthropic monstrosity the 0bamatrons intend)?
For example, do you propose the official state establishment of a particular Church? Do you propose that certain high government offices (such as the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, or perhaps the Secretary of Homeland Security) be conferred only on Establishment Church Prelates as a matter of constitutional privilege and right? Do you propose that certain high federal offices (such as President, Representatives, and Senators) be continued as elective, or do you envision all officers will be by appointment only by a Church Board of Governors? How far into government would you propose the following of this practice? How do you see it affecting the states?
You have announced your intention to crush “Gay Marriage, pornography, etc.” How do you propose to achieve this “crushing.” With show trials (to discourage further efforts) and boards of inquiry? Or do you propose to simply not allow elections on certain proposals, and to deny legislatures the power to consider certain issues?
Do you propose that membership, regular attendance, baptism, and financial support of the Established Church be required of all citizens? How do you see it acting on free inquiry? Would such a state necessarily dictate that error has no rights? How would this impinge on the freedom of speech? Rights to be determined by whom?
Thank you for your time and your consideration.
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