Theology Today - Vol 34, No. 4 - January 1978 - POETRY

431 - The Great D.Min. Experiment

The Great D.Min. Experiment
By J. Randall Nichols

WHEN American theological seminaries began to introduce the Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) degree about 1967, they launched a great experiment in theological education, almost without knowing it. It is one thing just to change the name of an existing degree; that has happened several times without a ripple. Starting up a whole new concept of graduate-professional education, geared to practicing ministers whose school days are long over, is something else again.

The idea of the D.Min. was and is elegantly simple: bring the best parish ministers back onto campus periodically over a several year period for a super continuing education program worthy of the "doctoral" level. Make the basic learning agenda a systematic correlation of theological theory and ministerial practice, with the ministers' concrete experiences as the data. Feed the D.Min. graduates back into the world of ministry, predominantly parish ministry, rather than into the teaching-and-research territory occupied by Ph. D.'s, and see if we don't get a new kind of dialogue going between church and seminary, pastor and academic, for the increased effectiveness of both.

The dialogue has begun, all right, sometimes with a fairly elevated decibel range. Ten years later we are beginning to see some results; this is a report from the laboratory.

The overall thing to be said about the D. Min. is that most everybody likes it-ministers, congregations, and faculties, in about that order. A recent survey conducted at Princeton Seminary showed that congregations felt themselves directly benefited by their pastors' participation in the D.Min. program-in fact, to a slightly greater degree than the pastors themselves. The ministers too, though, would sign up again for the program, knowing what they know now, at the rate of something like 95 percent. Excitement for the "peer learning" approach of the D.Min. runs high. Theological faculties, a certain amount of ritual grumbling aside, are at least interested enough country-wide to have founded in ten short years something like 65 separate D.Min. programs.

For all the speed of the bandwagon, the D.Min. idea of connecting theory and practice based on "case studies" of actual ministerial experience is serious and important. Unlike short-term continuing

J. Randall Nichols is Director of the D.Min. Program and Lecturer in Theology and Communication, Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Nichols is a graduate of Dartmouth College and has served as pastor of churches in West Virginia, Texas, and New Jersey.

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education seminars, which are traditionally directed to developing particular skills, tasks, or topics (and at far less expense of time, energy, and money), the D.Min. reaches straight down to the minister's fundamental values and principles: Why do we do what we do in ministry? How does it all fit together? What does the concreteness of human experience have to say to theological reflection and vice versa? It is no easy task; done well, the D. Min. is a truly earned and well named doctorate.

At this juncture at least three major side effects of the D.Min. experiment are coming clear. Like all good experimental results, they are in and of themselves ambiguous. What we as ministers and educators do with them over the next few years is the main thing.

In the first place, the D.Min. experience has made it abundantly and embarrassingly clear that traditional seminary M.Div. education does not produce the "working theologians" we have wanted to think it does. Again and again we discover that our D.Min. candidates, in some ways the most competent and reflective ministers available, have abandoned theology. They do not think in theological terms, they are not literate theologically, and they find little connection between the theologies they may be personally committed to and the practice of ministry they engage in.

It can be a dreadfully significant awakening. On the seminary side, it is difficult to convey the discomfort and guilt, both personal and professional, felt by doctrinal theologians or professors of biblical studies or church historians who realize through exposure to D. Min. candidates that their best efforts in the M.Div. classroom all these years have apparently been lost. (It is worse when their very own former students, the best and the brightest, turn up in the same condition.) It is equally painful for ministers to realize that their seminary commitments to the theological enterprise have been swamped by the pragmatics of their job (calling it "vocation" may just rub salt in the wounds).

The great chance we are taking is that out of that critique of M.Div. work can come some positive changes, both in the seminaries and in the churches, if we do not run from what we are learning. Two come quickly to mind. Seminary M.Div. instruction, in direct response to the D.Min., shows signs of becoming more sensitive to the experiential, operational dimension in the shaping of theological thought. Here and there even bodies of classical academic content are finding new expression through case studies, interaction with convictional positions of students, and dialogue with other disciplines more closely related to the practice of ministry. Even more significant, we are discovering that when we push a theological discipline hard enough to get to its fundamental, structural issues, there is already an interconnectedness both between theory and practice and among separate theories. The D.Min. is a tantalizing bit of evidence that it may be possible to teach at that

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base level of question and operation, rather than in the higher branches of our various sub specialties-rather like discovering that our separate ivory towers may have a hidden sub-cellar that turns out to connect them all.

Blame for an abandonment of theology among ministers cannot altogether be laid at the door of seminary teaching; the responsibility for integrating and concretizing theological knowledge still must remain, after all, with the student and with the profession whose demands ultimately arrange a minister's priorities. Something else is becoming apparent: in the world of the church itself, what we usually call "program" has increasingly taken the place of theology. Some examples: For both ministers and their congregations it is easier to engineer a new Christian education program than to think theologically about what it means to "learn in faith" in a church context; we are awash in stewardship campaign programs geared to fund-raising, but high and dry when it comes to a theology of money; building leadership skills in church officers is duck soup compared to teaching them the nature of the church as incarnational/institutional reality; jazzing up the worship service does not have to come anywhere close to the question of what worship is and how it makes a difference. D.Min. candidates are usually well-read; but their reading tends to be in service to building programs for the church rather than understanding-still less cultivating-the dynamics of faith and its response. Far too many books and most denominational materials are only counterfeit theology; "programming" rules the agenda. It just may be that as the D.Min. turns the seminary more toward the lived experience of faith, it will also turn the church and its agencies more toward the nurture of theological understanding, self-criticism, and action.

A second effect D.Min. education seems to be having is on seminary faculties themselves, who at times show considerable resistance to the undertaking. To be sure, teaching in any new kind of degree program is bound to take some getting used to, and the D.Min. is the new kid on the curricular block; but something more serious also seems to be afoot, In discussions of the faculty's experience, two things keep appearing as a result of the D. Min. experience-oriented approach.

For one thing, the integrative, inter-disciplinary emphasis of the D.Min. tends to blur the traditional boundary lines among academic disciplines and sub-specialties. The authority and protection of the academic guilds does not work with the D.Min., especially when the program uses teaching teams of both "practical" and "classical" faculty. When, for instance, a biblical theologian must take seriously the critique of a Christian educator, or a pastoral counseling teacher must respond to the claims of a systematic theologian, all in the presence of minister-candidates whose top priority is the work of ministry as a whole, there are very few places to hide. The hope, of course, is that such cross-fertilization of disciplines will give us a more

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unified and "connected" sense of the theological task-and it just may work.

If the D.Min. calls the authority of different disciplines into question, in the second place it also tends to affirm theological teachers in their sense of vocation. Teachers have said often enough for us to take it very seriously that working with D.Min. candidates was a kind of rediscovery of the church for them, and at the same time a revival of their sense of having a direct ministry as theological teachers. For some teachers, the contact with the church through D.Min. programs is an offer of repatriation.

III

A third effect of the D.Min. experiment is shifting the whole sense of educational gratification which fuels the enterprise of theological education: What is the educational payoff we are working so hard for, anyhow? As academics we have always thought more or less in terms of something like "mastery of subject matter," recognizing, to be sure, that the subject matter in the theological case had a special, life determining significance beyond mere ideas. The D.Min., however, raises a serious question even about that. Here we have "successful" pastors doing their level best in ministry-and that can be an impressive performance indeed-but with their sense of vocational fulfillment coming from nothing remotely like the goals that motivate seminary education. Not so strangely, those same experienced ministers, when they enter a D.Min. program, do not simply revert to the good old seminary days of mastering a theological subject. Far from it, they introduce into the heart of theological education the serious question of what should count as educational success anyway: something about conducting the work of ministry in a lived sense, or something more along the lines of academic knowledge? Putting together candidates who are more committed to the former and faculty whose daily bread is the latter gives us at least the possibility of a creative new appreciation of just what our primary educational goals ought to be. That same question of goal reappears, by the way, without spot or blemish in every church pew, parlor, and board room in the world. Just what is it that we are aiming for anyway, in Christ's name, and bow will we know when we hit it?

At the beginning of D.Min. work, many wondered how working pastors would take to the idea of academics telling them bow ministry ought to be conducted. Would there be a slaughter of the innocents, and who would be the innocents anyway? Happily, that has not occurred. Partly because of the peer-learning and case-study context of most D. Min. work, in which faculty are full participants, and partly because of the team-teaching emphasis which uses both practical and academic faculty (partly, too, perhaps because ministers have to develop a high vocational tolerance for being told what to do), the meeting of parish and academic worlds is peaceful. If anything, one might hazard the guess that minister-candidates are more tolerant of

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faculty foibles than the reverse; but the main thing is that so far the confrontation is creative. Seeing that it stays that way is part of the educational management task facing those of us involved.

Actually, what may have happened at the seminary level is that the ministerial objectives have always been primary, but the intermediate objective of theological knowledge has gradually edged its way to the forefront in the cloistered world of the seminary. We should be careful not to make it an either/or choice; the healthy thing about the D.Min. is that it is probably calling both ministers and academics alike to a confession of their shared laziness in thinking through just how one goes about learning both to act and to reflect as Christian ministers. The bet is that through this kind of education we can learn some better answers.

Among the uncharted areas on the D.Min. map is a concern for women in ministry. Relatively few women are enrolled in D.Min. programs. Those programs which require several years of ministerial experience prior to application have been telling themselves that we are only just now developing a large enough group of experienced women ministers to apply. It may also be that the "first generation" of women clergy have their hands full of other issues than those taken up in D.Min. study. Whether that is the case or not, it is probably a safe bet that as women come increasingly into D. Min. work the very nature of the minister's work in its role-related, socio-cultural, and historical dimensions will have to be grist for the educational mill, if it is not already. One of the intriguing and possibly heated questions that may then appear on the agenda is none other than a variant of Phillips Brooks' old "truth through personality" dictum: Between the minister with his or her characteristics (including sex), strengths, and weaknesses, and the people with their expectations both high and low of what the minister ought to be like, how do we tell which counts for what, theologically, in assessing the work of ministry?

We will not be able to write up the results of the great D.Min. experiment for several years. If the tension it creates becomes intolerable for either ministers or seminaries, then we will have missed a chance to examine ourselves rather more closely than we usually want or are permitted to. If what we are experiencing proves to be the strain of new birth, then we will look back on these years as a watershed period in the history of education for ministry. In the meantime, we can watch and hope for sticking power and creative growth, since both are as needed in the launching of a theological degree as in the making of a minister.