BLOG 3/13/16. AN M.DIV DEGREE AND $2.00 WILL BUY YOU A CUP OF COFFEE!
OK, maybe it’s time to revisit the whole concept of clergy (and maybe lose a lot of friends), but periodically I think we need to de-mythologize the whole notion of professional clergy. I myself have some mixed feelings about this—after all, for over 60 years I have flown under that rubric myself. But a couple of things this week have provoked me to take another shot at it. For one, I looked at the gentleman all vested and stoled, looking ever so ‘ecclesiastical’ leading the procession at the burial of Nancy Reagan, and wondering to myself: “I wonder what he is really like under all of those vestments? He’s obviously good at performing the liturgies of the church, … but what’s he like close up?”
The other thing was an over supper conversation with a couple of close friends in which the question was raised to me: “Why do people go to seminaries?” These close friends know that (after my first retirement) I spent ten years as a mentor to seminarians in a number of seminaries across the country. There is, of course, no single answer to that question. People attend seminaries for all kinds of valid or questionable reasons. When I was in seminary after World War II, we had a lot of men who had had some kind of horrifying experience during the war and had promised God that if he got them out of that, that they would “go into the ministry.” Then there are those who are disaffected or bored with some other profession, and so who go to seminary to make a career change, thinking that such will bring them more fulfillment. The more healthy reason was those who had been engaged in some kind of ministry in a local scene and knew that they needed more knowledge and skills if they were to take the next steps in fruitful Christian mission. All kinds of reasons … some legitimate and some not so much so. There are those numerous ones to go to seminary primarily looking for themselves, some raison d’etre for their directionless lives.
The irony is, however, that several years in an academic institution and the awarding of an academic M.Div. degree may mean that you have some remarkable gifts, but it does not equip you to engage in the ministries of Christian formation that will enable God’s people to, themselves, be fully equipped to engage in their own fruitful lives in the vicissitudes of their daily ‘marketplace’ lives. Not a few of the professors in seminaries are marvelous academics, but have never been in the trenches of reality where they were the teaching-shepherds of God’s people.
And the designation of clergy also raises questions. The venerable sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul names that as one of the subversions of Christianity, and calls for the de-clergification of the church. Or, maybe, what does it do to hang the title reverend upon some man or woman who is also a sinner saved by grace?
One has to look to Jesus, first of all, to see that his seminary was to call men and women to follow him on the back roads of Palestine, and to learn from him, and to have the message modeled by him and to be mentored by him … so that he could ultimately call on them, themselves, to make disciples and know that they understood that to mean that they were to do to others what he had done to them. True teaching-shepherds (cf. Ephesians 4:11-13) are those in the Christian community who engage others in the disciplines/formations that will form them into God’s New Humanity, the demonstration of his purpose that they be conformed to the image of Christ. They are mentors, models, and teachers. They allow others to get close to them, to know them, to ask questions, until the authentic New Creation life of the pastor is reproduced in those who are their followers, or disciples, i.e., God’s people for whom those mentors are a gift.
Something in that direction. But the conception of clergy as is popularly conceived is not a part of that, … and an M.Div. degree may have nothing to do with it! There, I’ve said it.
