How about Getting Rid of Some Seminaries?

by Dr. Riley Case

These are tough times for church institutions and agencies.  Right across the board-- progressive, evangelical, in the U.S. or overseas--church groups are struggling because of the economic recession.  The Billy Graham Association is laying off 55 workers, or 10% of its staff.    The Association's budget is being cut 15%, to about 84 million.  

Christianity Today is shutting down four publications (it has 9 more still in operation) and laying off 31 (or 22%) of its staff.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) is reducing its next year's budget by $5.6 million and has eliminated 23 jobs.   Other staff salaries have reduced 3%.  The Presbyterian Church (USA) has dropped 56 jobs since September of last year.  The Friends Committee on National Legislation has cut 12 staffers.  The Church of the Brethren has simply closed its Washington office.
 
As for United Methodists, the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) is reducing the 2009 operating budget by $3.9 million, or 7%, which will include cutting 17 staff positions.   The Publishing House has indicated it will not be able to donate the $1 million to annual conferences for pastors' pensions.  The Board of Discipleship (GBOD) has laid off 30 employees since January.  The bishops have voted to roll back their salaries in 2010 to 2008 levels, from $125,658 to $120,942.
 
Annual conferences are facing similar cut-backs.  Clergy pensions and retired clergy health benefits are facing deductions.  Local churches are eliminating staff positions.
 
United Methodism's seminaries (and indeed, seminaries of all traditions) are also facing budgeting problems.  While some seminaries are well endowed, the endowments are themselves suffering as the result of falling stock markets.  In this climate it is time to ask the tough (actually it shouldn't be such a tough question since the answer would seem obvious) question: does The United Methodist Church have too many seminaries?     
 
Forty years ago, at the time of the Methodist-EUB merger, the newly formed United Methodist Church declared that the combined fourteen seminaries of the new denomination were too many and not well located to be effective.  The General Conference mandated (or at least strongly recommended) at least two mergers.  One merger did take place: Evangelical Seminary merged with Garrett Biblical Institute to form Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.  The other logical merger, United (former EUB) in Dayton, and METHESCO, in Delaware, Ohio, never took place.  
 
Because there were too many seminaries chasing too few students, the seminaries made urgent pleas for help.   The church responded by establishing the Ministerial Education Fund in 1972,  a "bail-out" fund before the term "bail-out" was widely used.  The fund would subsidize US seminaries (but do nothing for overseas seminaries where the help was really needed) to the tune of $15 million a year.  This means that over the 40-year period since 1970 the church has poured $600 million into the seminaries.
 
Since the merger The United Methodist Church has lost 3 million members.  Despite the loss of 27% of its membership there has been no reduction in the number of seminaries to serve the smaller denomination.  Enrollment has plummeted in many of the seminaries.  At Garrett Evangelical, there were 73 graduates in the 2009 class.  Fifty years ago (before the merger) Garrett alone graduated 153.  
 
One of the unfortunate by-products of this pressure to keep the seminaries viable has been the effort to force students to attend these United Methodist seminaries.  Numbers of excellent seminaries, where students would prefer to attend, have been disapproved for the training of United Methodist seminaries in an effort to force students to attend United Methodist seminaries.
 
There is a further question as to whether these seminaries are really serving the church.  Claremont School of Theology was put on probation in 2006 by the Association of Theological Schools, and in danger of losing accreditation because of continual bleeding red ink.  The school has recently announced, with great fanfare, that its financial house is now in order.  Not only that but, thanks to a $5 million gift by an anonymous donor, it is transforming itself into a "multifaith university," with a new vision and a new mission statement and a new set of values.
 
The new vision and new mission statement and new set of values say nothing about Jesus Christ, nothing about preparing pastors, nothing about United Methodism, nothing about theology or Biblical studies, and nothing about the Christian Church.  The statements stress preparing "leaders" for an increasingly diverse, multi-faith world.  As evidence of what the seminary is all about, a Muslim graduate of the class of 2009 read from the Koran at the graduation ceremonies.
 
Claremont can obviously do what it wants to do.  But does The United Methodist Church need continually to pour $1 million yearly into such an institution?   Isn't The United Methodist Church supposed to be something about winning disciples to Jesus Christ?  
 
The University Senate while disapproving numbers of excellent seminaries because they do not "reflect United Methodist ethos" evidently feels that Claremont does reflect "United Methodist ethos."   It is a strange understanding of United Methodist ethos.
 
So the question remains.  Does The United Methodist Church have too many seminaries?   The church downsizes programs and personnel; when will it begin to downsize the total number of seminaries?  

Comments

[John Meunier]

Other than Claremont, if it were up to you, which seminaries would you target?

[James-Michael Smith]

Rev. Sider,
I would like to publish this as an article for the Examiner with links back to this page. Would you allow this?

Blessings,
James-Michael Smith
Methodist Examiner
www.examiner.com/x-8276-Methodist-Examiner

[John Slider]

In response to John Meunier:

I have been a United Methodist pastor for 30 years and nothing has ever "been up to me." We are, therefore, speaking theoretically.

Claremont seems to be a good first step. I would examine all the seminaries with three criteria in mind: (1) connection to and emphasis of Wesleyan/Arminian theology; (2) geographic location and proximity of seminaries; and (3) results such as number of effective pastors produced by the seminaries. I would also be in favor of reconsidering the funneling of UMC candidates to UMC seminaries.

[John Slider]

Response to James-Michael Smith:

The article was received from the Confessing Movement and written by Dr. Riley Case. The Confessing Movement may be found at www.confessingumc.org.

[Dee Harper]

I think a more simple approach to this situation would be to simply give out scholarships from the Methodist Education Fund to Pastors who go to university senate approved schools. If United Methodist affiliated schools are not attracting students then it will be self selecting. Also it allows students who want to go to, say Asbury Theological Seminary, but do not because of the financial issues involved.

[Philip Amerson]

Three Slices of Stale Bread Do Not Make a Fresh Loaf

My friend, Dr. Riley Case, recently wrote on theological education in a piece entitled “How About Getting Rid of Some Seminaries?” Dr. Case notes the current economic challenges and the many institutions and agencies that have been forced to cut back on staff and programming. Noting that seminaries too face economic challenges, he suggests that seminary enrollments have been declining and budgets are tight, so it is time to ask the “tough question:” should we close some schools? To illustrate the decline in seminary enrollments over the past five decades he writes about is his own alma mater, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
As president of Garrett-Evangelical, I read the opinion piece with interest. While I agree that it is time to ask tough questions and, indeed, some seminaries should be closing, I found that Dr. Case has managed to offer his readers three slices of stale bread and call it a whole fresh loaf. His analysis is faulty at two essential points: 1) current and future enrollment trends; and, 2) a misleading portrayal of history.
Nothing is more important to this conversation than the fact that God is calling a remarkable group of young people into Christian service TODAY. The Holy Spirit is moving in remarkable and fresh ways across the church and nation. Young people are responding with the decision to seek theological education. The 2008 entering class at Garrett-Evangelical was the largest in twenty years. The number of persons under thirty years of age at our school has nearly tripled in the last five years. These approximately 150 students join another 150 to 200 older students. I am blessed hearing all their testimonies and learning their high commitments to sharing the Gospel in contemporary ways.
These patterns of growing enrollments are true in other theology schools. Yes, this year Garrett-Evangelical has had to cut our budget, freeze salaries and delay hiring new faculty. However, seeing a rising group of exceptional Christian leaders caused us to make a counterintuitive move – we are increasing our already generous scholarship budget by 10% for the coming year, to over $2.2 million. Our belief in the future and our desire to support this movement of the Spirit means that we had no choice but to do the very best we can to support this next generation of church leaders.
There were several misleading conclusions and inaccurate historical statements in Dr. Case’s column. For example, to call the 1972 decision to initiate the Ministerial Education Fund (MEF) a “bailout” is nonsense. The authoritative word on the MEF is found in Gerald McCulloh’s “Ministerial Education in the American Methodist Movement” (1980). The MEF was modeled on several previously existing annual conference programs for ministerial education. Mr. D.W. Brooks, layperson and noted agriculturalist, was the inventor and active supporter of the MEF in 1970. Originally an apportionment of 2% of general church dollars was to be set aside for the costs of theological education. Within four years, by 1974, this plan was abandoned by the GCFA and the funding has remained flat ever since. Funding never reached the original goal of 2%.
Today, Garrett-Evangelical receives the same annual amount for ministerial education it did forty years ago. The purchasing power of this support is 1/5th of what it was forty years ago. Currently the MEF represents about 9% of our school’s budget as compared to over 33% in 1974. At the same time, for every dollar we receive from the MEF, Garrett-Evangelical provides more than two dollars in student scholarships. One wonders if this isn’t precisely a time when the denomination should join our school in doing more, not less, to support this highly committed and exceptional crop of future pastors.
Dr. Case is correct that the 1974 General Conference mandated the merger of schools that never occurred. This is unfortunate. However, his analysis misses the fact that barely a decade prior to the formation of the new denomination four new seminaries had been established (Claremont, Methesco, St. Paul and Wesley). Like local congregations in the 1950’s and 1960’s who overbuilt educational wings on buildings, we expanded our theological delivery system thinking the growth of 1950’s and 1960’s would continue. Case’s analysis of the role of the University Senate is astonishingly flawed. Among other things, it misses the work of the Council of Bishops over the past dozen years whose “Wesleyan Vision” document has been used to strengthen the focus and work of seminary education. It also misses the singular support the Senate has given for Asbury Seminary’s distance learning program.
In fairness, Dr. Case may not be aware of recent research demonstrating that our United Methodist Schools out perform Non-United Methodist schools in providing effective and exceptional pastoral leaders. “Effective pastors” in this research was measured in terms of congregations in each annual conference in the United States with the highest growth in worship attendance during the last decade. While 48% of our pastors attended a U.M. school, over 54% of the congregations with the highest growth in worship attendance were lead by our graduates. Asbury graduates also had a higher than expected rate of pastors of growing churches at approximately the same rate as our U.M. graduates. So, let’s be clear, over 75% of the leaders identified as effective and exceptional were graduates of a United Methodist school or Asbury.
The notion that some seminaries should be closed is not a new one. In fact research done by Dr. Daniel Aleshire, head of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States indicates that perhaps one-third of the 250 theology schools in the nation are in serious economic stress. We will see fewer seminaries in the future and the denomination should be careful in evaluating and funding our system. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead of the stale and inaccurate arguments that paint all our schools with the same brush designed to reduce resources or keep them frozen in place for another forty years, it is time to take initiatives for the future. Many schools and students need more support, not less… if not, we will likely miss the joining of our hands and hearts to a most remarkable time of renewal ahead for the church.