Most ELCA Ordained Ministry Candidates Study at ELCA Seminaries

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Recent improvements in gathering data
about people preparing for ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America (ELCA) allows church leaders to examine data
from two sources -- the ELCA's eight seminaries and the candidacy
committees of the ELCA's 65 synods.
"In the early 2000s, as we improved our capacity to track
data from candidacy committees," it seemed that the number of
candidates for ordained ministry in the ELCA who were going
outside the ELCA for theological education had nearly doubled,
said the Rev. Mark N. Wilhelm, associate executive director for
educational partnerships and institutions, ELCA Vocation and
Education.
Candidacy is the ELCA process of preparation and formation
for a candidate to become "rostered" as an ordained minister or a
professional lay minister -- associate in ministry, deaconess or
diaconal minister. The process begins before a candidate seeks
theological education and involves a time of discernment, in
which the candidate enters into conversations with his or her
pastor, congregation members and synod candidacy committee. The
candidacy committee works with the candidate throughout the
process.
"Although ELCA candidates are normally encouraged to attend
ELCA seminaries, circumstances sometimes lead a candidate to
enroll at a non-ELCA theological school," Wilhelm said. "Small
numbers of our candidates doing so can even be helpful to the
ELCA, because it gives this church a group of leaders with
ecumenical experience and connections to the larger Protestant
community in the United States."
When the ELCA began to examine data from synod candidacy
committees, "we noticed what appeared to be a jump from the
perception" of 10 percent and "started pushing toward 20 percent"
of the candidates preparing for ordained ministry in the ELCA not
at ELCA schools, Wilhelm said.
Wilhelm found a closer look at the data to be more
reassuring. The candidacy records of 316 people in the process
to become ELCA pastors showed they are not attending ELCA
schools, Wilhelm said, but 56 records listed the candidate as
"undecided or unknown" regarding seminary enrollment. That could
mean the candidate hasn't enrolled in a seminary yet, he said.
Another 25 of the 316 records contained "bad data" regarding
seminary enrollment, Wilhelm said. Another 83 records were for
candidates seeking reinstatement, entering the ELCA from other
churches or participating in the ELCA's Theological Education for
Emerging Ministries (TEEM) program, which would not involve
seminary enrollment, he said.
That meant that 164 of the 316 candidacy records could not
be linked to non-ELCA schools, Wilhelm said, and only the
remaining 152, or 7.4 percent of ordained ministry candidates,
were confirmed as studying at non-ELCA schools, which was more
typical.
Wilhelm said candidacy records confirmed that ELCA
candidates for ordained ministry are studying at 65 theological
schools outside the ELCA; and 15 of those schools have four or
more candidates. He said the greatest numbers of those
candidates attend historic east coast seminaries, such as Harvard
Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.; Princeton Theological
Seminary, Princeton, N.J.; Union Theological Seminary, New York;
and Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Conn. Most of the remaining
candidates attend seminaries in regions not served by ELCA
seminaries, including other countries, he said.
The number of ELCA candidates for ordained ministry studying
at ELCA seminaries dropped from 1,211 in the 2001-2002 academic
year to 1,196 in 2002-2003, Wilhelm said, but has shown a healthy
increase in recent years -- 1,201 in 2003-2004; 1,252 in 2004-
2005; and 1,284 in 2005-2006.
Candidacy figures indicated that in March 2006 there were
316 people in the process to become associates in ministry, 11 to
be deaconesses and 183 to be diaconal ministers in the ELCA.
"I began to follow our data about ELCA candidates attending
non-ELCA seminaries because I was concerned that perhaps we were
losing our culture, in which nearly all candidates attend ELCA
seminaries, with an increasingly larger percentage of ELCA
candidates for rostered leadership enrolling at non-ELCA
schools," Wilhelm said. "That clearly is not the case. It's not
happening."
The ELCA needs to pay attention to this data in the future,
as the church develops its theological education network, Wilhelm
said. The ELCA must "think more strategically and intentionally
about the place of non-ELCA theological education resources in a
theological education network for our community," he said.

Theological Education for Emerging Ministries
A master of divinity (M.Div.) is the minimum degree required
of ELCA clergy. Earning the degree usually requires a bachelor's
degree and four years of seminary education, including a parish
internship during the third year.
TEEM provides an alternative program of preparation for
ordination in the ELCA for certain people identified for ministry
in a specific context.
The number of people in the TEEM program, who enrolled in
specially designed TEEM certificate programs at ELCA seminaries,
grew from 72 in the 2004-2005 academic year to 94 in 2005-2006,
with 49 of that 94 engaged in a "program of study" through
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, Calif. Other
seminaries are developing similar certificate programs of
mentoring combined with online and "intensive" on-campus courses,
Wilhelm said.

Age and Gender of Seminarians
ELCA seminaries reported in 2005-2006 that 523, or about 40
percent, of Lutherans in their M.Div. programs were age 30 and
younger. That number compares to 479 in 2004-2005 and 502 in
2003-2004.
Enrollment in M.Div. programs at ELCA seminaries has been
equally divided between women and men in recent years. Lutheran
churches that formed the ELCA began ordaining women in 1970, and
for three decades there was a steady move toward "parity" between
the genders among those enrolled at ELCA seminaries, Wilhelm
said. Enrollment reached parity "five or six years ago and has
maintained parity since," he said.

Ministry Needs and Resources in the ELCA
The number of pastors in the ELCA and the number of
"ministry needs" in the church are almost the same, Wilhelm said.
"For existing congregational service, we have roughly the numbers
of persons we need," he said.
ELCA Research and Evaluation conducted a study of "the need
for and supply of ordained ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America" and issued a report in 2000. "It has shown
that, despite the public perception of there being a great crisis
in numbers of rostered leaders available for service in the
church, we are about where we need to be in terms of absolute
numbers," Wilhelm said.
"We have a problem, however, with overall distribution or
'deployment,'" he said. The difficulty comes when matching the
skills, capacity and mobility of ministers to the ministry needs
of particular urban, rural and small congregations, he said.
"All of those factors around opportunities and resources are
highly complex," Wilhelm said. Sometimes a congregation needs a
bilingual pastor, or the pastor may need a congregation near his
or her spouse's work, he said.
-- -- --
The home page of ELCA Vocation and Education is at
http://www.ELCA.org/vocationeducation/ and includes links to
information on the ELCA's eight seminaries. The 2000 report of
ELCA Research and Evaluation is in a PDF file at
http://www.ELCA.org/research/reports/dm/minstudy.pdf on the ELCA
Web site.

For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or news@elca.org
http://www.elca.org/news
ELCA News Blog: http://www.elca.org/news/blog