Aaron,
Your comment reminded me of a conversation I had with an ordained Lutheran missionary last week. He is greatly concerned over the lack of sending ordained missionaries to the field. These men are often involved with educating the first generation of native born pastors (or providing continuing education to the current generation). Lay missionaries have not been prepared for this task.

Larry,
Blackmail is not too far off from the truth a sem prof told me. If the sems opposed it, they knew that they would be falsely accused of being “ivory tower” types cut off from reality, whose saw their kingdom as being in danger. (Can’t you hear the accusation of, “This is like when the Pharisees were upset because people were going to Jesus and not them.”?) SMPP was the least bad proposal on the table – consider the proposal that pastoral education be at the LCMS mega-church in the region with one faculty professor in residence on its staff. He is responsible for the whole education program. I will agree that SMPP is playing out in the direction of the mega-church, but at least it is not that bad, yet.

By voicing their approval, the sems get to have a hand in what SMPP looks like. Though I agree with you, this is something akin to having a hand in building your own coffin. That only delays your execution as long as your executioners put up with how slow you are building it.

I’ve been through this once before, in the transformation of the RCC after the council. Our LCMS polity is different, but the idea is the same. I learned it from the guys who did it.

The guys in the liberal Catholic bee hive where I was were all watching Seminex, hoping the repressive, oppressive, supressive, depressive, and not to mention patriarchal, LCMS would finally get itself out of the late Middle Ages.

The idea is, the battle over this or that professor or seminary is not really where a church is changed. You change it by lex orandi lex credendi. Change what happens in the parish, most specifically in parish worhsip, and you’ve got change. New orders of service, new lectionaries, etc all cut the cord with and to the past. It does not matter if the people know that, the effect will be there. In fact the less they know the better, then they will think we’re really the same and better than ever! And the door is wide open to whatever. Within a generation, who will know?

Worship is doctrine in motion. Want to change doctrine? Change worship. That’s where more people are more of the time. Change that, and the classroom will follow suit or become irrelevant and die.

In our context, that means who won Seminex, for example, is rendered meaningless. First you change worship, then make the seminaries irrelevant. RCs didn’t have it quite so easy there, but the process is the same: you don’t first change the pastors who in turn change the environment into which they are sent, you change the environment and the pastors and their training wll follow.

This is why, and how, Johnny sees the candidates he does for SMP.

It’s how call committees manipulate things, and how call committes are manipulated..

It’s also how you win Seminex after all.

To date, however, every one of the SMP candidates we have interviewed are economically viable, middle class Caucasians from metropolitan areas who worship at large church growth congregations. They have been advised by their pastors to forgo the traditional route and come on staff with their churches as ordained pastors in one fashion or another.

Pastoral shortage, I agree, is a chimera. SMP is an attempt to circumvent theological formation by those for whom theological reflection has no place in pastoral care, public worship, or private devotion.

At this rate, someone will have to write a little book setting out the basics, and put in the preface that the situation is so bad that your average guy is knows practically nothing of Christian doctrine and many pastors are nearly incompetent, unable to teach!

We, the “educated” pastors are, as a rule (using myself as an example), woefully under-educated – especially (as you point out) compared to our forbears.

This is an ominous trend, and I’m with Pr. Beisel in his amazement that the seminaries went along with this like sheep to the slaughter. They have just signed their own death warrants, though the execution protocol in this case will be “by a thousand paper cuts.” What in God’s holy name were they thinking? Were they blackmailed?

Because the districts have already been working end runs around the seminary, I’m already seeing a wedge between the educated guys (who resent the slackers) and the uneducated guys (who resent the “ivory tower” types). This is one more symptom in our synodical false dichotomy between orthodoxy and mission. As if our ministerium didn’t already have enough divisions.

And the notion that we need all these “90 day wonders” because of a clergy shortage is as laughable as the way this was sold to us: that this SMP program is for that extraordinary situation of a rural Eskimo congregation that meets in an igloo that would just melt into a puddle if the guy they want to be their pastor had to actually attend seminary. That was then. Now the DPs are pleased as punch that a third of our seminarians are now such “hard luck cases” and “exceptions.” This who thing was a damnable lie from day one. Someone ought to be defrocked for this.

Already, those who chose to go to seminary are openly mocked, and the curriculum ridiculed for not being “relevant.”

Furthermore, as you pointed out so well, the classroom is only one part of the seminary – and even in the classroom, the experience is far more than the acquisition of knowledge. I wouldn’t trade my time at the sem for anything. Pastors are formed, not trained. As the sainted Kurt Marquart said, “Pastors cannot be mass produced.” He said that they are formed in a painstaking process of interaction with the Holy Spirit through the crucible of the Scriptures.

You can’t get that in a handful of Sunday School classes via internet. I’d be willing to wager a week’s pay that I have several laymen in my congregation who know more theology and are better read than these “seminarians.”

How would you like to find out that you know more cardiology than the guy who is going to give you a triple bypass tomorrow?

I suppose the next step is ordination like the Universal Life Church – just send in your $25 and get ordained through the mail – no questions asked. And the seminaries will have representatives looking the convention in the face and saying that this would be just a great idea and will in no way lower the educational standards of our pastors.

Lord, have mercy!

I don’t get this at all. The only explanation I have is that this is a diabolical attack.