April 25, 2008

Financial Crisis Forces Illinois Seminary to Make Radical Cuts

An Episcopalian seminary outside Chicago has stopped accepting new students and has told its professors that their appointments will be terminated next year, according to the Episcopal News Service.

Officials at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, located in Evanston, Ill., said the institution was not closing, but would instead focus on distance learning and other nontraditional approaches in an attempt to keep its doors open. The move was prompted by what the seminary’s trustees called a “financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution.”

Seabury-Western isn’t the only Episcopalian seminary in trouble. Beset by rising costs and falling enrollment, three others have also cut back their services. —Thomas Bartlett

Comments

1. The seminaries of the Episcopal (not the “Episcopalian”) Church are in trouble partly because the church itself is in trouble. As with some other institutions, when its clergy became known as something women do, men quit doing it. There has been an oversupply of priests and an undersupply of places for them, and now entire dioceses are seceeding. Some have accused the Church of caring more about the Wholly Trendy than the Holy Trinity and it along with some other mainline churches may be in some risk of becoming a sideline church.

   — Joseph F Foster    Apr 25, 03:12 PM    #

2. If this church organization actually believes its problems are caused by women becoming clergy, then it has much bigger problems that it probably doesn’t even understand. Isn’t religion supposed to encourage love, understanding, and tolerance among all people?

   — Carl    Apr 25, 04:44 PM    #

3. Mr. Foster’s argument seems self-contradictory. First he says men quit going into the priesthood becaume of women being ordained then he says there are too many priests— even though men have stopped going into the priesthood (?!). The type of financial struggle described here is one faced by many other seminaries, including those that are limited to male clergy. The financial challenges are a function more of the declining enrollment of mainstream churches and the rising cost of higher education. Most seminary students must rely on student loans which are a true burden on a minister’s salary. If anything, the enrollment of women as well as men to seminaries is helping the schools with their enrollment.

   — CP    Apr 25, 06:01 PM    #

4. Mr. Carl (#2) you’re thinking sweetness, truth, beauty, and churchs’ “goal” to reinforce current liberal secular views thereunto believed to appertain. I was speaking not of what the church “ought to be” — and liberals and conservatives do not agree on that, nor on how the church should be it— but of the church as an institution and what IS — to what happens when an institution becomes thought of as primarily or even noticeably a women’s thing. It doesnt even have to be a majority at first. Men began to leave elementary education as women moved in, and it happened in librarianship, and there have been a number of articles about that in some academic fields in the pages of the Chronicle. An article over a decade ago in , I believe the Atlantic Monthly, dealt with how the “mainline” church seminaries had a “lot” of very capable women but largely men of mediocre capabilities. Well, CP (#3), sometimes apparent contradictions happen, although if one look beneath the surface, they often aren’t contradictions. So there was a surplus of clergy even as women began to move into the clergy ranks, and capable young men began to look elsewhere for professional endeavors. And of course #3 the declinning membership of the mainlines exacerbates it. Part of the reason is that the liberal churches, especially Episcopal, tend to have upper middle and lower upper classes and historically, the upper classes in the US tend to eventually move out of the churches. Part of the difficulty is that their espousal of secular “trendiness” renders them ever less distinguishable from secular social do-good and feel-good institutions.

   — Joseph F Foster    Apr 26, 12:40 AM    #

5. Regardless of your views on gender, life style, ethics; an institution is given birth based on its vision and mission. Once that institution ventures from that mission for the sake of numbers, whither it is bodies or dollars, its identity becomes defined by those it embraced for the sake of those numbers. No mater the type of institution; educational, religious, or corporate; once the vision is lost that entity falls into a down ward spiral.

   — Dr. Bill    Apr 26, 09:57 AM    #

6. I wonder if Henry VIII is listening?

   — NJH    Apr 26, 11:09 AM    #

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