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When I look back upon seminary I invariably recall those few winsome professors who seamlessly held together love of learning and its role in ministry practice. They didn't just teach knowledge and practice—they somehow also modeled who I wanted to become, and they gently coached me in such a way as to know without knowing that at its best ministry calls for head, hands, and heart together. Because it shows how the best clergy educators do this integrative work, and much more besides, Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination by Chuck Foster and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is simply the most important study of theological education in a generation.1
Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination
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This study is the first in a series of studies emerging from the Carnegie Foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program. The lead volume for this series of studies is titled Work and Integrity. There, Program Director William Sullivan divulges the Foundation's root concern driving the program as a whole. Sullivan argues that the professions are impoverished today because of the rise of a kind of "technical professionalism" that has lost its mooring from a normative orientation to the broader public good.2
The movement in the 18th century from apprenticeship training to training in the university is the most salient factor in the rise of this sort of "technical professionalism," according to Sullivan. Whereas in the apprenticeship model, the dominant method for training was face-to-face time with expert practitioners, with the rise of university training in the professions a separation developed between the formal-analytic parts and the clinical and practical parts of the curriculum. Sullivan argues that over time the positivist cast of the university has instituted a hierarchy of priority among what he calls "the three apprenticeships": first priority (usually with the most prestigious tenure positions) is the cognitive apprenticeship, followed by the skill apprenticeship (often taught by adjunct faculty), with the third apprenticeship—normative or professional identity—left to ad hoc influence of particular faculty or workplace mentors. The lynchpin of Sullivan's argument—and the reason for Carnegie's keen interest in clergy education—lies in the revitalization of the professions. Clergy education, by combining professional and vocational formation, most clearly offers to the other professions a vital image of the third apprenticeship as a means to give moral shape and an organizing center to professional knowledge and practice.3
The clergy study focused on teaching practices at accredited seminaries from various Christian and Jewish traditions. The research team spent three years in pursuit of this core research question: "How do seminary educators foster among their students a pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic imagination that integrates knowledge and skill, moral integrity, and religious commitment in the roles, relationships, and responsibilities they will be assuming in clergy practice?"
In addition to tending carefully to a wide range of relevant literature and making good use of survey instruments, the research team visited ten seminaries in order to interview faculty, students, and administrators, observe classes, and participate in the life of the community (albeit for a very brief window of time—usually two to three days). Choosing "appreciative inquiry" as a methodology emphasizes what is already working and then seeks to influence change through amplifying these aspects. Thus when they approached 18 seminaries (representing Conservative and Reform Jewish, as well as Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christian schools) they explicitly requested names of faculty who were known for excellence in integrative teaching for ministry. Creative examples of a representative sampling of these teachers are peppered throughout the book.
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