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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