Preparing men and women for Effective Leadership and Service 

Why is it important for Moravian Seminary to serve as a strong and vital force in theological education?

Our mission statement calls for us “to prepare men and women for effective leadership and service in congregational, counseling, teaching, and other ministries.” In that role, we face immense challenges. The denominations in which most of our graduates serve as pastors, counselors, and teachers have experienced decades of declining membership. Many congregations served by our graduates struggle to meet their budgets, strain to maintain aging buildings, and spend more time worrying about survival than seeking to find their mission and purpose. Counselors must deal with the red tape mazes of changing legal and insurance requirements, all while contending with forces that hinder or destroy individuals and families — abuse, addiction, adultery — and that’s just starting with the A’s. These observations are not intended to overlook ministries that thrive or to miss all the ways that pastors, counselors, and teachers bring life and light into our world. But they point to the complicated spiritual, communal, and leadership demands that our graduates will face throughout their careers.

That’s why it’s important for Moravian Seminary to serve as a strong and vital force in theological education. And that’s why, given those realities mentioned above, we spent the past year exploring and deciding the best ways for us to allocate our time, our people, and our financial resources to meet those demands for the next seven years (a good biblical number). Briefly — in conversation among faculty and staff (incorporating leading research in all our fields of study and endeavor) and in conversation with Trustees, alumni, denominational leaders, agencies, pastors, counselors, and lay leaders — here’s what we decided.

We will focus our attention on three strategic initiatives: academic excellence, enrollment development, and resource development. The key elements of each initiative follow:

Academic Excellence
Moravian has long been well-known for its emphasis on three facets of learning — knowledge, skills, and “being.” The experiences and practices of ministry must be grounded in theology and theory. Theology and theory must be refined in light of practice and experience. Pastors, counselors, and teachers who understand that “upward spiral” of learning have the most effective ministries. Along the way we are developing more systematic ways to assess our students’ progress — more sharply defining “desired learning outcomes” (where they should be educationally and vocationally when they graduate) and intentionally assessing their progress as they move through their degree programs (how we know that they’ve gotten there).

An emphasis on “missional leadership formation” in the MDiv degree seeks to deal with the post-Christian, media-driven, consumer-oriented society in which we live. Congregations can no longer operate as if for most people Sunday morning equals “go to church.” Congregations that focus on “membership and attendance” continue to decline, while congregations that focus on meaningful ministries among their members and for their neighborhoods continue to rise and shine. (This does not mean that membership and attendance are unimportant, just that they are positive byproducts of effective ministry, not an end themselves.) From day one in their ministries, our graduates serve as spiritual and organizational leaders. Most people are not born leaders. Leadership must be molded, shaped, and learned. The best learning we can offer will connect seminary education directly with the strengths and struggles of individuals, congregations, and denominations. We do that well, but we must do better.

Spiritual and organizational leadership also depend on the depth of one’s spiritual reservoir. Our last curriculum revision called for a course in spiritual formation for all three degree programs. A new emphasis on formative spirituality adds electives in individual and group spiritual direction, prayer, holistic health and healing, and spiritual practices for congregations. While these emphases are good in their own right, they also stand in service of individual and congregational discernment of mission and calling. Meaningful ministries among members and for neighborhoods depend on a strong undergirding in spiritual practices.

The “upward spiral” mentioned previously, that results from the interplay between theology,
theory, experience, and practice, applies in particular ways to students in our MAPC program. No matter how well one is grounded in theology and theory, what clients, employers, and agencies care about most is how well one is grounded in excellent clinical practice and experience. We will form more extensive partnerships with area agencies to assure the highest quality clinical training, while deepening the pastoral and spiritual elements of students’ training.

When our seniors are asked about ways the Seminary could improve its teaching, a consistent response is to expand the faculty in order to deepen the reservoir of expertise from which they are taught. In 1964 our fulltime faculty increased to six; at that time the FTE was 32. In 2008, our FTE is twice that number and we continue to serve our student body of over 100 with a faculty of six. New Chairs in Moravian Theology and Ministry and in Pastoral Counseling will intensify learning for students, increase the range of their readiness for ministry, and significantly increase our faculty’s ability to serve as a resource to congregations and the community.

Enrollment Development
This strategic initiative covers two areas — financial support for students and the nature of our student body.

When students enroll in seminary, they are often caught between material needs and spiritual calling. While graduate students, they have to eat, pay rent, pay bills, and/or care for families and medical needs the same as everybody else. And our graduates are not following a calling that will typically lead to great wealth. Years of seminary education exact a significant financial toll without the prospect of immediate financial reward. We must increase significantly both tuition assistance and support for living expenses while students prepare for ministry. This allows greater focus on learning while they are in school and also reduces debt and enhances their quality of life when they leave to serve. Thus, increasing our resources for financial aid stands as the Seminary’s primary strategic initiative. It serves our students and, ultimately, the larger Church.

The Seminary serves a dual role as the denominational seminary for the Moravian Church and as a regional seminary serving many denominations and faith communities. Our ability to serve both constituencies well stands as a distinctive element of our identity. This also creates in our seminary community a positive and enriching array of diversities in theology; gender; ethnicity; race; educational, vocational, and life experience; and so on. Within that array of diversities, we have identified specific emphases aimed at sustaining our strengths and improving in those areas where we need to grow.
We will continue to refine our efforts to enrich student diversity, setting, as a minimum, targets that reflect the diversity of the North American Moravian church and the regional populations that we serve. It is important that students who will serve in an increasingly diverse society learn and develop in diverse educational settings. Our challenges are multifaceted. We draw from the population as a whole, including historically underrepresented groups, but specifically from those people who already have a college education, and even more specifically, from those people who plan to go into some form of ministry that calls for seminary education. We seek to grow in numbers and diversity while targeting the educational needs of a narrow slice of the population. At the same time, that narrow slice of the population has a major influence on individuals, congregations, and communities, which makes our capacity to provide high quality education an even more urgent concern.

Resource Development
The final piece of the picture is, of course, resources. Those resources are not for the sake of the Seminary as an institution but for the sake of the Seminary’s ability to carry out its mission for the sake of the Church and the world. I won’t end this article with an appeal for funds. That’s for other times and other places. But we place resource development as one of three overall strategic initiatives because we recognize that high quality education is not cheap at any level. We want our graduates to excel in leadership and service to the individuals, congregations, and communities that they will serve. We need appropriate resources in order to accomplish that task.

Moravian Seminary has a mission that matters. We believe that these strategic initiatives will enable us to fulfill our calling in excellent ways.

— Frank Crouch
Dean & Vice-President