Preparing People for Real Ministry

I was fresh out of seminary. It was installation Sunday, my first day as “the Minister.” We had a covered dish supper that night. As the supper ended, a woman came up to me and said almost apologetically, “I’m having exploratory surgery on Tuesday, looking for cancer. Do you think you could visit me at the hospital?” In the next weeks and months there were other members to visit, people to meet, worship services to plan, sermons to prepare. There was the person from the trailer park across the street, knocking at the parsonage door, asking if the Preacher could come because a teenager was threatening to kill himself. There was the woman at the church office door with two black eyes and a baby in her arms, asking for help. The first Board meetings had agendas ranging from “the Women’s Bible Study Class asks that if groups use their room they don’t smoke because it makes their new curtains smell bad” to “how is our little, hundred member church going to grow?” And, there was that first time at one of those early Board meetings when the decision mattered, the course was not clear, and a Board member looked at me and asked, “So, what are we going to do now?”

Right off the bat, from day one, “the Minister” will be called on to do things that matter. People’s lives will be affected, for better or for worse, by what “the Minister” does and how he or she does it. That fact stays at the forefront of our minds as we, the faculty and staff at Moravian Theological Seminary, engage in the work of preparing people for ministry. We know there are real human beings on the other side of everything we do. We know congregations seeking to serve the Lord will be calling our graduates to lead and serve. We know that the ministers, counselors, and teachers who come to the Seminary will, in their ministries, potentially encounter every joy, every sadness, every glory, every complexity, every possible moment of sin and redemption that takes place in the lives of individuals and communities. So, how do we go about our work?

People in ministry need certain kinds of knowledge, certain skills, and a certain kind of “being.” We want our graduates to have knowledge, skills, and being that are (as our mission statement says) centered in Jesus Christ, grounded in scripture, ecumenical in spirit, committed to community, and focused on missional leadership. Those elements permeate our curriculum, courses, programs, and community life. In the context of those elements, students read thousands of pages and write hundreds more. They listen, speak, challenge, and are challenged. MDiv students spend hundreds of hours in Supervised Ministry, serving in congregations, leading worship, preaching, planning, and leading groups. They pray —privately and publicly — and seek to grow in faith, hope, and love. They visit in homes and hospitals. They are asked to absorb and integrate an array of biblical, historical, theological, and pastoral learnings and experiences so that they will be ready, with the grace of God, for their ministries.

We strive to provide a foundation for a lifetime of growth and learning accompanied by a desire never to stop learning. (The Greek word for “disciple” literally means “learner.”) Are nine masters-level courses in biblical study enough for a lifetime of ministry? Will two preaching courses place every student among the ranks of the great preachers? Most likely not. They provide a great start, but no matter how well prepared students might be on graduation day, from that point forward, what will matter most is what happens after graduation — their relationships with the people they encounter, their service and leadership in the midst of change, their enduring response to God’s call wherever it leads. Faculty and staff make every effort to provide students with the learning, the example, and the resources to grow into whatever ministries lie ahead.

A Holy Week service has just ended, the one that speaks of the end times, including the statement, “woe to those who are with child in those days.” Not many people attended. Afterwards, walking through the sanctuary, the Minister wonders whether these services should continue. A woman, pregnant, visibly upset, comes to the Minister and says, “What did Jesus mean when he said ‘woe to those who are with child in those days’?” At the Seminary we know that we cannot anticipate every possible question that could be asked. We also know that what the Minister says and does next matters. We seek to offer courses of study such that, even if the Minister has never thought of that question before, in the next moments of life, God and that woman will be served faithfully and well.

The Rev. Dr. Frank Crouch is the Dean of Moravian Theological Seminary, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.