Seminaries and the Decline of the Church (I)

In 2009 Boston School of Theology received $863,235 dollars from the Ministerial Education Fund (MEF).  For this investment a grand total of seven students in 2008 received United Methodist ordination at the cost of $123,319 per student.  The School of Theology at Claremont did a bit better; ten students from Claremont were in the newly ordained elders and deacons 2008 class in the various conferences.  The church’s investment per Claremont ordained student totaled $84,967.  Claremont, of course, has declared itself to be a multi-faith seminary and has indicated that it is not in the business of trying to convert persons from other religions to Christianity.  Money from MEF trains United Methodists, they argue.  United Methodist students must be treated quite well at Claremont.

This situation with MEF funds points to what many of us consider a serious problem in the church: namely, the seminaries (and the colleges).  The church is presently excited about the Call to Action Report that speaks of widespread church reforms in order to address decades-long membership losses.  Based on two independent studies and adopted unanimously of the Council of Bishops, the report calls for the building of vital congregations, the consolidating and eliminating of church agencies, the reforming of clergy leadership development, and for holding bishops accountable for church vitality.

However, the report, and the studies preceding the report, says nothing about the seminaries or the way the present seminary situation addresses the need for clergy leadership development.  Part of the problem is that the seminaries (and the colleges) are basically independent entities which go their own ways quite apart from the stated mission of The United Methodist Church, which is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Some background is helpful.

At Methodism’s organizing conference in 1784, preachers were advised never to let study interfere with soul-saving:”If you can do but one let your studies alone.  We would throw by all the libraries of the world rather than be guilty of the loss of one soul.” (1784 Discipline)   John Wesley himself was highly educated, and valued education, but he understood that there was not a direct link between educated clergy and church vitality.

Between 1780 and 1829, during the period of Methodism’s most rapid growth, forty colleges and universities were founded in the United States, mostly by Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists.  Hardly any were Methodist.  While Presbyterians and Congregationalists were steeping themselves in classical studies so that they could serve the cultured elite of the nation, Methodist preachers were organizing camp meetings, preaching revivals, and winning the hearts of the masses.

The Methodist message that all could be saved (unlimited atonement), that every person had value in God’s sight, and that in God’s sight the experience of the heart was more to be desired than the trained mind, made it attractive to all people, rich and poor, black and while, sophisticated and unsophisticated.  Methodism was a “bottom-up” religion rather than a “top-down” religion ruled by mediating elites.

In 1832 Congregational seminaries enrolled 234 students, Presbyterians seminaries 257, Episcopalians 47, Baptists 107, and Methodists none.  The first Methodist seminary opened in 1847.  By 1859 the other denominations enrolled over 1,200 students to the Methodists’ 51.  Yet Methodism in its several bodies claimed the allegiance of one-third of all the religious adherents in America.

In the last half of the 19^th century Methodism began to establish colleges and seminaries with abandon.  These were not the cause but the result of Methodism’s evangelistic success.  As Methodism grew more sophisticated they became more and more enamored with education.  Education was the new means by which the world could be civilized and thus Christianized.  While many of these educational institutions sought a close relationship with the church, many were also increasingly drawn into the values of an increasing secularized society which worshipped at the altars of academic freedom, new knowledge and the scientific method.  The coming kingdom began to look more and more like a secular utopia and less and less like the Biblical millennium.  Creedalism, sectarianism and all forms of “dogmatism” were to be resisted on the way to this kingdom.  Educational institutions began to believe that they were the change agents, and the church existed to serve them, and not they the church.

In 1901 Bishop Warren Chandler, a Methodist bishop on the Vanderbilt University board, presented a resolution that that the university should give preference to hiring Methodists, all other things being equal.  The school reacted by disaffiliating itself from the M.E. Church South.  In 1908 the General Conference of the M.E. Church, under the influence of its educational institutions, passed legislation removing bishops (who were instructed by the Discipline to guard the faith) from the responsibility of guarding the faith in regard to university or seminary teaching, thus effectively removing the church from intervening in university or seminary affairs.  From this point on seminaries and colleges would be free from all church constraints.  Religious tests for teaching were discarded.  The only “heresy” the church now allowed was the belief that heresy could exist.

Within a very few years,  by 1925 according to a study done by Ministers’ Monthly, of ninety-one seminaries in the country, only thirty-three seminaries in America identified themselves as “orthodox” in orientation, none of which was Methodist (four United Brethren and Evangelical Association seminaries claimed to be “orthodox”).  “Fundamentalism” (which in the modernist mind included all forms of evangelicalism) was pronounced as dead.  Modernism was considered the wave of the future for Methodist schools and for the future of the church.

Fortunately, at the time nearly 60% of the ministerial students of the north and south Methodist churches were trained through the Course of Study and were not required to attend seminary.  These were the pastors who did the work in the trenches and helped to keep some kind of theological balance in the church.

By the 1960s and 70s, ministerial candidates who wanted full ordination were required to be seminary graduates.  But the seminaries, at least the mainline seminaries, wanting to be sensitive to all the cultural shifts, were missing what was really happening in the Christian world.  Theological modernism and its successors were spiritually bankrupt.  The evangelical renaissance was taking place.  Pentecostalism was breaking out world-wide.  And, not least of all, many theological students preferred to attend growing and thriving evangelical seminaries.  The seminaries, wanting to be relevant, were becoming irrelevant.  This would mark the beginning of Methodism’s 43-year decline, a decline which must be placed in part, at the feet of the official church seminaries.

The seminaries (and their friends) never admitted to their own complicity in the church’s problems.  Their enrollment and financial problems were not of their own making.  What they needed was more money.  And so, in 1972, the church established the Ministerial Education Fund (MEF), otherwise known as the “bail-out” fund.  In recent times this fund has channeled fifteen million dollars a year to the general budget of the seminaries with no strings attached so that the seminaries might continue to do all the things they had always done in the way they had always done them.  There is no indication that the millions of dollars which have been poured into seminaries since 1972 have in any significant way increased the quality of seminary education.

There are some hopeful signs in seminary education (and these will be discussed in upcoming articles) but despite these hopeful signs the question still remains:  is The United Methodist Church really interested in renewal and reform?  If so, what shall be done with the seminaries?