Urban Perspective on Pastoral Education

We cannot fail the cities.

IF Christianity fails the cities, it fails—period.” So says David Frenchak, director of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE), an agency through which several evangelical seminaries are making a partial breakthrough in ministerial training geared for the awesome challenge of city churches in the 1980s.

When critics of Christianity say that the church has already failed the cities, Frenchak, a Boston pastor for eight years before he came to the Chicago-based SCUPE directorship in 1976, responds that the charge is partly true. He gives several reasons why he and his associates in this pastoral education program make such emphatic statements about the necessity of a vital urban church ministry.

Reason one: sheer numbers. More than 47 million Americans now live in the country’s ten largest metropolitan areas, and all ten are growing. Reason two: credibility. The nation is watching to see whether the church can meet human needs. Reason three: basic theological considerations. Our Lord taught his disciples to help the poor and oppressed—the vast majority of whom now live in cities. Such ministry is not easy, but if the church is to be strong, it must exercise its muscles. If we avoid the difficult, we’ll grow soft.

Seminaries participating in the Consortium thus far are Bethel (St. Paul), Calvin (Grand Rapids), Mennonite (Elkhart, Indiana), Northern Baptist (Lombard, Illinois), and North Park (Chicago). Administrators of Conservative Baptist, North American Baptist, and Trinity have participation under consideration. Through SCUPE, which serves as the department of urban mission for each school, the cooperating seminaries make available a full year of specialized courses and practicum for students who choose it—normally as the middle year of a Master of Divinity program. The consortium’s curriculum combines intense academic study with field work to produce ministers, not social workers. It integrates sociological study with theological education, but it emphasizes parish ministry. What is the philosophy behind this? At SCUPE’s small, crowded suite, I interviewed Frenchak and three key members of the executive committee who also serve on the faculty. Each is a practitioner-educator with ten to twenty years of experience in urban church work.

Olson: As you see it, what special ingredients are indispensable for effective urban pastoral education?

Bill Leslie: Something that builds optimism about city churches. Whenever I mention the city, people go into despair. Christians need a truer picture of God’s ultimate triumph. They need a deeper understanding that Jesus Christ is as much Lord of the city as of any other place. They need to know that God is not bound by political structures or any other kind of structures. Effective urban ministers believe that even the gates of hell will yield to the presence of God’s people in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. They remember too that according to the Bible the poor are more open to the Gospel than others are. So a biblical optimism about city ministry needs to pervade the education of urban pastors.

Another indispensable ingredient has to do with values. One must learn to measure success in a city church by what’s happening to people. Not by “scalps, shekels, and sanctuaries” (to quote a student’s lament), but by God’s bringing wholeness to broken lives. Awareness at this point only comes through being present with people in their own setting and situation. It’s essential that the trainee live and work in a city parish during his education.

Bud Ipema: Experience in an urban community with impoverished people and with people of differing cultures is absolutely necessary. The actual doing of ministry or attempting it in such situations is vital. At the same time, the student needs to think theologically about that. He needs to talk to people with experience, with his peers, and with the people to whom he is ministering.

Certain theological considerations are particularly pertinent: the biblical mandate to minister to the poor—and the concept of God as just and demanding justice, for example. And in this connection the student needs both the theory and the experience of uncovering and using the special resources that exist in a large city. I find that pastors often fall short of meeting their people’s needs simply because they don’t know about the social agencies around them. An urban minister must learn how to use them. He must also help his folk learn to condition those agencies, to infuse good where there may be some corruption. This calls for special training.

Ray Bakke: A city is not just “normal life accelerated.” It’s a different kind of life. The average pastor without a specialized education just doesn’t know how to relate to a city church. He’s tempted in frustration to reduce the church’s message to a simple formula and to retreat to inner piety rather than to deal with the systems around him. So he needs a broad biblical concept of God’s kingdom and of the city church as part of that kingdom. That kind of ecclesiology can save him from two perils: existentialism (just running on feelings) and parish pragmatism (doing whatever seems to get quick results). Academic study alone will not give him that kind of ecclesiology. He must gain it through involvement with city churches that is combined with sound theological reflection.

Dave Frenchak: The city offers the church opportunities to be prophetic—to confront institutional and systemic evils. This calls for education that is not available in seminaries located in suburban or rural communities. The difference is not so complete as to require that all three years of an M. Div. program be replaced; but it’s different enough to require much more than a summer or two in the city. At SCUPE we feel it requires an intensive year of living, working, and studying in the city, with direct, supervised involvement in the ministry of an urban local church.

Exposure to successful models is especially important. Ray has his students look at nine different urban models to understand the wide range of urban churches. And at the heart of each student’s SCUPE training is his intimate involvement in a church where he serves for twenty hours each week under the direction of its pastor. Our former students say that our program opened whole new worlds to them.

Olson: Specifically, how does traditional seminary training fall short of preparing students for effective urban ministry?

Ipema: In traditional systems, students tend to see theology as theoretical rather than practical. Since so many of them are isolated from urban life, they relegate theology to the study section of their minds rather than learning to apply it to people’s needs. The theology of ministry often goes wanting.

Frenchak: If you look at the history of theology you see two schools of thought: the training of churchmen and the training of scholars. Our evangelical seminaries do train churchmen; but too much of the training is being done outside the church. Even the best of our seminaries tends to isolate itself from the very institution from which it is training leaders. There’s too little on-the-job training. The majority of seminary professors are academicians—they’ve never been pastors. I’d say that their awareness of the present urban church situation rates a score of three on a scale of ten.

Bakke: Theology courses are taught from an apologetic viewpoint more often than from an ecclesiological viewpoint. Apologetics is necessary, of course; but urban pastoral candidates need to see the nature of the church in God’s plan much more clearly than most of them do. And they need to see ministry not as a technique, not as something half-detached from the purposes of God, but as an essential element of theology.

The normal seminary assumes an environmental neutrality that renders it incapable of dealing adequately with the city. Most of their faculty members, administrators, and students possess such a middle class ethos and milieu (because that’s where they come from geographically and sociologically) that they can’t be critical about their attitudes. When seminary graduates get out into an urban cross-cultural or subcultural situation, that’s when they begin to say, “What I was taught doesn’t fit here!”

An inner city pastor’s counseling work, for example, differs from his suburban brothers. In an upper or middle class suburban situation the counseling often relates to inner problems—anxieties, neuroses, insecurities. But in a typical urban church, where most of the members are not professionals (but the pastor is and indeed must be), the pastor’s role is a bit like that of the old frontier pastor. He must sometimes be a paralegal resource, and sometimes a facilitator for many other sorts of human needs. To fulfill that role he must draw on a considerable variety of agencies. The urban pastor and his family need also to learn how to live in a city apartment, how to live with the public school system, how to be happy on a smaller salary than they might enjoy in some other church, and how not to look upon their urban pastorate as a stepping stone to a more prestigious parish elsewhere.

Leslie: Clearly, the best way to learn is on site. To get the flavor and the feel of the city, you must live in it—not just for a day or two, or a week, or a few weeks of a summer, but six or seven days a week for most of the months of a year. That way you can experience the city’s many different moods and surges.

It’s impossible for most seminaries to create credible urban ministry departments on campus. One problem is what it would cost. A greater problem is the necessity of having professors who are really in touch with the urban scene. You could take Ray or Bud or Dave or me out of Chicago and stick us in at the campus of Gordon or Bethel or Trinity, but in three or four years we’d be out of touch, because the city constantly changes. People who teach urbar ministry must be practitioners. They must use the city as their laboratory.

Olson: What common denominator, if any, do you observe in students who choose the SCUPE type of training?

Ipema: A high level of commitment. To choose urban ministry at this point is to decide to go contrary to the normal flow, which is out to suburban settings or to small cities. Apart from that, I think our students are as diverse in heritage and personality as seminarians in general.

Frenchak: I agree. Every one of our faculty members would say the same. Students in programs such as ours are not here because it’s another thing to do. They’re here because they feel they’ll be dealing with life. And they have a strong sense of mission to people of different national origins, rather than to people of a single cultural entity.

Bakke: Most of these students (and this also goes for the people who administer the program and teach in it) grow up as conservative Christians. Most of us came from outside the city, but we experienced a growing awareness of the urban problem and a deepening desire to do something about it. I think that pastors who come to serve in the city usually start out from parochial backgrounds. But their inquiring minds are unhappy with the average character of American life. They’re discontent with the priorities of the average church, the materialism, and the common notions of what success means. They’re not radicals; they don’t chuck the good things of their evangelical heritage; but in a quiet way they apply themselves to a different kind of commitment.

Olson: You’ve often described the need for well-trained black pastors, especially in the sections of the inner city that have a large black population. Yet you have no blacks in the student body this year. Why? How do you plan to meet the needs of blacks and predominantly black churches?

Leslie: We and our sponsoring seminaries face a challenge at this point, because our student body comes only from their student bodies. We need to help each other. Until SCUPE came into being the average black person seeking ministerial training would not choose an evangelical seminary because it simply could not prepare him for ministry to blacks.

Recent demographic projections by a leading black sociologist indicate, by the way, that the city is steadily becoming more pluralistic as blacks move out of the inner city and whites move in. In the 1980s the cities will have fewer all-black churches, and a larger number of integrated ones. I look forward to the day when white congregations will think nothing of having a black pastor, and vice versa.

Frenchak: Adding students from one or more black seminaries would increase the opportunity for cross-cultural fertilization, both in the student body and in the program in general. I have recently talked with John Perkins of Voice of Calvary and with other black leaders. And I am contacting black seminaries, inviting them to join the consortium.

We’re also deeply interested in placing students of whatever racial background in black churches under the supervision of black pastors, and we plan to do more of this. Even now, about half the placements are in either black churches or in churches with a large percentage of black members.

Ipema: Most of my own ministry for twelve years has been and still is with blacks, so I feel the problem keenly. I think we must remember that the SCUPE program has a broader purpose than to give blacks skills. The program has now developed to where it can serve black students well, and I’d like to see us move in that direction.

An important related question is, How do we expose nonblack students to black churches and to black culture? We’re preparing to do this by adding blacks to the faculty. We only have one black member on our board right now, but we will add to that, at least when we add a black seminary to the consortium.

Bakke: Your question requires several answers. First we use black and Spanish church supervisors in placement settings. Second, our students come from seminaries whose constituents are overwhelmingly white. As a link between them and urban Americans, we are pushing for racial, geographical, and methodological diversification in ministry. Third, we are also focusing on the internationality of cities. Worldwide, the major metropolitan cities are yellow (Asian); the fastest growing are brown (Latin American); even in the U.S., rural black migration to cities has been supplanted by international immigration from many parts of the world. Fourth, many urbanologists see a diminishing significance to race in urban America, and a heightening significance of class conflicts, which clearly cut across racial lines. SCUPE must address all these factors, because they make an impact on the urban church and its pastoral leadership.

Olson: You’ve mentioned the role of the pastors to whom you assign students for supervision of field work. What keys do these pastors hold?

Ipema: The pastor’s role is crucial. A vital function of the pastor is that of helping the student integrate into the community. He directs the intern in terms of the needs of that particular community. And, much more important, he evaluates the intern week by week. Not just theological reflection (which is important), but also constructive criticism of the student’s performance in a particular situation.

This of course takes time and energy, and it naturally produces some tension between learning and the practical matter of getting certain tasks accomplished. To give and to get as much as possible, a pastor needs a good image of himself. Is he reasonably content with his own abilities and with his relationship to his church and his community? Does he possess enough skills or enough ability to accept his weaknesses, so he won’t feel threatened by the intern’s questions? If the answer is yes, he will welcome the opportunity that the arrangement affords for him to both teach and learn.

Leslie: In coaching a seminarian, a pastor has to be open. A real two-way process will be of great value to both the student and the pastor. Both must be open.

Bakke: Many urban pastors did not study the way these students have. They’ve learned a lot by hard knocks. They may have had little chance to reflect on their hard-knock lessons. Yet they can make highly significant contributions to students’ training and service, because a student simply must have the experience of working with a good minister. Students need to know what a pastor does, from day one. And in return they need to support the pastors who sponsor them.

Besides coaching students in this way, the supervising pastors make suggestions about our program. They have a representative on the SCUPE committee. And together they teach a course called “The Urban Church as a Learning Laboratory.”

Olson: What specific skills do you seek to develop?

Frenchak: Here’s a list of seven, which we may rework somewhat as we go along:

1. Ability to analyze one’s neighborhood and local church.

2. Ability to think theologically on Christian mission in a city.

3. Knowledge of certain basic skills of urban pastoral care.

4. Knowledge of preaching and administration in an urban church.

5. Ability to work with other churches and agencies.

6. Ability to lead an urban community.

7. Depth of commitment, reflected in lifestyle.

There are many lifestyle problems for some of the students and for their spouses, especially for those whose field work is among the poor and oppressed. There have been no dropouts, however, in either year. Our students from last year without exception still prefer a city ministry, and some of them are already engaged in it full-time.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.