I don't know what the future of the Church Herald Blogs are, but I thought we needed something new to chat about. I'm cross posting this with my personal blog which, I'm sure, none of you read :-)
One of the best things about the Reformed tradition, in my opinion, is the fact that, throughout the ages, it has placed a heavy emphasis on educated pastors. This emphasis has become less and less important over the past several decades, yet the normative preparation for a minister in the Reformed Church in America still requires a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, and this - to at least a certain degree - helps prevent (at least to some degree) churches from putting idiots in the pulpit. It also has allowed ministers to sit at the table with other professionals, like social workers, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, etc.
This professional collegiality becomes less of a reality as the qualifications for being a minister diminish (for example, up to 10% of a seminary’s students in a master’s program aren’t required to have a bachelor’s degree — we don’t want doctors who didn’t bother with college, but apparently it’s ok to have ministers who aren’t willing to take the time....) [For the record, I understand that this is meant as an "exception" but I've yet to see it invoked with someone who couldn't get a bachelor's degree.]
Having said all of that, I also understand the key problem with our system. To even candidate for a position as pastor, one needs to have completed (or be very close to) a master’s degree. That means that for the privilege of even applying to be a pastor (one of the lowest paying “professional” positions in the country), one needs to have figured out how to pay for at least seven years of education following high school. In short, to be a pastor in the RCA you either need to be independently wealthy (you can pay for it with family money), really lucky (someone, for some reason, decides to pay for it), or enter into your gloriously-low-paying job with debt dripping from your ears.
In my case, it’s student loans. I don’t come from money and no one graciously offered to pay for my seminary education. Add my student loans and my wife’s and we pay a mortgage-worth of school debt every month... this, merely to reach the most basic qualifications for our jobs.
This is a problem.
Wealth (or debt) should not be qualifications for ministry. On the other hand, neither do I believe lowering our expectations is a good option (although I’d argue it’s the one we’ve flirted most intently with in the RCA).
Yet, let’s be honest, we are never going back to the days where seminary tuition is denominationally covered (as it was when my grandfather went through).
What are we to do?
Let me offer two ideas:
The “Pay if you Quit” Approach
I actually think this is immediately do-able. Essentially, you put an individual’s seminary tuition costs into a 10-year loan (or 15). If they stay in a local church for that period of time, their seminary tuition costs are forgiven; if not, the costs are pro-rated and payed back at a normative student-loan interest.
For example. Let’s take the 10-year plan. If it costs $20,000 worth of tuition per student (some are more, others less), that’s $2,000 a year. If you minister in a local church for 10 years, you don’t pay any of it back. If you only stay in church-based-ministry 5 years, you pay back $10,000 (with interest set at normative student-loan rates). If you never work in the church, the entire $20,000 becomes a student loan - no big deal.
Why working in a local church? Because I believe it’s ministers preparing for local church ministry that seminaries ought to be focusing on not pre-PhD students or people preparing for denominational positions.
The “University of the People” Approach
I actually love this idea! The University of the People is a free university (albeit, yet unaccredited). Cool huh?! Read about it in the NY Times. I’m not sure how well it’d work for a general university degree; after all, tuition and salaries are part of how we pay for professors’ education, etc. However, I am convinced this would work for a seminary. It would only require two things: (1) scholarly-proven pastors to teach a course once in a while, and (2) theological professionals to do a tiny bit of pro-bono work once in a while.
There are hundreds of doctorally-educated pastors serving in local churches. Many of whom would both love to teach an occasional course and be highly qualified to do so. Add to that, theological professionals (of which there are many!) who could do a bit of pro bono work here and there. I’m not talking about a class a semester, I’m talking maybe 1 course a decade... really.. that’s all. Lawyers do pro-bono work... doctors do pro bono work. If pastors and theologians are professionals, a bit here and there wouldn’t hurt us either.
Make it a distance-learning system (like Western Seminary’s DL Program); use Open Source software; demand excellence from high-quality students, professors, and education (making no exception on any of them).
In the long run I don’t believe it does us well to lower the expectations of those we put in the pulpit - and no, as important as “life-experience” is (and as much as many seminary students need more of it), I do not believe it is an adequate substitute for education. And yet, there is a problem with the way we pay for theological education. Wealth or debt ought not to be basic qualifications for ministry....
Grace and Peace,
`tim