The Future of Anglican Theological Education

THE FUTURE OF

ANGLICAN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

BY GARWOOD ANDERSON, PHD

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ABOUT THIS SERIES In 2023, Garwood Anderson, PhD, dean of Nashotah House Theological Seminary, was invited by The Living Church to share his reflections on the current state of Anglican theological education and his projections for the future. The following three-part series was originally published by Covenant in July of that year. Visit covenant.livingchurch.org to read the original posts.

PART 1

A Dean’s Diagnosis

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o imagine the future of theological education in the Anglican world is to engage in a combination of prognostication and prescription. In this three-part series, I shall try to do a bit of both, but first a diagnosis.

We begin with the symptoms, focused on Anglican[1] bodies in North America, especially in the United States. We are in a highly dynamic situation, as can be witnessed by a series of events among the Episcopal/ Anglican seminaries even within the past year.

The breaking news is the sharp decline in residential seminary formation programs and the abrupt rise of distance programs and local formation for future clergy. Merely a decade ago, the Episcopal Church had 11 seminaries that offered residential theological formation

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— albeit in different configurations and some of us struggling, to be sure — and today, while nine such seminaries remain, only five still offer residential theological formation.

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In 2012, Bexley Hall and Seabury-Western federated, relocating to the property of Chicago Theological Seminary a few years later, and have pioneered an exclusively hybrid-distance or low-residency model.

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This year, we learned that General Theological Seminary has been taken into Virginia Theological Seminary and has turned to an exclusively hybrid-distance model.

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Church Divinity School of the Pacific, now in partnership with Trinity Episcopal Church Wall Street, has followed suit, no longer

offering residential formation.

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Episcopal Divinity School, once of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Union Theological Seminary (New York) have severed their relationship, leaving EDS an unaccredited institution.

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Finally, Trinity School for Ministry, while continuing residential education, has effectively severed ties with the Episcopal Church for a more exclusive relationship with the Anglican Church in North America.

This means that only five institutions traditionally affiliated with the Episcopal Church are now offering residential formation programs: Virginia Theological Seminary, Seminary of the Southwest, The School of Theology of the University of the South, Nashotah House, and Berkeley Divinity School, this latter being embedded in Yale Divinity School. As for embedded institutions or programs, there are several, some of which may boast a larger class of Episcopal or Anglican M.Div. students than many of the historic Episcopal seminaries, including the Anglican-Episcopal House of Studies at Duke Divinity and the Episcopal and Anglican Studies Program at Candler School of Theology at Emory.

No less significant, we have witnessed an upsurge of local formation options sponsored by dioceses or provinces, such as the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry, or the local adoption of the Iona program from Seminary of the Southwest, and the emerging plans for the Mercer School of Theology in the Diocese of Long Island. These and other unaccredited programs seek to make theological formation maximally accessible, not least for prospective parttime and bi-vocational clergy or for persons for whom either the expense or relocation to an accredited seminary is deemed impractical.

If we ask how this has come to be, the answers are not hard to find.

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institutions traditionally affiliated with the Episcopal Church continue to offer residential formation programs: Virginia Theological Seminary Seminary of the Southwest The School of Theology of the University of the South Nashotah House Theological Seminary Berkeley Divinity School (embedded in Yale Divinity School)

ENROLLMENT TRENDS

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ehind all that dizzying change are some straightforward statistics, all of us responding to them as best we can. According to the Association of Theological Schools data, there were 1,129 Episcopal M.Div. students at member schools in 2003-04 compared to 531 in 2022-23 (a 53% decline). There is a proportional decline in the total number of Episcopal seminarians, from 2,271 in 2003-04 to 1,050 reported in 2022-23 (a 54% decline). The situation for the Anglican Church of Canada is even more stark in its decline of M.Div. students (-66%), though less severe as it concerns the total number of seminarians (-25%). See chart on page 4.

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2003-04

2022-23

MDiv Total MDiv Total Students Students Students Students

% Change MDiv % Change

Total % Change

Meanwhile, although the ATS only began reporting an Anglican–Other category in 2008, unsurprisingly, this has become a growing pool.

2008-09

2022-23

MDiv Total MDiv Total Students Students Students Students

% Change MDiv % Change

Total % Change

It is important to note that these students are spread across numerous institutions, not merely those that are traditionally Anglican/Episcopal, but it remains significant that the overall pool of Episcopal students is shrinking dramatically. Given these numbers, it can be no surprise that numerous Episcopal seminaries are downsizing and reinventing themselves. While this is generally the case among mainline seminaries, even once-growing evangelical seminaries are not exempt.[2] Still other factors compound and exacerbate this situation — most obviously, financial factors.

Higher education is expensive, especially full-time residential formation — expensive to both the providing institutions and to their students. Small, boutique institutions, if lacking a large endowment, typically run with skeleton staffs, live with deferred maintenance, and still run perpetual deficits, nonetheless. Even much larger institutions have recently looked to downsizing programs and staffing and to property sales to secure their futures. Seminaries of all kinds and sizes are taking a beating. Anglicans are not alone in this regard.

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The changing demographics of seminarians is yet another factor. The time is long past when it could simply be assumed that the bishop’s directive to pack up and move to seminary was non-negotiable. Today, seminarians are quite often from a two-career household, and students and senders more frequently engage in a negotiation that will work for both partners, increasingly choosing a local or remote option over one requiring relocation.

Moreover, if the local parish “job market” is increasingly bi-vocational, part time, or non-stipendiary, it is thought hard to justify three years and all the expense. Even called persons with willing hearts may not be able to make the math work out.

Meanwhile, the rise of serviceable technology has combined with market forces to drive a decisive move toward distance/online/low-residency education. While this has been happening across ATS seminaries to various degrees for several decades, seminaries in the Anglican tradition have been relatively late adopters until very recently. While this promised cash cow has often failed to materialize, there is no question that there are practicalities and financial savings to be had in this mode of instruction. Convenience and perceived efficiencies are winning.

In the next two installments, I will turn from diagnosis to prescription.

[1] I will use the designation Anglican in the proper sense of those affiliated with the Anglican Communion or those drawing their self-understanding chiefly from the Anglican tradition, rather than its increasingly popular sense of those in North America who are eager to distinguish themselves from the Episcopal Church.

Where there may be ambiguity, I will use the inelegant slash for a double descriptor.

[2] Witness, for example, the elimination of satellite campuses by Bethel (St. Paul, Minn.), Fuller, and Asbury; the sale or proposed sale of property for Gordon-Conwell and Fuller; the decline in enrollment and reduction of faculty at Bethel, Trinity Evangelical Divinity (Deerfield, Ill.), and Southwestern Baptist (Ft. Worth).

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PART 2

Practical Prescriptions

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f we can acknowledge that the Anglican theological training enterprise in North America is at an inflection point, the obvious question is this: What might be done?

The expected answer will be ruminations on how to save the seminaries, which is an outcome in which I have a vested interest, but which we should also consider an unworthy goal in itself. If some of us need to be pruned, it will be painful, but so be it. The question is what the Episcopal/Anglican tradition needs to flourish, and the seminaries are important only in as much as we show ourselves critical toward that end. If there are better — not necessarily to say more expedient, cheaper, or less demanding—options, these also should be considered.

Here are some prescriptions under the heading of theses. This installment will focus more on practical suggestions, with more philosophical matters to follow in the concluding essay.

1. Remote, distributed, and accessible theological education is here to stay, but it is not the future.

The biggest misstep we could make at this critical juncture, with pressure on all sides, would be to follow the trends without sufficient reflection and without a clear inventory of what would be abandoned in doing so. While we can affirm these innovations and alternatives as good and necessary — my seminary was a pioneer among our peers in hybrid-distance and low-residency programs — if we do not redouble our commitment to residential formation, we will miss the opportunity to shape this most promising generation of future leaders as deeply as we might.

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Indeed, the entire conception of ordained ministry will change shape accordingly, and the lower price of admission will not result in its elevation. While a wholesale adoption of remote learning and of local formation as the expedient alternatives may well supply the church with clergy in the short run, it will severely under-supply the church with the leadership, the theological wisdom, and the continuity we need for the long run.

If there were two takeaways from the remote experiences we shared through the COVID pandemic, they were that it was heartening how much fellowship, worship, and learning could be done through remote technologies — and that it still just wasn’t the same, and for all kinds of reasons. Screens and speakers are not bodies with eyes and ears and dimensionality. The little timing hitches — “No, you go” — and the not-quite-synchronous body language cues, five senses reduced to two, and those two distracted — it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same because it is not the same. I know almost no one who at the end of it said, “Let’s do more of that whenever we can.”

And this is only an account of the classroom. Never mind the spontaneous after-class Q&A, the chat on the way to refectory, sitting around the table for a raucous to-and-fro, the interpersonal niceties of vesting for chapel, the late-night study sessions that lose their way (not to mention those that stay on track). Now occupying the space of all that ennobling human interaction, we have only the at once blunt and jagged social media alternative, with its incessant posturing, dissimulation, agonism, and wounding assaults. Truly residential Christian formation is not all sweetness and light, but it is real — charity and sin comingled, tolerance and forgiveness in generous supply, bearing with one another and forgiving one another even as God in Christ has forgiven us. Its alternatives can be good, but they are not comparable.

2. There’s residential and there’s residential.

That having been said, residential is a slippery word. Neither seminaries nor our accreditors draw any formal distinction between a truly residential seminary formation experience and classroom instruction that just happens to take place in-person. A seminary could be fundamentally a commuter enterprise, part time, or even a choose-your-adventure experience, and if the classes are in-person, it can be counted as residential. But this is a far cry from on-campus housing, shared meals, a fulsome chapel participation, and navigating a non-negotiable social existence.

While community life and corporate worship may traditionally be seen as essential aspects of ministerial formation, it is fair to ask what is finally gained through life in community. Close fellowship with others and “required worship” could most certainly be counter-productive toward their putative ends. Seminary communities are not always healthy, indeed, not infrequently toxic.

Seminarians — and perhaps even faculty and administrators — have ways of granting each other permission for behaviors antithetical to Christian godliness. The seminary is a temptation-rich 7

environment, especially for such social sins as hypocrisy, contempt, anger, bitterness, and belittling.

Bad habits are easily learned and hard to break. The histories of our seminaries are rife with the “works of the flesh,” as St. Paul would call them. And the seminaries have bequeathed many of these sins to the church in large quantities through the clergy trained in our institutions.

Here is a paradox: these very imperfect persons and the communities they comprise are the essential raw material from which sanctification is realized. Yet for this to be so in fact and not merely in theory presumes and requires a level of communal health — self-awareness, modeling, leadership, and intervention — so that what is not well can be made whole, albeit never perfect.

Meanwhile, a healthy community is stocked with sufficient antibodies so that its inevitably considerable imperfections and toxicities do not prevail as the norm. Since every community is a chemistry experiment — seminaries a new experiment every year — this requires a level of attentiveness and intentionality difficult to maintain amid all that it takes to make the trains run on time.

It is incumbent, then, upon the seminaries that still market the singular goodness of residential formation to tend those gardens such that they bear the fruit of the Spirit — against which there is no law but with respect to which there is also no guarantee or formula, not even residential formation.

3. Most Episcopal or Anglican seminaries will not survive as proprietary seminaries of a single ecclesial body.

As can be seen from the statistics I’ve noted, the Episcopal Church is not raising up enough seminarians to supply our current seminaries with enough students to remain viable. This was a point made emphatically by Chris Meinzer, vice president of ATS, to the deans of the Episcopal seminaries at our 2018 meetings. Only a few of us, he said, with scads of data to back up the assertion, are likely to survive if our only pool of students comes from the Episcopal Church alone.

Five years later, he looks like a prophet.

It is not insignificant, indeed ironic, that the January 2018 meeting was at Trinity School for Ministry, which has a strong enrollment of ACNA students, supplemented by its partnerships with the North American Lutheran Church and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, though at that time and even more now, with a significant decline in students from the Episcopal Church.

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Here is a conundrum, however — or several. A ready solution would be to invite Anglican–Others into the same educational orbit with Episcopal students. Indeed, Duke’s AEHS, Wycliffe College, and Nashotah House have been doing this for some time with real success. At the same time, the hurts from division, depositions, property disputes, and other legal actions, and a general environment of mutual recrimination, creates a public relations challenge. The mainline constituents resent those they regard as “schismatics” or “Donatists” and “Puritans,” and the newer breakaways are no less suspicious of those they regard as “liberals” or “woke.” While these characterizations may have little to do with life on campus or what is taught in the classroom, distrust and hostilities impose themselves on the institutions’ capacity to recruit students and raise financial support. It is not hard to understand why TSM elected a disaffiliation from TEC, though it remains to be seen if this proves to be a viable choice, given the significant differences that exist even within the ACNA on issues deemed fundamental, such as the ordination of women to the priesthood.

If a mixed ecclesial economy is a necessary part of the answer, the constituencies of the seminaries able to provide this option need to give their permission, lest the wounds of the past finish their work by leaving these same constituencies bereft of centers for training their clergy. Moreover, for those of us committed to this vision, the motivation is not first pragmatic but the imperative of a gospel that reconciles once-estranged persons to one another in Christ.

Meanwhile, most of the Episcopal seminaries are not able to broaden their constituencies to Anglican–Other since these are characteristically conservative bodies with deep-seated suspicion, rising to antipathy, toward the mainstream and progressive end of the Episcopal Church represented in its seminaries. Therefore, proprietary institutions without substantial endowments funding generous scholarships are likely to meet the fate that Meinzer prognosticated in 2018.

4. The Anglican studies programs embedded in nonAnglican seminaries are arguably the most sustainable business model, but if this comes at the expense of the Anglican seminaries, it will prove costly.

A good case can be made that Anglican programs or institutions embedded in larger seminaries or divinity schools is a promising model for the future. Yale, Duke, Candler, Princeton, among others, enjoy strong faculties across theological disciplines and the financial and prestige resources that are the envy of the smaller stand-alone alternatives. Theoretically, this could be the best of all possible worlds.

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At the same time, for all the scholarly and administrative resources, it is unlikely that such institutions can finally match the tradition-specific formation characteristic of the bonded, liturgical, and peculiar communities. For starters, the offerings of the “Anglican studies” curricula typically pale in comparison to the thoroughly Anglican alternatives. A survey of websites or catalogs will show that in liturgics, Anglican history, polity, ascetical theology, sacramental theology and so on, the offerings are not comparable. Furthermore, while the diversity of perspectives offered by the transdenominational institutions is clearly a certain kind of benefit, it is not the case that some theological subject matter is sufficiently generic such that it can be taught from any vantage without loss, while only a few disciplines are “Anglican.”

As one teaching in one of the “generic” disciplines — biblical studies — I can say without exaggeration that Anglicanism and the Catholic theological inheritance inform and even determine the syllabus of every course and directly or indirectly bear upon every lecture. For example, in our Introduction to Biblical Interpretation course, we read daily from Cranmer’s “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” and we discuss explicit and implicit hermeneutical commitments enshrined in our formularies and history. Likewise, sacraments, church order, homiletical reflection, canon consciousness, a sense for the place of Holy Scripture in the economy of salvation, an openness to the plenary senses of Scripture, a favorable regard for developments from the first century to the second and following, an awareness of Christian Wirkungsgeschichte, and so on — these comprise, for me and my biblical studies colleagues, an Anglican course in Holy Scripture. And it is not generic.

In many respects, as a “business model,” the Anglican Studies tracks or embedded programs are arguably the best model, but no one should assume that these are quite the same as an Anglican seminary — better in certain ways, lacking in others.

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PART 3

Philosophical Prescriptions

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aving now provided a diagnosis of the inflection point facing theological education, including but not limited to Anglican formation, and suggested several more practically oriented considerations, in this final part, I invite us to step back and consider the bigger picture.

1. The way forward is to think backwards.

By “backwards” I don’t mean a return to mythical good old days so much as starting with the end in mind. One affliction of all higher ed, possibly seminaries more than anywhere else, is that the point of reference is typically what we have done in the recent past, what we are doing now, and what we now need to do to catch up, keep up, or otherwise secure a future. This is a hamster wheel — starting with givens often followed by half-measures.

The future shape of theological education is a question that ought not be answered exclusively by what we think is possible or where we see things heading, but by what we want for the church.

Sadly, many are envisioning a future for the church and for theological education whereby we meet each other at the nadir of both. It is important to know the trends, but it may be more important to defy them.

If instead of what we expect we ask what we want, the answer should be an orthodox and learned clergy, composed of holy and virtuous persons, applying wisdom and skill to advance the mission of the church. So, learned, virtuous, and skillful clergy are the order of the day and perhaps always have or should have been.

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The future shape of theological education is a question that ought not be answered exclusively by what we think is possible or where we see things heading, but by what we want for the church.

If that seems uncontroversial, I would hope so, but it could be noted that these characteristics are not found abundantly in this combination, and seminaries increasingly find more barriers toward their fulfillment than might have once been the case. As for a learned clergy, expectations have decreased as we have shortened the path through the M.Div. Most Episcopal seminaries have reduced the M.Div. to the Association of Theological Schools’ minimum of 72 credits, have eliminated requirements in biblical languages, while also having limited coursework in biblical studies, have a minimal expectation for systematic and historical theology, and have little more than the bare essentials in liturgical training. And this is the M.Div., the demanding, professional degree. Many are prepared and ordained with much less. It is even harder for most seminaries to take an active role in moral and spiritual formation. Since moral norms are not widely agreed upon, the lowest common denominator will tend toward interpersonal courtesy because it is the pragmatic necessity of the seminary community and a useful virtue in public ministry. While this is a good thing, it is not a high bar. And it no secret that many disappointing, failed, or disastrous parish ministry tenures are born in clergy character deficits.

If seminaries are doing one thing generally well, it is preparing their graduates with fundamental skills for parish ministry. The curricula reveal this priority. Yet, even here, it must be said that the breadth of skill expected or hoped for is a tall order. More significantly, the parish ministry for which they are being prepared is not directed toward the crying need of churches that are in severe decline. It is not for the ministry of church planting; it is not for turning around a declining parish from imminent hospice care back to health; it is not evangelizing the unchurched or reaching those who have given up on the Christian faith to give it yet another chance. You could not discern through our seminary curricula that we are serving a church in severe decline. Damning though it may be to say this, seminarians are not being equipped as a priority for obeying the Great Commission.

Admittedly, this is a fraught agenda. In the aftermath of the church growth movement and in view of the scandal-rocked megachurch phenomenon, Anglicanism is for many a breath of fresh air, to the extent that it eschews the desperation of trendiness and minimizes the personality cult. I would most certainly not argue for renewing a church growth movement with its tried-and-true and “what people want today” confidence in marketing and technique. At the same time, the very attraction of our tradition, with all its variations, appeals differently to its clergy and their would-be successors than it does to people in the pews — or, more pointedly, not in the pews. Where our 12

clergy have found refuge may not be the places other people find life.

It is a comforting half-truth, if not canard, in theologically conservative circles to blame the church’s decline on the advance of theological liberals or the encroachment of progressivism. While I believe this is not without basis, it is a much too simple and self-justifying narrative and admitting far too many exceptions — failing conservatives and flourishing liberals — to work as a onesize-fits-all hypothesis. Conservatives believe that theological orthodoxy and the word faithfully proclaimed will be self-authenticating and the only hope of outlasting the winds of cultural change.

Traditionalists — maybe conservative also, but of another sort — understand the cultural goods of the church, its virtues and aesthetics, as its chief donation. Progressives believe that righting the church’s longstanding wrong-side-of-history track record will show that religion is a social and political good and the church is a key component for our shared desire to make the world a better place. Yet whether through Bible preaching and catechesis, refined liturgies and glorious aesthetics, or community activism, the priorities remain institutional self-perpetuation rather than reaching and discipling lost persons — if, indeed, we think there is such a thing.

2. Let’s take paths of more resistance.

While remote education and local formation should be viewed as commendably adaptive to changing circumstances, they can also be a sign of hopelessness or fatalism. Rather than valorizing convenience, accessibility, and business opportunity, we should acknowledge these paths of least resistance for the temptation they are. Perhaps we should strive toward a different target: how, acknowledging circumstances, can we together do the best, rather than the easiest, for everyone?

For someone “reading for orders,” it will almost certainly be an improvement to join an accredited hybrid-distance cohort under the instruction of bona fide and seasoned educators. For those who think they can only manage an asynchronous, fully distance course of study, they should be pushed and encouraged and supported toward a low-residency alternative. They will not regret it. And for those who say a hybrid-distance or a commuter existence is all they can manage, bishops and commissions on ministry and sponsoring parishes should give every possible effort to support them toward the goods of residential formation. We should not settle for paths of least resistance if our goal is paths of discipleship.

Here I note diverging paths between two competing narratives. It is frequently claimed that there are fewer parish jobs available, especially full time, fully funded, and that what is needed are bivocational or non-stipendiary candidates. I don’t doubt that this is true. Just as true is the testimony of seminary deans, including me, and diocesan transition officers, that we do not have nearly enough graduates to place in the openings that come our way. While our placement rate for M.Divs. is effectively 100%; we could easily place two or even three times as many graduates as we

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have each year. The “there are fewer and fewer jobs” narrative is not entirely true, especially with the recent disclosure that 50% of Episcopal Church clergy will be of retirement age in the next 10 years.[1] Much hinges on which of these two narratives informs our choices and which data confirm our biases. If we follow the decline narrative of fewer openings, sending persons off to seminaries for a M.Div. will seem a luxury or worse. If we embrace a visionary opportunist narrative, we will call the best and brightest and stock the church with those capable of leading her into an envisioned future. This is an enactment of the proverb that “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”

It is not hard to understand why bishops and dioceses are scrambling to fill part time or bivocational openings for faithful parishioners whose only “fault” is having loved a parish that declined from its former halcyon days. This is good and important work, and the training of clergy open to and adequate for these tasks is important. But unless there is a supply of gifted, especially welltrained, and eventually well-seasoned clergy, most parishes will go the way of these unable to support a full-time priest, much less a team. The well-motivated drive to fill openings is not the same as preparing exceptional leaders for the future.

3. Decline is opportunity.

While narratives of religious decline can be commended for their honesty, they frequently become something else. They can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy of fatalism. I am certain I am not the only one to watch congregations or even clergy throw up their hands in helplessness, taking comfort in a changing religious landscape that functions as a satisfactory explanation for the decline of their parish or diocese. Demographics, migrations, and housing patterns are also factors — possibly insurmountable. But if one looks closer, to ask what sorts of commitments have been made together — in sacrificial giving, in service, in hospitality, in openness to the sorts of change that would open our communities, and in defiance of such theological innovations as leave the church barren — if we ask whether we actually wish for a faithful and flourishing church, the answer is unclear if measured by our commitments. There are, for example, far too many parishes that have decided they “cannot afford” a full-time priest, when it is mathematically beyond dispute that a congregation that was merely tithing could afford that and launch into new opportunities.

If that is the self-justifying appeal of the decline narrative, its subtler counterpart is the selfcongratulatory version. Here the decline of our church is attributed to our uniquely good taste, or our brave stances on matters of social justice, or our (environmentally conscious) slower rate of procreation and so on. Self-justification and self-congratulation are compensations for our inability to speak the truth to ourselves.

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Twice recently I had the privilege of visiting Detroit. If you visited Detroit 25 years ago, you might not have used the word privilege. But the burned-out, blighted ghost town of the turn of the century is becoming a thriving, bustling, multiethnic, contemporary city that has been significantly transformed from a stay-away into a go-to city. Not everywhere, and certainly not for everyone, of course — urban redevelopment is almost always a mixed bag. But it would have been hard to predict today’s scene just 20 years ago.

One powerful force behind the transformation are the capital investments of Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball franchise, who purchased Detroit real estate at its nadir, including moving Quicken Loan employees to the new downtown headquarters in 2010; it is estimated that Detroit employees of his enterprises number over 17,000. Reportedly, he has made a $5.6 billion investment in Detroit real estate, owning over 100 downtown properties and recently pledging another $500 million toward the revivification of the city’s neighborhoods, including $15 million in overdue property taxes providing amnesty for about 20,000 homeowners. Investments of these sorts invite others to follow. And many are following suit, finding real estate, housing, and business opportunities within reach not in spite of but because of the devastating economic downturn. The decline — tragic and devastating and seemingly final — made new opportunities.

When I was considering coming to Nashotah House from a very large and prospering evangelical seminary, which has continued to flourish and grow, I discussed the decision with a sagacious evangelical friend whose advice was to “sell high, buy low.” Not an Episcopalian himself, he discerned that for all its regrettable decline and even while segments of the church despise their birthright, the bones were good. There was an opportunity, not for personal gain, but for the kingdom of God. Not underestimating the misery of decline — urban or ecclesial — the point is straightforward. The losses suffered by the Episcopal Church, even the self-inflicted wounds of recent decades, are an opportunity for those who have the eyes to discern it. And the raising up and propulsion of theologically sound, morally virtuous, skilled disciples for the next generations of clergy leadership is, or should be, this tradition’s most urgent priority. It remains for our seminaries and our churches to answer the call.

[1] Note the recent comments of Matthew Price, senior vice president for research and data of the Church Pension Group: “We have seen a gradual drop of entrants into the priesthood over the last 12 years,” Price said. He counted 225 newly ordained priests in 2022, down from 325 in 2010, while annual clergy retirements have remained steady at about 400 a year. The gap between new ordinations and retirements has widened significantly since 2018, and about half of the remaining clergy are within 10 years of retirement.

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Partner with us CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION Set up a time to talk with Dean Anderson about the future of Anglican theological education by contacting Teri Lynn Monarrez at tmonarrez@ nashotah.edu or 262-646-6512.

LEARN ABOUT OUR PROGRAMS Reach out to Dr. Jim Watkins, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, to learn more about our degree programs at jwatkins@nashotah.edu or 262-6466507.

HOST AN INTERN Interested in hosting an intern at your parish? Contact the Rev. Ben Hankinson, Director of Field Education, at bhankinson@nashotah.edu or 262-646-6519.

VISIT NASHOTAH HOUSE We welcome visitors to come and see the mission of the House at work.

Contact Joy Wint at jwint@nashotah.edu or 262-646-6530 to set up your visit.

GIVE TO THE MISSION The future of Anglican theological education depends on the investment of those who share a vision for the future of the church. Contact Robin Little, Senior Director of Advancement, at rlittle@nashotah.edu or 202-306-5352 to discuss your giving.

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