Joseph Schmidt has left a new comment on your post "Lutheran Pastors Getting Swindled":
The cost of seminary education is one of the main reasons I decided not to go into the pastoral ministry. Why pay $40,000 - $50,000 to sit at the feet of professors in love with Reformed doctrine, when I can study Lutheran doctrine at home?
More cowbell?
More Leonard Sweet?
3 comments:
J. Schmidt, Yes, seminary is definitely not a big intellectual/spiritual experience anymore if you go the M. Div route (as opposed to going the theology or philosophy degree routes, I suppose), and I speak from personal experience.
In the name of "pastoral formation," car culture has come to the seminary. They have students going off-site for all kinds of training, often driving 5, 10 or even 37 miles one-way to get to the training site. I logged a lot of miles on my car going to field worker training (it's up to two years now at the seminaries), pastoral clinical counselor training, vicarage, going to other libraries for research, and to part-time jobs that ware necessary to make ends meet, etc., since the synods are chintzy toward the seminaries and students.
Now, why up to 37 miles? Back when the seminaries were founded, they were put in wooded out of the way areas so people could study and reflect, which sure doesn't help now that much of the training is off site! There just aren't enough LCMS (or WELS) churches and hospitals with Lutheran clinical counseling/chaplaincy programs nearby each seminary. Remember, each church can only take a few students at a time. So that leaves many students driving to the suburbs and outlying towns, and having to drive through bad areas in unreliable cars. (That's where some students first "get religion" during the seminary years.)
Cont'd:
Some students even had to go to off-site secular counseling to deal with their "issue(s)", and pay big bucks for it, too. They had been nabbed by the seminary head shrinks who are right on the staff, and they evaluate and test everyone two or three times. For example, one guy I knew had a few OCD habits. He was second careerist and put the bill on his credit cards which still had a high credit limit based on his previous income. Later I found out he started his pension at 63 rather than later, even though there was a big penalty involved, just so he could pay down his CC debt accumulated at the seminary. The real kicker is the secular counseling didn't even help him a bit!
I think it's good that the seminary student bodies have shrunk since, when the student bodies were larger, many students who were not top notch, or had "issues", were placed in troubled churches and institutions, and with less than successful bishops/trainers with "attitudes." They were also the ones who were assigned field-work training, and vicarage assignments, at small congregations way out in the boondocks. Moreover, the surplus of candidates gave the seminary too much latitude over students, so more are probably getting a fair shake now and not getting weeded out quite as quick.
Now, why did they get the head shrinks on staff back in the 1990s? When Barry and Kieschnick tell the synod, via the glossy magazines etc, that the clergy is graying and they need more seminarians, many go to seminary who otherwise wouldn't have. The seminaries, however, know that if there is a surplus of graduates with huge student debt, it will make them look bad. So what they do is try to dismiss students for the smallest things, or often give them an academic degree but not certify them for the ministry, so they don't show up in any "statistics."
The whole graying clergy problem can't be solved because the LCMS changed the rules and allows pastors to collect pensions and work at the same time, so they never retire. Even if more students go to seminary, there are no open slots for them when they graduate, and the seminaries magically only certify about as many men as there are expected positions to fill, never allowing a glut of certified candidates to form. (Having a pool of disgruntled non-certified ex-students and graduates with big student loan debt is not their concern.) In fact, it allows them to go back to the synod and say we need more students and money. So the baby boomer retirement problem is never solved no matter how many Generation X Y and Z seminary candidates are thrown at it, and go into big-time debt in the process.
Cont'd:
Here's some comments on other blogs about training at the seminaries:
http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=7618
excerpts:
Rev. Furgeson wrote:
The St. Louis Seminary has an interesting dichotomy in some respects at this point in time. The first class you have, Pastoral Ministry, has Hybel’s book Being a Contagious Christian and Warren’s Purpose Driven Church as required reading. The final classes in the practical department are Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Leadership, which promote Callahan’s Twelve Keys to An Effective Church, Peter Drucker, and other business and church growth models.
Pr. John A. Frahm wrote:
Do they even read any real Lutheran or patristic stuff there? It tells me we cannot count on time (read: retirement of baby boomers) as a solution to our theological issues. The St. Louis seminary has not done pre-certification formal theological interviews since about 1995. They still do at Fort Wayne and the two Canadian (LCC) seminaries. I’m sure they do plenty of of psychological-sociological and “leadership” stuff though.
How many courses in liturgy or hymnody are required in seminary nowadays? Do they read any Walther, Loehe, Sasse, or Chemnitz as part of a required curriculum?
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