Some common understandings would have folks believe that ministers are not exactly happy campers. Say “pastor,” and some folks jump to the conclusion of “burned out, isolated, lonely, and frustrated.”

And some have drawn a straight line from that to the idea that people going to seminary these days aren’t considering parish ministry — more and more, they’re leaning towards other lines of work.

But research from Auburn Theological Seminary  and other sources suggests that picture may not necessarily be accurate. In fact, many seminary graduates are pleased with their theological training overall and have, during their years of theological education, moved towards careers in congregational ministry rather than away from them.

“Persons educated for ministry tend to end up in ministry, tend to stay in ministry, and tend to think that their education provided good preparation for what they are doing,” Daniel O. Aleshire, executive director of The Association of Theological Schools, said during an address last year. “The question about goals and strategy is thus not a question arising from crisis. The system, with its faults and foibles, seems to be working.”

Lee Hinson-Hasty, coordinator for theological education and seminary relations for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), said in an interview that he regularly hears the criticism that what’s being taught in seminary is not necessarily relevant to the needs of congregational life.

“Students, though, say over and over that they had good experiences in seminary and they did learn what they needed to learn,” Hinson-Hasty said. “And year after year, Bible and theology are at the top” of what students feel satisfied about.

There is really no other place equipped to expose students comprehensively to Scripture and give them a chance to seriously reflect on it, he said. Seminarians learn “to read through the whole breadth of theologians and sort out their own theology … ”

At the same time, however, some involved with theological education are increasingly asking questions about both what seminaries are doing well, and about what they need to do differently to respond to changes in the world and in churches. “We’ve got to keep imagining where the church is going,” Hinson-Hasty said, and to find ways to prepare leaders to serve in that changing context. Ministers need to learn to exegete Scripture, he said – but also the culture and context in which they’ll be preaching.

The Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, for example, has created a program to help train those who are interested in becoming seminary professors to think about how theology intersects with practical ministry. It is in part a response to criticism that some seminary graduates feel they’re not as well-prepared for the practical parts of ministry, such as pastoral counseling and administration.

In the sermon he preached in May 2008, when being inaugurated as the new president of Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Brian Blount challenged seminaries to consider their role in a world that is increasingly multicultural; in which many mainline congregations are becoming smaller; and in which important questions are being asked about how churches can be creative, entrepreneurial, committed to evangelism and social justice.

“I think that’s my fear for the church and for the seminaries that educate its leaders, that we’ll get too used to being ill and dying, that we’ll get seduced by the calm and peace of the tomb, that we’ll start decorating in there, make ourselves at home with our own decay, ignore the stench of stale approaches, and ignore the call to get up from that deadness and come out because, in the end, to be dead is at the very least to be comfortable,” Blount said in that sermon. “But let us remind ourselves about Jesus’ love. Because Jesus loves us, Jesus is not going to come to Union-PSCE or to the churches we serve and sit in the decay with us. Jesus is going to call … us … out! The question is, are we ready to come out?”

The research on how effective seminary graduates view their theological education also is providing momentum for discussion about the changes that seminaries are seeing in their student populations — and what they can be doing better.

“Generally, the news from this study is good,” states a 2007 report from Auburn Theological Seminary, called “How are We Doing?”

The study found that “large percentages of graduates assume the primary professional role for which their education prepares: leadership in a congregation or other religious organization. Attrition is fairly low.”

It did find, however, some particular causes for concern.

Seminary graduates tended to find the practical parts of their education to be less satisfactory than their grounding in Bible or theology.

And there are indications that women seminary graduates are still having a tougher time of it — taking longer on average to find a call; being less likely to be heads of staff; being more likely to leave congregational ministry within the first five years.

This study surveyed graduates of theological and rabbinical schools — graduates of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish theological institutions who earned master of divinity degrees, master of arts in religion degrees, rabbinical or other comparable degrees in 1995 and 2000. The study also compared answers that the students gave upon entering seminary and when they were ready to leave about what kind of work they intended to do, and how well they considered their theological training had prepared them to do that work.

“There is a narrative out there about theological education, which is widely believed, and that is that seminary deflects people who have felt the call to ministry from entering that call,” said Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary and a co-author of the study. The myth is that seminary “lures them into academic study or some non-church related kind of doing of good in the world,” and away from their original commitment to parish ministry.

A second part of that commonly-believed narrative, Wheeler said, is that “those who do head for church ministries, when they get into them find themselves woefully unprepared, and in the middle of a culture-clash between what are often termed the ivory-tower institutions from which they came, and real church life on the ground. And then they drop out at very high rates because of the shock of the difference. And none of those things proved true in this survey.

Seminary actually does the opposite of what it’s believed to do. It takes people who are very unsure” about whether to pursue congregational ministry, “and turns them in that direction.” The study found that some students who had not been considering congregational ministry when they came to seminary did, when they graduate, intend to work in parishes. Ultimately, nearly 90 percent of graduates of master of divinity programs, or equivalent programs in seminaries, divinity, and rabbinical schools, “go immediately into some form of professional religious service,” the report found.

Teaching practical skills

All of these findings have implications for the ways in which seminaries function. The report found, for example, that seminary students give lower rankings to their training in practical aspects of ministry — provoking a conversation about why that’s happening. In part, that may reflect a hierarchy of how things are seen in theological education with Bible and theology being given particular prestige, and as a result attracting acclaimed professors.

“I think that’s true,” said Ted A. Smith, director of The Program in Theology and Practice at Vanderbilt University. “There has been a kind of systematic neglect and lack of valorization of the practical fields. That shapes students’ experience; it also shapes those who enter the program for each.”

That also means, Smith said, that fields such as pastoral theology, church leadership, and homiletics have increasingly tended to define their focus not on what’s closest to the practice of ministry, but on more internal matters. One example would be writing more for others working in the field of homiletics, for example, than for those trying to hammer out sermons.

It’s becoming increasingly less common, Smith said, to find seminary professors with significant experience being pastors themselves. Now he’s working to help doctoral students approach the practical aspects of theological training “by diving into it in more depth and seeing all the complexity of the lived stuff of ministry, and saying that’s as complex and deep” as anything else.

For example, Vanderbilt is bringing in experienced pastors to assist in teaching doctoral seminars, working side-by-side with professors from the divinity school in an interdisciplinary setting and focusing on the intricacies of on-the-ground ministry. In one seminar on hospital chaplaincy, for example, ethicists talked about for-profit hospitals; Biblical studies professors about lament; church historians about the history of hospitals as institutions; and hospital chaplains about their own experiences with people in crisis.

Thinking vocationally

Seminaries also are focusing more intentionally on the idea of vocation. And research has found that it’s not uncommon for seminarians to move, midstream, towards the idea of serving in parish ministry. Smith, for example, not infrequently sees students switching from the master’s in theological studies program to the master’s in divinity.

 “I think each of the students that I have in mind came in on some level really wanting to be a minister, but there was some reason they couldn’t do that — they couldn’t tell that to themselves,” Smith said. Some had difficulties with the institutional church; some were uncertain; some needed to spend time with others who also were considering a career in ministry.

“The younger the student, the closer they are to college, the less focused they are” and the less likely to say they want to go into congregational ministry when they enter seminary, Wheeler said. “Those students are of the spiritual but not religious generation, who are very interested in exploring the big questions of life and want a committed life of some kind, and see seminary as a place to do that, but may have very limited experience of real church. … Congregations aren’t where college students spend a lot of their time.”

But some in theological education also are seeing the impact of programs at the college and even high school level — some funded by the Lilly Endowment — encouraging teenagers and young adults to consider how a sense of vocation might influence the work they choose to do. “We are just now beginning to see the effects of those programs,” Smith said. “They’ve really made a difference.”

And seminaries are not alone in nudging people to consider a career in ministry.

Hinson-Hasty, for example, learned a lot from his experience working in a congregation before he started seminary.  “I watched a gifted pastor at work and saw how he lived out his ministry,” learning how he used his time and what his responsibilities were, Hinson-Hasty said. He was given opportunities to lead worship himself, and to see the interplay of shared leadership between a minister and a congregation. So what the life of a minister might be like wasn’t a mystery to him.

In that approach, seminary does not stand alone in preparing people for parish leadership. It’s a process, beginning with baptism, involving seminaries, congregations, the movement of the spirit, the whole community of believers.

The shaping of a minister doesn’t start with seminary Hinson-Hasty said.

It doesn’t end there, either.

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