In the cloistered world of Episcopal seminaries, time sometimes seems to stand still as clergy-in-training gather in stone chapels to pray in ways familiar to their forebears centuries earlier.

But the semblance of timelessness can be deceiving.

Some of the 11 seminaries affiliated with the Episcopal Church are slashing core programs, while others report rapid growth in enrollment. Still others are reexamining conventional wisdom about what it takes — and how much it costs — to shape a faithful priest.

The Episcopal method of training clergy “is a very expensive way to do theological education,” said Daniel Aleshire, executive director of the Pittsburgh-based Association of Theological Schools. “There is significant financial stress in the Episcopal seminary system.”

Centrist and liberal seminaries are facing especially hard times….

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The Trinity School for Ministry Board of Trustees announced today that the Rev. Dr. Justyn Terry has accepted an enthusiastic call by the board to become the new Dean and President, succeeding the Rt. Rev. Dr. John H. Rodgers, Trinity’s second Dean and President, who left retirement to serve as Interim Dean/President beginning in August 2007.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees the Rev. Canon David Roseberry said, “The Lord has blessed us indeed, as Justyn will assume the awesome responsibility of Trinity’s vital role as a bearer of an orthodox evangelical witness in North America.”

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McGill University has bought the Anglican Diocesan Theological College for an undisclosed amount.

“The sale price is between us and McGill University,” college principal John Simons said yesterday. “But all things shall one day be revealed.”

The college says it can no longer afford to maintain the century-old neo-Gothic building on University St. north of Sherbrooke St.

It will however, lease the north wing of the building, known as the Principal’s Lodge, from the university, convert it into a seminary and continue to use St. Luke’s chapel in the building’s south wing, which it will share with McGill as a multi-purpose teaching facility.

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At the Andover Newton Theological School here, banquets, exhibitions and church services proclaim the bicentennial this year of the school’s founding as the Andover Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Nick Carter, its president, celebrates the seminary’s history proudly, but he is more engaged by how the school will adapt to the deep ferment in American religion and survive until the 250th anniversary and beyond.

Mr. Carter’s question is shared by scores of other smaller and midsize independent Protestant seminaries that have seen their financial support from denominations wither, their costs increase, and their assumptions about church life and the career of ministry tested by growing fragmentation and change in the pews.

“The church is changing,” Mr. Carter said. “Our concepts of religious leadership, mission, denomination and the status of ministry are being redefined. Other than the Gospel itself, most of the assumptions that our programs of study are based on are being swept away.”

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Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, one of 11 schools in the U.S. dedicated to preparing Episcopal priests, told tenured faculty on Thursday that their jobs would end next year.

Officials at the Evanston seminary insist the school is not closing, but that it is redefining its approach for preparing men and women for priesthood. Earlier this year, the school stopped accepting new candidates and advised first-year students that they should enroll in other seminaries if they wish to earn their degrees from an Episcopal institution.

For more than a century, seminarians have traditionally enrolled in a three-year residential program to earn a master’s of divinity degree that prepares them for the priesthood. Seminary officials said the school would explore the possibility of offering the degree in other formats such as distance learning or short-term residential stints.

“We want to bring the traditional excellence and depth of residential theological education to the new challenges and realities of the 21st Century,” said Rev. Gary Hall, dean and president of Seabury-Western. “People can’t afford to come here. We need to figure out how to bring it to them.”

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The Trustees of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary today declared that the Episcopal Seminary “is in (a state of) financial crisis that threatens survival of the institution” and has given notice to all faculty that employment will end on June 30, 2009. The school also eliminated nine staff positions. The final date of employment for most of these staff will be May 23 ”“ a week after graduation and the school’s 150th anniversary celebrations.

The decision was the outcome of a special board meeting in which the trustees were presented with recommendations by a committee charged with reviewing the seminary’s finances. In February, the board was informed that income from tuition, fees, and endowment resources would be insufficient to overcome an ongoing deficit of nearly $500,000 per year. The seminary currently has an estimated $2.9 million in accumulated debt — likely to climb to $3.5 million later this year because of transition costs. The board ordered a financial plan that brings expenses in line with revenues.

“This is an especially painful and difficult decision to make and announce,” said the seminary’s dean and president, Gary Hall. “However, it became clear during the past 18 months that the seminary’s endowment and other income sources are not capable of sustaining a traditional residential seminary program.”

“At its heart, Seabury will always be a school in service of the mission of God as proclaimed and enacted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Hall said. “We simply cannot sustain our mission with limited resources and by using a traditional model of ministry education.”

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Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States comes at a time when Roman Catholic seminary enrollment is down 60 percent since 1968. Two seminarians talk with Michele Norris about the shrinking pool of priests and other issues facing the U.S. church.

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“The new face of Christianity will be the black woman,” a renowned theologian told a Lexington audience Thursday.

Kwok Pui Lan, the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., explained that in mid-2007, Europe laid claim to the greatest number of Christians in the world: 532 million, followed by Latin America at 525 million and Africa at 417 million. But by 2025, Africa will climb to the top spot with 634.6 million Christians, with Latin America a close second at 634.1 million and Europe dropping to third at 521 million.

“The challenge,” she said, “is to reimagine Christianity in the 21st century.”

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Of the 11 Episcopal seminaries in the United States, one recently announced it would end its main residential program, another is shutting down one of its campuses, and a third is selling a good portion of its campus. The changes reflect not only each institution’s own financial or enrollment straits but also changes that are coming in Episcopal seminary education, which has historically played a key role in American theological life. Among them are an embrace of distance education and new, more flexible alternatives to the traditional residential seminary model thus far sustained for centuries, and ever-increasing numbers of collaborations involving other seminaries, Episcopal and non, and non-sectarian colleges, as tiny institutions struggle to survive.

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A Palestinian terrorist opened fire at a central Jerusalem yeshiva late Thursday night, killing eight students and wounding 11 others, police and rescue officials said.

The 8:45 p.m. shooting at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood broke a two-year lull in terror in the capital and sent students scurrying for cover from a hail of gunfire – a reported 500-600 bullets – that lasted for several minutes.

“There were horrendous screams of ‘Help us! Help us!'” recounted Avrahami Sheinberger of the ZAKA emergency rescue service, one of the first to respond to the scene. “There were bodies strewn all over the floor, at the entrance to the yeshiva, in various rooms and in the library.”

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The class of seminary students graduating in May will be the last for Bexley Hall Seminary’s Rochester, N.Y., campus which will be closed. Bexley Hall remains committed to a three-year residential seminary program at its Columbus, Ohio campus, according to the Very Rev. John R. Kevern, dean of Bexley Hall.

The decision to close the Rochester campus was based in part on changing demographics, Dean Kevern told The Living Church. Another factor was the more stringent standards the Rochester campus would have to meet when its accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools came up for renewal in 2012.

“We are too thin on the ground there to meet the labyrinthine requirements of the state and the accrediting agency,” Dean Kevern said. “So with reluctance and no great pleasure, the board acquiesced to the analysis of both entities and decided to terminate the satellite M. Div. program as of this May.”

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At the same time, all the seminaries of the Episcopal Church face real economic and missional challenges. The stand-alone residential model developed in the nineteenth century is becoming unsustainable for most of our institutions. Bishops, congregations, and seminarians have fewer resources to allot to the education of seminarians. And the cost of theological education has resulted in an unprecedented level of student debt.

Like many other Episcopal Church institutions, over the past two decades Seabury has both confronted and thought hard about how it can adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the present moment. We have come to the realization that we cannot continue to operate as we have in the past and that there is both loss and good news in that. We believe that the church does not need Seabury in its present form; there are a number of other schools who do what we have traditionally done as well as we do. But we also believe that the church very much needs a seminary animated by and organized around a new vision of theological education””one that is centered in a vision of Baptism and its implications for the whole church, one which is flexible and adaptive and collaborative in nature. We are committed to Seabury’s historic and ongoing ministry as a vital center of theological education, reflection, and congregational study. We are enthusiastic about the prospect of doing this in a new and, we hope, more economically feasible and pedagogically innovative way. At its heart, Seabury will always be a school in service of the mission of God as proclaimed and enacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ….

After consultation with the faculty, students, and staff, the Planning Committee met on Tuesday, February 19, 2008. The Planning Committee asked the board’s Executive Committee to clarify its understanding of the long-range educational mission of Seabury, and it proposed two resolutions which the Executive Committee passed in the following form on Wednesday, February 20, 2008:

The Executive Committee affirms that Seabury will no longer offer the M.Div. as a freestanding 3-year residential program. This does not preclude offering the M.Div. in other formats.

The Executive Committee accepts the 3 following recommendations of the Planning Committee:

1. That Seabury will immediately suspend recruitment and admissions to all degree and certificate programs in this time of discernment.

2. That Seabury will enable all current D.Min. students to complete their programs.

3. That Seabury will assist all current M.Div., MTS, MA, and certificate students to find alternative arrangements for the completion of their programs as may be required.

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The leaders of the 11 seminaries connected with the Episcopal Church have agreed that the schools they lead will consolidate their efforts in four areas of theological education.
The agreement came during a January meeting at Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Attending the meeting were deans and trustees — including many board chairs — from nearly all 11 of the seminaries, along with many of the bishops who serve on some of the seminaries’ boards.

The collaborations will be distance learning, Spanish-language ministry preparation, Anglican Communion partnerships, and seminary-diocesan partnerships for local ministry development education.

“The spirit of cooperation” that was present during the meeting is “critically important” to the success of the plans, and marks a major change in the way the seminaries relate to each other, the Very Rev. Ward Ewing, dean and president of the General Theological Society (GTS) and convener of the seminaries’ Council of Deans, told Episcopal News Service.

“This is a big deal because we say we’re not going to be Lone Rangers anymore,” agreed Donn Morgan, dean of Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) and Ewing’s predecessor as convener.

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For several months during my time as a seminary student I worked the night shift at a local mirror factory. My title was prism inspector, and for every hour of work I was expected to check about a hundred car rearview mirrors for possible defects. But I was also required to take a ten-minute break each hour, to rest my eyes from intently staring at mirrors for the previous 50 minutes.

During these brief rest periods I would study for my seminary courses. Alongside the stacks of mirrors on my work bench was a small pile of books””Hebrew grammar, church history, systematic theology.

My attempts to cram some studying into my scheduled breaks were often frustrated, however, by the appearance of Jed, the night watchman. Jed always seemed to pass my way just as I was in the middle of some important reading. And he liked to talk….

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The reputations of many Roman Catholic parishes have been tarnished in recent years, both by the priest sex-abuse scandals and a growing number of embezzlement cases. That has prompted a burgeoning movement to improve the management and leadership skills of church officials through new programs being offered primarily at Catholic universities. M.B.A. Track columnist Ron Alsop talked recently with Charles Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management and a professor of economics at Villanova University’s School of Business in Villanova, Pa., about the launch of its master’s degree in church management in May and the need for more sophisticated and more transparent business practices in parishes and religious organizations.

WSJ: Why did Villanova decide to create a master’s degree in church management?

Dr. Zech: We find that business managers at both the parish and diocesan level often have social work, theology or education backgrounds and lack management skills. While pastors aren’t expected to know all the nitty-gritty of running a small business, they at least need enough training in administration to supervise their business managers. Before starting the degree, we ran some seminars in 2006 and 2007 as a trial balloon to see if folks were interested enough to pay for management education. The seminars proved to be quite popular, drawing people from all over the country, including high-level officials from both Catholic dioceses and religious orders.

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One of the Church of England’s best-known theologians is suing the Bishop of Liverpool following a row at an Oxford theological college.

Dr Elaine Storkey, a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot, told an employment tribunal in Reading yesterday she had been bullied while a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall.

She accepted around £20,000 from the trustees of the college after they acknowledged that she had been unfairly dismissed from the post. But the 64-year-old is still seeking a ruling of religious discrimination against the president of the 130-year-old college, Bishop James Jones, over the row.

The dispute, which has split evangelicals, erupted following clashes between the Rev Richard Turnbull, the principal, and staff who criticised his allegedly abrasive management style and conservative brand of Christianity.

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Here is one:

Sir, ”” I am sure the Revd Dr Giles Fraser expressed the anxieties of many in his description of the diocese of Pittsburgh and in his remarks about its Bishop, the Rt Revd Bob Duncan. It does look like puritans breaking away again, as they have gained a reputation for doing.

Nevertheless, as a Church of England cleric currently teaching at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, I would like to make a number of points.

First, Trinity was founded as a theological college in 1976 because, by that time, the last remaining Evangelical one (Virginia) had become liberal in its commitments. One of the systematic-theology professors left his tenured position there to help start this risky enterprise with the aim of securing a continuing place for Evangelicalism in the Episcopal Church.

Second, conservatives in Pittsburgh are not planning a “hostile takeover”, as Dr Fraser suggests. About 80 per cent of the clergy in the Episcopal Church are liberal-leaning (much more liberal than those in the Church of England, in my experience); so any such ideas would be totally unrealistic, even if they were being considered. All conservatives are looking for is a continuing place at the table which they and their parishioners can hold with integrity.

Third, I very much hope and pray that there will be developments in the coming year that will mean that the diocese of Pittsburgh does not in the end vote to leave the Episcopal Church. If it does come to that, however, the clergy and lay leaders know it will risk lawsuits, and might lead to the loss of some church buildings and clergy pensions. No bishop or priest would undertake such a move lightly, and I would invite people not to assume the worst about their motives.

It would be a great help in the current tense situation if Dr Fraser would use his influence to encourage the clergy and people of Calvary Church to drop their lawsuit against Bishop Duncan. He might also want to visit Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry next time he is in the States, and assess it for himself. While here, he could arrange to meet Bishop Duncan, who is in many ways a traditional Anglo-Catholic, whose high view of the Church and devotion to Jesus Christ are what makes him willing to live with all the criticism.

JUSTYN TERRY
Associate Professor of Systematic Thology
Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry
Ambridge, PA, 15003,
USA

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Matt Riley, a second-year student at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Conn., helps lead “The Left Behind,” a club of atheists and agnostics at one of the nation’s premier training grounds for clergy.

Along with co-leader Christy Groves, Riley has given nonbelievers a place of their own on a campus that explores belief. He chose divinity school, he says, to obtain an “inside view.” The club fosters dialogue between non-Christians and Christians on campus and staged “Div School Idol,” a takeoff on American Idol in the chapel last spring.

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The average age of people enrolled in the seminaries associated with the Episcopal Church continues to range from the high 30s to the mid 40s.

Episcopal News Service contacted all 11 seminaries this fall, asking them for specific information about their incoming classes, as well as their student bodies as a whole. Not all of the information requested is compiled in the same way from seminary to seminary, and thus apples-to-apples comparisons are not always possible.

It is also worth noting that most seminaries now offer degree and certificate programs beyond the traditional Master of Divinity degree sought by most people in the ordination process.

Most seminaries showed enrollments ranging near to what they had experienced in recent years. Whether male or female students form the majority varies from seminary to seminary.

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Jim McGreevey, the nation’s first openly gay governor, is returning to the classroom Tuesday as a seminary student.

The former New Jersey governor will begin full-time studies at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Chelsea, where he will pursue a three-year Master of Divinity program.

McGreevey, 50, switched denominations from Roman Catholic to Episcopalian earlier this year and has expressed an interest in becoming a priest.

“I hope that Jim McGreevey finds some contentment and satisfaction in his new role as an Episcopalian priest,” said Tom Giblin, the Democratic Party chairman during McGreevey’s run for governor.

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Financial difficulties and drastic changes in the role of the Christian church in society are prompting the leaders of the 11 seminaries connected with the Episcopal Church to reconsider theological education.
The seminaries’ Council of Deans has met three times this year already, twice more than its normal annual meeting, to discuss issues facing the seminaries. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori joined the deans in their March and June meetings.

The Very Rev. Ward Ewing, dean and president of the General Theological Society (GTS) and convener of the Council of Deans, said the deans have realized that because of financial restrictions faced by all the seminaries, “every seminary can’t provide everything for everybody.” Thus, they are exploring how to develop “the kind of coalition so that each seminary becomes a gateway to the resources of all the seminaries.”

The deans’ goal is not simply to improve and strengthen their own seminaries, Ewing said.

“The seminaries exist primarily as servants for the Church,” he said, and are called work together to “provide the resources of the seminaries for the whole Church” so that the seminaries are seen as “adding value to the leadership of the Church.”

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Fr. Montgomery also objects to the non-canonical open invitation to communion printed in our service leaflet. As ordinary of the chapel, I have articulated this policy in full awareness that it does not comply with the canonical provision about communion and baptism. One reason seminary chapels are traditionally “ecclesiastical peculiars” is so that they will have the freedom to push the edges of liturgical practice in the direction of the church’s emerging theology. There is a serious theological argument abroad these days about the relationship of baptism and Eucharist. To characterize the open invitation as “liturgical universalism” misconstrues the state of the argument. Those of us who favor open communion do so knowing that the church has historically seen one sacrament as a precondition for the other. We simply question, in the present pastoral situation, the propriety of following that practice.

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The bill is aimed at helping borrowers like Dan Lozer. Twenty-five years ago, Lozer borrowed $15,000 in student loans to attend divinity school. He has paid back much more than that, yet he still owes nearly twice as much.

Lozer has never been paid more than $25,000 a year.

In his job, he counsels cash-strapped parishioners. He works at a soup kitchen, and he buries the souls of those who died with nothing in the pauper’s cemetery by the river.

Lozer, too, knows he will die in debt.

By the time Lozer was supposed to begin repaying his student loans, he was only earning minimum wage. His student-loan bills were nearly half his income. He couldn’t pay them, so he fell into default.

He has been there ever since. Because he was in default, the government could garnishee his wages, seize his tax refunds, even take his Social Security checks. It means he can’t borrow money for a house or a car.

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Dr. Seitz joins his ACI colleague Ephraim Radner who has recently been appointed Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe

[Principal Richard] Turnbull’s supporters ”“ off the record, of course ”“ suggest that it is he, not the saintly Storkey, who is the real victim of a witch-hunt. “This charge that he is a fundamentalist is baloney,” says one well-placed Anglican academic and writer. “He was brought in as a new broom and Wycliffe badly needed one if it was going to survive. Its administration was hopeless and, although it was doing well in teaching theology, its training for ministry was well below the standards needed. The irony in the three former principals attacking Richard is that he wouldn’t need to do what he is doing if they had grasped the nettle of modernisation when they were there.”

In a church famed for its moderation, neither side in the dispute seems willing to turn the other cheek. What seems clear, though, is that most students there are heartily sick of the whole matter and see it largely as a personality clash that is threatening to distract them from the serious business of studying the Bible.

Whether Wycliffe can ever get back on an even keel when, as Turnbull and his supporters hope, the wave of bad publicity has ebbed away, may depend ultimately on a review of the status of the private permanent halls at Oxford currently being carried out by a working group led by Oxford’s former vice-chancellor Sir Colin Lucas, now Warden of Rhodes House. This, it should be stressed, is a regular check-up of their health, but the activities of the Lucas group has taken on a new significance because of the crisis at Wycliffe. Its report is expected in the summer.

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A 2005 study by Auburn Theological Seminary in New York shows that between 1991 and 2001, the average student loan debt for new pastors more than doubled to $25,018, from $11,043. If the trend continues, by 2011 about 84 percent of seminary students will have to borrow to finance their education, with an average loan burden of more than $54,000, the Auburn study showed.

In its own survey of seminarian students last year, the Episcopal Church found that students halfway through their training already had amassed an average of $42,874 in debts ”” on track to graduate owing well over $50,000. Meanwhile, the median compensation package for new Episcopal clergy hovers at $44,500 per year, a starting salary that’s considerably higher than in many other denominations.

“Financial planners say that if you graduate from school with a $36,000 debt, you should have an income of $60,000 in order to handle your finances and move forward,” said John Mittman, executive director of the Society for the Increase of the Ministry, an Episcopal office that has been studying seminarian debt.

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The move will mean the departure of a priest who, arguably, is one of the most accomplished and theologically noteworthy clergymen ever to serve in the city. He was among five candidates to be considered in 2003 to head the Colorado Diocese. Radner already had gained worldwide respect as a theologian and author by the time he was chosen earlier this year by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be a part of an international panel asked to design a “covenant” for all the world’s Anglican churches. The aim was to create a working agreement among members of a church riven when American Episcopalians – a part of the Anglican community – ordained an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

Radner had been a delegate to the August 2003 general convention in Minneapolis, which ratified the New Hampshire diocese’s selection as bishop of Eugene Robinson – a divorced father of two who had lived with his male partner for 13 years.

Radner left the convention in protest, claiming that the meeting had forfeited “its authority, according to the traditional understanding that church council which act either illegitimately or heretically are no longer valid councils.”

He said that, “ultimately, some means within the larger Anglican communion must be brought to bear in order to adjudicate this matter.”

It made sense, then, that he serve on the international panel, as one of only two Americans thus invited. The gay-bishop and other issues have divided parishes, dioceses and the worldwide community of Anglicans, which numbers 77 million adherents.

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Pressure is mounting on Church of England authorities to take action against the principal of an Oxford theological college accused of alienating staff.

The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones, is being urged to withdraw his support for the Rev Richard Turnbull, the principal of Wycliffe Hall, who has been criticised for his allegedly abrasive management style and conservative brand of Christianity.

Alister McGrath, a leading theologian and Wycliffe’s previous principal, has pulled out of delivering a prestigious lecture in Liverpool in protest at the lack of action by Bishop Jones, who is the chairman of the hall’s governing council.

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