“The best part of my work is the students,” Mendenhall said. “The best part. I have incredible hope for the church because of the people God is calling to seminary.”
In 2000, when she started as president of Columbia, located in Decatur, Ga., the median age of students was about 33, Mendenhall said. Now it’s dropped to age 24 or 25, which has held steady over the last five years. Many of the incoming students have been young adult volunteers for the PC(USA) or youth elders or have otherwise worked in mission.
“They’ve already served the church,” Mendenhall said. “These are people who could be going to law school or medical school or business school, and they are choosing with their rich academic backgrounds instead to come to seminary. And they know there’s no guarantee about what’s going to be waiting for them” when they graduate.
“There’s no guarantee they’re going to make enough money to live without food stamps,” but “they are throwing themselves into it.”
The students also are willing, she said, to enter into conversation with those with different perspectives.
“It’s not about tolerance – I hate that word `tolerance,’ ” Mendenhall said.
“They are learning that they need each other,” that learning how someone else with a very different perspective reads the Bible can help them better discern what God is saying in Scripture.
If Presbyterians get discouraged, “go visit a seminary,” she said. “Just slip into a class. … I am not afraid. I am deeply assured that God is doing a new thing.”
Bruce Reyes-Chow, moderator of the 218th General Assembly, has been talking to seminarians and said some of them worry “that we’re being prepared to do something that doesn’t exist.” In other words, the reality of so many Presbyterian congregations being small and rural may not match what these students are used to, or the kind of ministry in which they feel called to work. Or they may go to seminary, Reyes-Chow said, “not realizing that the job possibilities are not that high.”
Mendenhall answered that for most, “they’re not going to be the pastor at First Presbyterian at some big city with four associates working with them.”
Or, Reyes-Chow added, working in a big city at all.
As Mendenhall put it: Do students in seminary want to go out and serve three tiny rural congregations in Nebraska? Small, rural churches are the ones most likely to be without pastors.
Asked about the debt load that many student carry when graduating, Mendenhall said the Columbia admissions committee talks with students directly about money. If a student applies and already has significant educational or other debt, Columbia encourages that student to go out and work for a few years first, to pay off some of the loans. And “we won’t take any more people into a class than we can offer scholarships to,” Mendenhall said.
If students come to seminary with significant debt and don’t have enough financial support, “then we aren’t doing them or the church any favor.”
She also talked about the idea of educating students to serve in a post-Christendom world.
“We need graduates who don’t imagine going in and having the church take care of them,” Mendenhall said. “They need to be using all the gifts they have and that every member of the congregation has to work with the Holy Spirit to build something that may not even exist, or to rebuild something that is dying. If all we’re doing is preparing folks to be chaplains for the church, then that’s hospice work, and it’s very important work, but we won’t need this many seminary graduates to do hospice work.”
But what can happen, she said, is that through field education or other experiences, students begin to gain a practical knowledge of a different kind of church than they had previously known. Columbia has a required course called “alternative contexts;” the idea is help students see the possibilities of ministry in different ways.
“When a person goes out to Nowheresville to serve,” Mendenhall said, “what generally happens is they fall in love with those people, and those people fall in love with them.”
