The changing nature of vocation
Forming new pastoral leaders for a new world
By Matt Forster
Photos by Allison Shirreffs
Calling. Vocation. Ordained ministry. Christian service.
These are the stock words of our work in theological education.
And yet their meanings are changing.
P erhaps not their literal meanings.
North American theological schools
still look for students who have a
call to serve God in some way that sets them
apart from their peers — generally as leaders
of congregations, but also as teachers and pro-
fessors, religious sisters, chaplains, denomina-
tional officials, mission organization staff
members, directors of Christian education,
musicians, and lay leaders of many varieties.
Theological schools have modeled flexibility,
creating popular new programs and degrees
to train people for these many roles. And they
have reveled in their broader calling to nur-
ture not just pastors for one denomination,
but a variety of kinds of leadership for inter-
denominational and perhaps even postde-
nominational Christian service.
But variety and diversity sometimes arrive at
the expense of clarity of purpose. A multiplici-
ty of degree programs attracts a student body
with many interests — aspiring worship lead-
ers to the master of music degree, future pro-
fessors to the M.A. in theology, retirees with
an enthusiasm for the Bible to nondegree cer-
tificates in Christian studies. Students increas-
ingly arrive at the seminary door with a desire
to serve God or their fellow people in some
vague way, but often they aren’t sure whether
they want to lead a congregation. Do theolog-
ical schools have a responsibility to help
them? To be sure, boards take on the respon-
sibility for ensuring that their schools achieve
clarity about mission and vision, but can they
also be responsible for vocational clarity
among graduating or even incoming students?
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Chandra Allen Payne, 24

Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
Vanderbilt University Divinity School

At Davidson College, Payne decided to participate in one of the

Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation, a national initia-
tive supported by Lilly Endowment Inc. “I looked at the program and at
first said ‘no way,’” remembers Payne, who had plans to become a
teacher. But she later felt an urge to apply. “I never thought I would
be in ministry,” she says, “but it seemed like something incredible to
explore. I’ve only known one definition of ministry, and I wanted to
know about other paths.”

Source: FTE

evangelical camp in California as a staff chaplain

Theological schools admit men and women who
are not simply responding to economic pressure to
earn a living, but who also recognize a spiritual
calling, the seeds of which began germinating long
before a decision was made to earn a theological
degree. As such, these schools are in a unique posi-
tion — connected but very separate from the com-
munities they serve. Theological institutions, of
course, evaluate potential students, but they have
little control over the church experiences (or lack
thereof) of those who apply. While the quality of
education a school provides and its reputation may
open doors after graduation, schools have little
control over how churches will receive their alumni.
Perhaps that is why board members must think
about how seminaries prepare their students voca-
tionally — not only how they prepare them theoret- was an aha moment. “There was this mental connec-
ically and practically, but how they help students
develop a vocational identity. This means taking
into consideration how the experiences students had thing I was supposed to do,” he explained.
before graduate school shapes their understanding
of the church and recognizing that the leadership
needs of the church are continually evolving.
Putting a face on vocation
According to a recent Auburn Center study (see
“Field Notes” on page 15), Christian and Jewish the- gifts and felt others reconfirmed. By the time he
ological schools in the United States are generally
doing a good job of routing students into pastoral
ministry. A high percentage of those who entered
seminary in the 1990s with vague vocational goals
left with a desire to work in a congregational setting.
The Rev. Mark Peake is pastor of First Presbyterian encouraging words from professors and others
Church in Pleasantville, New Jersey. Just 10 years
ago, he was taking his final load of courses at
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and prepar-
ing to graduate with a hard-earned master of divini-
ty degree. The road from seminary graduate to solo
pastor and head of staff of a small congregation has
been a formative one. For a time he worked at an
and later as part of the camp’s administrative staff.
While on the West Coast, he circulated his personal
information form (PIF, a Presbyterian resume) and
soon became an associate pastor at Grosse Ile
Presbyterian Church in Michigan. These experiences
greatly influenced his understanding of ministry. He
credits seminary, however, with giving him the basic
tools he’s needed to become an effective pastor.
Learning biblical languages, principles of exegesis,
church history, and how to think theologically were
just part of the story. When Peake first considered
ministry as a vocation, he was a junior at Elizabeth-
town College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
Involved with an evangelical fellowship on campus,
he spent a summer working at a summer camp in
Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Up to that point, he
had been planning on a career in law, but one day,
he found himself considering seminary, and there
tion, a click, when I realized it wasn’t something I
was just interested in, but rather, it felt like some-
When Peake went off to seminary, his vocational
goals were still fluid. At first, his experience with
youth ministry had him thinking of earning a
master of arts in youth ministry rather than the
master of divinity. Eventually he chose the M.Div.,
and while in graduate school, he discovered new
graduated, what began as a roughly defined desire
to serve God had become a full-fledged call to
congregational ministry.
Peake remembers moments of questioning his
calling while in school. At some of these times,
confirmed what he felt to be the moving of the
Holy Spirit, and his own vocational identity
developed from all these experiences.
The Catholic and Orthodox churches and nearly
all Protestant denominations have well-defined
steps that lead toward ordination. As a Presbyterian,

6 IN TRUST NEW YEAR 2OO8 | www.intrust.org

Peake was in close contact with his denomination
throughout his years in seminary. His Reformed
tradition, like others, teaches that three things con-
firm a person’s call to ministry: personal inclination,
relevant giftedness, and the recognition and affirma-
tion of the community. Peake had the inclination,
and his gifts for ministry were tested and confirmed
by his seminary education and field experience.
The recognition and affirmation of the community
is officially a denominational matter, but he found
much affirmation in seminary as well. “It was
encounters with specific people in seminary that
reaffirmed my call,” he says. Friends, professors,
and pastors he worked with all played a role in
helping shape his vocational identity.
Today, Peake sits on the Committee on Prepara-
tion for Ministry in his presbytery, supervising
students as they go through seminary and the
ordination process. During his own discernment
process and education, his committee liaison had
become a good friend, and now he wants to be
able to help nurture future ministers.
Vocation in its historic context
Dr. Malcolm Warford is professor of the practice
of ministry at Lexington Theological Seminary
in Lexington, Kentucky, and the director of the
Lexington Seminar, which offers faculty develop-
ment opportunities to Protestant seminaries in the
United States. As such, he has long studied ministry
in both its contemporary and historic shapes. The
vocation of ministry is not just a personal decision
made by individuals, he says. The community,
however defined, has much to say about whether
particular people minister and how they accomplish
that ministry. And there is, of course, a hard-to-
define but essential spiritual calling as well.
The Christian call to ministry, he points out, is a the actual community of the
large part of the meaning of baptism. “In the earliest church,” says Warford.
baptismal services, a person was baptized into the
body of Christ,” Warford explained. “At the same
time, there was a sense of being sent on a mission,
so baptism was both an inclusion into the commu-
nity and also a kind of authorization for ministry.”
Board members must think about how
seminaries prepare their students vocationally
— not only how they prepare them theoretically
and practically, but how they help students
develop a vocational identity.
From the earliest records of the Christian church,
new leaders were culled from within congregations.
Young people deemed suitable for full-time ministry
were identified by older and wiser leaders, either
from within the ranks of the clergy or within the
larger community of laity. But within recent
decades, Warford says that something has changed.
“A generation ago, people coming to seminary
came out of a whole network of experiences
and communities that nurtured and evaluat-
ed them, and in one sense encouraged
them into these roles of leadership,”
says Warford. Most young people had
attended parochial schools or Sunday
schools, they had served as assistants
during worship or as guardians of
younger children in the congregation’s
nursery, and they had attended religious
camps and participated in youth groups.
“Now, it’s not uncommon for a large
number of seminary students to
have had very little experience in
Instead, they have more

F U N D F O R T H E O L O G I C A L E D U C AT I O N M I N I S T R Y F E L L O W

David Chang, 24
United Methodist Church
Wesley Theological Seminary

The son of Korean-American missionaries, Chang grew up in Bangladesh

and India, where he attended boarding school. After studying psychology
at the University of Illinois, he worked for a year at a psychiatric hospi-
tal in a teen residential ward. “It was spiritually and emotionally hard,”
Chang remembers. “I found myself searching for a reason and a purpose
for their suffering . . . for evidence that God was still in control of their
lives.” Now he is preparing for ministry, planning to work with Korean-
American youth.

Source: FTE

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 experience outside the church walls — in evangelical
youth groups or Newman Centers, or mentored by
coaches or teachers. Their vetting for ministry, if it
has taken place at all, has often come from an
ordination committee rather than from the lifelong
nurture of a single congregation.
There are many possible causes for this change.
Warford suggests that congregations and denomina-
tions need to do a better job at encouraging people
to live out their ministry in the day-to-day world.
“I am struck by the extent to which we’re not real
adept at helping someone who all of a sudden
discovers the power of the Gospel — helping them
understand the way in which that can transform
the work they do as a lawyer, doctor, teacher, or
anything else,” he says. “Because the general common-
place is that if the Gospel has meaning for you, you
have to go to seminary and become a minister or a
pastor to express this new sense of faith.” That means
that seminaries attract enthusiastic believers who may
or may not be suitable for full-time ministry.
New students tend to be more individualistic in
their approach to ministry, Warford says. Rather
than being borne out of a community, these new
students see ministry as something they need to
bring to a congregation, rather than understanding
that their role is principally to equip the congrega-
tion to carry out its communal mission.
In some ways, seminaries have participat-
ed in creating this changing student
body. “I can remember when seminaries
began to appoint recruitment officers
— it’s been within the past 30 years,”
said Dr. Warford. “In an ideal world,
seminaries shouldn’t really ‘recruit’
students on their own. They ought
to be receiving students — eval-
uating them, of course, for
admission, but doing
that in partnership with listened to the stories of hundreds of young people
the church, not doing
it in the way your typi- that many students pursue a theological education
cal liberal arts college does, in terms of recruitment
and cultivation.” Of course, he admits, seminaries
are under great financial pressures, and enrollment
numbers are a big piece of the financial success of
an institution.
Given that board members are sometimes geo-
graphically removed from the schools they serve
and often well connected in their own communities,
they are particularly well placed to influence congre-
gations and denominational leaders to become
more active in identifying and raising up leaders
from within the community. At a very basic level,
board members can get involved in their own
congregations — talking with pastors about the
need to cultivate the next generation of ministers
and working with church leaders to identify and
nurture these individuals.
Help on the journey
One organization that helps identify, nurture,
and support young people with a gift for pastoral
ministry is the Fund for Theological Education
(FTE). Established in 1954 to “attract promising
but otherwise undecided candidates to seminary
education,” the fund received a significant grant in
1998 that made it possible to expand its mission
to “advocate excellence and diversity in pastoral
ministry and theological scholarship.” FTE helps
students with grants for graduate-level theological
education — some who plan to teach in theological
schools and others who are preparing for ministry.
The fund also encourages young people to consider
ministry as a vocation, working in partnership with
congregations, denominations, and schools to
identify leadership candidates from high schools,
colleges, faith-based volunteer year-of-service
programs, and seminaries.
Melissa Wiginton is the vice president for ministry
programs and planning at FTE. In that role she has
considering vocations in ministry. Wiginton agrees

FUND FOR THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION MINISTRY FELLOW

Kara Reagan, 28
American Baptist Church
Eden Theological Seminary

A second-year seminary student, Reagan works closely with youth groups and spent
the past year as a hospital chaplain. She feels “as if I’m being led toward campus
ministry, maybe even college chaplaincy,” and to other places where she can contin-
ue to explore life’s big questions with a group of faithful seekers. “My passion is to
challenge others — both believer and nonbeliever — to consider Christ, the nature
of the church and to find their role in it.”

Source: FTE
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FUND FOR THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION MINISTRY FELLOW

Zac Willette, 34
Roman Catholic Church
Weston Jesuit School of Theology

After graduating from Vanderbilt University with a degree in elementary education and a
self-created service learning minor, Willette headed to a primary school on a large Arizona
reservation. There he taught kindergarten and learned a fair amount of the native lan-
guage. Teaching 24 full-day kindergartners wasn’t all he did. Willette worked to help
found a college prep high school that opened a year later. The first of its kind in Arizona,
the school integrates tribal language and history into the curriculum and is still going
strong. His future plans: ministry that promotes education and justice.

Source: FTE

with only vague vocational goals and sees this as
part of a larger cultural reality. She makes reference
to the October 9, 2007, New York Times op-ed
column by David Brooks titled “The Odyssey Years”
(available at www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/
09brooks.html). “Adolescence lasts longer in this
culture than it used to,” she says. Students in their
mid to late 20s have not yet achieved many of the
hallmarks of adulthood. Career decisions are still
somewhere on the horizon, and there is a “roaming
quality to life,” as she describes it.
Students in this stage of life, she explained, may
experience an impulse to ministry. “Seminaries have
the opportunity to be companions with these
students as they struggle to discern what kind of
ministry they are called to do,” she said.
Working at FTE since 1998, Wiginton has seen
attention to the need for pastoral leadership grow
as congregations feel the impact of a generation of
ministers retiring. “When a pastoral search commit-
tee can look through a whole stack of excellent
resumes and find a candidate they want, people
don’t pay attention to the need to cultivate leaders,”
she says. “But when they have fewer choices — both
in quantity and quality — people in the pews do
start to be concerned. This is why it’s important for
churches to be continuously vigilant about develop-
ing leaders. When qualified candidates are not avail-
able, it’s too late to start looking to your young peo-
ple to fill the gap — it takes time to grow a leader.”
Another concern, one especially relevant to theo-
logical school board members and administrators,
is the changing leadership needs of churches. “This
is an exciting time for board members to be asking
themselves a lot of questions,” Wiginton said. “We
need a diversity of institutions to prepare leaders
because the church is so diverse. And so board
members can be asking, ‘What is the vocation
of this institution?’”
Most seminary boards would say that their voca-
tion is to train church leaders, but do they have a
clear sense of the kind of leaders they are trying to
create? If they want gifted, interesting, and amazing
students to become
gifted, interesting, and
amazing young lead-
ers, Wiginton says,
schools have to ask
themselves what they
are offering to support
these gifted, interest-
ing, and amazing
young people as they
discern a vocation for
ministry. Students
coming to seminary
following a vague “impulse to ministry” need some
direction. They may be invigorated and engaged
when they are ladling soup at a shelter for the
homeless or teaching a confirmation class or visiting
an elderly person or bringing Bibles to a remote vil-
lage in a faraway country. But she says that seminar-
ies “need to figure out how to imbue that activity
with the profound wealth of theological education.”
At a very basic level, board members can get
involved in their own congregations — talking
with pastors about the need to cultivate the
next generation of ministers and working with
church leaders to identify and nurture these
individuals.
Some observers are describing Christianity in
North America as increasingly postdenominational.
An increase in parachurch organizations, intercon-
gregational ministry organizations, and nondenomi-
national congregations suggests that denomination-
al loyalty is waning. But what does this mean for
theological education? Denominationally affiliated
schools have already noticed that students are often
more interested in the school’s geographical loca-
tion than its relationship with a particular denomi-
nation. Some find that fewer than 10 percent of
their students are members of the school’s sponsor-
ing denomination. Continued on page 24

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F U N D F O R T H E O L O G I C A L E D U C AT I O N M I N I S T R Y F E L L O W
Jon Bergstrom, 26
Evangelical Covenant Church
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
While a student at Gustavus Adolphus College, Bergstrom spent his junior year
in India, where he studied and worked with a community development nonprof-
it. Along with other student volunteers, Bergstrom says he gained new perspec-
tive on “social involvement and how the Gospel calls us to work for peace and
justice. It took me outside my comfort zone. But it also showed me how power
works within Christianity — how we are called to be servants and to give away
power to others.”
Source: FTE
Continued from page 9
This, of course, means that schools need to recon-
sider their own institutional vocation. Can they con-
tinue to train up leaders to fill particular roles when
churches are calling for different kinds of leaders?
Multicultural, interdenominational education
One example of this is found at New Brunswick
Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, New
Jersey. Founded in 1784 by the Reformed Church in
Boards should take the time to understand these
changes. They ought to ask themselves if their his-
toric mission and heritage can be preserved while the
school changes to meet the needs of new students.
America, the school used to attract mostly Reformed
students who went on to serve that denomination.
But for the last 20 years, the seminary’s evening pro-
gram has been attracting more and more students
from the surrounding community — students not
affiliated with the Reformed Church in America but
with a wide variety of other denominations like
Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and Methodists.
No longer mostly Dutch, the student body reflects
the diversity of community, including a strong
showing of Koreans, African-Americans, and Latinos.
No longer exclusively young, single, and male,
seminarians tend to be older, with many already
involved in full- or part-time ministry.
The shift in demographics created a challenge
for the school. Is the mission of New Brunswick
Theological Seminary to educate leaders for the
Reformed Church in America, or is it to form leaders
for the wider church? The school has moved deci-
sively toward the broader mission, changing to meet
the needs of the new students. Working with leaders
from local denominations, New Brunswick has
added courses that serve the particular needs of
Baptists and Presbyterians — classes that teach
24 IN TRUST NEW YEAR 2OO8 | www.intrust.org
denominational polity and history. Moreover,
African Methodist Episcopal students can take four
to five classes that help prepare them for ministry
in their denomination.
Dr. Mark Tyler, pastor of Macedonia AME Church
in Camden, New Jersey, is on the board of the
seminary and chairs the Institutional Structures
Committee, which is creating a strategic plan for
the school. Though Reformed students have become
a minority, Tyler said the Reformed Church in
America remains committed to preserving the
school as a center for theological education in
central New Jersey. He is just one of many board
members who come from outside the sponsoring
denomination. The non-Dutch, non-Reformed
board members not only serve as leaders, but they
act as liaisons to their respective denominations.
As Tyler and the board create a strategic plan,
the needs of the student body are being carefully
considered. For example, they are asking if the facul-
ty is representative of the community and if future
students will find professors that match their own
cultural and theological backgrounds.
But the board has many more questions to grap-
ple with as well. If the nature of vocation is chang-
ing, then boards should take the time to understand
these changes. They ought to ask themselves if their
historic mission and heritage can be preserved while
the school changes to meet the needs of new stu-
dents. And of course they need to know where the
money will come from. At what point should other
denominations start contributing to the operating
budget of a school preparing their future leaders
for ministry?
The challenges are many, but a clear understand-
ing of a theological school’s own vocation, along
with an active attention to the changing needs of
churches and students alike, will keep leadership
aimed in the right direction. IIT
Matt Forster, a freelance writer, lives in Goodrich, Michigan.
He is a member of In Trust’s Writer Workshop.