Lead Time
Lead Time
What if Residential Seminary is NOT the "Gold Standard"?
The episode highlights the critical need for innovation in pastoral training due to the growing shortage of pastors in the LCMS. It explores alternative educational models that integrate local community involvement while addressing the demographic shifts among prospective seminary students.
• Traditional residential seminary programs are being challenged
• Over 700 pastoral vacancies currently exist in the LCMS
• Many congregations need co-vocational leaders due to financial limitations
• Increased age of seminarian entrants complicates the structure of training
• Local engagement enhances practical learning experiences for future pastors
• A call for flexible and innovative approaches to training leaders
Breaking down faith, culture & big questions - a mix of humor with real spiritual growth.
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This is Lead Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman, here with Jack Kauberg. I pray you're excited for an awesome conversation. Today we're talking, you know, a lot of times on Lead Time we talk about pastoral formation. Today we're talking about five reasons.
Speaker 2:The residential program is not necessarily, though. It has its certain place, certainly has its place because I went through it, but the days are too short for us not to explore alternative means toward raising up leaders Spivo, covo, residential leaders, raising up residential all the way to working in the trenches. And I pray, just to kind of set this up. I pray that this conversation leads toward collaboration and care for one another. Pray that this conversation leads toward collaboration and care for one another, those that live in the institutions connected to Concordia Seminary in St Louis as well as those that are at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, and we really would love to have a conversation. If you sense any kind of frustration, it's too strong of a word. We've just been talking about this for a long period of time and we have had the white paper rebuffed not necessarily given the hearing we were hoping it would have with the academic, the leaders at both institutions bringing out more talking points and to do so, chris Holder, partner with the ULC, wrote a little blog that we're just going to talk through five reasons.
Speaker 2:The residential program is not necessarily the gold standard. How are you doing, chris? Thanks for hanging bud. I'm doing great. It's so great to be back. Yeah, man.
Speaker 3:I look forward to our time together in Phoenix next week as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's going to be a good time at best practices. So talk through the narrative of the MDiv We've heard in various you know I don't even know that you can use whatever analogy you want to talk about this I think residential. If it was producing the quantity and quality of pastors, meeting the current crisis in the LCMS, I would be okay. It's working. It's very evident, though, that it's not working. One story I have to tell to kind of set this up.
Speaker 2:I'm talking with my grandma, who lives in Sterling Colorado. Just yesterday she and my grandpa, betty and Elvin Klein, my mom's parents, lifetime LCMS, lutherans, right, and they live in a community of about 10,000 people, three LCMS churches. They just celebrated 68 years of wedded life together. Praise be to God. They're Betty and Elvin. And grandma says we don't have a pastor. And then she goes oh, and the church down the street doesn't have a pastor. They've been vacant for a while. Oh, there's a third church just in the neighboring town, they don't have a pastor. So while, oh, there's a third church just in the neighboring town, they don't have a pastor. So this is a crisis, not just for those of us that are looking to plant churches or do microsite, multisite merger type stuff, but it's a crisis in our rural communities as well. So, chris, take it away buddy, and we'll let you go. You give your first kind of case, your first point, and then Jack and I are going to respond.
Speaker 3:Okay, I just want to share a little bit of background. I am personally gone through a residential seminary program here locally in Dallas. I've gone through SMP and I've also mentored guys through a variety of programs and I'm on the other side of it now with you, tim and Jack, doing the creative work through Luther House. So a couple of people from the Texas district actually asked me to kind of put this together and say what are your insights Like, as they're seeing the pastoral shortage and they're seeing churches go three, four or five years vacant. Like you're in the trenches of this, chris, what are you seeing? So that that was kind of the the genesis of all of this, and I kind of want to start with a little bit of background that says we have this narrative out there that says that the residential MDiv program and this is not unique to the LCMS, I'll research this, this is across the board, right.
Speaker 3:There's a narrative out there that says that this is the gold standard, right, that this is the one and only way to train pastors, and that general narrative just goes unchallenged.
Speaker 3:No one really challenges it and, tim, you and I have had to defend a thesis right or a dissertation, to write a doctorate, and we had to find support for our hypothesis or whatever.
Speaker 3:And I found no actual evidence that says, for example, that residential trained pastors are more effective in the parish than SMP pastors, et cetera, et cetera. So first of all, there just is no real testing of that. So beyond that, my first real point that's just kind of the background is that the MDiv and residential seminary programs are not found either in the Bible nor the Lutheran Confessions as a preferred way of performing pastors, lutheran confessions as a preferred way of performing pastors, if anything, it could be argued that a distance program encourages local leaders to be raised up and trained locally is closer to what we see in Acts and the epistles. Also, local leaders that are raised up by a church are vetted by a local congregation from the start, who commits to training them as a vicar and then ordains them as a pastor. And since the call and our polity as Lutherans comes from a church, you could argue this is actually more in line with our confessions or at least equally in line with yeah, Jack.
Speaker 2:what's your feedback there?
Speaker 4:No, I mean, I totally agree. Well, let's put it this way the argument is not to say that residential is inferior. What we're saying is what's being untested right now is that there's other models that can be equally as effective right, effective can have the benefits of scale and localization that we don't necessarily have with a residential program, right? So in theory, a non-residential let's say online or some sort of hybrid program can be just as effective and can create a whole bunch of logistical benefits that we don't have right now with a in-person only residential program. That's kind of what we're getting at, right?
Speaker 2:And there's also some models that can be tested right now around collegiality of learners, right. I mean I think that's one of the biggest arguments. There's something about being with the professor for an extended period of time a quarter, a semester, et cetera, or for an intensive period of time in person. What we're not saying is that cohorts shouldn't be tested and intensive times of learning shouldn't be tested with said academic expert in whatever the theological topic is, I think that definitely has its place. It's just that they're being raised up and staying in connection to the local church the entire time, rather than the current model which keeps, I guess, somewhat of a relational connection. But when they're residential they're in an entirely new context. It's either in our context for Fort Wayne or St Louis and we've entrusted them to that system for formation.
Speaker 2:I mean, you kind of lose touch with that leader for a certain period of time. And could it be some sort of a test toward cohorts in partnership with academic instructors? So, jack, I mean you just got done with a gathering and there was a great power in a week-long intensive. The CMC program has a three-week type of intensive. We're not saying that you shouldn't be focused on that. And also another case is that we don't care about the languages. I think for an MDiv, if you can get the languages figured out for that respective context, I think we should do the best we can to give the languages. We're not against Greek or Hebrew as well Any more reactions to that?
Speaker 4:Well, this was kind of a cool thing for me. Like you said, there is connection building. There is, I know, in the program that I am. There's relationship building with professors that are teaching the program. It's not just watching videos. There are some videos that you watch, but there's also discussion that's being done live via Zoom. You know, and, okay, you can make an argument that being in a room is different than being on Zoom. But when you're doing this, week after week after week, you are definitely building relationships with people.
Speaker 4:And then we have these gatherings.
Speaker 4:And what's interesting in this particular context because the school we have, that I'm going to Lutheran school, right, but it's also in a wider university system where there's other denominations.
Speaker 4:So I go into this gathering a bunch of Lutherans there, a bunch of Baptists there, a bunch of others there, and we're having really great conversations where we're getting to apply what we learned. And so you know, dan and I were in this table we're the only two Lutherans sitting at this table and we're having wonderful conversations about baptism and how much we enjoy the fact that baptism saves you and having really fun, passionate conversations about that topic, right, and hey, you know what? What's a better way to test that than to bring other theologians in there and actually have a conversation and not try to strawman the things that you disagree with, but actually strongman that and actually have really good conversations with smart people about these topics and actually have really good conversations with smart people about these topics and I would definitely say from my own experience going through a cohort program, smp, where we had week intensives, and my doctor of ministry program, which also had week intensives, and that was similar to yours, jack where I was with Lutherans and everybody, right, gordon Conwell is.
Speaker 3:I still have people I text with. I still have people like. One of my best friends in the world is a is a Lutheran pastor in Madison, wisconsin. I met through SMP, so I was there when his wife got cancer and flew up. And so you're not going to tell me that you can't have long term relationships with people that you meet through a program like this. If anything, especially if you're later in life, you have a different type of connection. You're not spending every day together. But so yeah, that's. I totally agree with that.
Speaker 3:Second point is and you touched on this a little bit, tim, already but the residential MDiv program does provide the opportunity for students to live in community while studying permanently, like over four, three, four years. However, individuals studying in an active ministry while studying in a distance or hybrid still get the benefit of interacting with other students but this is the part I want to add but also get the added benefit of community from the local ministry where they are serving, and that's a community they're going to stay in after they're done. Right, like you talked about that, tim, that the community is not going to go away, right, so that can. So they're building community that's going to actually last and benefit them in their ministry, instead of being plucked out of one community and dropped in another.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the main arguments there is that we need more general ordination pastors who could be sent into another context. And let me be very clear we have never said that that leader couldn't be called to another context. We're putting the hamstrings on ourselves, say with SMP, by saying they can't be called If the person has an MDiv and they've been recognized by their local congregation and maybe a season of ministry has moved on and there's another opportunity for kingdom expansion in that area or another church or somewhere across the country. Why would we hamper that call into another context? We should open it up rather than close it down.
Speaker 2:But to your point, chris, they're learning the entire time with professors, with students, in a context, testing as they're learning. There's great, great power. Teaching is actually learning twice right, I mean you're taking it in and I know the seminary. This is nothing against residential. I know that's what we're trying to do. We have a fieldwork congregation You're testing it out doing Bible studies, et cetera. We can have the same sort of experience at the local level, jack. Anything more there?
Speaker 4:Well, that's exactly some of the stuff that I've been doing. So I've been active in the local church here, helping to design curriculum, for example, for our new member class, very, very deeply involved in that, very passionate about it, because I am an adult convert to Lutheranism and so one of the cool things is I get to bring that perspective into teaching in our new member class. Like, hey, I know a whole bunch of things, what it's like to not be Lutheran let's talk about these things right. And so I'm applying this as I'm learning a lot of these topics in these classroom environments and in many ways, some of these projects that you're doing in context can be really things that satisfy the assignments for your class. So it's a great opportunity, very hands-on and, you can say, not just theoretical, but very, very, very practical in the work that you're doing. So I can see there's situations where that might even be preferable because of the challenges that you have when you actually do it and actually apply it with people and take the stuff in real time and apply it.
Speaker 2:Amen, chris yeah.
Speaker 3:So then the third one is that the residential MDiv program is still the preferred option and opportunity for young men in their 20s who are not established in their careers. I don't think anyone's arguing against that. However and this is across again, this is across Christianity. This is not unique to Lutheranism at all. This is across Christianity. This is not unique to Lutheranism at all. The average age of students entering seminary or entering pastoral training is increasing, and it has been steadily over the last 20 years. So then, for these older students somebody in their 30s, 40s, 50s the benefits of a residential program do not outweigh the family, financial or loss of a leader from their current context. So I would say the benefits that that student gets don't necessarily outweigh what's lost.
Speaker 2:Well, let me pause right there. I think that there's going to be a season you could call it a generation where we're going to need to think creatively. I think the Lord is doing something extraordinary in the lives of a lot of young people today and my goodness, if they saw their dad going deep in theology and having a non-residential kind of learning program, what's to prohibit that next-gen leader, say in 10 years or 20 years? Who's seen their dad go through that path and say you know what I want to go? I remember Dad you talking about. I'll just throw out a name Dr Joel Bierman talking about systematics.
Speaker 2:Dr Joel Bierman, I could go learn at Concordia Seminary in St Louis. Dr Joel Bierman in my twenties. Like let's go game, game on, like I don't think this is a forever thing in the life of the church. I pray the church becomes much better at leadership development, that we're filling our institutions and this is a season where we need more bivalent and co-vocational leaders. It's a season where we need more maybe full-time leaders but working part-time because they're out of place in their life in their 50s and 60s, where they don't even need a full-time paycheck but they want to help that church grow from 50 people in worship to a higher number in time Jack, any comment there?
Speaker 4:Oh, I have a lot to comment on this. So what you're talking about because we're talking about like, hey, this is still this residential thing is still an awesome thing and it has its place, and we're saying it's great for certain things, and I wrote a blog article about this, about what we can learn from the military, right? So I'm an army guy. I actually at one point got invited to apply for West Point. I turned it down. I didn't want to do that. I had my own ambitions for my career. You were too smart, I know.
Speaker 4:What I learned about the educational institutions of the army is that they have the gold standard kind of residential program that they call West Point. It is like an amazing school that teaches people to be phenomenal army officers, right, that are commissioned and that only in about a fifth of all the officers raised up in the military are come from West Point. Four-fifths come from ROTC programs, which are done in partnership with 1,700 universities across the country and internationally, right. So what the Army has done is they've embraced both models the residential and the non-residential model for education. They complement each other. These programs are learning from each other. There's a lot of best practices that West Point puts together, that it distributes and it contextualizes into the ROTC programs and it creates this massive amount of scale. Now the military recognized this very early on. They established West Point and I think roughly two years or three years later the commandant of West Point left to start up what's now considered the first ROTC program. And the reason why was because we need to scale. We need to scale this thing and there's no way that we can scale the needs of this country by having this one school. We have to have multiple schools, multiple schools. So imagine if we had to try and fight World War II and we had this one officer candidate school, right, or even two, like how much of a bottleneck that would have been logistically speaking, versus 1700 schools in theory that could do this program. You know, if I'm an enemy and I wanted to take you out, I'd take out your school. Now you don't have, you know so, but that can't happen when you've created this network of really great learning here. So it expanded to a scope of something that could fight like a world war two.
Speaker 4:Now think about in America right now, the need, the urgent, urgent, urgent need to raise up pastors. We live in Arizona right now. How many Lutheran pastors do we need in the Phoenix metro area? If I had to guess, to serve the needs of a metropolitan area of 4 million people, probably 10,000. So does our system right now scale up to give us 10,000 Lutheran pastors for the Phoenix metro area? No, we have to think differently about scale. We have to think about the local church being the engine that spins off ministry leaders to do, to multiply, as we said, we did not too long ago a talk about multiply disciples. Multiply disciples is about multiplying leaders, turning the local church into an engine that kicks out people to preach the gospel Right. So how does the institution, the wider synodical institution, become something that equips the local church to do that? Well, it could do that through a non-residential program in partnership with the local church.
Speaker 2:Amen. So point number one residential. Jesus didn't do it exactly like that. Obviously it was a rabbinic model. The Lutheran confessions don't say it has to be residential. And the Apostle Paul? Obviously, in the early church that wasn't the way they were doing it. We can build community online with in-person experiences. And then this point here we've got an increasing age of our potential leaders, future pastors. They're going to have children, they're embedded in their community and uprooting them from their community may not always work. It does work in some situations, but it may not always always work for leaders. We need an ROTC as well as a West Point. Good stuff, jack. All right, let's go to point number four.
Speaker 3:Point number four and this one to me is, in what I see, maybe the most important or the most compelling point because it creates that sense of urgency that over 50% of the LCMS congregations, or at least 50%, currently worship less than 50 people on a Sunday. Most of these churches will not be able to afford a full-time pastor and need to be served by a co or bivocational pastor, hopefully a co-vocational someone who's going to commit to that long-term. The residential MDiv program does not prepare people for co-vocational context and to pull someone out of their current job in ministry context where they have already been vetted by their church and their community, already own a house, already have figured out schools for their kids all those things to go away for three years and likely not come back, there's little to serve the pastor or community in that context. All those things to go away for three years and likely not come back, there's little to serve the pastor or community in that context?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, we're walking through that right now. A growing school how do we raise up more and more teachers?
Speaker 1:It's an economic issue.
Speaker 2:It's a struggle to bring a teacher from anywhere in the country really into Phoenix, which is our cost of living is approaching California. Thanks California for everybody coming. Anyway, we're approaching California rates right. So it's a real, real economic struggle. It's a boondoggle Jack, anything more no.
Speaker 4:Economically speaking. What makes sense is that we find people who have figured out how to live here and we colloquize them to be teachers. And we're saying that realizing that there is an incredible pipeline of teachers that we can bring in from the colleges. They're wonderful, they're fantastic, but they're not. I mean, if we're, let's say, the vision of Christ Greenfield multi-church and multi-school, there's not going to be enough of a pipeline there. We're going to have to be creative with it. And there is this benefit that these people have already figured out, they've established themselves they don't necessarily have to buy a house. You know, I bought my house. Tim, can you believe this? I bought my house for $185,000. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2:Wow, I'm sure it's worth a little bit more than that.
Speaker 4:It's a 2,000 square foot house. Right, I can live here because I don't have to take on, you know, this massive mortgage to buy a house. I've got more freedom, you know, than a person that who we have to move here and they got to figure out how am I going to spend 600, $700,000 to buy a house. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:I don't envy people in that situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. So we've walked through four of the five. We're just about done. Just a few more minutes here. Chris give us the number five and then this is the.
Speaker 3:Again to the urgency context and to just the state of things in the LCMS and to your point on scalability, jack. It says there are at least 700 vacancies in the LCMS right now and more are retiring or leaving the pastoral ministry than are entering the ministry. So we have a deficit there.
Speaker 2:We've had some internet issues with Chris. He just popped off. He was like that's all I got to say about that, but he left us before he could talk about point number five.
Speaker 2:That's live streaming. That's the way it goes. So here's point number five. There are at least 700 pastoral vacancies in the LCMS right now and more are retiring. More pastors are retiring and leaving the pastoral ministry exponentially more honestly than entering the ministry right now.
Speaker 2:Again, many of these vacant churches are not in a position to call a full-time pastor. While the Set Apart to Serve initiative does a noble job of bringing up pastoral awareness with younger men and will certainly bear fruit in time, it's going to be 10 years or more to see that program bear fruit. These 700 churches simply do not have 10 years to wait, while online and hybrid programs provide an opportunity for a church to raise up someone who could start serving in a vicar capacity almost instantly and as an ordained pastor within two to five years, depending on the program. So it just is what it is and we're trying to meet the real needs of congregations like my grandparents in Sterling Colorado, and there's many rural, suburban and urban contexts where pulpits are empty and we're just trying to fill them so that Word and Sacrament is brought to God's people to mobilize them for mission. Any final last words there, jack?
Speaker 4:Well, I think what that stat shows is that we need to completely redefine what our paradigm is for pastoral development. The use of technology, the use of a flexible program can definitely meet this need. There are people willing to serve and lead in the local context if they're allowed to stay local. And you know, the scale is not just to fill those 700, but to become a church body that's planting 700. Right, so again, this is the idea of changing the scale of things. It's a new paradigm shift. And here's what we're trying to say.
Speaker 4:This is not all about doom and gloom. We're trying to cast a positive vision of the future. The positive vision of the future is this is all solvable. This is all doable, there are solutions to this. This is going to. This is hey, this kind of stuff is going to work. Yeah, well, there will be things that need to be learned and ironed out, for sure, hundred percent. But this is all things that is being solved and can be solved, and we just have to have kind of a desire to get behind it in our own church body. And we're just trying to inspire people to hey, let's start running some experiments, let's monitor it very closely, let's see what the positives are and what we can learn from it, and just be very open-handed about it.
Speaker 4:It's a build measure learn mindset and all entrusted into the work of the Holy Spirit to push forward the preaching of the gospel in the church.
Speaker 2:Yep, this is a proactive invitation. We live in reality, a rapidly growing East Valley context, and so we have to be proactive with our solutions rather than just reactive, and so hope you found this helpful. Keep the conversation going. There are strong opinions about this topic and I think we need all voices to speak into it. Opinions about this topic, and I think we need all voices to speak into it, praying for both seminary presidents, dr Egger and Dr Bruss, in their faithful work locally and looking forward to continual, collegial, hopefully collaborative conversation as we look to cast vision for raising up more leaders to multiply disciples. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. This is Lead Time. Good work, jack. God bless guys. Thanks. Thanks, chris. Sorry you didn't get to hang out with us at the end, but all is well, peace You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective.
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