At one time the conferral of ordination was accomplished largely through apprenticeships where a veteran pastor would take a candidate under his wing and take them through all of the motions of being a pastor. Back then an undergraduate education served the purpose of educating the candidate, what we now expect of ministers in denominations such as the Presbyterian Church (USA) is conferral of a Master of Divinity Degree in which field education has come to replace the apprenticeships of days gone by. Did we just think we needed smarter pastors who needed more education?
Not really.
The Historical Baggage Professional Ministers Carry
As higher education moved away from a curriculum designed around ideals of piety (which the history shows was a monumental failure for the elite institutions); and mental discipline that focused largely on the classics, classical language, and rhetoric, the central place of the professor-minister began to dwindle. There were a lot of factors that came into play such as agnostic activists primarily in the social sciences who were seeking upward mobility for whom religion was a barrier. But the most powerful framework was the emergence of the college as a place for developing citizen political leaders, captains of industry, and a place for developing a career path. Colleges were fastly becoming comprehensive universities. As people came to college not for discipline to maintain social standing and learn about the theology of their religious tradition, but for social mobility and un-inherited prestige, something happened to the stock of available ministers – it began to dwindle.
The importance of education for ministers in especially Protestant circles goes back to the Reformation. Rather than legitimation conferred through Papal authority, it was the passing on of the true teaching of the church at the heart of the Reformation through education that served the same source of legitimation. It is the root of why Protestant ministers began to wear academic garb in the pulpit. It also is a factor that came into play towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that changed the place and the social status of the minister.
When the tradition of education performing the role of creating a social elite among Protestant ministers became fused with a vastly different educational landscape in which theological education was no longer the center of an education, the social capital of the job of minister began to decline. Those who once would have gone through the process no longer saw the ministry as a very sustainable or lucrative place to be. So degree conferral once again became the legitimating power to improve social capital for the ministry. Theological education moved to the seminaries and divinity schools which became the places where it was thought both the importance of theology in higher education, and the re-booting of a ministerial elite attractive enough for young undergraduates to once again consider as a career path.
Bad Debt and Toxic Assets
This is the place where the profession of the ministry is today. We are caught in a bind between an implicit ideology of social capital and upward mobility that no longer serves a viable church function in our society. The social capital function, as observed in the opposite by Putnam and others, is not served best by developing a socially elite leadership (the old model), but by creating places that serve greater needs of increasingly disconnected people who shift and move about more from place to place, and yet who deeply desire a sense of place in a society that largely eschews constancy of "place" as a nest to discover and develop social connectedness.
We may now think the function of the graduate degree for ministry is to develop leaders in the churches who can understand core theological and biblical concepts more adeptly than their undergraduate institutions were likely not equipped to handle. This is partially true. But in other ways it is a catch 22. We developed graduate degrees to create ministers who would garner a more elite social standing and be more competitive with the markets colleges were now serving. In so doing, the central place of the undergraduate education as a place to receive the core theological and biblical education needed to perform preaching, liturgy, and church education was pulled out leaving only the M.Div. to meet these core educational needs. The M.Div. often does not offer a very advanced theological and biblical education, it only serve very basic needs that most undergraduate curricula are no longer expected to offer.
The problem now is that we are expecting our candidates for the ministry to continue graduate educations after college and asking them to assume positions that can only help them to pay their accrued educational debt (often 20K and more) by asking larger bodies for financial assistance to fill these positions. Thus, young ministers don't want the small church because they and the church cannot afford the very requirements that were necessary for them to be approved to even see if they can get said job. The result is often burn out with educational debt playing a larger than life role. This is not a sustainable model.
The system is basically broken. We are asking people to accrue a large financial burden from the start to meet educational and other requirements that the positions that they will then qualify for cannot pay and probably should not be expected to pay. We saw this in the banking industry – when you have accrued enough bad debt and have no capital flows to pay the bill for those holding that debt, the markets freeze up and everyone suffers. Most of our candidates are like bad debt and as our churches get older and capital investments in churches continue to slow down, the financials will freeze up and seminary will be a really good classical education to serve the ends of another career.
Dumping the M.Div.
So here is a radical solution: dump the M.Div. as a core requirement and focus on beefing up the theological education that our undergraduate institutions can offer. Make the function of the preparation process include apprenticeships where candidates can work with a church and provide services to the church while continuing their education in a "real-life" setting. This might mean that Presbyteries and other local governing bodies can take a deeper role in the educational ministry they provide by offering oversight to these apprentices. It might also mean that pastors should take more interest in the youth to develop young ministers rather than treat youth groups as nuisances.
The question is this: do we want to create upwardly mobile pastors who mimic the social elites who are slaves to post-industrial capitalism? Or, do we want to develop shepherds who lead the people of God to transform these systems in order to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and pass the peace of Christ? We cannot do both and unfortunately we continue to as if nothing is wrong – even though we all know something is most certainly wrong, and deeply so.
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You have the side of the problem down that I'd expect you to have, Drew, and I do love your explanation of the problem and solution. I agree.
The side that I am turning over and over in my head is what can be done to shake the laity's desire to have leaders who are accomplished and functional narcissists and unwillingness to be led by those who have real social skills and real pastoral skills. Somehow it lets each of us off the hook of being people who pursue lifelong learning and walk out our own callings. And for those laypeople who do embrace a vision of faithfulness that is more passionate than our culture condones, we seek to move them toward "the ministry" so that we can maintain the illusion that normal people have to do anything more than "follow the rules" and walk out the basics of membership and faith.
How do we reignite the laity with a vision of the normal Christian life that makes pastoral care something that we all do, that makes life-long learning a goal of all to the level of their competency, and that makes full commitment to the Triune God something that truly affects the lifestyles and worldviews of all? Obviously this is something all ministers seek to know and do . . . but maybe the answer needs to be laity-written and laity-driven?
a big part of the "deal" between Christian religious professionals and Christian secular professionals who receive religious goods and services from them is "no boat rocking" – the Christian religious professional stays in his professional lane, making no inconvenient demands of the secular professionals – as evidenced by the lack of an organized Christian influence in any secular profession, regardless of how much institutional evil the lack of such an organized "salt and light" influence enables or how much common grace is thwarted.
The economic meltdown and all the "toxic asset" is a prime example – where were all the Christian bankers, mortgage brokers, regulators, credit raters, etc? We all know the answer – they acted like everyone else as Christian religious professionals said, tacitly at least, "free pass."
Many Christian religious professionals perceive they are 2 provoking sermons away from "would you like fries with that?" as their next job, with good reason if they were to "boat rock" in the professional lanes of Christian MD's, lawyers, bankers, engineers, etc.
"Love of money is the root of all evil," and its explains a lot about status quo and the rather dismal chances our children and grandchildren have of getting to die natural deaths.
[...] Notes from off-center The problem now is that we are expecting our candidates for the ministry to continue graduate [...]
I think we are coming to a place where the realities of congregational lives are going to force the laity into a greater role than they have been in before. While as a pastor, I am anxious about the future in terms of the plain-and-simple providing for my family, I do think that as congregations face a decreasing amount of giving either due to economic conditions or to shrinking congregational sizes, that the laity will be forced to take on a larger role in the life of the community.
While I think in the short run, this will be a painful switch, I think that it has potential for a healthier future than what we have set up in the denominational world right now.
you are noting another irony – the idea of the Reformation is that ministry is lay driven. the reality is that it has always been directed through those who are leaders legitimated through an ordination process that actually reinforces the desire for parishioners to have a pastor who serves the same functional role as a priest. let the pastor represent god for us so we can passively receive grace. we consume our religion as other goods and services. the issue is how can the church stand in as an agent to resist and break the mold of existential comforts rendered through worldly goods. post-industrial capitalism is the root of all of our idolatry today and there are few prophets who are forceful enough to evoke real change. claiborne may be the only one, but he's too diplomatic imho.
it's true. we have put ourselves in a bind where volunteerism may be the only solution to our self-imposed unsustainable structure. this would mean a drastic change in G-14 in the book of order and we know how that goes since we can't even get one very minor section changed.
in short, we need prophets in the pulpits, not bureaucrats. but that's tough since asking for prophets means asking people to basically sacrifice themselves for their faith. and god said, whom shall i send? who is among us who really wants to accept that burden?
Drew,
Thanks for tackling a difficult subject. I think your analysis of the social repercussions of the clergy elite in American culture is spot on. We have been stuck on this bifurcation of ministry for so long that "layperson" is a vocation-less figure, void of any meaningful identity.
As someone now halfway through on and off again MDiv studies, a few thoughts on solutions. As someone who came to understand a pastoral calling a few years after undergrad I'm not sure how much beefing up of the theology program would have done to attract my interest (I went to a Catholic university). But I will say that the level of analysis, writing and social science courses at my disposal made exegesis fairly easy. I realize now that the MDiv's current emphasis on studying theologians and doing biblical scholarship is better suited for a stand alone MA in Theology than an MDiv aimed at pastoral ministry. For those of us who already come to seminary with the necessary kind of rigorous training in analysis, an emphasis on education in the practice of ministry is often most helpful. For those that come in with practical experiences the reverse may be true. Few MDivs offer a way to concentrate one way or the other based upon the unique history of the student.
In my case, I would much rather read theology as an ongoing exercise in continuing education, while bulking up on courses in church planting, counseling, mission and discipleship. It's alittle disturbing when courses such as these are open to DMin candidates who I hear more often than not say, 'I really learned how to be a pastor after my DMin.' That is a problematic statement.
i'm with you there. and thanks for reading such a long post…
to your point, i think this is why apprenticeship is such a good model. we in the pcusa have truly lost that and i do not think that the committee system can function in nearly as efficient a capacity. that's the place where one can serve a year as a candidate, or longer, and truly engage biblical exegesis and foundational theologians in the tradition. if you have not read ellen charry's "the pastoral function of christian doctrine" i highly recommend it. if i were a mentor that would be my textbook.
i'm with you there. and thanks for reading such a long post…
to your point, i think this is why apprenticeship is such a good model. we in the pcusa have truly lost that and i do not think that the committee system can function in nearly as efficient a capacity. that's the place where one can serve a year as a candidate, or longer, and truly engage biblical exegesis and foundational theologians in the tradition. if you have not read ellen charry's "the pastoral function of christian doctrine" i highly recommend it. if i were a mentor that would be my textbook.
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