These institutions are charged to prepare women and men for ordained ministries and other vocations of professional church leadership and to provide strong theological resource centers for the leadership of the whole church” (Articles of Agreement, Article 10; Book of Order, B-10).
What is the state of Presbyterian theological education today? Does the Presbyterian Church still need theological schools and are these still the right tasks?
The first question is easier to answer. By almost any measure, the theological schools of the Presbyterian Church are among the very strongest schools in the country. Most Presbyterian seminaries are in the top ten percent of schools in terms of size of endowment. Most have a strong and supportive alumni/ae base. All have extremely strong leadership from trustees who insist on the highest level of management and governance. The faculties are made up of scholar-teachers with outstanding academic credentials and deep commitment to the life of the church as evidenced by their extensive publishing, speaking, and preaching.
One of the signs of the strength of our schools is the number of non-Presbyterian students who seek out Presbyterian theological education, both at the master’s and doctoral level, because of the reputation for both academic excellence and educational creativity. Obviously, I am not a disinterested observer, but as a member of the Board of the Association of Theological Schools, the main accrediting body for theological education in the United States and Canada, for the past six years (and president of the Association for two of those years), my assessment is based on both personal observation and review of data.
Evidence of the institutional strength of Presbyterian theological schools does not by itself answer the questions about the how well our schools are serving the Presbyterian Church and the broader church of Jesus Christ, however. At the time of reunion, a number of people could be heard to ask whether the Presbyterian Church needed ten theological schools. Shouldn’t some be merged or closed, people asked. Twenty-five years later, we hear a different question. It goes something like this: is a degree from a theological school the best preparation for either ordained ministry or church leadership? Can theological schools as they function today prepare leaders that the church needs both now and for the (somewhat uncertain) future?
Some of those raising these questions are pastors of large congregations trying new models of ministry; some would call these “missionally” oriented churches. Leadership for these congregations cannot be learned in school, some of these pastors argue; it is best learned in “on the job” apprenticeship or mentoring. Mentoring is indeed a critically important part of learning the work of ministry, and all theological education includes supervised practice of ministry. The opportunity to place students in growing congregations is something all seminaries look for. But mentoring alone is not enough … if we think that effective ministry is more than replicating a model of congregational life that happens to be working at some point in time.
If “practicing” ministry is part of being prepared for the work of ministry, what else is needed?
Answering this gets to the heart of what a theological school is and what it is for. What happens in a theological school is a sustained conversation between past and present in service of the future. The heart of any theological school is its faculty, and the vocation of faculty is to make the rich resources of the past — the Bible, theological traditions, expressions of Christian community life, practices of prayer, worship, and witness — available to a new generation of leaders and to encourage them to exercise their imaginations about what these resources from believers who have gone before us have to contribute to effective Christian life today. One of the most important things to be learned in seminary is that Christians today (no matter how successful the ministry) are not the first people ever to respond to the gospel. The Christian movement is two thousand years old and has flourished in the past and flourishes today in many contexts and cultures. Theological schools have the resources to make these practices and ideas from other times and contexts available to the church today and to the ministry of the future.
But if all a theological school and its courses of study do is hand on the traditions of the past or teach that the only good theology is one that was written at some other time or in some other context, then the critics are right and the theological school is failing to take account of what both church and culture need from the church today. This is why an on-going and honest conversation between theological schools, faculty members, pastors, denominational leaders, and church members is absolutely necessary to the vitality of both school and church.
Over the past ten years, the church has become worried that smaller numbers of younger persons were coming to seminary than it years past. The schools responded with creative strategies for identification and recruitment of young, very talented women and men, often with the help of grants from the Lilly Endowment. These students are now graduating with some new ideas about church and ministry. They are ready to take some risks, to move beyond church-dividing issues, to engage in ministries that create new communities. The theological schools are very proud of them. Now it is up to the church to welcome the energy and creativity they want to bring.
The Presbyterian tradition from its beginning in Calvin’s school in Geneva has always prized and nurtured education, for pastors but just as importantly for all believers. One of the keys to the renewal of the Reformed way of being Christian is to embrace again a church-wide program of formation for Christian living — our curriculum was once called “Christian Faith and Life.” Theological schools can and should be active partners with the church in this renewal in which the rich resources of the past help us be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the present for the sake of the future of faith.
Cynthia M. Campbell is president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Ill.
