LeQuita Porter:

In the dynamic landscape of religion, culture, and higher education, what should the next future of theological education become? Should it be a further accrual of intellectual and professional skills, or should it also serve to form Christian leaders with a deep, abiding, resilient, generative identity as Christian human beings? Let's talk about it today on The Distillery podcast where we welcome Daniel Aleshire, the inspiring author of Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education.

Daniel Aleshire served on the staff of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada from 1990 until 2017. First, he served as an associate director of accreditation, then associate executive director, and then he became the executive director in 1998. Prior to joining the ATS staff, Aleshire was a seminary professor for 12 years and, before that, a research scientist for three years. Among his publications are Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools, published in 1997, co-authored with Jackson Carroll, Barbara Wheeler, and Penny Long Marler; and Earthen Vessels: Hopeful Reflections on the Work and Future of Theological Schools. Join us as we discuss this book, Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education, which is a part of the Theological Education Between the Times series. Good morning, Daniel, and welcome to The Distillery podcast.

Daniel Aleshire:

Thank you, and good morning to you.

LeQuita Porter:

We're so thankful that you agreed to have this conversation today on your exciting book, I find it very exciting, Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education. Before we get started, I did want to ask a couple questions. One of them is I saw that your book is a part of a series, Theological Education Between the Times. Can you tell us a bit about that series?

Daniel Aleshire:

Since the 1980s, there have been efforts to try to define what are the aims and purposes of theological education, what's happening in theological education. The 12 books that are part of this series are part of a project that's been ongoing for the past decade and continues. As the title suggests, we don't completely know where we're going. The church and theological education are changing. There have been times of more linear movement in theological education. This seems not to be one of those times. So it's hard to predict the future from the past. It is an effort funded by the Lilly Endowment carried out at Candler School of Theology at Emory University under the directorship of Ted Smith to look at the variety of issues that are happening in theological education and ways it should think about going or may go, one way or the other.

It also was attentive that previous studies have had a rather unitary idea of what good theological education and who its constituencies are. This one by this effort has said, "There's a grand diversity. We cannot assume a unitary vision." So some of these books are written by persons of color, some of them are written by evangelical Protestants, some by mainline Protestants, some by Roman Catholics. So there's a sense that, whatever theological education is becoming, it is likely becoming many things, and a series of smaller books that look at a variety of issues in what it may become or should become would be profitable rather than taking a perspective of assuming there's one particular understanding of theological education that should guide the effort.

LeQuita Porter:

I see. So it's a very dynamic process.

Daniel Aleshire:

Yeah.

LeQuita Porter:

In your experience, I understand that you served as executive director of the Association of Theological Schools for 19 years. You also mentioned in your book that over the past 30 years you've had a lot of interaction with presidents and deans and even faculty members that contributed to your focus. Can you tell us more about that?

Daniel Aleshire:

Prior to becoming executive director, I was on the staff of the Association of Theological Schools for eight years, primarily responsible for its program of accreditation of theological schools. So that 27 years at ATS plus the 12 years I was a seminary professor plus the three years that I was a full-time researcher doing much of the work that I was doing on theological education actually become more than 30 years. But those 30 years was a rounding up of the time by a full 27 years at the Association of Theological Schools where our primary constituency tended to be presidents, deans, and faculty of theological schools but most especially presidents and deans.

LeQuita Porter:

I see. Is that the primary target audience for your book?

Daniel Aleshire:

I think so. What's interesting is that most people who work in theological education, their area of scholarly activity is in some other... No one studies theological education. They study Scripture, they study theology, they study history, they study the work and life of the Church and the arts of ministry, and that's how they come collectively to a theological school, but most of them don't spend a lot of time studying theological education. So this was an effort to write to people who are in the middle of doing the work of theological education that may not have thought about it in any kind of scholarly way.

LeQuita Porter:

I see, I see. So I guess that fed into your motivation to write this book at this time?

Daniel Aleshire:

Yeah. I think that there were two or three motivating factors in writing it. One was my sense of how the whole work of theological education had changed and was changing during my time at ATS and prior to that as a professor. I think that another motivating factor was that there have been hoped-for outcomes of theological education, like character and spiritual maturity, but have seldom been the clearly designated goals of theological education. They are presumed to have been a consequence of it but did not necessarily identify as a goal in it. I felt that it was important, at this point in time, for theological educators to say, "Yes, what we're hoping to do is to help inform people who are morally mature and spiritually mature in order to be leaders of communities of faith.

LeQuita Porter:

Now, you said earlier that this is a very dynamic process. I'm wondering if you could share with us what your overall premise is in this particular book and why you titled it The Next Future of Theological Education.

Daniel Aleshire:

I decided to take part of the time in the book to talk about the history of theological education among the various constituencies that have been involved over the last 250 years. That story is the story of many new forms of theological education. The idea of the next future was simply, this is not the new permanent future. None of these moments have been... They come, they become a focus, something is added to the work of theological educators, then things change and move in different directions.

LeQuita Porter:

I see.

Daniel Aleshire:

So the next future of theological education was a speculative statement about what should be, if not what will be, and the perception that this is not the only future that theological education has, but it's the one that seems to be on the horizon or, most importantly, should be on the horizon at this time.

LeQuita Porter:

So what theological education can become, would that be a fair statement?

Daniel Aleshire:

Yes.

LeQuita Porter:

Or should become?

Daniel Aleshire:

What should become. Many of these changes have not been... They've been subtle changes of what's in the foreground and what's in the background. So it's a recommendation of what has been in the background that should be brought more into the foreground of our work in theological education.

LeQuita Porter:

I see, I see. Can you share a bit from your second chapter? It's entitled “Diverse Histories and Common Influences,” a history of theological education. Can you share a bit about, I guess at a very high level, some of the types of theological institutions and how they developed over the course of history? You mentioned the Protestant, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, evangelical, and historically Black institutions. Can you say a little about that?

Daniel Aleshire:

The earliest kind of theological education was located in colleges and by those colonial denominations that would now be identified as mainline Protestants: Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. They founded colleges, and a primary goal of those colleges was the education of religious leaders. Over time, much of theological education left colleges and universities that had been founded to be agents of theological education and formed freestanding theological schools. That movement began in the early 1800s. Princeton Seminary would be an example, having been founded as the College of New Jersey of Princeton. But then the Church grew concerned that, as part of the larger educational enterprise, some issues related to the education of pastors might not be attended to properly. So a freestanding theological school was developed. The longest history is the history that would now be defined by mainline Protestants. All Protestants had more evangelical connections in the 19th century.

The next group that developed were Roman Catholics. As Roman Catholic communities immigrated to the United States, they developed different forms of theological education. There was a lot of anti-Catholic bias in the 19th century, and Catholics were unto themselves. They were also accountable as a worldwide church to Rome and to ecclesial authorities outside of the United States. They developed a pattern of education for ministerial priesthood that was different than the Protestants had in the 19th century. They were freestanding schools, but they were more tightly connected to the Church. The diocesan seminary was under the control of the diocesan bishop. The religious institute or order-related seminaries were directly under the control of the superior of the order. It was a different pattern of theological education.

Then after the Civil War, we start seeing the movement of historically Black theological education. The Samuel Proctor School of Theology, for example, at Virginia Union University was founded in a building that previously had been used as a destination place for slaves, for African Americans who were being sold into slavery. The historic Black theological education emerges after the Civil War when it became possible for African Americans to attain some education which had not been possible in slavery. Many of these schools were founded by Northern denominations in the South for the benefit of African Americans who were serving a growing and newly independent Black Church throughout the country.

Then after the controversies of the early 20th century and the modernist and fundamentalist struggles, identifiable evangelical denominations and movements emerged. Since World War II, over a hundred of the current ATS member institutions that would identify as evangelical Protestant in one way or the other were founded. So the evangelical Protestant seminaries are newer then the historic mainline seminaries and even younger than many of the historically Black theological schools that have their origins in the mid- to late-19th century after the Civil War.

There's not one story of theological education. There are many stories. While, for example, everybody's going to have a course in the New Testament, the version of the English Bible you may be recommended to use for your study, the text that will be used in the introduction to New Testament courses will vary by those four traditions pretty significantly. So you have different models of theological education that grew up at different times, particularly the freestanding theological school in the 19th century and then toward the end of the 20th century, the movement of many freestanding schools to re-affiliate with a larger educational institution.

In 1990, about 20% of the ATS member schools were related to a larger educational institution, and currently, it's almost 40% are related to a college or university. So there's been a movement back into the broader educational context. That movement was not so much an educational movement as it was an effort to reduce the cost of theological education and provide more efficiency of scale in the way schools do their work.

LeQuita Porter:

Financial considerations, yes.

Daniel Aleshire:

But still, if you go to a historically Black school or a mainline Protestant school or an evangelical school or a Roman Catholic school, you will know you're not in one of the other kind. They do similar work, but they do it differently in a different ethos and culture and context.

LeQuita Porter:

You mentioned in your book that for this chapter, Chapter 2, where you discuss these diverse histories and common influences, you got input from some of the other authors in the series.

Daniel Aleshire:

Yeah. Willie Jennings, for example, is African American who has had a career in predominantly white institutions, at Duke and Yale. Katie Day is African American who, like Willie, has had most of her experience in historically white institutions, at Brite and Princeton. I talked with them, sought their counsel about how to understand some things in historically Black theological education. I had worked with those seminaries during my 27 years at ATS, and about half of them in fact became accredited during the time I was at ATS, so we worked with them moving through their accreditation process.

There are other constituencies that have emerged that I don't talk about. ATS now has about 13 member institutions whose primary language of instruction is Cantonese or Mandarin or Korean. They are Korean, Asian, Chinese institutions, primarily founded by immigrant groups who've come to the US from China, from South Korea. They are forming a new model of theological education that follows the existing model but takes it culturally in different directions.

LeQuita Porter:

I see.

Daniel Aleshire:

They're represented in the work of Chloe Sun among the writers in the Theological Education Between the Times project.

LeQuita Porter:

Wonderful. After Chapter 2, you included an interlude. In that, you talk about theological institutions and history and their relationship to culture and why you felt some were maybe more successful in meeting those needs. You mentioned fitting in and fitting with. Can you share the distinction you draw between those two?

Daniel Aleshire:

It's not clear, so it's a great question. What I was trying to say is... Let me back up just a moment and say, well, these different strands of theological education have different cultures and different communities, but they have all been influenced by three different factors. They've been influenced by the culture. They've been influenced by what's going on in religion. They've been influenced by what's going on in higher education. So one way you could think about, for example, being with the times or in the time, religion could hold its finger to the air and see which way the wind is blowing and then remake itself in that image…

LeQuita Porter:

I see.

Daniel Aleshire:

...as opposed to there were certain intrinsically religious reasons why theological schools and the community they serve did what they did and they happened to fit with the culture or the history of the moment. It was not the school's choosing how to be popular or religion how to be popular, but there were certain religious factors that seemed to fit with the moment.

For example, in the earliest theological education, historian Glenn Miller points out that those colleges, those early colleges, Yale College and Harvard College and William & Mary in Virginia and the College of New Jersey, they really saw their primary task as the education of persons for either civic or religious leadership and both kinds of students took much of the same curriculum. There wasn't as separated a curriculum as you might have in a law school now or a theological school. That fit with the time because it was a time of the colonies were learning how to be colonies and then learning how to be a nation. Those kind of educational interests fit exactly with what was going on as the colonies were moving toward nationhood in the early years of nationhood. That's very different from where we are now and the place of religion in the culture or in American history.

LeQuita Porter:

You also talk about authenticity in theological education.

Daniel Aleshire:

One of the things I think that is increasingly important is authenticity in ministry. If we've come through a period where the authority of the minister was in terms of the learning and the knowledge and the capacity to do the work, which would be a definition of professional ministry, we've now moved into an area where I think, while those things are not unimportant, foregrounding is on their authenticity as persons of faith and human beings. In the language of Scripture, if you have lots of knowledge but you don't love, the knowledge doesn't have the same effect. There were times when the Church had a much more pronounced cultural presence where skills would carry it or knowledge would carry it. But now I think it has to be ministerial authenticity that will carry it, and then that translates into the need for theological authenticity and the work that seminaries do and in the education they provide.

LeQuita Porter:

[inaudible 00:26:00] preparation. Well, that leads us directly into what you are proposing as the next future of theological education, formational theological education. In your third chapter, you state the goal of formational theological education should be, and I like this definition, and I want to share it in parts: "The development of a wisdom of God and the ways of God fashioned from intellectual, affective, and behavioral understanding and evidenced by spiritual and moral maturity," which you just mentioned, "relational integrity, knowledge of Scripture and tradition and the capacity to exercise religious leadership." You do talk a bit about the changes and different modalities of teaching in that first chapter and how these have developed over time and even more so now, this book was published in 2021, I would still say in the midst of the pandemic or certainly the impact of the worldwide pandemic, and I’m wondering if you would add anything or change anything that you shared here in terms of the look forward.

Daniel Aleshire:

Many people think that the effect of the pandemic on the practice of religion in the United States was exacerbated, accelerated things that were already going on. It didn't cause new things to happen. We were already doing more with technology, and church attendance was already declining in terms of frequency. Other things were going on and the pandemic just became something that exaggerated all of those existing changes and took them to a completely new level.

My sense is that the level they're in now makes even more important some of the things I was arguing for in this, in that on the one hand, what will bring people back to congregational life, will make ministers about whom there's a lot of suspicion in this current era, will be authenticity as human beings, their ability to care for other human beings, their moral maturity and spiritual maturity. Those same pastors have to learn all kind of new things with technology, and congregations have to learn how to be online congregations as well as communities that are gathered. But I think that the importance of the kind of things I'm trying to argue have to come more to the foreground becomes even more important…

LeQuita Porter:

That's right [inaudible 00:38:23].

Daniel Aleshire:

...in post-pandemic religious life. I'm trying to imagine as I'm talking with you, how do you manifest these things when more people get their religion digitally? How do you show moral maturity? You can fake it digitally. It's harder to fake it when you've got real people who get angry at you or with whom you get angry, or relational integrity. These are things that are subject to digital play acting that are less subject to being falsified in face-to-face religious encounters. So I worry about that. Does the increasing digital presence of worship life and religious life make it easier for ministers to avoid some of these things that are really crucial, I think, to the character of faith and to the authenticity of their leadership?

LeQuita Porter:

Well, it's interesting that you should say that, and I hadn't thought about it that way, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. I do remember, though, that when it first started, that more pastors needed to be on camera with no audience in their churches. That it was very humbling for them because certainly in the Black tradition, the call and response is key and important, but that there were so many who struggled a bit because they didn't feel that, the in-person effect and, I guess, some of the charisma that comes with that helped to carry them through. So they had to learn a different way looking into a camera, or for some, I believe they put pictures of members on the pews in different places.

Daniel Aleshire:

I think good ministry has always had this relational component, and the pandemic took away the relationality.

LeQuita Porter:

Yes, yes.

Daniel Aleshire:

Even if it's not call and response in a staid white congregation, you can still look and see whether people are attending or not or reading their phones. You lose that...it's sort of a kinesthetic feedback, and it's most evident in a called-and-response worship context, but there are others. And we just lost that for a while. Some people have learned it's easier to go to church with a cup of coffee in their robes than getting ready and going to a place miles away from where they are on their one day off.

LeQuita Porter:

Yes, and that the key is miles away because many churches are miles away…

Daniel Aleshire:

That's right.

LeQuita Porter:

...rather than right in the neighborhood. You talk a lot in Chapter 4 about specific educational practices that theological institutions, as a whole, but also faculty individually can look to in order to accomplish this type of formational theological education. Can you say more about some of those practices?

Daniel Aleshire:

In the late '60s and early '70s when I was in seminary, having grown up in church, having gone to a denominational college, having since high school thought of myself as possibly a ministry candidate, the New Testament was taught pretty academically. It was important that I knew what it said.

What I'm arguing is that has not become less important, but that of equal importance is, how has this text affected me? So one way that in teaching of the New Testament, professors not only ask, "What did the text say and what did it mean and how should you preach it, but how has that text affected you? How does that shape how you understand your own faith or how you understand leadership and communities of faith?" It's the task of taking the historic content that we have learned in theological schools and being more explicit about, "What does that mean for you as a believing person? What does that mean for you as someone who advocates on behalf of this way of seeing the world, of how in your tradition the text is understood and interpreted?" So that's one way.

I think another is using the tools. I think that field education or contextual education was something that didn't happen in theological schools until the '60s and '70s. It really became dominant in Protestant theological schools. As it became dominant, it became a focus on how you do this work. But it's when you run into problems doing it, those are the soul-crunching times and to pay more attention to, how does that person's anger toward you because you didn't do what they thought you should do in that situation, how does that affect you as a believing person? Not just how do you handle anger and how do you respond effectively as a good minister, but how is this shaping you?

Ministry at its best is always soul crunching. People don't understand or they do understand but don't do what they know to do, or they do it wonderfully and lovingly and they never seem to have needed any pastoral coaching to get there. All of those are complex realities. So how do we take those practices in ministry contexts and see them not only as the opportunity to build skill and capacity, but to see them as the setting in which we develop depth as human beings and depth in our own spirituality?

Those would be two examples: one from a traditional discipline, one from a newer context, both of them always required in both master’s, a Master of Divinity and professional master's degrees in theological schools. It's not that we only do that. This is a story of bringing something to the foreground that's been in the background without eliminating the other things that have been in the foreground.

LeQuita Porter:

I see.

Daniel Aleshire:

That's a hard educational task.

LeQuita Porter:

I see.

Daniel Aleshire:

What the new education is that we are assuming more responsibility as educators for the character and the quality of graduates not only their knowledge and skill and ability to do the work.

LeQuita Porter:

As you speak, I am reminded of my field education experience at Princeton Seminary when I went to Jamaica and worked with a pastor who covered four churches. One of the first acts when I arrived in Jamaica a couple nights in, is we went to the home of a former member who was nearing the end of life, and it was the first time I ever had that experience. We sat at her bedside, and Pastor Laylor was his name, talked to me very [inaudible 00:47:19] about the process that she was going through and rubbed her hand. I'll never forget the compassion and the love that he showed in that moment and the amount of time we were there with all of the other...he had four churches. But the time and care that he gave really impacted me forever. That was on the front end of my ministry. So I'm listening to you and that comes back immediately.

Daniel Aleshire:

It is the reality of the experience that's the educating factor. A professor of preaching told a story about a student who had been in his Preaching and Liturgy class, and they'd gone over funerals and how to do them, what should be the liturgy, and what are the kind of things you may want to say. A student, a graduate called him the semester after he graduated and said, "I've got to do my first funeral and I need some coaching." The professor reminded him, "We went over these things in class," and the graduate said, "Yeah, but this guy's dead." There's something about the reality of death and life that you deal with in ministry that moves from the content, that moves from the propriety of what to say that is pastoral and takes on human substance.

So your experience is exactly the kind of experience... Whether that came to the fore in your field education experience or whether you wrote about other things you learned as your report of that for your conversation back on campus, I hope that the field educator would be encouraging you to process what it was like to feel those things and see that kind of pastoral attention in that moment.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen, amen, absolutely. You say here in the postlude of your book when you're talking about this notion of being the kind of Christian human beings, that you possess the professional competencies, but there's much more. It's more about the kind of Christian human being you are. You say, "Authority will accrue to leaders who have a deep identity as Christian human beings, who have life-centering religious commitments, whose moral and spiritual maturity demonstrate the presence of mature faith, and who possess relational integrity that reflects a faith in which God took on flesh to relate to the human family." For me, that says it all.

Daniel Aleshire:

Well, thank you for identifying that passage. That's an important passage to me. You asked earlier, why did I come to this? When I was a seminary professor, we had a course that was required for all of the students in our school. We called it Formation, but it really wasn't a formational course. It was more an introduction to theological education and to ministry. But early in that course, almost every time I taught it, I asked the students to think about the best minister they had ever known and then write down characteristics that they remember about this individual. Then I asked them to think about the worst minister they had ever known and to write down characteristics. We spent the class getting these characteristics, this really dates me, up on the chalkboard.

LeQuita Porter:

[inaudible 00:51:42].

Daniel Aleshire:

Then we noted that all of the characteristics most associated with those persons who were deemed the best ministers they had known were almost always about character, about spirituality. Sometimes it was that they really knew their stuff or they were really a wonderful preacher. But most of the time it was they were caring, they were loving, they were honest. The characteristics that got associated with the worst pastors, ministers they'd ever known were the antithesis of those. They were, uncontrolled emotions. They were, insincerity. They were dogmatic. The way they related to people was inauthentic. Then I would tell the students, "Okay, you're now embarking on three years where we're going to focus on this religious content, this theological content, these skills and practices of ministry. But what do you do with all of those things that you've now used as your primary criteria for determining who's a good minister and who is not?" The results were always the same class after class after class.

So after I was at ATS and we had a workshop for persons newly appointed to theological faculty, I did the exercise with them. These were new professors of New Testament, new professors of theology, new professors of history, new professors of preaching, of religious education, etc. I asked them to think about the best minister or priest they'd ever known, and then the worst, and to put their words together. Then we aggregated those words, by this time, usually using a computer projected onto the screen.

It was the same. Here were the faculty who were devoting their lives to the teaching of particular disciplines, but still when they thought of who are the ministers that are the best ones they've ever known and who are the ones that really were not good, they still tilted toward these more characterological, faith-oriented, personal authenticity kind of characteristics. It didn't surprise me so much that the students had come up with them. It surprised me a little that the faculty did. But it said that there's such a common understanding, at least I interpreted it that way, about these qualities and their importance for our being receptive to the work of the ministering leader among us.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen, amen.

Daniel Aleshire:

That's why I hope theological schools, and I think they are, as a matter of fact, taking these kind of things more seriously and bringing them from the background to the foreground and letting them have a place with the other things that have historically been in the foreground.

LeQuita Porter:

Wonderful. That's good news. That is very good news. Well, I thank you so very much, Daniel Aleshire, the author of Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education. You can find his book at all of your book outlets. Do you have any other resources that you'd like to share, Daniel, with us?

Daniel Aleshire:

I think the other books in the Theological Education Between the Times series have very insightful perspectives about a wide variety of issues in theological education. If you go to the Eerdmans site, you'll see all of those books as a set of books. They're available at other sites, but they're aggregated as the set of books in this project on the Eerdmans site.

LeQuita Porter:

Great, great. Well, thank you again for your time. You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, LeQuita Porter, and Shari Oosting. Our producer is Garrett Mostowski. If you like what you're hearing, and we hope you do, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app, and you can hear many other interesting discussions. And while you're at it, leave us a review and let us know how we're doing. The Distillery is a production of the Office of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Until next time, thanks for listening.