THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION: HOW ONE CHURCH CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

"How can I make a difference?" Have you ever said that about the Presbyterian Church (USA)? How frustrating it can be, especially when attempts to return the denomination to its biblical and confessional roots get sidelined at presbytery, or clotheslined at General Assembly! The temptation we face is simply to ignore the denomination, to place our energy and effort in local ministries we trust. However, doing this can only bring disaster; we are a connectional Church, and abandoning the larger ministries and governing bodies will mean more frustration and heartache, if not outright schism.

Theological Education is a huge problem area in the PC(USA), though working for changes within the system seems like a daunting task. After all, if John Leith and Jack Kingsbury seem unable to affect changes at Union Seminary, what can one little preacher or one little session do? Beyond this, who wants to challenge a professor’s teaching when you haven’t sat in the class, and your knowledge of Schleiermacher is weak? Nobody likes to seem "intolerant", or even worse, ignorant.

I silently watched Union move away from Orthodoxy for years, until Dr. Kingsbury was suspended from teaching in 1996, the only professor ever to be suspended there, and this on the questionable grounds of "intimidating" students. I wrote a letter of support for my former professor, one of the kindest and most humble I had known in my seminary years. In doing so I set off a chain of events which led to a meeting in November 1998 at my church between our session and six trustees from Union, with input from representatives of several other churches in Salem Presbytery. The biggest names at Union were present: President Louis Weeks, then Board Chair William White, current Board Chair John Kuytkendall, former G.A. Moderator Price Gwynn, Edward Lilly, and Jane Davis Rourke. I write this article to say, "If we can do this, so can you." In fact, by the end of the meeting the Trustees themselves were saying how much they had benefited from this gathering, and how they should do it more. I pray you will consider giving then the same opportunity we did, and that nationwide the other nine theological institutions will enjoy such attention.

Step 1: Read John Leith’s book Crisis In The Church. Dr. Leith explains many problems in the seminary system, from teaching centered around religious studies departments in secular universities to independent Boards of trustees who answer to no one directly. It will help get you started.

Step 2: write some letters to the Trustees, respectfully voicing your concerns. Ask questions, present facts. Do not demand the firing of anyone, request more information.

Pastors probably need to begin the conversation with seminaries. Not only are we more familiar than most lay people with various theological debates and problems within the Church, we usually have some inside tracks through old professors and staff people at our alma maters. Write every member of the Board; sometimes negative letters are buried if only one or two people receive them. You will be sure to get some response if you write everyone, and you may even find trustees sympathetic to your concerns. (We did.) The list of trustees is a matter of public record, and can be acquired through the seminary.

Step 3: Keep a file of every letter you get from the seminary. This is an invaluable source of information for finding points of inconsistency over time. For example, it was helpful to answer the statement that only basic Reformed theology was taught in the basic theology classes with a Theology I syllabus listing Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk as one of five texts. Make a note of every other communication as well; on May 28, 1997, just after noon, we received a phone call from a person identifying herself as "a pastor in the Presbytery of West Virginia" who finally turned out to be a member of Union’s staff living in Richmond!

Step 4: Involve you session. A church court has much more clout than an individual. Some first responses to my initial letter were rather condescending; when the session wrote a few months later, the condescending parties were much more polite. Your elders are a gift from God, and an often untapped resource. As you will see, it became the wisdom of the elders which saw these events through to the end. I also checked with them at every stage of the communication to make sure a righteous cause had not become my personal vendetta.

Step 5: Accept an invitation to go to the seminary with members of your session. Such an invitation to "come, see what we are doing," is, or at least was, a standard response from the seminary. I do not think they expected us to accept it. Once the invitation was accepted, conditions began to be added by the seminary. The president informed us that since the Board of Trustees has responsibility for examining the fitness of professors to teach, it was not our jurisdiction, and we could not ask what they personally believed. The elders saw this restriction as an opportunity, and requested an additional meeting with the Trustees. Besides meeting with the president on our Union trip, we attempted to meet with three professors, two of whom accepted our invitation, and a third who could not, though a phone call from me convinced her to write a letter to the session. The logistics of finding a date, finding a room, scheduling interviews, and rescheduling work took about two months.

Step 6: if necessary, involve your presbytery as mediator. Even those who might not agree with or understand your concerns can recognize unfairness. Three days before we were to go to Union (and two days after the Trustees had met), the president called to postpone our meeting to the following week, which was, of course, impossible for our elders. His reason: he had to meet with other people who were big contributors to the seminary which, he said, we were not!

I was ready to quit. The elders said, "Inform presbytery," which I did. Our associate executive said, "He may not think much of Westminster’s annual $1100 to the 1% fund, but when he considers what our presbytery gives, I believe he will reconsider." He advised me to write to our presbytery council; they wrote the seminary on our behalf, only asking that we work out our differences. Suddenly, after three months of silence from the seminary, the Chair of the Board of Trustees began to answer our letters again.

Step 7: If seminary leadership will agree to meet at your church, invite other like-minded churches from your presbytery to attend. This time we invited them to come to us, and the elders told me to invite other sessions. This was essential for the success of the meeting. By the time the Trustees had arrived, several could not look at me without blood in their eyes, but when they heard similar concerns expressed by folks from whom they had never heard, cracks appeared in the armor. We also invited a representative from the presbytery office.

The meeting went from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, with an hour for lunch at 12:30. Our Clerk of Session acted as neutral moderator, inviting those with raised hands to speak. I spoke only twice, with eager pastors and elders allowing no gaps of silence between Trustees’ answers and the next comment or question.

Step 8: Openly record the meeting. We did this because a trustee who could not be there requested a transcript. The objections of some trustees nearly stopped it; they were concerned that out-of-context quotations would be published. The tape was saved only be the timely comment from a lawyer turned preacher that recording would preserve the proper context. If a session votes to tape at a prior meeting, these objections could be avoided.

This was helpful later, when some attendees thought a blanket of confidentiality had been lowered over the entire meeting. The tapes proved otherwise; we had agreed not to distribute the videotape, and not to release individual quotations for publication to prevent out-of-context reporting. Never be sneaky in the name of truth; truth doesn’t need the help of hidden agendas. However, do not be lulled by the "we’re all just friends sitting around talking, I see no need to tape" tactic. "friends" who do not know or trust each other, with such opposite views on the state of theological education, can only benefit from an exact record being kept of what is said.

Step 9: Feed them a good, free lunch, everybody together. We arranged for a local Greek restaurant to cater the meal. You would be amazed at the difference in the level of tension on that tape before and after lunch! Perhaps we did depart that meeting, if not true friends, at least as not quite enemies. We certainly understood one another better.

So, what did we learn from the meeting? The trustees are convinced that Union is on the right course now, that the public relations problems they are having are just that, P.R. problems aggravated by biased reporting from publications like The Presbyterian Layman. The praises of John Leith were sung, and the course of the Presbyterian Coalition’s Renewal of Theological Education mission statement was embraced; the Coalition was surprised to hear this! (One wonders how the Covenant Network of Presbyterians will react to this news, or what they would be told by Trustees at their own meeting.) I believe we changed no minds. However, I also believe the Trustees began to see the critics as having legitimate concerns; perhaps an avalanche of mail from and meetings with other churches nationwide would make an impression and bring about change. Unlike churches, our seminaries’ Boards of Trustees have no one directly looking over their shoulders. Presbyteries don’t, synods don’t, General Assembly doesn’t or won’t. But you can if you try.

One Final Observation: Do not be afraid to seminary professors! This is a tough lesson for preachers to grasp. Professors have higher degrees that we do, they are sometimes internationally known, they are experts in areas about which we know little, and we think they taught us everything we do know! But fewer and fewer of them have served a congregation for a significant amount of time; as John Leith used to say, "Ideas that wouldn’t last two minutes in a church can last decades in a theological institution." They may know Calvin better, or Schleiemacher, but preachers know the Bible, and that’s where our final authority rests! Don’t allow the debate to end with Schleiermacher, end it with Paul! And you don’t have to attend all their classes to know how they teach; read their books, since they don’t publish what they don’t believe. You are smart enough, really!

Stonewall Jackson used to say, "Duty is ours, and consequences are God’s." If theological education is going to change for the better in the PC(USA), individual pastors and sessions will have to accept the duty of scrutinizing our seminaries. Remember John Knox, at whose funeral it was said, "He feared God so much that he never feared Men."

Reported by C. Powell Sykes, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Burlington, NC, and 1988 graduate of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia