AKMA’s Random Thoughts

What Is Wrong With Seminaries?

My parents-in-law recently sent me a column from The Living Church, an Episcopal Church weekly. The columnist, the Very Rev. Gary Kriss, recently retired as Dean of an Episcopal seminary (a seminary strongly identified with certain partisan issues). The article in question was not published online, so I can’t link to it; you’ll just have to puzzle out Dean Kriss’s position as best you can, on the basis of my response to it.

The retired dean argued that Episcopal seminaries suffer the inevitable corruption of their faculties that derives from their improper allegiance to academic scholarship and their adherence to the practice of granting professors tenure. While I recognize problems with both the dimensions he cites — and other problems as well — I sensed some imbalance in a column written by one who had not toiled on the other side of the big oaken desk, so I wrote back to my in-laws about my thoughts in response to Dean Kriss, as follows (very lightly edited from what I originally sent off):

Thanks for the copy of Dean Kriss' article, which I would not have seen without your thoughtfulness.

My response is multi-faceted. To grant Dean Kriss all that I can, he certainly is right to suggest that our seminaries could do much, much better to prepare students for ministry; I could give a litany of reasons, but that might sound defensive, so I’ll refrain. Academic and practical-pastoral training do not yet easily converge, and some professors adopt the path of least resistance by pursuing either academic integrity or pastoral sensitivity to the exclusion of the other. Likewise, tenure systems always involve the risk that the tenured person (whether a rector or a professor) develops self-interested, destructive behavior. I don’t see the tenure system as an unalloyed good, although I still think it healthier than any alternative of which I'm aware. Perhaps Dean Kriss envisions a different system, for which he’s preparing the way with this article, but until he proposes it I’ll stay with my advocacy of tenure. Dean Kriss sensibly notes that institutional pathologies are probably aggravated by tenure — although making some members of an academic community vulnerable to the whims of others for their livelihood doesn’t sound like a panacea for dysfunction. Finally, power politics do indeed betray the calling to shared servant ministry. Thus far, Dean Kriss is making a strong case.

His argument misses some important elements, though.

Perhaps his experience as a seminary dean (who has not, so far as I recall, served as a full-time faculty member apart from his decanal responsibilities) focuses his attention on the problems with faculty, without recognizing some broader challenges in the endeavor of preparing students for ministry. Some problems in seminary education correlate with faculty tenure — but many do not, and tenure-associated problems might be greatly ameliorated if other the church tackled other problems directly.

To begin with, seminaries face the challenge of cultivating an ever-increasing amount of education in the same three years. Bishops and congregations now expect seminaries to do much of the apprenticeship training that formerly devolved on an ordinand’s first parish. It’s great that seminaries can step up and offer deliberate, expert guidance to practical matters, but the time for teaching such courses comes directly out of time for other courses that a seminary might teach. Moreover, seminarians arrive at seminary with less and less background in the traditions within which they will exercise leadership, so that seminaries must devote more attention to elementary instruction at the same time that they must devote more time also to teaching parish administration. In short, seminaries are asked to do more and more with the fixed time allotted them.

The ordination process complicates seminary education as well. Diocesan discernment processes address earnest volunteers, who are offering to give up rewarding, remunerative careers and the authority that comes from hard work’s experience, for a vocation which may involve starting from scratch in both earning capacity and authority. The Process, though, presents a well-intentioned series of psychological and vocational obstacles for these volunteers to survive — and with ordination as well as reality TV, not every survivor is someone best equipped for ministry. Those who do survive have often learned to guard their thoughts and feelings, to protect themselves from possible betrayal by unpredictable authority figures, to present themselves in their best light under all circumstances, whether that truly reflects their capacities or not. (This tendency can be reinforced when clergy try to justify their parish authority by representing themselves as the local experts on every ecclesiastical topic.) An unpredictable, intrusive, adversarial ordination process — where such exists — produces seminarians who sense a higher obligation to get through the various impediments to attaining ordination than to imbibe deeply from such nourishing springs as they may find at their seminaries. Moreover, the canons vest faculties with some of the responsibility for evaluating fitness for ministry, tacitly signaling self-protective students that the faculty may not be on their side. Faculty exercise this responsibility on top of the already taxing demands of teaching, scholarship, leadership in community worship, and active participation in the broader church, and they feel torn between nourishing strong trust-based pedagogical relationships with students (on one hand) and passing judgment on those students' clerical vocation (on the other). Under such circumstances, the faculty’s task of helping seminarians grow to theologically-sound understanding of their vocation often conflicts with the appearance that they serve as gatekeepers (sometimes hatchet-men, and -women) obstructing the path to ordination.

Now, the church certainly has sound reasons to exercise discernment and deliberation in considering when to recognize a call to ordained ministry. That deliberation risks attaining hyperbolic importance, though, both to participants in discernment and to those being examined. When the prospect of enduring the ordination process itself deters candidates from pursuing their sense of a calling, then those responsible for devising and implementing the process should account carefully for its design and effects.

The intractable pathologies to which Dean Kriss points tend to be exacerbated by some of the conflicts that beset the broader church in more ways than the obvious. Of course such conflicts tempt students (and teachers, deans, and trustees) to enact these conflicts with a fervor amplified by a seminary’s essential function of formation and instruction, and especially because of the unique vulnerability of seminarians (who may at any moment, with little recourse, be removed from ordination track). They also tend to engender an atmosphere of contestation and rivalry, all the more so where an institution’s own identity integrates tightly with one or another party in a church conflict. While an embittered, recalcitrant tenured professor can greatly impede the work of a faculty, a healthy faculty can usually work around such isolated troublemakers. When collegial problems seem to implicate an entire faculty in dysfunction one may wish to reverse one’s gaze and consider another possibility: Sometimes the dysfunction subsists at more central administrative levels; even a dean or president can fall prey to pathology, and although these do not have tenure, they can be quite difficult to identify as problematic and to remove.

Academic tenure imperfectly addresses particular problems, problems that actually abide powerfully in precisely the seminaries fro which Dean Kriss would uproot this protection for faculty. Church-related institutions show a dangerous proclivity to assess their employees less by their gifts for teaching and study, and more by their adherence to partis pris. We do not advance the cause of a well-prepared ministry by invoking the hovering threat that a dedicated, capable professor should be dismissed because he or she believes that the wrong sort of person may (or may not) be ordained, blessed, tolerated, or healed. Moreover, if our seminaries were to abandon the practice of tenuring faculty, we could only expect that our best scholars and teachers would regularly leave Episcopal seminaries in favor of tenurable positions at secular college and universities, or at other denominations' institutions.

One last difficulty with which church and seminaries should come to terms can only be named as a persistent anti-intellectualism in the church. Dean Kriss surely did not mean to invoke such a base sentiment in assailing faculties, but in an ecclesial culture that shows relatively little respect for the deep work of theological reflection and critical study (tending to prefer self-promotion, bonhomie, partisan allegiance, and bluffing), his one-sided emphasis on the shortcomings of faculties might too easily be interpreted as a superficial appeal to the premise that those who lead church and congregations needn't really understand that much about the faith they presumably uphold and teach. (And since one impediment to effective seminary education is the chronic desperate financial circumstances that beset most seminaries, where neither professors nor students are by any means eating caviar for breakfast and nibbling bonbons through their leisurely day’s activities, Dean Kriss’s complaint ought at some point acknowledge the adverse financial circumstances that bear heavily upon both faculty and students.) A substrate of anti-intellectual self-congratulation strikes an especially discordant note for a church that boasts of its sophistication and openness to critical inquiry.

Everyone can point fingers, and by the same token everyone can cooperate in improving conditions. First, every congregation and every diocese must take seriously its dependence on the church’s seminaries — in part for clerical training, and not least for the sort of deliberation and critical thinking that enriches the faith by setting its roots deeper in truth and in understanding of the traditions we have inherited. Support for seminaries doesn’t mean only financial contributions, though that would make a good foundation; support should also involve active encouragement for the seminary’s teaching mission, interaction in seminary community life (where that’s practicable), and participation in governance.

Second, dioceses can step back from an exclusive emphasis on discernment of aspirants’ calling, and look to ways that the entire process can more effectively encourage aspirants and thank God for the gifts they bring to the community. Seminarians reasonably perceive a massive wall of hostile interest and discouraging consequences in their dealings with the process that leads to ordination, and they feel relatively little safety and support. (General Ordination Exams are only the bitter icing on this unpalatable cake — but I won’t go there.) If the church institutionalized as much support for those preparing for ministry as it does inquisition and rejection, the population of seminaries would take a marked turn for the healthier.

Third, bishops, deans, and faculties might consult one another for a clearer and more manageable sense of what is being asked of seminaries, and of what outcomes can be expected. Were dioceses to prepare students for seminary with a year's elementary instruction (not for credit, and preferably not for preventative costs) before they started formal study, the seminaries might be able more effectively to teach these better-prepared students. Similarly, if dioceses recognized that guided instruction in pastoral practice works especially well when students are actually in the midst of that practice, they might devise mentoring programs that alleviate the pressure on seminaries to teach students what they might do when circumstances arise that they've never experienced before.

Fourth, the church should devote concentrated energy to encouraging its scholars to explore ever more thoughtfully the relation of (on one hand) learning to use one’s full intellect in God's service, and (on the other hand) to learning how servants exercise sound care and leadership in congregations. We have paid fitful attention to the topic, but Dean Kriss appropriately pushes us to cultivate a more articulate, profound response to what are too often treated as antithetical interests. That can't be right — but we need better clues toward bearing fruit in what seems a barren no-one’s-land between the two options.

If after we make strides in these areas, we still find deleterious consequences to granting tenure to professors, then by all means let us take up a careful search for productive alternatives to tenure. But let us not begin an effort to strengthen the church’s mission by amputating its head for having a bad hair day; let’s hear from more voices than just Dean Kriss’s (and mine), and let’s work together dramatically to enhance the work of encouraging the educational ministry of the Episcopal Church.

Posted by AKMA at May 21, 2003 10:09 PM | TrackBack