Seminary offer specialty programs to meet needs, attract students

All these are examples of an emerging array of specialty programs now being offered by Presbyterian seminaries, and at Christian seminaries of other denominations as well. In addition to offering the traditional theological degrees that prepare people to be pastors, seminaries are coming up with a smorgasbord of additional offerings — some of them degree programs, some specializations, and many intended to draw in students who might not have come there to study otherwise.

The growth of specialty programs in both Roman Catholic and Protestant seminaries has boomed over the past 10 to 20 years and, in general, “is an attempt to respond to what they perceive as a need that’s been articulated to the seminary,” said Daniel Aleshire, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools.

“As the denomination has for various reasons had to drop things, then the seminaries have picked them up,” said Dottie Hedgepeth, the PC(USA)’s associate for theological education. “And it’s partly been a marketplace kind of thing … It’s the seminaries listening to the church about what’s needed. They’re doing far more than just preparing pastors for ministry.”

So as congregations and denominations and individuals have asked for help — for training for people who want to work in urban or racial-ethnic churches, for example, or to provide support for those who’ve chosen a career in pastoral ministry, such as Austin Seminary provides — then new programs have sprung up.

Over the last several decades, seminary enrollment has gone up consistently, almost doubling over the last 25 years, Aleshire said. But enrollment in the master of divinity programs has not doubled, although it has increased — currently, about half of seminary students are in master of divinity programs, and about 14 percent in doctoral or other advanced professional degree programs. That means close to three in 10 — about 28 percent of the students enrolled — are in some sort of specialized program.

There can be a financial advantage for seminaries too in finding ways to seem distinct and to draw in students who might not have enrolled in a traditional master of divinity program. “Simply, institutions are trying to position themselves uniquely in the market,” said Dianne Reistroffer, dean of Louisville Seminary. “I know that sounds kind of entrepreneurial. But institutions look at what they’re good at, what they’re strong in, and they decide this is going to be our niche in the market.’

There has been some debate about the increasing number of specialized programs, about the wisdom of trying to do too much, or perhaps unspoken criticism of pursuing programs that might be lucrative but not especially well-advised. For example, a special committee that studied theological institutions and reported to the General Assembly in 1993 “admonished the schools to keep a focus on what their primary goal is,” meaning the preparation of ministers, Hedgepeth said. “They admonished them against program sprawl.”

But Aleshire said he’s not particularly worried about that, because “the center of master of divinity education is still so strong in all these schools … These other programs worry they don’t get enough room at the table, it’s never been that the M. Div has been squeezed off the table.”

Some programs also make a deliberate effort to draw in people from congregations — lay people who want theological training or pastors who want to develop specialized skills.

For example, University of Dubuque Seminary just finished its annual “New Tools” conference, giving training on how congregations can provide high-quality multi-media worship experiences — beyond PowerPoint, beyond video clips, using more advanced techniques, “growing disciples and not just entertaining the spectators,” as one seminar description put it.

Dubuque also offers a certificate in ministry and technology, to teach both technical skills and the theological and spiritual implications of using technology in church. And it will hold a conference next March on “Rural Youth Ministry,” a part of its Center for Theology and Land program, a joint venture between Dubuque and Wartburg Theological Seminary, a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, also located in Dubuque.

In each of these cases, Aleshire said, a seminary is responding to a need, to a perception that the seminary can help congregations and lay leaders and pastors as they do their work. ‘If things are happening in theological schools, it’s because they’re already happening in congregations or denominationally-related organizations,” he said. “Seminaries are small enough institutions that they can’t create market demand.”

In other words, they don’t create the wave, he said. But sometimes, they’ve figured out how to swim along.

Each of the specialized programs a Presbyterian seminary offers — and there are many out there — has a story to tell, a vision for how ministry can be done and people reached and faith made exciting. Here are a few examples.

URBAN MINISTRY

The Metro-Urban Institute is in its 12th year at Pittsburgh Seminary. It’s not the only urban ministry program around (McCormick Seminary has a strong urban ministry program, drawing on the deep resources of the Chicago area), but it is one that’s learned, through time, how to teach what assistant director Jermaine McKinley calls “doing ministry out of the box.”

The program started in 1991, McKinley said, after seminary president C. Samuel Calian decided “to do something that was unique and beneficial to the large number of urban churches, especially African-American churches, that quite often did not have adequate resources to train their pastors and lay leaders.

And it has evolved over time, from a Christian leadership certification program — geared at first to pastors and lay leaders who couldn’t go to seminary because they hadn’t yet finished a bachelor’s degree — to graduate-level training. Today, in addition to the certificate program and weekend and summer programs, students can earn a master of divinity or master of arts degree with a concentration of studies in urban ministry — meaning they often take specialized courses such as “Limited Resources Ministry,” which explores how congregations can do significant work even when there’s not much money to go around.

The Metro-Urban Institute, through its Office of Applied Religion, also involves students through a network of community partnerships in off-campus ministry projects including economic development efforts, faith-based health initiatives, and mentoring programs for African-American men.

McKinley, herself a graduate of Pittsburgh Seminary, said when she came to the campus in 1994, only a handful of African-American students were enrolled full-time in day classes and another half-dozen or so at night. Last year, at least 40 black students were enrolled, she said.

Through the Metro-Urban Institute, some students who started off with no college degree took classes at the seminary, some of which earned them undergraduate credit at other schools, got bachelor’s degrees, then came back for graduate work at Pittsburgh Seminary. “We realize that particularly in poorer urban communities which are predominantly African-American, people have gifts and have skills, but don’t have a college education,” McKinley said.

The program also has drawn in immigrants from other countries or people from small towns — people who intend to do ministry in churches that aren’t necessarily urban, but where money is tight.

In addition to her work at the seminary, McKinley also serves as interim minister for a mostly-white congregation, what she called a “remnant congregation” where most of the members are 75 or older and which is located in a racially mixed neighborhood, where families are being formed in combinations across almost every racial and ethnic line.

Many people there are also what McKinley calls the “unchurched of the unchurched” — meaning they may have had no exposure to organized religion going back several generations and aren’t familiar with typical church practices. Recently, she said, a man walked down the aisle while she was preaching on Sunday to holler at one of his children outside the church — he seemed to have no idea that was unusual. So McKinley’s congregation is taking nothing for granted. To be welcoming, they’re spelling out everything in the church bulletin, including the words to the Lord’s Prayer and the Doxology. And there’s a minimum of “stand up and sit down,” McKinley said, “aside from the fact that the congregation is older and can’t do it.”

All of this urban diversity, she said, “brings new meaning to doing church and being church.” It takes thought and preparation and communication. But Ronald E. Peters, director of the Metro-Urban Institute, wrote recently that the focus of urban ministry is not on the difficulties of urban life — the problems of the central cities — but on reconciliation, and “must be rooted in the fundamental hope that is the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

INTERIM MINISTRY AND SPIRITUALITY

Over the past year, Louisville Seminary has initiated two new degree programs, both, in part, responses to needs perceived in the church.

One, a new doctoral program with an emphasis in interim ministry, is being led by David Sawyer, an associate professor of ministry and the seminary’s director of graduate studies and continuing and lay education. Sawyer said he was approached about a year and a half ago by the Presbyterian Interim Ministry Consortium, a group that’s involved with training and certification of interim ministers; the consortium suggested that a degree program in interim ministry could be helpful, particularly since some pastors now are making interim ministry the focus of their careers.

Some interims are retired pastors who want to keep working for the church, Sawyer said. But other are experienced, mid-career people who have discovered they’ve got the skills for this kind of work — and congregations that need an interim often are appreciative of finding someone who has done it before and understands the dynamics. Sawyer, who’s himself been an interim twice, said “you’ve got to be a quick learner, you’ve got to figure out what’s really going on,” and you need to help the congregation move in the direction it needs to go.

Another new program at Louisville seminary is a master of arts in spirituality — a program that the seminary is co-sponsoring with Bellarmine University, a Roman Catholic college about a mile away. Half the students will be Protestant and half Catholic and faculty members from both institutions will teach the classes. In part, this program grew out of a visit several years ago to the Presbyterian denominational headquarters in Louisville by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, an Australian who was involved in ecumenical conversations between the PC(USA) and the Roman Catholics.

After the cardinal’s trip, people from the seminary and from Bellarmine, who already were acquainted through past collaborations, began dreaming aloud, doing “some focused thinking … about what does grassroots appropriation of ecumenism look like,” Reistroffer said, and about “How might that happen in an educational environment.”

What emerged, Reistroffer said, is the only spirituality program she’s aware of with an intentionally ecumenical focus offered collaboratively by a Protestant seminary and a Catholic university — “we think it’s an important witness to take to the Christian church,” she said. It’s also a chance for a Presbyterian institution to link up, as well, with a major center at Bellarmine focused on the life and work of Thomas Merton.