JACK HABERER: Jim, your credentials are impressive: a teaching elder in the PC(USA); current professor of church history and dean at Vanderbilt Divinity School; former professor and dean at Columbia Theological Seminary; previous experience at the Lilly Endowment; and before that served in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Now you add the mantle of president of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). So what’s the ATS all about?
JAMES HUDNUT-BEUMLER: ATS is the umbrella organization that credits, through its Commission on Accrediting, the more than 270 theological schools in the U.S. and Canada across the Christian spectrum of mainline, Roman Catholic and evangelical Christianity. It also provides a lot of leadership education for the community of theological education so that the way new presidents, deans and even faculty members get assisted in grounding their new jobs is through this community.
I would think that Outlook readers would be interested to know that from the very beginning, over 90 years ago, Presbyterians have played an outsized role in North American theological education. That is, we’ve produced more professors and leaders in professional theological ed. than our numbers in the pews would suggest.
JACK HABERER: What are some recent accomplishments in ATS?
JAMES HUDNUT-BEUMLER: One of the things we have been looking at fairly successfully is helping financially distressed schools. The reversals of school budgets after 9-11 and after the 2008 recession really hit the older and mainline seminaries very hard because they were dependent on endowments and often were declining in enrollment. Presbyterian seminaries weren’t exempt from that, but they were still affected. And the ATS, with grant support from Lilly Endowment, worked on best practices and modes of getting out and ahead of crises. So without that work of the extended community we would have seen a lot more seminary closures than were necessary on the basis of mission. As we all know: no margin, no mission.
Another exciting area I find as a theological educator are two programs that are done for theological school faculty. Because a lot of faculty are trained in secular graduate schools and may have prepared themselves for undergraduate teaching, when they arrive at a church-centered school they suddenly find themselves in the role of theological educator, which may include vocational counseling, counseling about faith journeys, preaching and discernment of who has the gifts and graces for ministry. And ATS does some programs where first-year faculty members can come to a neutral ground and, outside their seminaries, talk with one another on “What is this thing I’ve gotten involved with?” Since we’ve been doing that program, we’ve noted a greater esprit de corps in the field of theological school faculty. So much so that a second program for mid-career faculty was developed to answer the question, “Okay, now that you’ve got tenure, what are you going to do with it become a great contributor to theological education?”
JACK HABERER: So how are the seminaries dealing with all of the stresses going on in faith communities?
JAMES HUDNUT-BEUMLER: One of the fascinating things to me as a Presbyterian minister, that in all of my years in ministry as the General Assembly and other church councils have been super stressed, the seminaries, because they have constituencies and have the human resources of people who love them and faculties who renew one another, have become, if anything, more dynamic and resourceful gifts to the church.
Seminaries do a whole lot more for the church than they used to. It used to be they gave a degree and that might be the last that you heard from them (except at a reunion). Now, I’m on the mailing list of nearly all of the PC(USA) schools, and, if I had the money and travel budget, I could be going all over the country to enhance my ministry. And these are the people who are writing these great commentary series like “Feasting on the Word.”
JACK HABERER: What about new trends in theological schools, like distance education?
JAMES HUDNUT-BEUMLER: Two years ago, accreditation changes were instituted to allow for a greater amount of degrees to be earned online. We haven’t seen all the changes I think that we’re going to see in theological education when it comes to online learning. The challenge to theological education is that there’s a lot that can be learned, mediated through a computer screen, and yet we all want a pastor who’s able to work with us in moments of great joy and tragedy and the dark night of the soul. And that probably doesn’t come over Facebook. So choosing the right use of technology is a question for discernment and having school, students and the churches who ordain theological students all making the right choices rather than the expedient or cheapest choices is going to be a challenge.
JACK HABERER: Any other trends to be watching?
JAMES HUDNUT-BEUMLER: Another trend is that a lot of people do not want to go to theological to get an M.Div. The M.Div. had been a growing degree since its inception. But it has been a declining degree for the last half decade, and shorter-term specialized degrees or general theological education degrees have been growing in its place. So what does that mean is open to question. Does it mean that some people are going into specialized ministries? Does it mean that churches are accepting something other than the M.Div., especially evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational churches?
And the other thing is (and we saw this first at Fuller and Gordon-Conwell): a lot of people took two years out of their lives, took a degree and then stayed in a secular vocation using their theological degree to enhance their practice of the Christian life. It’s a de-professionalization of what we do, but not necessarily bad for Christianity to have a whole church full of people with more ability to read the Bible and do theology and think seriously about mission.
