David,
Thanks for your post.
We trust God to provide for our future. If he wants WSC to be in existence, then he will provide for us. If not, we'll return to preaching full-time. In my Christian life and ministry, God has ALWAYS provided, even in and through some fairly dire circumstances.
We do have a development dept and we do ask and pray for help, but we're not mercenary. I don't think you were suggesting that, but let me set anyone's mind at ease that we're not in this for the money! Most of our faculty are NOT as well paid as local ministers. Students whom I taught who just graduated routinely make more money than I do. That's fine. I don't minister for money. The same is true for the seminary. We don't exist to perpetuate our own existence. We exist to serve. If we thought we were draining resources from the kingdom simply to stay alive, we would shut the doors tomorrow.
I'm not sure how that "sounds," but it's true. We're here to fulfill a vocation. We're here because we love the gospel and the Reformed faith and want to do what we can to help advance the knowledge of Christ. To that end, I am zealous to see as many students as possible attend WSC because I think we have an outstanding school and I want to educate as many folks as possible. There are only 500,000 Reformed folk in the USA (in Anglo or predominantly English language churches anyway). We need to plant churches. We need to train ministers to plant churches. The need is vast (it's eternal!) and we are small so maybe (like some Marines I've known - no reflection on Rich!
) I overcompensate a little.
I did not mean to send the signal that we at WSC do not mentor students. Quite the opposite is true. We are deliberate in our out-of-class mentoring of students. Next to teaching, the best part of my job is going to lunch with and just talking with students, helping them to think clearly and biblically about their vocation and the ministry.
Officially, we meet with them weekly in prayer groups. We meet with them once a semester privately. We see them in class.
We have a lot more unofficial contact with them through email and phone and conversation and at church. There's been a real change since I was a sem student. I rarely saw my profs outside of class. That's certainly not true now. Some of my students have blogs, and I read them daily to keep up with what's happening with them. We see them in the hall and play football on the commons. I play quarterback. Even though I'm from Nebraska I can still throw a tight spiral for 20-25 yards. Not a great arm, but accurate enough for lunch time football. I digress.
I do wear two hats. I am first of all a minister of the gospel and I fulfill my vocation as minister in a seminary as a teacher. As a sem teacher, however, I cannot do the work of sessions and presbyteries. I cannot unilaterally decide that a man is unfit for ministry and chase him out of seminary. I can advise a man whom I perceive to be immature or not ready for ministry to wait or I can contact a session/consistory and advise them. At the end of the day, however, the visible institutional church must evaluate a candidate. As a school, we must not usurp the prerogatives of the church.
It would be very helpful if Presbytery committees and consistories/sessions would occasionally call us to find out how a student did and what our experience with him was. We often do not hear from Presbyteries/Classes until after exams and then only to complain. Well, if a man was a "C" student in seminary and he earned enough credits to gradute, what can we do? We're obligated to graduate him. Where were the complaining presbyters while this man was in seminary? Why were they surprised by his mediocre performance on the floor of presbytery? What else did they expect a C student to do? If they had paid some attention while he was in seminary they would have known he was a C student and that he needed some additional ecclesiastical oversight.
Some of our students never hear from their session/consistory or Presbytery/classis during their seminary career. It's as if they've been sent away to boarding school to be returned fully formed (often with no financial support either!) and then they sometimes complain that the "product" is not what (they haven't) "paid for."
For what it's worth, ALL our profs are ministers. All of them are required by school statute to be ordained to ministerial office or, by exception, to the office of ruling elder (to my knowledge, we've had one such in 25+ years, Darryl Hart, who is now a visiting prof). In this respect, I think WSC is different from other schools. We're all active in pastoral ministry. We all preach regularly. We don't hold classes on Mondays because many of us are away preaching and we don't want to travel on the sabbath to get back to school to teach on Monday. Our students are frequently away working in churches and they travel back on Mondays too.
So we try to function as ministers without usurping the role of the church. We do represent different denominations/federations. I can take a stronger hand with URC students than I can with OPC or PCA students, but we have OPC and PCA faculty who exercise special oversight over those students. We meet with them in intern lunches twice monthly to talk with them about specific practical issues in our various denominations/federations. So I meet with URC students and we have local pastors in to speak about ministerial vocation and other issues.
Frankly, because our academic requirements, we don't get many marginal students or students who aren't highly motivated. If they get in, they don't last long. If a student raises concern by his behavior or language or attitude or give some other signal that he might not belong in seminary we address it. Students are challenged regularly to look first to Christ, to believe the gospel, and then to apply it to themelves and to examine themselves to see if they're making progress toward fulfilling their vocation and not simply spending time.
Our student:teacher ratio is about 10 or 12:1 so we get to know the students quite well. We're about 140 students right now. I think RTS/J is about 500 students or so. It's a much larger place - students have to cross the street to use the library! Our campus is much smaller and a bit more intimate. There are no anonymous students here!
We are a commuter campus, but, if the Lord permits, we hope to change that by building on campus housing. That will increase our community with the students and their community with one another. Students do also help to keep one another accountable.
In short, we are a school full of ministers and ministers-to-be. We do live with certain amount of tension, but not ambivalence or confusion. We know what we're about and I think we know our duty and the limits of our offices as teachers in the seminary but we also know our vocation and duty as ministers in the churches. So we work hard to try to function in both worlds simultaneously.
I hope this helps.
rsc
