Episcopal Press and News
Episcopal seminary changes continue
Episcopal News Service. March 4, 2008 [030408-03]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The Episcopal Church-affiliated seminary Bexley Hall has decided to close its Rochester, New York, campus.
"We were too thin on the ground there to meet the labyrinthine requirements of the state and the accrediting agency," the Very Rev. Dr. John R. Kevern, Bexley's dean, said in a written statement sent to ENS. "So, with reluctance and no great pleasure, the Board acquiesced to the analysis of both entities, and decided to terminate the satellite M.Div. program as of this May."
Eleven of the 13 students enrolled in the Rochester Master of Divinity program will graduate in May.
The school will continue its affiliation with Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, where, Kevern said, "the seminary has continued to grow and flourish."
Meanwhile, the 2008-2009 academic year at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, will have a limited course schedule, according to a recent letter from the academic dean to the school's students.
The Rev. Dr. Ruth A. Meyers characterized the offerings as "kind of baseline, that is, the minimum that we can promise at this time" in the February 28 letter.
On February 20, the Evanston, Illinois-based seminary announced a major restructuring and discernment period. Saying that the seminary "cannot continue to operate as we have in the past," officials announced that the school will stop offering the traditional version of a Master of Divinity degree and would soon develop "a detailed plan for the future operation of Seabury, including a financial plan that brings expenses in line with revenues."
The announcement and accompanying resolution from the school's Board of Trustees is available here.
Bexley continues movement toward 'radical self-reinvention'
Kevern said Bexley's latest move is part of a trend for the 184-year-old seminary. The school had been affiliated with Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, a Baptist seminary in Rochester, New York, since 1968 when it moved from the campus of Kenyon College in southern Ohio. Bexley was part of Colgate Rochester, according to that school's website, until 1998 when it again became an independent seminary.
In 2000, noting a shrinking "client base" of ordinands, Bexley decided it had to become "light on its feet" by owning no property. Trinity Lutheran invited the seminary to move from Rochester to reside with it in Columbus. Kevern said the move made sense, given Bexley's roots as a seminary founded by Philander Chase on what was then the U.S. frontier in Ohio.
Bexley decided, with the help of the Diocese of Rochester, to retain a satellite operation in that city when it took Trinity's invitation to come back to Ohio.
In his statement, Kevern noted that the city of Rochester has at least four schools that grant the Master of Divinity degree and that the diocese there is involved in the local-training option available under the Episcopal Church's Title III ministry canons.
"Having started with only a Southern Ohio base, students are now coming from the Dioceses of Ohio, Chicago, Indianapolis, West Virginia, Long Island, Southeast Florida, and Michigan, for starters," Kevern wrote. He added that Bexley's endowment has grown "considerably, outperforming the market consistently" and that the school draws five percent from the funds. "We are thus not spending tomorrow's money today," he wrote.
Kevern also credits Bexley's growth to a decision to explicitly identify the school as existing in what he called the "generous Anglo-Catholic tradition."
"This has, in fact, proved a considerable draw to ordinands from around the country who identify with this tradition," he wrote.
The dean now describes Bexley as "light on property, grounded in doctrinal orthodoxy, transcendent in liturgy, with the explicit expectation of a personal rule of life, and progressive in social thought."
Seabury academic developments
The schedule for the 2008-2009 academic year at Seabury will include at least five courses in Anglican history, theology, polity, and liturgy; one semester-long course in congregational leadership; two January-term intensive courses, at least one of which will be in the area of congregational leadership and field-education work in both the fall and the spring, according to Meyers' letter.
Meyers predicted that a detailed course schedule would be available in late April, noting that Seabury students may also continue to cross-register for courses offered by other member schools of the Association of Chicago Theological Schools (ACTS). Students who complete their programs and graduate in spring 2009 will earn a Seabury-Western degree, Meyers said in the letter.
"We do not yet know whether Seabury (in some reorganized status) will offer any instruction on our Evanston campus in the 2009-2010 academic year," she wrote. "We are negotiating the details of a 'teach-out' agreement with [nearby] Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary to enable students to complete their studies. I am working with staff at our accrediting agencies, including legal counsel, to determine whether this is better done by having students transfer formally to Garrett-Evangelical or through continuing enrollment at Seabury."
Meyers' letter goes on to outline the components of such an agreement.
"Students who in this way complete one year of study at Garrett-Evangelical will earn a Seabury-Western degree," she wrote.
Noting that the smaller student body anticipated in 2008-2009 will change community life and worship at the school, Meyers said a committee of students, faculty, and staff will be asked to recommend how to manage those changes.
"For 2009-2010, we will work with students and faculty in spring 2009 to plan for suitable Episcopal formation," she wrote.
David Skidmore, canon for communications in the Diocese of Chicago, reported after Seabury's initial announcement the seminary's anticipated current fiscal-year deficit budget of $500,000 was a major factor in the trustees' decision. The seminary already carries a debt load of $3 million, Skidmore reported.
"We are on the verge of big change in theological education, and it is clear to every single accredited seminary that we can't continue doing business as usual," the Very Rev. Gary Hall, seminary dean, told Skidmore.
Both moves part of larger trend
Indeed, the deans of the 11 Episcopal Church-affiliated seminaries have been discussing for more than a year how their schools must adapt to that change.
Seabury had agreed earlier this year to participate with most of the other Episcopal-affiliated seminaries to consolidate their efforts in four areas of theological education. Seabury is to be part of a group that also includes Bexley, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, and Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking at ways to cooperate in the area of local ministry development programs.
The Very Rev. Ward Ewing, dean and president of the General Theological Seminary (GTS) in New York City and convener of the seminaries' Council of Deans, told Episcopal News Service in 2007 that that the deans had realized that because of financial restrictions faced by all the seminaries, "every seminary can't provide everything for everybody."
Thus, they began exploring how to develop "the kind of coalition so that each seminary becomes a gateway to the resources of all the seminaries."
"Some of the seminaries' very existence is threatened; others are simply looking at long-term development," Ewing said at the time.
In his written statement, Bexley's Kevern reiterated that prediction. "Most of the other seminaries will be faced with a form of this challenge of re-invention in what is now most certainly a missionary context to an increasingly secularized North and West," he wrote. "Solutions will be different, but the Deans, meeting together regularly, have committed themselves to be in close conversation with the national Church, and we applaud the House of Bishops having created a committee to examine the state of the seminaries and theological education generally."