Survey Reveals Eighty Percent of Protestant Ministers Without College, Graduate Training

The Harvard Divinity School, as a member of the Conference of Theological Seminaries of the United States and Canada, has been sharing in a survey of the Protestant ministry in the United States. The statistical investigation has been conducted by The Institute of Social and Religious Research, and its findings, in four volumes recently published, placed at the disposal of American Divinity Schools.

There are 200,000 Protestant congregations in the United States and Canada, served by about 150,000 ministers. There are 200 institutions engaged in the training of ministers. There are four or five Divinity Schools in the United States, non-sectarian in character, which are, as Harvard Divinity School is, integral parts of large universities. There are perhaps twenty or twenty-five more theological schools on independent foundations which profess to maintain academic standards of university level. Below these is a successions of seminaries of lower standards which resolve themselves. Finally into little more than schools of vocational guidance for students of hardly more than high-school grade.

The printed report is candid in recording and appraising the facts. The facts are significant. Of the 150,000 ministers in question 50% have had neither college nor seminary training. 18% have had college training only; 12% have had seminary training only. This leaves only 20% of the Protestant ministers in North America, who have had a college and post-graduate divinity school course.

We have here an adequate account of any loss of influence and leadership of which Protestantism is aware, and he goes on to say that he does not see how the Protestant church can expect to survive at anything like its present dimensions with so small a proportion of its ministry professionally trained.

It is not fair to blame any single divinity school, whatever its standards, for the existing situation. A graduate from the law school or the medical school has to pass, after taking his degree, the requirements of a State Board before he is allowed to practise his profession. A university degree is not itself a license to practise. So in the Protestant ministry, a theological degree after a college degree does not make a man a minister. A minister must be ordained by a church. So long as Protestant denominations are willing to ordain uneducated men to their ministries, the sem- inaries are helpless. The responsibility for the present deplorable situation rests primarily upon churches rather than upon divinity schools.

There is a strong movement on foot among the leading theological seminaries in the country to bring pressure to bear upon the various Protestant denominations to limit and ultimately to abandon altogether the habit of ordaining uneducated men to the ministry. Harvard Divinity School is backing up the Conference of Seminaries in an attempt to raise the general standard of the profession of the ministry