Ministry 101

When I look back upon seminary I invariably recall those few winsome professors who seamlessly held together love of learning and its role in ministry practice. They didn’t just teach knowledge and practice—they somehow also modeled who I wanted to become, and they gently coached me in such a way as to know without knowing that at its best ministry calls for head, hands, and heart together. Because it shows how the best clergy educators do this integrative work, and much more besides, Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination by Chuck Foster and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is simply the most important study of theological education in a generation.1

This study is the first in a series of studies emerging from the Carnegie Foundation’s Preparation for the Professions Program. The lead volume for this series of studies is titled Work and Integrity. There, Program Director William Sullivan divulges the Foundation’s root concern driving the program as a whole. Sullivan argues that the professions are impoverished today because of the rise of a kind of “technical professionalism” that has lost its mooring from a normative orientation to the broader public good.2

The movement in the 18th century from apprenticeship training to training in the university is the most salient factor in the rise of this sort of “technical professionalism,” according to Sullivan. Whereas in the apprenticeship model, the dominant method for training was face-to-face time with expert practitioners, with the rise of university training in the professions a separation developed between the formal-analytic parts and the clinical and practical parts of the curriculum. Sullivan argues that over time the positivist cast of the university has instituted a hierarchy of priority among what he calls “the three apprenticeships”: first priority (usually with the most prestigious tenure positions) is the cognitive apprenticeship, followed by the skill apprenticeship (often taught by adjunct faculty), with the third apprenticeship—normative or professional identity—left to ad hoc influence of particular faculty or workplace mentors. The lynchpin of Sullivan’s argument—and the reason for Carnegie’s keen interest in clergy education—lies in the revitalization of the professions. Clergy education, by combining professional and vocational formation, most clearly offers to the other professions a vital image of the third apprenticeship as a means to give moral shape and an organizing center to professional knowledge and practice.3

The clergy study focused on teaching practices at accredited seminaries from various Christian and Jewish traditions. The research team spent three years in pursuit of this core research question: “How do seminary educators foster among their students a pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic imagination that integrates knowledge and skill, moral integrity, and religious commitment in the roles, relationships, and responsibilities they will be assuming in clergy practice?”

In addition to tending carefully to a wide range of relevant literature and making good use of survey instruments, the research team visited ten seminaries in order to interview faculty, students, and administrators, observe classes, and participate in the life of the community (albeit for a very brief window of time—usually two to three days). Choosing “appreciative inquiry” as a methodology emphasizes what is already working and then seeks to influence change through amplifying these aspects. Thus when they approached 18 seminaries (representing Conservative and Reform Jewish, as well as Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christian schools) they explicitly requested names of faculty who were known for excellence in integrative teaching for ministry. Creative examples of a representative sampling of these teachers are peppered throughout the book.

Introducing the study at the American Academy of Religion meetings in 2005, Charles Foster noted that it offers a number of firsts, including the first comprehensive study of how seminaries educate and the first to attend to the varieties of ways seminaries educate—from classroom teaching to a seminary’s culture in the broadest sense, as well as community worship and formation, field education, and all manner of small group and individual vocational reflection processes. With breadth of focus reminiscent of Being There, an influential ethnographic study of two Protestant seminaries and the formative power of their respective cultures,4 Foster et al. wanted both to explore the relationship between teachers’ intentions and actual practices as well as the relationship between in-class teaching and communal formation beyond the classroom. The broad scope gives the book a sophistication and depth unparalleled in the literature.

Despite its ambitious aim and scope, Educating Clergy has an elegant and simple logic to carry the reader along, rewarding the reader with rich details and profound insights along the way. The book begins with an extended exegesis of two terms in the subtitle: teaching practices and pastoral imagination. Pastoral imagination, a term borrowed from Lilly Endowment’s Vice President for Religion, Craig Dykstra, offers a way to speak about an integrative and improvisational capacity—”a way of seeing into and interpreting the world”—at the heart of excellent pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic ministry. If cultivating this sort of imagination is the aim, Foster and company argue, then the means to achieve it lie in a notion of practice, and especially a community of practice where new perspectives, skills, habits and values develop in the context of others who share common commitments.

Much of what is taught in seminary comes from the school’s culture and extracurricular influences, and so the authors carefully attend to the educational formation that happens beyond the classroom as well. To do this, Foster et al. detail the history and contemporary influence of five traditions in seminary education and give sketches of historical figures central to each: Timothy Dwight, president at Yale and founder of the Protestant freestanding seminary; Emma Dryer, cofounder of the Moody Bible Institute and influential in the development of evangelical seminaries; Daniel Payne, ame Bishop and founder of Wilberforce University, where he built a new model for the education of African American clergy; John Ireland, Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota and advocate for diocesan seminaries; and Solomon Schecter, President of Jewish Theological Seminary.

In portraying the long shadow of these founders on seminary cultures today, the study highlights how all have in one way or another faced the challenge of relating traditions to modernity and social change—increasing numbers of women and minority students and faculty, the impact of globalization, and the dramatic rise in concern about spiritual practice. Spiritual practice next comes to the fore as the study explores the energetic and diverse attention seminaries give to spiritual leadership, including focus on community worship, small groups, and individual direction all as means of formation of spiritual leadership. Finally, the authors examine means for shaping professional leadership through field education. They differentiate between programs that use field education to do things the rest of the curriculum is not expected to do (either practical skill development or integration of the breadth of the curriculum) and those that see field education as an integrated part of a cross-curricular emphasis on the integration of knowledge and practical skill in forming professional judgment.

The book surely has shortcomings, yet to point some of them out only makes clear how very much this study gets right. First, the constraints of the study unfortunately limited the duration of the site visits—two and a half to three days barely allow for a more complex picture to emerge, especially when so much evidence is based on self-reporting either through survey, interview, or focus groups. Similarly, as the authors themselves note, much clergy education takes place outside the bounds of accredited graduate theological schools, and to have some attention to formation through those alternative channels would have given an important counterpoint. Lastly, while they make good use of a developmental model of learning skillful action so obviously relevant to a practice model in discussing pedagogies of performance, they miss an opportunity to fully press such embodied cognition back through all the pedagogies: interpretation, formation, and contextualization as well as performance.

To this reader, the most significant aspect of the study for clergy education (and as well the professions generally) lies in the way Foster et al. fundamentally discredit the traditional theory/application model so influential in the academy, the professional schools generally, and seminary education specifically. In doing so, they give robust examples of education of the head, heart, and hands across the curriculum and not simply in specialized settings for learning performance and professional practice.

Called to speak of God’s involvement in the world and the meaning of human life in response to God’s action, clergy in training are, Foster writes, “enacting—sometimes awkwardly—the integrative, discerning, often intuitive and complex imagination at the heart of clergy practice, as that inevitably comes down to the very practical embodiment of theory and theology in concrete decisions, concrete actions, concrete performances.” Teachers who nurture, admonish, coach and call students into this imagination are, fortunately for the rest of us, plentiful. And the great reward of this book is how compellingly and clearly it shows the way toward deepening such teaching, for clergy education, to be sure, but much more broadly than that as well.

Christian Scharen directs the Faith as a Way of Life Project at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, based at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of One Step Closer: Why U2 Matters to Those Seeking God (Brazos).

1. The most similar study, also supported by Carnegie, was H. Richard Niebuhr, Daniel Day Williams, and James M. Gustafson, The Advancement of Theological Education: The Summary Report of a Mid-Century Study (Harper & Brothers, 1957). Among other important differences, the Niebuhr study was limited to the Protestant churches.

2. William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, 2nd ed. (Jossey-Bass, 2005), p. 9. Many readers will hear echoes of Sullivan’s prior work as a co-author of Habits of the Heart, which decried a gradual uncoupling of career from calling and civic commitment, leaving technical expertise in the service of bureaucratic rules on the one hand or individual success on the other. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 119 and passim.

3. Sullivan, Work and Integrity, p. 217ff.

4. Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler, Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).