Seminaries In Crisis: A Challenge and an Opportunity
By Scott Manor, May 18, 2022.
This summer marks ten years of my working at Knox Theological Seminary. Maybe someday I’ll write a book about my experience, but let’s just say, while I love this seminary deeply, it’s been a twisty, bumpy road for long stretches of my time here. For example, one year into my role, when my wife was eight months pregnant, I and my fellow staff were told there wasn’t enough money for the next payroll. Obviously, God graciously saw the seminary (and my family) through that crisis. And when I get the chance to tell the story I will always say, “The story of Knox is the story of the Gospel.” In short, we were in serious trouble and unable to save ourselves, and yet God graciously and generously intervened to save this school, bringing new life out of a sort of death. There were many positive results of that crisis, most notably that the Lord led Knox to redefine itself, its educational model, and its mission to serve the church more effectively.
Today, a broader crisis is facing nearly every seminary, and I am curious and excited to see how God will use these turbulent times to reshape how these schools will serve the church and its shifting needs. Of course, I don’t know exactly what that looks like in the end, but I can address the nature of the current crisis and some of the steps that seminaries may consider taking to address it.
The Crisis
The most visible challenge facing seminaries is financial. The recent CT article on Trinity Evangelical Divinity School describes drastically shrinking enrollment as the core of the problem. [1] As the article notes, this isn’t just true for TEDS, but other notable evangelical seminaries as well. Yet, I’d argue that anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t been paying much attention. Data from ATS (the major accrediting body for N. American seminaries and schools of theology) have painted a pretty dismal picture over the last two decades. True, the total headcount of all seminaries over the last decade is essentially flat (~80,000 students). If you dip back just a little bit earlier, the decade from 2007-2017 saw a steady decline in enrollment, but a positive uptick around 2018 and following put us back on track. If you were to disaggregate these data and look only at evangelical schools, head count enrollment increased a good bit during this time, from ~45,000 students in 2002 to ~55,000 today, while mainline schools were down from ~23,000 to ~15,000 and Roman Catholic/Orthodox schools from ~8,600 to ~7,000).
Still, ATS schools comprise a leaky bucket, even within evangelical seminaries. This may seem at odds with the nearly 25% increase I just mentioned, but keep in mind that ATS experienced an increase in membership during this time, most notably Liberty University’s Rawlings School of Theology, though there are others too. These added schools essentially more than made up for the leak (that’s ongoing). But what happens if you were to look only at the same number of ATS member schools beginning a decade earlier in 1992? We see a peak total enrollment of ~72,000 in 2004 that gradually descends to ~61,000 in 2021. That’s a leak of about a 15% loss of enrollment. For some evangelical schools, as the CT article mentioned above notes, enrollment losses are as high as 30-40%. Ouch.
Bottom line, fewer students = less tuition = less operational funds = spiraling crisis. To be sustainable, this loss of operational revenues has to be offset somewhere, usually through a mixture of offense and defense. Offensively, schools often respond by being more aggressive in fundraising. But it can be hard for a seminary president or development officer to “sell” a school to a donor when that school is hemorrhaging students (and possibly faculty and staff). Defensively, schools have to make hard decisions, by reducing services, resources, and/or personnel to align revenues with expenses. The question is, where do you make cuts? Marketing budget? Then you’re reducing the opportunities to attract the students you so desperately need. What about facilities? Will students want to go to a school with run-down buildings or limited services? Maybe faculty or staff? In addition to more work for those who remain, this can create a culture of fear and low morale. The one other major option is to draw down the endowment beyond the standard annual limits, but there are institutional (and sometimes legal) issues here as well. And so the spiral goes.
I’ve heard various responses to the CT TEDS article about how unfair or hurtful the president’s actions are. I suppose my question in response is: What else is he to do? I’d argue that, while painful, such actions by many seminary presidents facing these challenges today are necessary; but I’d also argue they’re likely not sufficient in and of themselves to set things right. The financial and enrollment crises are not the actual problem, but rather symptoms of a bigger issue, namely mission.
Solutions – Educational Model and Mission
Today, seminaries are evaluating whether the core, traditional, residential model of seminary education is perhaps part of the issue. Over the last decade, more and more seminaries began including some level of distance education to attract more students. Then, of course, COVID forced all seminaries online, whether they liked it or not. In the many, many conversations I’ve had with leaders at other seminaries during this time, the core issue inevitably moved beyond how distance education may positively impact payroll and revenue issues to one of mission and educational philosophy. In simplest terms, where is the best education achieved? “Here” (on campus) or “there” (where the students already live)?
Each model seeks dominance, with little toleration for the other. Those advocating for the superiority of the traditional/residential model often argue that students benefit most from shared space and time with each other and faculty members. Rubbing elbows with one another in this sacred space is special, it is claimed, and cannot be duplicated well in a remote learning atmosphere. Fair enough. If a school’s educational philosophy and mission prioritizes an in-person community of learning, then the campus model it should be.
The residential model, however, is also operationally crucial for most campus-based schools. How does a seminary with significant infrastructural overhead justify promoting a remote educational model that makes its facilities largely unnecessary? Some schools have managed a decent balance (I’d include my alma mater, Covenant Theological Seminary here), but usually either online or residential is clearly stronger. In the world of Reformed, evangelical seminaries, it’s clear that the campus/residential model wins.
What I find irritating, however, are the claims that the residential model is “clearly” superior and that distance education is second-rate, especially when it comes to seminary education. There is ample evidence to prove this just isn’t the case.
I am a firm believer in distance seminary education; however, I am not an advocate for distance education across the board for any degree. While I may not care where my accountant got their degree, I don’t want my cardiac surgeon to have an online degree. I want him/her to have been trained by the best of the best, learning the delicate and vital hand maneuvers, etc. I want to rest assured they’ve had years of being cultivated into the practice and art of open-heart surgery. But does this mean that such mentorship must happen on a school’s campus? I’d argue NO. For seminaries, I believe practical and ministerial mentorship is best accomplished in the student’s church from a knowledgeable pastor investing in the cultivation of a maturing ministry leader, showing them how to navigate all the challenges and opportunities of that particular context.
Maybe it's time we ditched the binary way of conceiving of education, where students are either in a narrowly defined community of learning comprised of their professor mentors and fellow classmates or all alone with their computers and no meaningful community of learning. In fact, there’s a third and (I’d argue) better way of doing seminary that isn’t centered on either a computer screen or a physical classroom, but in the church itself. After all, the seminary’s main purpose is to serve the church, primarily by educating its leaders (in various capacities) for effective ministry and Kingdom service. Maybe, just maybe, the best primary mentor for the seminary student isn’t the professor but the pastor?
I believe theological education should be rooted and centered in the church. That’s what we see throughout much of church history, and people far smarter than me have made similar arguments. So, before you argue with me, read Justo Gonzalez’s The History of Theological Education and/or John Frame’s essay, “Proposal for a New Seminary” (though I don’t share his concluding proposal that we “…dump the academic model once and for all”) – just to name a couple of examples. Instead of ditching the academic model, it’s time to bring the seminary back into a meaningful, collaborative relationship with the church (and not those just in proximity to seminary campuses, but all over) – one that is marked by mutual accountability and shared responsibility for the education of the church. Yes, the whole church. To this end, seminary education ought to meaningfully extend beyond just those pursuing vocational pastor roles (though not at their exclusion!) to include all the saints who are to be equipped to do the work of ministry (Eph. 4:11-12), regardless of occupation. Such a model requires seminaries to take itself a bit less seriously and church leaders to take on new roles and responsibilities. But (and this is where I see the most central issue in this whole thing), it restores the way the church-seminary relationship ought to work, where seminaries are truly serving the church, not the other way around.
If the seminary is meant to serve the church, then why does it seem the church and the student are often making the biggest sacrifice in this relationship? Say someone feels a call to ministry with no nearby seminary. In the current, traditional/residential model of education, that person must leave the place where they first felt that call, and the church loses its budding leader with little likelihood that they’ll return. For their part, would-be seminary students have to weigh the cost of, on average, $33,000 in debt when they graduate, not to mention the loss of their church community, other relationships, and years of lost wages (if they were employed). It’s a big price tag for both the student and the church, a cost that many potential seminarians find insurmountable. It doesn’t have to be this way.
What if those students stayed put – their families in their homes, their kids in their schools, and their ministry work continuing in their churches? What if those churches were able not only to keep their rising stars, but also have a major role to play in their spiritual and ministerial formation? This is possible if seminaries were to decentralize their educational epicenter from the campus to the church. Crazy, right? What if a meaningful “community of learning” wasn’t defined by rubbing elbows in hallways but a national and even global mixture of (1) fellow seminary students learning together, encouraging one another, and integrating their education with their ministry context in real time, (2) engaged and intentional faculty (even if at a distance) who care about entering into the students’ unique worlds of ministry and helping them navigate them well, and (3) students’ own pastoral or ministry mentors who share their ministry expertise, much like the cardiac surgeon who learned from the seasoned pro? Perhaps, more people who feel a call to ministry may find the total cost of seminary actually worth it. And, seminaries who proactively listened to students and worked with their ministry mentors would have a much clearer sense of the effectiveness of their education and, ultimately, be put in the uncomfortable but necessary position of having to serve the church in and with the church, for the sake of the church.
For Knox Seminary’s part, that’s the idea behind our slogan: In, With, and For the Church. It’s the eventual result of years sharpening our vision as a seminary after the financial crisis I mentioned in the introduction – a completely revised model of education that is centered in students’ church and ministry contexts. We don’t have it all figured out, but we rejoice in what the Lord is doing through Knox’s efforts to co-labor with churches to equip the saints in their contexts, whether that’s here in Ft. Lauderdale, FL or elsewhere.
Amidst the crisis facing today’s seminaries, the words of J. Gresham Machen serve as a helpful guide for today’s seminaries. “There must be a renewal of Christian education. The rejection of Christianity is due to various causes, but a very potent cause is simple ignorance. In countless cases, Christianity is rejected simply because people have not the slightest notion of what Christianity is…Christianity cannot subsist unless people know what Christianity is, and the fair and logical thing is to learn what Christianity is – not from its opponents, but from those who are themselves Christians.” (J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism” (Eerdmans, 1923). Maybe in God’s providence this current crisis is providing us with an opportunity to find a renewal in our approach to theological education so that Christianity may robustly subsist amidst all the other current cultural challenges facing the Church. May God grant it.
Dr. Scott Manor is Professor of Historical Theology and President of Knox Theological Seminary.
[1] As discussed below, TEDS is hardly alone in this problem. In between the writing of this article and it’s publication released another article about a struggling institution: “Gordon-Conwell to Sell Main Campus, Move to Boston.”
