If two women””one in Yellowknife, one in Regina””hear the call to be priests in the Anglican Church of Canada, the steps they will take to become ordained are quite different. Although both will wear collars and be “the Rev.” in the end, their assessment and education will depend on their diocese’s unique program, which could range from an informal mentoring relationship to specific course requirements.

A national conference””to be held January 5 to 7, 2010, in Montreal, Que.””will examine this diversity. Representatives from theological colleges and dioceses, students, and pastors will explore differences and discuss what should be core and common in preparing people for presbyteral (priestly) ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada.

People may be surprised to learn that there are minimal national standards for such preparation, said Dr. Eileen Scully, General Synod’s coordinator for ministry and worship, and conference staff support. All that exists is a 1986 document called “Prerequisites for Ordination” from the House of Bishops and the Advisory Committee on Postulants for Ordination (ACPO), which assesses candidates in discernment weekends, then offers non-binding recommendations to their bishops.

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With donations slowing, religious groups across the theological spectrum are reporting millions of dollars in reduced income that is resulting in staff layoffs and program cuts.

Jewish and Christian seminaries also are feeling the pinch. Eight seminaries for the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, are undergoing staff reductions and budget cuts.

In Los Angeles, consideration was given this spring to closing the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary serving the Jewish Reform movement. Ultimately, college officials opted to keep the campus open, but only after cutting staff and entering into cooperative arrangements with other institutions and seminaries.

But college officials confirmed there is ongoing discussion of how millions more could be saved, including preliminary talks about selling the campus to the adjacent USC and leasing it back.

Meanwhile, 69 long-term foreign missionaries and 350 short-term missionaries for the Southern Baptist Convention will remain home this year because of reduced giving by local congregations to the denomination’s cooperative program. Southern Baptist officials also report a $29-million drop in an annual Christmas offering on which half the program’s budget depends.

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A few statistics tell the story.

A majority of seminary students now carry educational debt, and they’re borrowing larger amounts than in the past. Graduates confirm that their debt affects their career choices, holds them back from purchasing homes, prevents them from saving for their children’s education, limits their retirement savings, delays health care and creates distress.

Christian Century magazine recently reported that “churches are paying their clergy proportionately lower salaries today then they did a generation ago, making it more difficult for ministerial candidates to justify the high cost of a graduate degree.”

Fewer than 7 percent of clergy in most Protestant and Catholic denominations today are under age 35.

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A professionally trained musician who has performed extensively as a pianist, oboist, and conductor, Jeremy Begbie considers himself first a scholar and professor of theology.

“I’m basically a theologian who frequently works in the arts, not an artist who dabbles in theology,” says Begbie, who joined the Divinity School in January as the inaugural Thomas A. Langford research professor of theology.

A native of Great Britain, Begbie will maintain his ties with Cambridge University, where he is a senior member of Wolfson College and an affiliated lecturer in the faculty of divinity and the faculty of music. Among his priorities as director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts is developing collaborative programs between the two institutions.

Begbie is the author of Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (T & T Clark); Theology, Music and Time (CUP), and most recently, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK), which won the Christianity Today 2008 Book Award in the theology/ethics category.

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The task of forming priests is a delicate mission. The formation offered by the Seminary is demanding, because a portion of the People of God will be entrusted to the pastoral solicitude of the future priests, the People that Christ saved and for whom he gave his life.
It is right for seminarians to remember that if the Church demands much of them it is because they are to care for those whom Christ ransomed at such a high price.

Many qualities are required of future priests: human maturity, spiritual qualities, apostolic zeal, intellectual rigour…. To achieve these virtues, candidates to the priesthood must not only be able to witness to them to their formation teachers but even more, they must be the first to benefit from these same qualities lived and shared by those who are in charge of helping them to attain maturity.

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The graduates patted each other’s backs, and nervously chatted with their families. Some sat quietly, meditating about their future while others wept.

It could have been a scene from any of the thousands of commencement ceremonies this year. But these graduates were convicted killers, rapists and drug dealers at Mississippi’s only maximum security prison.

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Forty-five years ago, Alyssa Stanton was born into an African-American, Pentecostal family in Cleveland. On Saturday, Ms. Stanton is to become a rabbi ”” the first African-American woman to be ordained as a rabbi by a mainstream Jewish seminary, said Jonathan D. Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

Ms. Stanton is scheduled to assume the leadership of an overwhelmingly white synagogue in Greenville, N.C., in August. In interviews, many observers drew parallels between her joining the rabbinate and November’s presidential result.

“It is of incredible importance to note that her ordination coincides with the election of Barack Obama,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, who will ordain Ms. Stanton at the college’s Cincinnati campus on Saturday. “It offers a ray of hope that the world can become a better place.”

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Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) has announced that five full-time staff positions would be eliminated as part of “a response to mounting financial pressures and changes in the educational needs of The Episcopal Church.” The restructuring does not affect the number of faculty positions at the Berkeley, Calif., seminary.

“In the past two days CDSP has said goodbye to five good and faithful staff members,” said Donn Morgan, president and dean, on May 29. “They are leaving not of their own volition, nor because of performance issues, but because of our school’s need to bring its budget into a more realistic place, to try to get closer to matching revenues with expenses.”

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Check it out (52 page pdf).

A ministry of the Reformed Episcopal Church in the town in which I live (Summerville, South Carolina) worth checking out.

Also, the general course requirements are here.

One of the senior bishops of the Church of England has cited the Rev. Katherine Ragsdale’s appointment as dean of Episcopal Divinity School as an example of the possible need for a new Anglican province in North America.

“That a promoter of abortion on demand, who describes abortionists as engaged in ”˜holy work’, might be given a senior position must call in question any possibility of normal relations with the province concerned,” wrote the Rt. Rev. Peter Robert Forster, Bishop of Chester in a letter to the Church of England Newspaper (April 9 edition). “If any right-thinking Christian has doubted the need for a new province in North America, they should ponder your astonishing report.”

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Dr. Ragsdale has served as vicar of St. David’s since 1996. Since 2005, she has also served as president and executive director of Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank dedicated to building a more just and inclusive democratic society by exposing movements, institutions, and ideologies on the political and Christian Right “that undermine human rights,” according to information published on the organization’s website. During her tenure at Political Research Associates, Dr. Ragsdale helped the organization successfully broaden its donor base as part of a transition from a founder-led institution.

She has also been a passionate advocate and author on abortion from a Christian perspective. She served for 17 years (eight as chairwoman) on the national board for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

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Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey is receiving training at All Saints Episcopal Church in Hoboken toward obtaining his master’s degree in theology.

McGreevey — who famously resigned as governor in 2004, saying that he was “a gay American” — is at All Saints for half-a-day once a week and on Sunday morning.

He’s not preaching to the congregation — yet, but, “He’s getting his field education at All Saints,” confirmed Rev. Geoff Curtiss, director of All Saints Episcopal parish. “He’s basically learning about how the parish works and learning what it means to run a Sunday morning congregation.”

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Fallout continues from the changes of “four testing years” at Wycliffe Hall, the theological college in Oxford…where there are “some deeply wounded spirits”, says an inspection report prepared for the House of Bishops.

The five-yearly reports on theological colleges used to be confidential. The Wycliffe report was published on the Church of England website this week, along with one on St Stephen’s House, Oxford. The colleges were graded in 13 areas with “Confidence”, “Confidence with qualifications”, or “No confidence”.

The Revd Dr Robin Ward, Principal of St Stephen’s House, said on Wednesday: “We were of course surprised that the reports came to be published in full, with unexpected assessment criteria, which we didn’t know until after the inspection process had finished.”

Both colleges are declared “fit for purpose”.

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Sagging endowments and other shrinking revenue streams are challenging the status quo at the nation’s seminaries, most of which aren’t cushioned by a link to an endowed university.

Among the 175 “free-standing” institutions in the Association of Theological Schools, 39% were “financially stressed,” with less than a year’s worth of spendable assets, a fall 2008 report says. That’s up from 26% a year earlier, and the data don’t reflect fallout from the stock market crash in the fall.

Making matters worse, enrollments at ATS schools have dropped 4% since 2006, marking the first consecutive-year decline in more than 20 years. The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) says enrollments are also down at 60% of Bible colleges, which train undergraduates for ministry.

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When the students of the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies at Duke University speak about their community, they often speak of friendship and pain in the same sentence.

At the AEHS, part of Duke Divinity School, future church leaders pray together, take communion together, share classes and meals and conversation. Most are preparing for ordination as deacons or priests.

Yet despite their common goals, recent controversies in the Episcopal Church have complicated their sense of unity, particularly about the role of gay clergy and some dioceses’ decision to bless same-sex marriages.

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The board of trustees of Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Mass., has voted to roll back tuition by 25 percent for its master of divinity and master of arts degrees in theological study programs next year.

“This decision reflects EDS’ commitment to making theological education accessible to a wide range of students,” said the Rev. Randall Chase, acting president in a release. “For several years we have been looking for ways to address the problem of access to an Episcopal seminary education: our distributive learning master’s program makes access possible for students unable to relocate for two to three years; reducing tuition for our fall and spring master’s students, in combination with our financial aid program, helps to reduce seminarian debt, which often serves as a barrier to studying at EDS.”

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Many pastors remember struggling in their first ministerial position””isolated geographically or professionally, lacking ready access to mentors and peers. The first person to greet young Daniel Aleshire after he led his first worship service “told me my sermon was ‘the worst damn sermon’ he had ever heard.”

Aleshire was forewarned that the man was a troubled congregant. But the comments from the rest of the Baptist congregation months later “were so ambiguous that I was never sure how I was doing,” said Aleshire, now top executive at the Association of Theological Schools.

More than a decade ago, analysts of congregational ministry for the Lilly Endowment decided that seminarians’ customary year or nine months of internship at a church were not enough to prepare graduates for the pitfalls and anxieties facing a new pastor.

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One day in 1993, the Rev. Steve Hickle picked up his phone and received news of a death. Even for a minister who deals with funerals and burials at least once a month, this particular demise was especially troubling. The victim was just 48 years old, a father of five and, like Mr. Hickle, a Methodist pastor in the Piedmont foothills.

Until recently, Mr. Hickle had thought of his colleague’s death as an object lesson in the capricious impermanence of life. Several months ago, though, as he attended a discussion on the subject of health in the clergy convened by the Divinity School at Duke University here, he began to wonder if there was more involved in a middle-age man’s fatal heart attack than the mystery of the divine plan.

That discussion was one of the first stages of an ambitious effort by Duke to assess and improve the health of ministers, specifically the 1,800 United Methodist pastors in North Carolina because the Divinity School serves as a seminary for the denomination. What underlies the study ”” and what Mr. Hickle, among others, has experienced firsthand ”” is a concern that in serving the Lord, ministers neglect themselves.

“It’s a personality trait that accompanies the sense of divine calling,” said Mr. Hickle, 58, who has been the pastor at Fairmont United Methodist Church in Raleigh for 19 years. “You’re feeding your need to be liked, your need to be valued, your need to be needed.”

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The Rt. Rev. Donald Harvey, moderator of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by Nashotah House Seminary.

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Received via Email:

An after Chapel Address at Trinity School for Ministry
By the Very Rev Dr Justyn Terry, Dean and President
December 3, 2008

Today, in the town of Chicago, a new Province may be born. For some of you this will be a source of great joy and hope. For others of you it will be a source of great concern and discomfort. We have board members, faculty, staff, students and alumni on both sides of this. It is bound to be a time of tension. How are we to handle it? I ask us all to observe, and hold each other to account, to an ABC:

Be Aware of different feelings about all this. People with a high view of the Bible and a deep concern for world mission differ on how to respond to this crisis. Some see a need to withdraw from The Episcopal Church and realign with other parts of the Anglican Communion. Others see a need to stay in The Episcopal Church and witness to the Gospel from within. Both have deep concerns about where the leadership of The Episcopal Church is going. Both have a deep commitment to the Gospel. But they have reached very different conclusions about how to deal with it. Be aware of the differences.

Be Blameless in your talk. Controlling the tongue is notoriously hard, as James reminds us (Jas 3:8). But in this tense time, we need to be extra vigilant. Let us beware of letting our anger or our euphoria get the better of us. Let us look out for humor that puts other people down, and let us see instead how we can build others up. Remember Prov. 10:19: “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.” Be blameless in your talk.

Be Constant in prayer. Pray everyday for those with whom you disagree. Pray for the leadership of The Episcopal Church, for great blessing to be upon them. Pray for the witness of the Church to a watching world. Be constant in prayer.

We have an opportunity here to learn about living in the tension of a fallen world. May the Lord grant us abundant grace for these times of testing.

For millions of years, invisible streams of water have run deep in the earth below Manhattan at a constant temperature of 65 degrees, a source of energy that seems beyond exhaustion ”” and beyond reach. But eight months ago, a seminary in Chelsea began to pump water from those streams to heat its buildings in the winter and cool them in the summer.

“It’s forever noiseless, forever pollution-less, forever carbon-free,” said Maureen Burnley, the executive vice president of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church.

For the seminary, and now about 60 other places in Manhattan, the unseen bounty of the earth is being harvested by geothermal pumps. Manhattan is geologically suited for these deep wells. From a depth of 1,500 to 1,800 feet, the pumps deliver the consistently moderate temperatures of underground water to the surface, where it works like a refrigerant. It carries energy.

Read the whole article.

Candidates for the Catholic priesthood should undergo psychological tests to screen out heterosexuals unable to control their sexual urges and those with strong homosexual tendencies, the Vatican said Thursday.

A new document was the second in three years to deal with the effects of a sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Church six years ago.

It said the early detection of “sometimes pathological” psychological defects of men before they become priests would help avoid tragic experiences.

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One of the goods things which have emerged recently from the travails of Anglo-Catholicism in a riven Anglican Communion is a more profound reflection on what constitutes our patrimony: what makes Anglo-Catholicism actually distinctive, and justifies the anxiety which unites us to find a future for what we have received. After all, the great majority of Catholic Christians manage quite well without adding a national qualifier to the third mark of the Church adumbrated by the Creed. But those of us who live within our embattled, contrary tradition know that there is a tone, a way of doing things, a pastoral and liturgical ethos which is both absolutely distinctive and yet also prophetic in pointing beyond itself towards a greater unity ”“ those of us who went recently with the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lourdes will understand what I mean. When we look at the lives of the saints we see that in their diversity of character and spirituality they point us towards the truth of Revelation in different ways: for S. Thomas Aquinas, the overarching principle which organizes his understanding of reality is truth, for S. Francis of Assisi it is goodness, for S. Augustine it is beauty. Our tradition, rather at odds actually with the puritan mentality of the first Tractarians, values beauty: the beauty of holiness in Christian living, the beauty of holiness in Christian worship, the beauty of holiness in the magnanimous expenditure of human wealth on the splendour of Christian cult.It is important to recognise that this is not just an aesthetic preference (although there is nothing wrong with that). Attentiveness to beauty in religion is not like an enthusiasm for Bellini or Bonsai, it is to recognise a fundamental characteristic of the nature of truth as indeed beautiful because divine: as Augustine cried, Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. To prefer the trite, the banal, the makeshift to the artful, the well-crafted and the beautiful is to make a theological mistake about God. The present Pope is very anxious to rescue the ideal of liturgical beauty from the charge of aestheticism and is determined to put this right in a way which should rejoice all Anglican Catholics who have from the beginning been attentive to this core aspect of evangelisation. It was both moving and significant that on the feast day of Ss. Peter and Paul this year he invited the Ecumenical Patriarch to inaugurate with him the year of Paul in a liturgical celebration which reflected a new commitment to beauty in music and vesture which many of us thought was lost in the 1960s. But the great eastern fathers of the Church were not simply interested in aesthetics, not simply Christians of good taste. They understood beauty to be a morally valuable quality, human creativeness which exemplified our creation in the image of God himself, and our transformation into the divine likeness by the work of grace.

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Corinne Ware remembers being struck by how tall the church was.

She was in England doing graduate work and happened upon St. Margaret’s Church, a 16th-century sanctuary next to Westminster Abbey. Everything seemed vertical ”” the pillars, the stained glass windows, the massive organ.

“I thought, whoever these people are, they understand mystery,” she recalled Monday morning as we sat in her office at the Seminary of the Southwest, an Episcopal seminary just north of the University of Texas. Ware, a slender, elegant woman who teaches ascetical theology, was sharing her own story as she explained to me the different types of worship Christians gravitate toward.

A Southern Baptist, Ware loved her church and the foundation it laid for her. But that day at St. Margaret’s, she realized she had a thirst for that kind of church experience. She would eventually become an Episcopalian.

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They come from a host of Christian denominations, but one thing unites them: they are part of a shrinking number of theology students nationally who are interested in taking over a pulpit rather than doing something else with their degrees.

About 100 seminarians from over two dozen denominations, from Baptists and Roman Catholics to Unitarian Universalists, are attending a weeklong conference aimed at reversing a trend of young people shying away from the gaps in churches nationwide left by retiring Baby Boomer ministers.

The conference by the Atlanta-based Fund for Theological Education will also bring in 50 undergraduates from colleges nationwide who are thinking of attending seminary and then going into ministry as a profession.

“The image of being a church leader is very boring,” said 25-year-old conference attendee John Helmstadter, a student at Yale Divinity School. “It doesn’t seem like a vibrant sector. It excites me to be a part of the revival of the church.”

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The [theological] schools doing well “tend to be the ones that take their academic mission seriously. … Institutions that meet real challenges with a real commitment of resources will do better than ones that say ‘It’s not that bad.’ A great many institutions don’t seem to realize that actually knowing stuff about the Bible and theological tradition makes for better pastors.”

—Dr. A.K.M. Adam

Read it carefully and read it all.

Pope Benedict is a rock star. Following Christian rock superstars and American idols, he arrived at the seminary and entered the field to swelling counterpoint of Bach and the screaming cheers of thousands after personally greeting disabled children in the seminary chapel. The crowd’s expectation was fulfilled, the pope was present; the field erupted and would not relinquish the pope for several minutes of intense cheering.

In his address, the theological reflection was deep and expansive. The ultimate truth is found in the ultimate being, he said, exciting every fiber of St. Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy among the seminarians ”“ and all the people again broke out into shouts of joy.

At the far-flung missions in the Diocese of Salt Lake City, where the celebration of the Mass can be a monthly luxury, the spiritual support of the Christian faithful, though strong, is minimal. The Body of Christ is integral always and everywhere, though the reinforcement of joining people en masse is a uniquely moving moment without which the experience of faith loses a critical taste of universality.

The pope’s message has practical appeal to everyone. As Catholics, he said, we must foster our personal relationship with Christ, as well as be faithful to our liturgical prayer, work actively for charity, and be attentive to God’s call for each person: one’s vocation.

The excitement that filled the day at its beginning became the vehicle for the pope’s words into the lives of everyone who listened to it. For seminarians, it was a first exposure as men in priestly formation to the fullness of the priesthood through the presence of the curia. From the desert of the Boneville Salt Flats to the center of every great city, this was a moment no one who experienced it will ever let go.

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That was why she had come to New York last week. She was among 35 young adult volunteers from faith-based groups around the country selected by the Fund for Theological Education to spend a week meeting clergy in several urban ministries. The fund’s officials hoped that they might be inspired to pursue a similar calling, or at least bring a greater grounding in a higher purpose to their secular careers.

This is not necessarily an easy goal for young adults just out of college, since many of their friends are off making money, while they’re living in small groups working in soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

“Their families cannot understand why they’re doing this, because they should be getting a real job or need to pay their student loans,” said James Ellison, who coordinated the program for the fund, an ecumenical organization that seeks to increase the number of Christian scholars and pastors nationwide. “Their friends may admire they’re working with the poor, but they can’t understand this. Coming here, they see it’s not just a few crazy Presbyterians doing this. It gives them a sense that maybe this is not so crazy after all.”

A clear, sobering light filled the dark-wood sanctuary of Trinity Lutheran Church on West 100th Street. The stained glass windows had been put in storage, replaced by plain glass, which revealed the steel skeleton of a new building rising next door. The windows had been removed to avoid damage from the construction. The Rev. Heidi Neumark, Trinity’s pastor, said the church could not afford to put them back when construction ended.

She sat before the visitors, recounting her decision to be ordained. It was a roundabout process, considering that she was not especially drawn to organized religion. She had worked with the poor in her 20s. She had entered the seminary, thanks to a scholarship from the fund that paid for a year of seminary, no strings attached, for young people considering ordination.

“The church needs to be in those places where people feel outside the church,” she said. “For many of you, the important question is, how dissatisfied are you with the church? The church needs people like you.”

Read it all and make sure to enjoy the picture of Father Earl Kooperkamp .