Executive Director of Association of Theological Schools describes need for TiM Programs

Daniel Aleshire, executive director of The Association of Theological Schools, presented the following “Thoughts on the Transition into Ministry Program” on February 28, 2005 to the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. 

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Thoughts on the Transition into Ministry Program

February 28, 2005
Indianapolis, IN

Unpublished address by Daniel Aleshire
Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada

I want to share some thoughts with you from my perspective at The Association of Theological Schools about Transition into Ministry. 

1. The programs that you guide and the perceptions you have about transition into ministry are likely influenced by your own transition into ministry. 

Mine came after seminary and graduate school, when for a variety of reasons, I felt that my work should begin in the congregation. I remember about four months into the pastorate of Bergen Baptist Church in northern New Jersey that the semester didn’t end, the congregation didn’t change, there were no grades, and the work was not going to start fresh next week. Higher education is an environment where life comes in four-month blocks. I could stick out a professor that I didn’t like because I knew the course would end. All the work came to a certain and clean stop every four months. There was a clear indication of achievement at the end of the four months in the form of grades. And after a short break, everything started fresh: new professors, new courses, all with limited carryover from the previous semester. Work in school has a wonderful pattern of frequent and clear endings and beginnings and often nice breaks in between. In the congregation, the people didn’t change every four months. My first Sunday, a somewhat troubled member of the congregation (about whom I had been counseled) was the first to greet me at the door after the service and told me my sermon was “the worst damn sermon” he had ever heard. (It wasn’t that good, but I have heard enough bad sermons myself to think there is a lot of competition for this distinction, and I hated to have won it my first Sunday in the pulpit!) Four months later, this man was still there and not much more impressed by my preaching. And other than him, the grades the congregation gave were so ambiguous that I was never sure how I was doing. In the fifth month, nothing was all that new. School can provide an addictive world of clear time frames, frequent changes, regularized opportunities to start all over again, and limited carryover from the previous four months’ work to the next four months’ work. 

My transition from school to pastoral ministry was from a kind of work at school in which I was in the driver’s seat: deciding how much of my time would be invested in what, what work I would do, and what time of the day I wanted to do it. As a pastor, I was much less in control of when I did what and, on more than a few days, what I did at all. 

If you are like me, these kinds of experiences stay with you—I remember that first year in full-time parish ministry with more clarity than I remember many of the other years of work since then. 

2. School-based theological education is deeply influenced by the ontology of “schoolness”— and the nature of a school defines a lot about the kind of learning that is possible in a school. 

A school provides an environment that is very peer oriented. There are people in the class with you, more peers than professors. They are friends and, at times, competitors, but a school is a community of peers.

A school gathers people in what should be safe space so that there is room to explore new ideas and embrace new information. A school is responsible for providing space that is inviting, welcoming, and open. A school deliberately seeks to remove potential threats. 

School-based learning is typically highly controlled. A course begins with a syllabus that tells students what they should read, when they should read it, what they should learn from it, and how they should be able to demonstrate their learning from the assigned readings. The map is clear, the objectives are stated, and the course is set. The completion of one course is linked to another, under a carefully proscribed curriculum. There are many variables, of course, but the center of “schoolness” education is very articulated, focused, and orderly. 

Schools divide work into orderly units so faculty can gain sufficient expertise in an area and the work of the school can be organized. Disciplines grow up in schools as a way of providing the internal structure necessary for the school’s work to be done well. The work of a school orders material for students, distinguishes one kind of material from other kinds, provides a reasoned and organized exposure to it, and sequences that exposure to enhance student learning. 

Schools and classroom-based education are particularly suited for learning that emerges from information in books, teachers, and human interaction. It is very good for the assimilation of material, for relating material in one subject to another. It is ideal for the pursuit of the kind of intellectual work that explores ideas and imagines new combinations and interpretations of ideas. 

Schools are absolutely superb at certain kinds of learning. If you want to exegete the Greek text, go to a school, take baby Greek, then intermediate Greek grammar, then exegetical courses. If you pay attention and learn your lessons, you will be able to exegete a Greek text. If you want to learn the history of the church, go to a school, take a course on early Christian origins and New Testament, then Patristics, then church history prior to the Reformation, then church history post Reformation, and top it off with a history of your part of the Christian family. If you have studied your lessons, you will know a great deal about church history at the end of your school experience.

3. These programs for Transition into Ministry, as best as I can tell from reading your reports, assume that theological schools do reasonably well what schools were designed to do. None of these TiM programs have a single strategy to introduce new pastors to basic theological concepts, to the history of the community of faith, or to the grand narrative of the biblical text. If you are working with the graduates of ATS member schools, you can typically count on their knowing these things. TiM programs are seriously engaged in providing the kind of learning that schools, by their fundamental character, are not very good at providing. 

4. Transition into Ministry programs serve two significant educational functions. 

A. The first is to help students with the cultural adjustment from school as their primary work environment to a ministry setting as their primary work environment. If the school is basically a peer oriented environment, then pastoral work, especially for new graduates in small congregations, is typically not peer oriented. If schools gather people into a safe and welcoming space, then ministry often throws them into spaces that are as likely to be threatening and unsafe as warm and welcoming. If a school divides work into orderly units, then ministry contexts confound work into chaotic and disorganized patterns. If schools are particularly good for the intellectual work necessary for the acquisition of material from books, then ministry settings are particularly good for intellectual work that calls for discernment across a wide range of individual and organizational ambiguities. If schools invent disciplines to organize work, then ministry contexts have a way of smashing disciplines apart because the categories don’t hold up in pastoral practice. 

B. The second purpose of these kinds of programs is to guide the kind of learning that occurs best outside of school environments. Roger Shinn, in an essay now many decades old, wrote that “… perhaps the most significant education cannot be programmed. There are times of shaking foundations, times of trauma, times of revelation that bring new apprehensions of the life and the world. Often they are the very experiences that civilized and compassionate education tries to spare people.” (1)

Congregational and other ministry settings create the environment for a different kind of learning. They help students learn to think more clinically, administratively, organizationally, and interpersonally. These settings don’t teach novice ministers how to “apply” what they learned in school. Rather, these environments evoke different “intelligences” and students engage in a different kind of intellectual work. It is intellectual work that deals with the kind of wisdom that accrues from practices, from skills that get better with repetition and reflection, from perceptions that are informed and enriched by coaching. These lessons are not learned well in a classroom; in fact, that can’t be learned in a classroom. I remember the first time in ministry when I left the joy of new parents at the hospital delivery room to go to the funeral home. The emotional shift was so real I can still feel it. How does one learn to transition from celebrating birth to grieving death in two miles? However it is learned, it is not by applying something that was learned in absentia in a classroom. It is an altogether different kind of learning. Pastoral work is a constant variation around certain themes, like jazz. (2)

It is not the kind of music that is played by learning to read music, then playing the notes. It is improvisational, and improvisational playing requires both knowing the tune and how to vary from the tune. One learns to play this kind of music by being a very good musician, by knowing the tune, and by practicing how to play using improvisation. 

5. Why are these TiM programs needed? I realized, in thinking about these relatively new programs you have been inventing, that the Christian church has survived for a couple of millennia without them. So, why do they seem so needed and promising at this time? It is the combination of two factors. The first is that theological students have gotten older and older. And while older students bring significant gifts to ministry and typically extensive experience in the church, they don’t bring many remaining career years for religious leadership. American religion needs younger candidates, as well, which brings us to the second factor. The current generation of younger seminary students seems not to have as much experience in the church as we remember other generations of younger students to have had. Some younger students have been involved in church their whole lives, but many have not been. They come out of seminary without the church equivalent of “street smarts.” They graduate from schools that tend to focus on more denotative ways of knowing and enter ministry contexts where the primary way of knowing is connotative. They need “church smarts,” and schools—even very good ones—are not very effective at teaching that kind of “smart.” It takes a context of practice and engagement for this kind of knowing. 

6. The main point of these reflections is that good ministry requires more than one kind of knowing, and different kinds of knowing are most readily engendered in different kinds of educational settings. For ministry, those educational settings are ministry context and school. Neither setting—the school nor the ministry context—should feel guilty that it is not educating the way that the other setting is educating. Each setting, if it is doing its work well, provides a powerful educational venue for a kind of learning that is crucial to effective ministry. My hunch, as an educator, is that each environment most effectively educates when students are immersed in that environment for sustained periods of time. I also think that the multiple kinds of education that are needed are most effective when each educational setting deeply respects the contribution, educational capacity, and intelligence of the other.

7. I am from the “school” side of things, and I cannot tell you what I think congregational educators can do to make theological education more effective, but I do have a list of things that I think schools ought to be working on. 

• I think schools need to work on the disciplinary structure by which we do our work. The current structure makes little sense except in a theological school and for the work of theological school teachers. The disciplines of practice radically alter how the theological content is organized, and we school teachers need to think about disciplinary structures— or at least educational practices related to the disciplines—that better serve our students. 

• Theological schools need to value the range of “intelligences” that good pastoral work requires and examine how we can cultivate as many as possible as deeply as possible. 

• As schools work on the unending project of the curriculum change, we need a better appreciation for the kind of needed learning that is not readily attained in the classroom, and to figure out how to free some time for students to have greater exposure to the environments that facilely teach this kind of learning. 

• I also think that school-based educators need to learn how to distinguish among levels of quality in other than classroom performance and to use this information to make better decisions about admissions and more effective interventions during seminary. 

I had wanted to share the following text with you in Indianapolis, but the evening was growing late, and I had already overly taxed David Wood’s “suggestion” of 20 minutes. The text is from ATS accrediting standards and summarizes the overall goal of the theological curriculum, as we understand it at ATS. It is not always, if ever, attained, but I want you to know what we are striving for:

In a theological school, the over-arching goal is the development of theological understanding, that is, aptitude for theological reflection and wisdom pertaining to responsible life in faith. Comprehended in this over-arching goal are others such as deepening spiritual awareness, growing in moral sensibility and character, gaining an intellectual grasp of the tradition of a faith community, and acquiring the abilities requisite to the exercise of ministry in that community. (3)

If the schools could give you recent graduates like that, I think TiM programs could make them into pretty good pastors.

Footnotes:
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1) Roger Shinn, “Education is a Mystery,” in John J. Westerhoff, ed., A Colloquy on Christian Education (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1972), 19.

2) Max De Pree, long-time trustee at Fuller Theological Seminary and chair emeritus of the Herman Miller Company, wrote a book several years ago called Leadership Jazz in which he argues that all good leadership is jazz-like and improvisational. I think the image is especially useful for understanding pastoral practice. 

3) The Association of Theological Schools, “4 Theological Curriculum,” 4.1.1, Bulletin 46, Part 1, Standards of Accreditation (Pittsburgh: ATS, 2004) 54.

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