When this article appeared, a group of Presbyterian ministers had been meeting regularly over coffee in the pastor’s study of the First Presbyterian Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan. They had no specific agenda, but simply shared conversation together as colleagues in the ministry.
One of the ministers in the group had returned from an 8-day retreat at Wellspring, a mission group of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. The mission group seeks to nurture faith communities around the country by sharing their own experience of renewal as a church. This pastor was deeply stirred by his experience at Wellspring. His changing understanding of ministry in the church became a subject of conversation in the sharing group of ministers at Kalamazoo. Another minister in the group, Charles E. Kinzie, was prompted to write a letter to the other pastors in the group, reflecting on his own experience in the seminary and in church ministry.
Because of the relevance of his letter and the questions it raises about the relationship of theological education and professional ministry to spiritual growth and the renewal of the church as community, we have printed portions of the letter below.
I entered the seminary nearly two decades ago. In the intervening years we have been through everything from church renewal and all kinds of theologies to concern over the vocational crisis of ministers. Yet in those years I have not heard one word spoken publically concerning our spiritual condition and the resulting plight of theology. We have talked over the years as if these two elements were still intact; we have acted as if all that was needed was a little retouching of the outward circumstances of our calling. We decided erroneously that what we needed was professional training for a professional ministry. Now we know that none of these measures will suffice.
If we have been pointed in the wrong direction then naturally the question arises: where did we start and where did we go wrong? If your experience has been anything like mine, the answer may go something like this: many of us went first to the seminary and then into the ministry itself out of a strong, if inchoate, sense that we were called to make something out of our lives, to experience what one person has termed a “final integration” of personality. Historically, it is not unusual for the summons to such a life to take the form of a call to a religious vocation.
In our case, something seems to have been amiss from the beginning. After a few years of struggle, in the seminary and in our first years in the ministry, we realized that this thing to which we were summoned was not clarified. Although we had become acquainted with various theological formulas designed to explain and justify Christian life, we still did not feel that we were able to do anything about them. Some of us began to question the relevance of these formulas for modern man. Then, having detached ourselves from the formulas, we began to wonder about the meaning of the summons itself.
Though originally we have had some clarity concerning who we ought to be, we rather quickly became confused about the way to become. Both our means and ends became almost entirely theoretical, and our energy became involved in a way of life strikingly different from the one we originally sought. For example, the piety, if any, with which we entered seminary was soon jettisoned in the classroom. But it was not replaced by a more mature spirituality; rather, it was replaced by a theological system. Theology, even in an era of theological stability, is not spirituality.
If this experience is at all typical, it reveals what is perhaps the most striking feature of theological education. Seminaries simply do not accept responsibility for what has been called in Christian tradition “spiritual formation.” This responsibility theoretically belongs to the churches, but they assume no real responsibility for this training either.
As a consequence, the neat division of labor between the seminary and the church simply does not work. The work of the seminary increasingly becomes mere intellectual construct in the guise of theology, while the piety of the church is divorced from learning.
Upon graduation from seminary, ordination takes place -- without our ever having been examined in depth regarding our spiritual experience.
To make matters worse, some of us discover that the very demands of our work actually tend to prevent spiritual growth and personal integration. It seems to some of us, at least, as though there is no place for interior solitude. The demands of a minister’s work schedule hardly make room for an existential moratorium. We must face occasions on which the needs of spirituality are antithetical to the demands of the professional ministry. At that junction, a person simply chooses.
To add to our problems, we suffer from the lack of a spiritual community that could provide discipline and spiritual direction. A person can work alone, but no one has ever matured spiritually alone, not even the hermit.
Eventually, even if only in secret, the ancient wisdom finds us. That wisdom, to paraphrase an ancient maxim, is this: only the wounded physician heals. Even he cannot heal beyond the extent to which he has been healed himself. We can take no one further into health and the realm of the spiritual than we have been taken.
Eventually we must ask: to whom do we confess; who grants us satisfaction and absolution; who opens the word to us; with whom do we worship; who ministers to us; who or what act is a source of grace in our life? Are we deprived of that which we are to give to others?
When the answer to this last question is yes, we must realize that we are over-committed: committed to a ministry which we do not have the spiritual depth, maturity, and insight to cope with. All too quickly these responsibilities overwhelm us to the point that we suspend -- consciously or unconsciously -- our spiritual quest. We do this for the sake of our work. That reasoning allows us to settle into a pattern in which we cope from day to day, resenting all the more the spiritual poverty of our congregation -- which is, after all, merely a reflection of our own poverty. That is a weight too great to bear.
There is in the process of spiritual formation a crucial stage which is a full-time vocation, a stage which if successfully completed allows for the integration of the other needs of life. If this stage is skipped or aborted we find that the rest of life is always getting in the way of the spiritual quest. Spiritual formation forms a center in our lives from which we henceforth live and work.
If we skipped this stage, not because we willed to do so but because our training did not include it, there is frequently about us the aura of those who need to make up something in their lives. Whatever gave us the idea that there was a substitute for the experience of the novitiate? To have skipped this stage is tragic, because we live with the consequences in our personal as well as our professional lives.
Few of us can live for long with the consequences. Sooner or later some of us cease to see the poverty around us; others of us leave the ministry unable to reconcile what is with what ought to be. Some few of us persist in the quest even to the point of entering an existential moratorium while we remain in the ministry. But even these few continue to suffer from a lack of spiritual community and all that it can provide in necessary discipline, support, and guidance. Perhaps most difficult of all is the life of those who choose to leave. Once out, they find no place for spiritual formation outside the church either. We are damned if we stay and damned if we leave.
We are at the point where we shall either rediscover the spiritual resources necessary for existence or we shall cease to have any reason for being. As a civilization and as individuals we have been coming to this point for some time: anxiety dwells deep in the life of each of us. As a people we are no longer sustained or nurtured by a tradition whose weight or power we can take for granted. We have been living from it but not replenishing it, and now it is spent.
For how long have we struggled on alone, grasping at this or that idea, following this or that practice, only to see it all crumble on the rack of our own individuality and upon the exigencies of our lives? I confess to you that this has been both my practice and my experience.
Partly because of the entirely unselfconscious witness of a few men in community around me, I decided to submit myself to a spiritual discipline and practice that had existed long before I was born. I began to understand that I must be taught what I was not taught originally: that spiritual health and integrity came, not from what I manage to fabricate for myself, but rather from a disciplined immersion in the liturgical and spiritual tradition which is the fount of the knowledge of God. In the past I had had more than my share of devoted teachers to whom I had apprenticed myself, but I had never submitted myself to anything; always there was that cunning reserve at which we moderns are so adept. Then there began to be drawn out of me that peculiarly human demonic element from which we all need to be saved.
With the people we serve, we must join in this quest. We must turn back to our source and make it our own again, and that process is precisely what spiritual formation is all about: the recapitulation in our own lives of the Christian story.
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