Churchmen are expressing new concern over the shortage of ministerial recruits.
Distress deepened with release of figures last month showing a five per cent drop in the total enrollment of member institutions of the American Association of Theological Schools, accrediting agency for U.S. and Canadian seminaries.
The decline, most marked in recent years, will be felt more intensely in view of expanding churches and increased church membership.
Denominational educators will keep eager watch on enrollment prospects for next fall. Unless a recovery materializes, there may be a clamor for emergency measures, especially if church membership continues to climb.
Enrollment in 122 accredited or associate member schools of the AATS during the autumn quarter was 20,032. A year ago it was 21,088. The new figure is the lowest in five years.
Dr. Charles L. Taylor, executive director of the AATS, said there is “no simple answer” to explain the decline. Among factors involved, he suggested, are the appeal of science careers, weak recruitment programs, increasing costs of seminary training, the end of veteran education grants, and growth of Bible schools offering a “short cut” to ordination.
(Dr. S. A. Witmer, executive director of the Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges, reports that 11,299 students are enrolled in its 48 member schools for 1960–61, a seven per cent increase over the 1959–60 total, an all-time high.)
The AATS and its member schools are “very much” concerned about both the quantity and quality of ministerial students, Taylor said.
He declared that to counteract the decline scholars are working “very hard” on scholarship aid, recruitment, and adequate housing for the growing number of married students.
In contrast to the trend, three leading evangelical seminaries reported record enrollments for the current academic year. Here are comparative totals:
Lutheran seminaries also showed an aggregate gain over last year, from 3,833 to 3,945, a three per cent increase.
Enrollment was down generally in United Presbyterian and Southern Baptist seminaries. Aggregate, comparative totals for the previous and current academic years show a 12 per cent decline among the United Presbyterian seminaries (from 1,613 to 1,420) and a 4 per cent drop for those of the Southern Baptists (from 5,056 to 4,850).
Here are comparative enrollments for United Presbyterian seminaries:
The Presbyterian Office of Information issued a news release this month giving the enrollment figures and an explanation from Dr. Hermann N. Morse, a consultant to the United Presbyterian Council on Theological Education.
“Keener competition from industry, partly as a result of the emphasis on rocketry and space exploration, is one factor making it more difficult for our seminaries to get the best students,” said Morse.
“Seminaries and other schools,” he added, “are still getting most of their students from the depression years, when there was a dip in the birth rate. We hope for considerable improvement in a few years, when those born in the population boom after 1940 will be reaching graduate school age in large numbers.”
The Southern Baptist seminary enrollment decline, while not as pronounced, nonetheless embraced six of the seven graduate theological schools. Midwestern in Kansas City was the only seminary to report an enrollment increase. Here are comparisons:
Other factors in the decline, in addition to those enumerated by Taylor and Morse, probably grow out of the slight recession this year as well as the increasing secularization of society, failures of homes and churches, and a tendency among “young moderns” to seek material rewards.
Protestant Panorama
• Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C., is now included in the Register of National Historical Landmark Sites. Known as the “Church of the Presidents” because every President has attended at least one service there since its erection in 1816, the church is located on Lafayette Square opposite the White House.
• A new motion picture depicting the struggle between Communism and Christianity in East Germany will be titled, “Question Seven,” after a pivotal questionnaire distributed among Communist zone school children. U. S. Lutherans commissioned production of the film.
• The Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges plans a survey of Christian education programs offered in Bible colleges and institutes. The survey will be financed by a joint grant by the Scripture Press Foundation, the Standard Publishing Company, the David C. Cook Foundation, and Gospel Light Publications.
• The Portugal Baptist Seminary in Lisbon is conducting classes in a newly-acquired 22-room mansion. The seven-year-old building is located in a fashionable residential section.
• The China Sunday School Association is launching its second half-century with publication of a new monthly. Founded on the China mainland in 1919, the interdenominational association now serves churches and Sunday Schools from headquarters in Taipei.
• North Africa Mission is sponsoring religious broadcasts in colloquial Arabic for transmission over station ELWA in Monrovia, Liberia. The programs are believed to be the first in that dialect.
• The Malayan Christian Council is coordinating translation of key church literature in the Malay language. The council has established a national language committee to foster the use of the Malay language in church work. First task will be to decide on a standardized translation of basic Christian statements and prayers.
• A Lutheran pastor was credited with saving the life of a workman who was overcome by smoke aboard the fire-ravaged aircraft carrier Constellation in Brooklyn Navy Yard last month. The Rev. Frederick P. Eckhardt, 35, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Greenwich Village, revived the smoke victim by applying mouth-to-mouth respiration. Eckhardt is a chaplain of the New York City fire department.
• A new Gospel broadcasting station began operation last month at Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society is sponsoring the project.
• Methodists in New Zealand will accept the transfer into their denomination of members of other communions “which acknowledge the Lordship of Christ.” Only condition is that the prospective member be approved by the local Methodist church.
• Five Canadian Lutheran church publications are studying a proposal to adopt a common format and a common printer, with each paper issuing an identical three-page news section as a monthly insert. The news section would consist of a sixth publication, the present New Horizons edited by the Canadian Lutheran Council.
• The United Church of Canada is recruiting doctors for a year or more of service in the Congo.
• The Protestant Episcopal Church is establishing a new religious cominunity in Shawnee, Oklahoma. To be known as the Servants of the Love of Christ, the community will be unusual in that there will be no age limit for those entered.
• A Negro minister says he will turn down his unanimous election as president of the Batesville (Arkansas) Ministerial Association. Said the Rev. W. J. Daniels, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church: “There are times when the president of the ministerial alliance is called upon to represent the alliance at public affairs and functions. I don’t want to embarrass my friends or be embarrassed myself.”
Mark’s Secret Gospel?
The world of New Testament scholarship is in the mood for new discoveries, its appetite having been whetted by the momentous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the less momentous, though still important, discovery of the so-called Gospel according to Thomas in recent years. The latest discovery to reach the headlines is of a far more dubious nature. Speaking in New York last month at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University described how he had found a copy of a letter two years ago when he was studying ancient manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba southeast of Jerusalem. The letter was handwritten on the back of the leaves of a Dutch book which was printed in the middle of the 17th century. Dr. Smith maintained that its authorship should be attributed to Clement of Alexandria, who flourished during the latter part of the second century A.D.
The letter includes, and attributes to a secret gospel written by St. Mark, an account of the raising of Lazarus (found only in John’s Gospel in the canonical New Testament). The fact that Salome, who according to the canonical Gospel was present at the crucifixion, is mentioned as being a witness of this miracle is regarded as significant by Dr. Smith, since her name appears in a number of spurious writings of the post-apostolic era and was connected with the libertine sect of the Carpocratians and with later Coptic accounts of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary modeled on the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. Dr. Smith predicted that if this letter is accepted by scholars as the work of Clement, then the origin and character of the Gospels would have to be reconsidered.
The text and extent of the canonical Gospels, however, is established on evidence so strong as to be unassailable. That there were many spurious gospels and acts purporting to come from the hands of the Apostles, but which in fact belong to a later period and are the products of heretical invention, is well known; but a comparison shows how unworthy they are to stand beside the canonical texts of the New Testament. God who gave his Word also preserves it. The suggestion that a reference in a post-apostolic letter (of which we possess only a 17th century copy) to a spurious document could require a reconsideration of the origin and character of the Gospels is remote both from reality and from sound scholarship.
P.E.H.
A Closing Door
U. S. termination of diplomatic relations with Cuba left American mission boards to decide whether to recall their missionaries. The U. S. Embassy in Havana advised all American citizens to leave Cuba unless they have compelling reasons to remain.
Mormon Initiative
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) is launching a program this year to build 250 chapels across Europe.
Church sources say the building program will be under direction of G. R. Biesinger, who was sent to New Zealand in 1950 and has since built 18 chapels there besides the $8,500,000 Mormon college and temple at Tuhikaramea, near Hamilton.
Baptist Ties
Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention met with representatives of the nation’s two largest Negro Baptist conventions last month to explore the possibility of closer cooperation.
A special joint committee was projected to do research in areas where cooperation might be possible, such as in education and evangelism.
The meeting, held in Chicago, brought together 25 Baptist officials led by Dr. Porter Routh, SBC executive secretary; Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc.; and Dr. C. D. Pettaway, president of the National Baptist Convention of America.
Southern Baptists and the two Negro conventions already are engaged in cooperative work in 17 states in missions, education, evangelism, and stewardship.
Jewish ‘Godlessness’
A year-end address by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion prompted a storm of protests from U. S. Jewish leaders. Ben-Gurion declared he had been misunderstood.
In a speech to the 25th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem the Prime Minister said that Israel must have more immigrants, especially educated Jews, and cited the Jewish law of the Talmud which says:
“Whosoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no god.”
The remark was widely interpreted as an accusation that Jews who choose not to live in Israel are godless. U. S. Jewish leaders promptly challenged the propriety of such an assertion.
Ben-Gurion subsequently explained that he cited the Talmud in his speech “when I was addressing myself specifically to the minority of Orthodox Jews.”
“Certainly,” he said, “I do not think that American Jewry is godless and it is senseless to attribute such a thought to me.”
African Rights
Two major Dutch Reformed churches in South Africa warned last month that if complete territorial separation of whites and non-whites is impossible, then full political and other rights cannot be withheld from Africans living permanently in white areas.
Joining in a formal statement released to the press were the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa of the Cape Province and the Dutch Reformed Church of the Transvaal. Both churches were represented at the December conference in Johannesburg which discussed, under World Council of Churches sponsorship, apartheid policies.
The statement of the two Dutch Reformed bodies was issued in the wake of criticism provoked by their qualified approval of certain resolutions adopted by the conference urging more political rights for non-whites and condemning various aspects of the South African government’s race policy.
The Ecumenical Summit
A summit with ranking Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox leaders may be in the offing, according to the new Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Canada, Bishop Athenagoras of Toronto.
The meeting may yet be arranged to take place this year, he said. It would include Pope John XXIII, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Istanbul.
The bishop has declared that in view of Communist gains a reorganization of the Christian community is necessary. He suggests a federation which would give equal status to the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican communions.
Russia got into the ecumenical act last month by dispatching Orthodox Patriarch Alexei on a four-week jaunt to Athens, Istanbul, and the Old City of Jerusalem. In Istanbul he conferred with Patriarch Athenagoras, but the substance of the conversations was not revealed.
Canadian Yapping
“Let’s stop yapping at the United States,” says the lead editorial in a current issue of The United Church [of Canada] Observer, the denomination’s official publication.
“Too often,” the Observer adds, “Canadians sound like puppies yapping at the heels of a big dog, knowing perfectly well he will not turn and bite or even bark back.”
The editorial says that while the United States has its faults, “she is the leader of the free world and is doing far more to preserve freedom and raise the living standard of poor nations than any other power in the West.”
