Requiem For a Heavyweight

Requiem for a Heavyweight

On the Demise of the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry

In September, 1997, I enrolled in the Master of Divinity program of the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington (IETS of STM at SU). It was the beginning of the most transformative time of my life. I’d spent a lot of time in school before I got to SU. I already had a Ph.D. in history and J.D. What I didn’t know when I first entered STM at SU (we did use a lot of acronyms there) was just how transformative and how wonderful my time there would be. Seattle University is a Jesuit university, thoroughly Roman Catholic and more specifically Jesuit in its approach to education and to life. Just a couple of months before I enrolled the SU School of Theology and Ministry had created the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies. STM had offered a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree for some time by September, 1997. The School had worked with representatives of several Protestant denominations, including my United Church of Christ, to design a way for Protestant students to earn that fully accredited degree at Seattle University. The Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies was the result. It officially opened on July 1, 1997. It was a radical, even revolutionary thing for Seattle University to do. A Jesuit university was going to be educating Protestant students and forming them for ministry in a range of Protestant denominations. It was unprecedented. As far as I know it still is.

My experience at STM wasn’t perfect. It was after all human, and nothing human is perfect. It was however beyond wonderful. When I started I wasn’t even entirely sure why I was there. I just knew I had to be. I remember seeing that the M.Div. degree required two years of field internship. I nearly decided not to go. I couldn’t possibly imagine actually arranging such a thing, but I did. The student body at STM was about half Catholic and half some sort of Protestant. Most of the professors were Catholic, with one major exception. Many of them were wonderful. Father Mike Raschko, Ph.D. was the one from whom I took the most classes, six of them as I recall. Father Raschko is brilliant. He did a wonderful job of combining deep theological thought with a pastoral emphasis. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and while he taught at STM he also served part-time as a Catholic parish priest. Father Jim Eblen was another great one. Like Father Raschko Father Eblen is a Catholic parish priest. He knows Hebrew scripture backwards and forwards, inside and out. I learned Christian sexuality from a priest and a nun who are a couple in every way except sexually. There were a couple of clunkers. A class called Group Dynamics was a total waste of time and money, and I did a lousy job of concealing my disdain for it.

Then there was MTI, a class called Ministerial and Theological Integration. It was the class that went together with the students’ first year of field work. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the name of the woman who led my section of it, but the field work program at STM was designed and led by The Rev. Dr. Richard Cunningham. Dick is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and he put together a field work program that surpasses by orders of magnitude any other I’ve heard of anywhere in the country. I’ve always called MTI the class where they cut you open, spread your guts all over the table, and put you back together as a pastor. The class that goes with the second year of field work was called Supervision. I took it from Dick Cunningham himself. I can’t tell you how many times he told me to get out of my head and show some heart. He was right. Years later, at a clergy retreat at the local UCC camp and convention center, I got talking with a woman who told me that earlier in her career she had directed the field work program at Yale. She described it to me. I hope I didn’t show it, but internally I was just shouting NO! What she described was nothing but head work. It didn’t sound like the program focused on how students actually function in ministry at all. Dick’s program at SU certainly didn’t have that problem. It was all practical. It was all integrating the student’s theological learning with practical ministry. It was mostly because of Dick’s program that the first day I walked into the church office as pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ I knew I was already a better minister than I had been ever a lawyer, my previous profession.

At STM I learned the power of listening. One of the required courses was called Pastoral Helping Skills. I remember it as a class on active listening. I learned in that class and even more so in my work as a parish pastor just how powerful actually listening to a person can be for that person. Perhaps the most important pastoral work a minister can do is to let her or his people know that the pastor will listen to them. Listen deeply. Listen not to formulate a response but simply to understand the person to whom you’re listening. My ability to do that was a gift of STM.

My fellow students were as important as the faculty in the transformation I underwent at STM. They came from a dozen or more Protestant denominations as well as the Roman Catholic Church. I learned from my interactions with them how everyone has a personal story that shapes who they are and what they are dealing with. I learned that the Catholic students didn’t know the Bible as well as the Protestant students did, but I also learned that it didn’t matter. They were wonderful people of faith both deeply committed to their Mother Church and struggling with some of its aspects. On a couple of occasions I sat with wonderful Catholic women who were in tears because they so strongly felt that the Holy Spirit was calling them to the full range of parish ministry, and their church would never let them do it. Among my classmates were Roman Catholic priests and nuns from around the world. One priest from The Philippines told a powerful story of standing up to Ferdinand Marco’s tanks along with his parishioners. My fellow students enriched my STM experience immensely.

Now, while STM is not shutting down entirely, it is drastically curtailing its offerings. The M.Div. program has been suspended. The school may do something to help current M.Div. students complete their degrees, or perhaps not. I frankly do not expect STM to survive for long under current circumstances. Seattle University as a whole faces an enormous budget deficit. Apparently enrollment at STM has declined to the point where tuition does not cover the school’s expenses. I understand that the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the ELCA Lutherans have withdrawn their support of IETS. STM will not function again the way it did when I was a student there twenty and more years ago. I find that reality to be tremendously sad.

The demise of STM is part of a larger, nationwide decline in seminary education. Many seminaries have closed. In my UCC the seminaries in Maine, Connecticut, and Missouri are closed or nearly so. My UCC Conference Minister Rev. Mike Denton says that Chicago Theological Seminary is the most viable of the remaining seminaries because it has cooperative agreements with several other universities in the Chicago area and because it does a lot of its teaching online with students around the world. Not many seminaries will be able to set up anything like that to keep them afloat.

The drastic decline of the seminaries echoes the drastic decline of the mainline denominations generally. The churches we used to call mainline have been losing members and member churches for decades now. There is no reason to believe that that trend will change any time soon. In my UCC there are nowhere near as many fulltime ministry opportunities as there used to be. Newly minted Master of Divinity degree recipients must expect that any ministry position they find will not pay enough to support them and certainly not enough to support a family. I have thought for years that if anyone talked to me about going to seminary my first question to them would be “What else are you going to do to support yourself?” Most of us in one of the declining denominations find current developments in the church to be sad at best, but there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do about it.

So rest in peace STM. You enriched my life in more ways than I can recount. You prepared me for the last career of my life, the one in which my late wife said shortly before she died that I had become who I really am. I’m retired now, but the education I received at STM and the ministry STM prepared me for continue to enrich my life and I’m sure will continue to enrich my life for as long as that life may last. With the demise of STM we are losing an educational and ministerial heavyweight. Those of us who benefitted so much from her will never forget her. We pray for those whose lives are adversely affected by this loss—students, teachers, and staff. I don’t think they’ll find anything else like STM or like STM was. No such thing exists. Rest in peace STM. You were a bright light in my life and in the lives of so many others. We will never forget you.