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“As I wrote in my letter to seminarians at the close of the Year for Priests, it is not only a question of learning obviously useful things but of knowing and understanding the structure of the faith in its totality — which is not a summary of theses but an organism, an organic vision — so that it becomes an answer to the questions of men, who change in externals from generation to generation but who remain fundamentally the same,” he said.

The Pontiff also emphasized that the study of theology must be connected with the life of prayer.

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In early September, as new students wandered onto the campus of Concordia Seminary in Clayton, they were joined by another group of theological rookies ”” mostly midcareer types ”” joining the school’s program that allows students to train for the ministry online.

As the consultants, electricians, farmers and entrepreneurs in the Specific Ministry Program got to know one another in person, before reconnecting online from hundreds or thousands of miles away in the weeks that followed, one student had an orientation story that truly rocked.

David Ellefson was an honest-to-God founding member of the legendary thrash metal band Megadeth.

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“The Clear Call” is the title–listen to it all.

Regent College is pleased to announce that Bruce Hindmarsh, the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, has been appointed as the incoming President of the American Society of Church History.

The appointment began on January 1, 2012, and finishes on December 31, 2014, and includes one year as President-Elect and another year as Past-President. Dr. Hindmarsh’s responsibilities include planning the program for the 2013 annual meeting in New Orleans, chairing the council and executive committee, providing the presidential address to the society in 2014, and chairing the nominating committee in his final year.

“This is a great honour for Bruce and for Regent, not least because Bruce is the first non-American to be awarded the post widely seen as the highest academic honour for the discipline in North America,” says Paul Williams, Academic Dean of Regent College.

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Founded in 1977, AFTE is the creation of two regal figures within United Methodism who could hardly have been more different””Dr. Albert Outler, the erudite seminary professor who at the time was the world’s foremost authority on all things Wesleyan, and Dr. Ed Robb Jr., traveling evangelist and the day’s best known critic and reformer of the UM Church.

Ironically, this oddest of couples discovered that they had much in common. They both loved the church, treasured our Wesleyan heritage, and were greatly concerned about the state of theological education within the denomination. And they both felt that true renewal would never be possible or lasting if UM pastors were not trained in the great tradition of classical Wesleyan theology….

Albert Outler and Ed Robb were vexed over the theological trends in the seminaries preparing United Methodist preachers and professors. They wanted something substantial and transformative that would provide long-term change. What they agreed upon was AFTE, a program designed to raise up a new generation of leaders.

Much food for thought here; read it all.

Since I’ve been chairing a national Presbyterian Church (USA) committee on the Nature of the Church for the 21st century, I’ve been gaining a different perspective on many of the larger trends of our denomination. One thing that has been difficult to realize (and equally difficult to communicate to the larger church) is the young clergy crisis.

Why would I call it a crisis? We’ve known for a long time about the startling decline of young clergy. The drop-out rates don’t help (I can’t find hard and fast stats on this… but some claim that about 70% of young clergy drop out within the first five years of ministry, usually because of lack of support or financial reasons). The average age of a pastor in the PCUSA is 53. And I’ve realized that the age of our leadership might be much higher.

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The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, announced on Thursday 8 December 2011 that the Reverend Canon Dr Samuel Wells has been appointed as the next Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Sam, who will take up the post in the summer of 2012, is currently Dean of the Chapel and a Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, where he leads a staff of 25 in upholding the Chapel’s reputation for preaching, music and liturgy, oversees the 35 campus ministers and is the regular preacher at the year-round Sunday services, which regularly attract a congregation of around 900….

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Christian faith, but not secular faith, now effectively banned from schools, colleges, and universities, has been relegated to the private and subjective arena. The result is the growing popularity of any who eliminate from Christian faith all that secular trust finds incompatible: miracles, the radical nature of sin and the consequent radical nature of grace, transcendence, holiness, and our human desperate need for God’s initiative action in Jesus.

The consequence of this secular replacement of Christianity over the years is that otherwise educated people can be bereft of any substantial grasp of scripture. One glaring example is Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori who tells us that Marcus Borg “opened the Bible to me.” (Acknowledgements A Wing and a Prayer). The Christian creed’s affirmation, to which she has repeatedly sworn, (but Borg negates) is that Jesus Christ is:

“the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made . . .”

Borg has not opened the scripture for Bishop Jefferts Schori but closed its revelation of Jesus’ divinity.

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For more than 200 years, Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) has trained future pastors to have expertise in biblical studies, pastoral care and preaching.
But in today’s world, the nation’s oldest school of theology has decided that’s no longer enough, and other schools are starting to agree.

Under a recent curriculum overhaul, ANTS students must prove competency in key skills for the 21st-century church, including high-tech communication and interfaith collaboration. They still study theology, but unless they can use it to help others find meaning, they don’t graduate.

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On Oct. 31, 2011, the Very Rev. William S. Stafford, dean of The School of Theology, announced his decision to retire from his position, effective June 30, 2012.

“Bill Stafford has served as dean with great distinction,” stated Dr. John McCardell, 16th and current vice-chancellor of the University of the South. “I admire him immensely. He has strengthened the faculty of The School of Theology and been an articulate voice for the importance of residential theological education. His intelligence, his humility, and his understanding of the whole Church, broadly defined, in all its richness and diversity, have set an exemplary standard of leadership. I join his friends, his colleagues and, perhaps, most important, his legion of former students, in thanking him for his conspicuous service to the Church and for the many ways in which his remarkable career will shape that Church for many years to come.”

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In recent months, we have been listening to ongoing discussions about the problems and promises of seminary education. Some of the talk is fraught with anxiety, and some of it is filled with hope, but it is all marked by a sharp awareness that seminaries must adapt to an increasingly complex world.

What challenges do seminaries face in the coming years? How are they””and the churches and communities that are the focus of their mission””preparing for those challenges? What signs of transformation can we see as we survey the horizon of theological education? What will seminary look like 10 years from now, and what purposes will it serve?…

Read it all (numerous contributions).

Nashotah House is one of two orthodox Episcopal seminaries in the country, and the only one of 11 that shapes students in the Anglo-Catholic tradition that emphasizes the church’s Catholic, rather than Protestant, history and culture.

Students come, they say, for any number of reasons: the classical education, with its emphasis on Hebrew and Greek languages; the quasi-monastic culture; the sense of community; the focus on prayer and liturgy.

“This just matches more with my piety,” said Forrest Tucker, 31, a father of four and one on the way, who lives with his family in married-student housing on campus.

“You get into the spiritual rhythm of life here, and it becomes a very important part of your life,” he said.

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Saying it must reverse a trend of annual deficits and restructure to meet the changing needs of theological education, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific’s board of trustees agreed Oct. 14 to increase and broaden enrollment, increase annual giving and reduce its 11-member faculty.

The seminary has run annual operating deficits for several years. The current fiscal year the deficit is $1.4 million on a $4 million budget. The budget includes the cost of being a member of the Graduate Theological Union, of which CDSP is a founding member.

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I had been ordained for a month and was meeting with two people appointed to evaluate my fitness for ministry….The question that I’ve never forgotten was, “Do you preach for a decision?”

The question has haunted me. We preachers proclaim good news and speak about all the amazing ways that good news penetrates, comforts, challenges and transforms lives. But my questioner had a point: proclaiming good news ought to in some way lead to a response, a decision of some kind. Otherwise proclaiming the good news of unconditional divine love can be an exercise in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Preaching ought to lead to people caring more, giving more and living more. It is the assurance of God’s presence, to be sure, and it is testimony to God’s healing love. But it is also an invitation to do something.

–John M. Buchanan, Christian Century, October 4, 2011, issue, page 3

Charles Kingsley Barrett, who has died aged 94, stood alongside CH Dodd as the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century. Barrett regarded commentary on the texts as the primary task of the biblical scholar, and his meticulous commentaries have provided solid foundations for students and clergy for more than 50 years. He was a Methodist minister for nearly 70 years and, during his time as lecturer and professor of divinity at Durham University (1945-82), and in retirement there, he preached most Sundays in the city or a nearby village. His opposition to the scheme for Anglican-Methodist reunion in the 1960s brought him into contact with a wider public as a church leader, as well as a renowned teacher.

He was born into a Primitive (Calvinist) Methodist clergy family in Salford. He was sent to Shebbear college, in Devon, where he became captain of cricket and a promising opening batsman. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he distinguished himself in the mathematical tripos before transferring to theology. His supervisor, Noel Davey, directed him to what turned out to be the last course of lectures on the theology and ethics of the New Testament by EC Hoskyns.

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Bishop John Rodgers remembered John Stott as “monumental” in importance, especially as a leader for evangelical Anglicans worldwide. He also played a significant role in the founding of Trinity School for Ministry. It was John that put forth the Rt. Rev. Alf Stanway’s name for consideration as the first Dean and President of the school. He also accompanied the Rev. John Guest on a visit to the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, to present the vision of starting a “school for ministry” in his diocese. Finally, John Stott and J. I. Packer were both consulted in the development of Trinity’s Statement of Faith.

Read it all.

[John] Stott meant a lot to me, and in several respects.

First, he modeled intelligent preaching, preaching that implied that both preacher and congregation were intelligent people who were concerned to understand difficult and important matters, and that patient and skilled interpretation of the difficult and important texts of the Bible was not only possible, but to be expected from sermons on every occasion. Preachers I have heard since then, and that’s the majority, who fail to interpret the text intelligently, fail to treat their audiences as intelligent people, and fail to express themselves intelligently, earn either my pity (if they can’t help it) or my contempt (if they can). But they do not get a pass: John Stott showed us what could be done, and we ought to do it, even if few of us can do it so well.

Second, he showed that smart and educated people could be evangelicals and remain evangelicals. In my young adult years, many upwardly mobile evangelicals were hitting the “high road,” so to speak, on their way to Anglo-Catholicism, Catholicism, or even Orthodoxy, but Stott”“whose church services at All Souls Langham Place were like InterVarsity meetings with robes”“was irrefutably sophisticated and unapologetically low-church evangelical.

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From here:

Owning Poverty: A Transformational Spiritual Journey
This course takes a Christian spiritual formation approach to the exploration of the crushing human poverty experienced in our world today. A theology of poverty requires a posture and epistemology of poverty of spirit. Until poverty is taken into ourselves, it is not a truth we can really know, although we might acknowledge it as an undisputed fact or recall statistics of injustice in our world. As poverty is allowed to engage us internally, our mode of engagement with the poor shifts from distant empircism and observation, to identification and incarnational compassion. As we engage hands, heads, and hearts in this course, our desire is that participants will come to better understand poverty (spiritual and physical poverty, their own poverty and others) and experience God’s heart and blessing for the poor. We want students to internalize biblical truths to facilitate Kingdom transformation in themselves and the world.

India’s best-known Islamic seminary ousted its reformist leader on Sunday, less than seven months after he assumed the post, because he was quoted as speaking favorably of a Hindu nationalist suspected of fomenting deadly anti-Muslim riots.

The reformer, Mullah Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, was appointed in January to lead the seminary, Darul Uloom, in the city of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh State. He had become popular in part because of the success of his madrasas, or Islamic schools, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra that bridged traditional Islamic education with the needs of the modern world by teaching students secular subjects like science and computer programming. He had hoped to bring those innovations to Darul Uloom.

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A report setting out a road map for theological training in the wake of substantial government cuts was ”˜overwhelmingly carried’ by Synod on Sunday.

The result followed a lively debate on a report by the Ministry Council suggesting areas where the Church could save money.

Introducing the report, the Bishop of Sheffield, the Rt Rev Steven Croft, said: “Last September, the government announced far-reaching changes to the funding of Higher Education in England. It is not my purpose this afternoon to comment on the broad thrust of those proposals. They have significant consequences for the training of ordinands in the Church of England and also for other forms of formation for ministry.”

He said more than £900,000 per annum was likely to be lost in resources for pre-ordination training from 2012, as a result of cuts to the Higher Education Funding Council….

Read it all (subscription required).

The Very Reverend Doctor Guy Fitch Lytle III, Professor of Church History and Anglican Studies, Bishop Juhan Professor of Divinity, and Dean Emeritus of The School of Theology of the University of the South, died on July 15, 2011 in Winchester, TN, of complications of diabetes.

He was born on October 14, 1944, to Nelle Stuart Lytle and Guy Fitch Lytle, Jr., in Birmingham, AL. An avid tennis player, Dr. Lytle won the Alabama Youth Tennis Championship title and went on to compete in the National Youth Tennis Championship. Dr. Lytle graduated from Princeton University in 1966. He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University in England, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

After teaching positions at the Catholic University of America, University of Texas: Austin, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Dr. Lytle joined the University of the South as Dean of the School of Theology. For eleven years he served the University of the South with creativity and distinction, during which time the School doubled in size, built a new chapel – The Chapel of the Apostles, found financial stability, and gained national prominence. During Dr. Lytle’s tenure, he was a significant supporter of theology and the liturgical arts, and vastly increased participation of Sewanee students in world mission outreach and cross-cultural experiences. With his wife Maria, he developed programs in Hispanic ministries and attracted significant numbers of Latino students to the School. Above all, Dr. Lytle was an Episcopal priest of unwavering commitment to his Lord, Jesus Christ.

He is survived by his wife, Maria Rasco Lytle, of Sewanee, TN; his brother, Stuart Lytle, Newburyport, MA; his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Lytle Knowles and Joe Knowles, of Lynchburg, VA; his daughter, Ashley Lytle, of Atlanta, GA; and his grandchildren, Madeline, Sophia, and Jacob Knowles, of Lynchburg, VA.

The family will greet visitors on Monday, July 18, from 12:00-1:30 PM at the University of the South’s Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, TN. The funeral service will follow at 2:00 PM, with the Right Rev. Don Wimberly officiating. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Dr. Lytle’s memory to the School of Theology Dean’s Discretionary Fund for student financial needs.

I love the picture here. From a family member via Facebook:

We would like to thank everyone for the prayers and love we have received since the unexpected passing of The Rev. Dr. Guy Lytle…[Friday]. Please join us in a service celebrating Guy’s life on Monday, July 18 at 2:00pm at the Chapel of the Apostles in Sewanee. ALL CLERGY are invited to vest (alb & white stole) and process. Please help share this news with those not on Facebook. Blessings.

How can the Christian Church, and more specifically Anglican churches, best make disciples in the 21st century through catechesis? That topic was the subject of the second Ancient Wisdom””Anglican Futures conference June 16-18 at Trinity School for Ministry.

“We need much more depth and breadth in the way we think of making disciples,” Philip Harrold, associate professor of Church history at Trinity, told The Living Church. “We need to rediscover ancient ways of reading Scriptures from the Fathers and the Reformers, and also the revivalists. We need to recover new ways of being the body of Christ formed around that Scripture.”

Read it all.

[Bishop Edward] Salmon said he plans to strengthen relationships, both among seminary faculty and staff and between the seminary and bishops of the Episcopal Church.

“The name of leadership is relationships ”” people connecting with each other and working together,” he said. “Our broken relationships in the Church are a testimony against the Gospel.”

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Check it out.

Go here and his thoughts begin just past 1 hour and 45 minutes in and last a few minutes.

Please note that Dr. Wilkinson is particluarly well suited to speak to such a topic, since, as he says of himself:

Before working in Durham as a theologian, I was a scientist and then a Methodist minister in inner city Liverpool. My background is research in theoretical astrophysics, where my PhD was in the study of star formation, the chemical evolution of galaxies and terrestrial mass extinctions such as the event which wiped out the dinosaurs. I am a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and have published a wide range of papers on these subjects.

Sarah Sentilles was about to be ordained as an Episcopal priest when she lost her faith in God.

To put it in perspective-she was engaged and the wedding invitations were sent. Calling things off was more than a little awkward.

In Breaking Up with God: A Love Story (HarperOne; Hardcover; June 2011), Sentilles tells the deeply personal story of her difficult decision to leave not only the priesthood, but to let go of Christianity altogether. She had spent years immersed in the religion-from CCD to youth ministry to Harvard Divinity-and had, as an adult, wholeheartedly embraced the religion that had defined her youth. And yet one day she woke up and realized…it was over.

Read it all.