n late June the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University will launch a major revision of its standard course for preparing pastors for ministry, the Master of Divinity (M. Div.) degree.  Some observers call it the most sweeping change in the Seminary’s program in more than 40 years, and one that will have a major impact on students, church leaders, and especially local congregations.  Adventist Review associate editor Bill Knott recently spoke with seminary dean (and longtime friend) John McVay (above) about how the new program will change life for pastors and people in dozens of congregations across the North American Division.

BK: John, as I’ve listened to Adventists across North America, I’ve sensed that many groups of people feel they have a stake in how pastors are educated and trained for ministry. Congregations certainly care the most about how their pastors are shaped, but local conferences and union conference and division leaders tell me they’re also vitally concerned. I can only guess that you and your faculty colleagues at the seminary have felt at times as if you were walking a tightrope on this one.

JM: I’ll admit that there have been moments when those of us charged with helping to reshape the program have felt the stress. We want to deliver a top-quality education that’s fully Adventist and theologically sound and do it in a way that helps equip young men and women for real-life

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A Cooperative Effort

ministry in a local church. Keeping those commitments in balance yields what my psychologist friends call “creative tension.” We surveyed some 1,800 church leaders—church employees and lay leaders—during the process, and had numerous study committees and focus groups in different parts of North America giving us input. A lot of people have done a lot of quality thinking about pastoral education to produce this new program.

The very idea of a major change in the way pastors are trained for ministry implies some kind of critique of the current system. Is that an accurate assessment? Has there been a sense that the current program wasn’t yielding everything that the church in North America wanted it to?

A lot has happened in 13 years since the Master of Divinity program was last revised. It certainly was time to take this task up again. We also had a natural window for revision in that Andrews University was moving from the academic quarter system to the semester system. We were going to have to make modifications anyway, so why not take the moment to reflect in a more thorough way? We had also just completed in 1999 our own self-study report for our accrediting agency, and that self-study report sketched out some changes we felt were called for. All of those things came together to suggest that this was a moment to do some serious thinking about how we train pastors.

What features of the current program do you think were least successful?

Our graduates have been telling us through the years that they were very satisfied with the quality of their seminary education, and would recommend it to others. But I think many of us have been less comfortable about the ways we go about teaching practical theology and practical ministry skills. Our current “practics” program evolved over a number of years, especially in a dialogue with the North American Division Evangelism Institute, which moved from suburban Chicago to our campus nearly eight years ago. One thing that has proved challenging for us is that southwest Michigan doesn’t appear to provide an adequate laboratory for the range of needs our North American churches experience. There isn’t as broad a diversity of types of congregations here, and it’s been difficult to provide solid experiential settings in local congregations for students to work out what they’re learning in the classroom.

Was there some moment or event that provided the real impetus for changing the pastoral education program?

A very important conversation took place between the North American union conference presidents and our seminary faculty members here on campus in July of 1997. One faculty member remembers that meeting with this phrase: “The earth moved.” The call for change was broader than for what we typically call a “curriculum.” There was a sense that what was needed was a whole new “delivery system” for learning about how to be a pastor.  This new delivery system would offer the same curriculum, but in a very different format, and not all just here on campus.

How does the new delivery system differ from the previous one?

Currently a student from the North American Division graduates from college and is invited by a conference to join them in ministry for a couple of years. Then they come to seminary. They’re here at least 27 months—two years and three months on average— and then return to the field. From college graduation until they complete the Master of Divinity program can be roughly five years—

Approximately two years in the field, and almost three on-site in Berrien Springs.

Right. We wanted to see if we could work with the idea of a much briefer time in Berrien Springs and more time in the field. The new model looks like this: After graduating from a theology or religion course at an Adventist college, students are hired by a conference or by some other North American Division entity, and begin their ministry in a real-life setting. They’re also simultaneously enrolled in the Master of Divinity program.

So they’ll actually begin working on their seminary degree before they move to Michigan?

Exactly. Now a student will be able to say “I want to get started right from the get-go. I want to work out in my pastoral ministry this afternoon what I studied this morning.” In the new model the student will spend about two years in a real-life ministry setting before they come to campus, and they’ll actually complete one fourth of their degree program before they move here.

Mostly focusing on the practical courses?

Mostly, but not exclusively. When they come to campus after two years in a local ministry setting, they’ll spend 15 months here on campus—two full semesters, bounded on either side by a summer. At the end of that second summer they’ll go back to their field—with three-fourths of the degree under their belts. After two more years of field-based work, in which they’ll continue to earn credits through the seminary, they’ll have finished their training in about the same five-year span as currently.

But they’ll have spent almost four of those five years in the field! That’s a dramatic shift in the whole notion of where pastoral education takes place.

Very definitely. We’ve moved into this new model with the clear understanding that it involves the seminary in collaboration with a capital C—in ways we’ve never experienced before. We’ll be collaborating with local churches, with conference ministerial directors, with mentoring pastors and with our academic colleagues around the division in brand-new ways. We think that will be a tremendous strength and a great challenge, all at the same time. This is still coursework accredited by the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, and for students who don’t choose this track, we want to make sure our parallel programs, on campus and off campus, stay equally strong.

It sounds like there’s a much greater role for the congregation and the mentoring pastor in training new pastors than has ever been there before. What do you think a local church can do to help shape new pastors?

One of the best things a congregation can do is just be there and be the church, with all its joys and sorrows, all its needs and gifts, Sabbath after Sabbath offering up praise. It’s no little thing to offer a pastor-in-training a place right in the middle of a local church, where he or she can see real people, up close, while getting a top-notch education. A church doesn’t need to feel that they have to do anything grand or glorious or special when a pastor-in-training comes to live and work among them.

Let me push that a little bit more. Should a congregation that has a recent college graduate join it as a pastor think of its role differently in the new program?

Local churches will need to be aware that their pastor will have some additional responsibilities in the new model. The pastor will be spending, on average, 10 dedicated hours a week in learning, growing, thinking about ministry. That’s an important change from the current program. But more important, the congregation needs to get ready for a fresh level of excitement. The pastor will be ministering to them while being trained. The pastor will be learning something in a class setting and will want to experiment with that, or will have a class project that he or she wants to do in the congregation. There’ll be fresh initiatives, fresh ideas, fresh methodologies. That’s bound to raise the quality of programming and excitement and evangelism in the local church.

Picture yourself, John, as a local elder—let’s say somewhere in Ohio. You get word that a ministerial student who is also signing up for the new Master of Divinity delivery system at Andrews will be joining your congregation. How should you feel about getting involved with the program? Will you sense that training a pastor is something “we” all do now, or is it still the responsibility of “them” at the seminary?

There’ll definitely be a greater sense of “we” in the months ahead. The seminary faculty is eager for a much greater sense of engagement and dialogue with local churches where students are being trained. We think that it will become far less “us” and “them,” far less “seminary” and “field,” neatly divided from each another. We want to, in a sense, adopt each local congregation where a student is placed, and have them adopt us as part of one training setting for the pastor.

You mentioned a new role for mentoring pastors. Tell me about it.

Walt Williams has recently joined us as the supervisor and director of the “in-ministry” delivery system. He’s had experience in developing mentoring programs in two or three conferences around the North American Division, and has just earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from Denver Seminary that gave him special skills in developing pastoral mentoring relationships. He’s been focusing on “training the trainers” during the past few months, building on the successful programs that conference ministerial directors have already been developing for their young and unordained pastors. The mentoring pastors will be vitally important in advising and guiding those in the new program, helping them find personal and professional stability in those first crucial months of pastoral ministry. We’re searching for—and finding—experienced pastors who have it in their hearts to “pass the torch” of being a pastor and spreading the good news.

Are there other resources that will help to support that pastor in the field?

In addition to regular contact with Williams and the seminary faculty who will be guiding their field coursework on an extension basis, students in this new program will have a network of friends and peers in ministry across the country to draw on. They’ll meet each other in a two-week on-campus orientation session at the outset of their program. And believe me, there’s a lot of learning that takes place when a young man or woman calls up a friend somewhere else to say, “What do you think about this for a sermon topic?” or “Have you found any new ways to reach out to secular people in your community?”

When you and I were in seminary—a long time ago!—we took homiletics classes to learn how to preach. How will such a basic pastoral skill be taught in the new model?

When we took preaching classes, Bill, we got to preach at most two sermons over a 10-week period, and only to about 20 classmates. Moving that piece of learning to the field allows the student to preach not two times, but 52 times in a year. A student can present a portfolio of sermons actually preached to a real church, and tell us how those sermons functioned as part of worship events they planned. A local church provides a much more natural and wholistic setting in which to think and learn about preaching. There are still important skills that we can communicate best here on campus—in biblical studies, theology, church history, and the like. The seminary is blessed with an enormously talented faculty who will deliver a first-rate education during those 15 months here in Berrien Springs. But we know that some things are learned best in real-life settings, and we’re embracing those local ministry settings as a crucial part of our new model for training pastors.

How many students do you anticipate entering the program here July 1 for this first year of implementation of the new delivery system?

It looks as though we’ll have about 25 students participating this first year. We anticipate that when we’re up and running fully, we can probably expect about 40 students moving into this delivery system each year, for a total of 80 or more students in preresidence field education. Once the program is fully operational, there’ll be another 80 or more in the postresidence part of their coursework, or a total of about 160 students.

You’ve been using a metaphor as we talked that sounds intriguing. You’ve been talking about a delivery system for this new training program. Does it really feel like a birth?

Oh, absolutely! It feels like the seminary—this grand old institution of the church—is about to give birth. And it’s been a long gestation period—not nine months, but almost four years in this case. Needless to say, we just can’t wait for our new arrival!

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Bill Knott is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.