Sour economy forces change, innovation at seminaries

SOUTH HAMILTON, Mass. — For 18 years, Haddon Robinson has taught preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary by having students give sermons and then reflect on feedback from fellow classmates, who act as a congregation du jour. But as soon as this fall, students seeking insightful feedback will turn to “congregants” they’ve likely never met, including […]

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.

(RNS3-APR01) Karen Cartier delivers a practice sermon during a preaching class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., as Joe Bartley records the video. The seminary is launching a pilot program where students in satellite locations will film themselves giving sermons and receive feedback from professors and fellow students in other locations. For use with RNS-SEMINARY-CHANGES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Bryce Vickmark.


SOUTH HAMILTON, Mass. — For 18 years, Haddon Robinson has taught preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary by having students give sermons and then reflect on feedback from fellow classmates, who act as a congregation du jour.

But as soon as this fall, students seeking insightful feedback will turn to “congregants” they’ve likely never met, including Robinson. Through a pilot online course, they’ll preach into the lenses of video cameras, upload sermons to the Web and seek feedback from afar via e-mail or online discussion forums.

“My hunch is that the quality of feedback is going to be quite good,” says Robinson, a professor of preaching at evangelical Gordon-Conwell. “Afterward, I think I could say to my colleagues who are teaching in other areas, `Look, this worked with (preaching), which is difficult to conceive of teaching on the Web. So you should be able to teach any other subject on the Web.”‘

Welcome to the experimental frontier of clergy training.

Seminary educators, under pressure to grow enrollments and cuts costs, are racing to find alternatives to the quasi-cloistered, academic environments that have trained generations of pastors. But they’re also being cautious not to compromise on quality when shaping a holy cohort set apart for ministry.

This year, Gordon-Conwell and four other evangelical seminaries are embarking on experiments to test the limits of what’s doable in ministerial education. With $2.5 million in Kern Family Foundation grants, they’ll explore how technology, congregations and clergy networks might deliver — often in a student’s hometown setting — a level of training that’s long been the province of campus-based classrooms and professors.

What evangelical schools discover by the time the pilots end in 2013 could have implications for clergy training across the board, observers say, becauseevangelical institutions tend to be early adopters of methods that later become mainstream. Mainline Protestant seminaries, such as the Disciples of Christ’s cash-strapped Lexington Theological Seminary in Lexington, Ky., have increasingly replicated evangelical innovations such as satellite campuses for commuters and online courses to expand enrollments.


“Schools are adapting to the needs of students, many of whom are overcoming an economic barrier,” says Anthony Ruger, a seminary financing expert at Auburn Theological Seminary’s Center for the Study of Theological Education. “The most expensive way to go to school is to quit your job and go full-time as a student for three years and then go into the ministry.”

Pressures to adapt are mounting for theological schools of all stripes. America’s recent economic woes have hit seminaries hard, especially since most aren’t tied to a university with an endowment to cushion them. Of these 175 “freestanding” institutions in the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), 39 percent were “financially stressed” according to a report last fall, meaning they had less than a year’s worth of spendable assets. That’s up from 26 percent a year earlier — and the data still don’t reflect fallout from the stock market freefall in late 2008.

Combined with a 4 percent drop in enrollment since 2006 at ATS schools,educators say funding for experimentation has arrived none too soon.

“Theological education is the most conservative industry in the country,” says Howard Loewen, dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Theology in Pasadena, Calif. “It is perhaps motivated now, particularly by the financial crisis, to engage in adaptive change in a way that wasn’t the case even five years ago.”

Some experimentation will involve information technology. Fuller, for instance, plans to explore the possibility of using an online tool to do spiritual formation among ministry students. Gordon-Conwell will explore whether online students learn best under certain conditions, such as when they have opportunities for Web-based conferencing in real time.

Yet because ministry relies heavily on face-to-face interaction, seminaries are also seeking new ways to teach all-important soft skills without requiring students to relocate to campus. Experts say the social lives of parishes represent a potentially rich resource.


Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo. aims to pioneer the concept of “teaching congregations,” where students would work full-time for a semester and receive academic credit. In Southern California, Fuller has assembled the first of six cohorts of about 20 students who will take a class in a local church. The theory: in these real-life ministry settings, students will learn not only from professors but also from pastors and congregants, who may serve as guest speakers or even mentors.

Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Mo., also received a Kern grant but declined to comment.

As new models take shape, educators foresee a day when adults can get a top-notch seminary education wherever they live, no matter how remote. Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Ore., for example, is cultivating networks of clergy in Anchorage, Alaska, and Reno, Nev., near its planned satellite facilities (pending ATS approval). By screening local pastors by phone and then training them (in some cases online) to be mentors, the school aims to build teams to pass on skills that already exist in abundance, even in small cities and rural areas.

“We’re asking: how can we go micro?,” says Multnomah Dean Robb Redman as he explains the challenge of educating handfuls students in Salt Lake City, Boise, Idaho, or Missoula, Mont. “How can we bring quality theological education affordably to (small, underserved cities) and not lose our shirts in the process?”

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