WATERVILLE, Maine — The Rev. Dr. Robert Grove-Markwood was installed Saturday as the 11th and final president of Bangor Theological Seminary during the opening of the school’s last convocation at First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ.
Grove-Markwood’s tenure will be the shortest of any president. He said Thursday that he would serve one year at the helm of the 198-year-old institution before the seminary becomes a very different kind of institution from what it has been for the past two centuries.
He will oversee the institution’s transition from a degree-granting seminary to a much smaller organization most likely dedicated to providing continuing education to ministers, lay leaders and spiritual seekers.
In March, the seminary announced that it would suspend its master of arts and master of divinity programs at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. Grove-Markwood of Presque Isle said Thursday that those programs and its doctor of ministry program would end in May 2013. As a result the seminary could graduate its largest class in recent history next year. More than 40 students are trying to finish up their degrees this year, he said.
“Our past mission has been equipping and supporting persons engaged in ministry,” he said. “I think our future mission, whatever structure, whatever shape the new entity takes, it needs to be clear we are ending all the degree programs, which will have a significant impact on the size of the institution. We will no longer have a full-time faculty and will not need the number of staff that we have. It will be a much smaller institution.”
Associated with the United Church of Christ, the seminary has for nearly 200 years trained ministers and lay leaders in mainline Christian denominations including United Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Congregationalists.
The school’s future still is unclear, Grove-Markwood said, but is emerging slowly.
Since March, the Third Century Committee has been meeting to determine the seminary’s future since it no longer will offer degrees, Grove-Markwood said Thursday. More than 250 students, alumni, area ministers, denominational officials and community leaders have shared their thoughts about what the future might be.
The timeline calls for a draft plan to be presented in October to the board of trustees with a decision tentatively scheduled to be voted on in November.
With fewer residents of northern New England — where BTS has historically drawn students from and supplied ministers to — praying daily, attending church services regularly and claiming a denominational affiliation, mainline denominations have been losing membership over the past 40 years. Most churches no longer can afford full-time ministers or other staff, Grove-Markwood said Thursday. Consequently, BTS does not have enough potential students to sustain itself in its traditional role.
“This is an historic threshold in the life of Bangor Seminary,” the Rev. Dr. Nick Carter, president of Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, Mass., said Saturday at Grove-Markwood’s installation. “Ten generations after your founding, amid tectonic shifts in the plates that lie beneath theological education, the dreams of your founders are being probed for new inspiration.”
BTS is not the only mainline seminary struggling to redefine itself, Carter said.
“Other than the Gospel itself, almost all of the assumptions on which theological education has been based for the last 200 years are in the midst of being swept away,” he said. “But God has not abandoned us, just as God did not abandon Israel. God still has a dream for us. God still has a dream for this great community.”
That “dream” most likely will be focused on continuing education, the seminary’s newest president said.
Grove-Markwood was named interim president in June 2011, a week after the Rev. Dr. Kent J. Ulery resigned after three years at the helm.
Grove-Markwood has a long history with BTS, having received both master of divinity and doctor of ministry degrees from the institution. He also served as the institution’s director of admissions from January 1985 to June 1987. For the past five years before being named interim president, he was a member of the board of trustees.
what a shame that it has to close.
I agree. I am a graduating student. It took me 20 years to be able to be able to attend seminary – I wanted to most of my life, and now it is closing. At least I will graduate bur learning itself was the objective. I have fulfilled my credits yet my theological hunger remains insatiable.
Has the paper become so poor it has to rely on a reporter’s cell phone for a photo?
As an evangelical Christian, it saddens me to see the Seminary suspend its degree programs, at a time when God seems to be absent in our society. People of the Christian faith are literally under assault all over the planet, while here at home we’ve cast aside the most basic tenets of morality in favor of anything goes under the guise of “fairness”. I fully expect to have my post here to be mocked or attacked and that, too, saddens me.
Are you aware that BTS is a very liberal teaching seminary? They haven’t been attracting students for years, other than radical feminist, because of the seminary’s stand on moral and social issues. When you stand for nothing you will fail.
Your argument would have more weight if all liberal seminaries were closing. This is not the case. Andover Newton – mentioned in the article – is doing fine. There are many factors at work here.
“Theology is ignorance with wings.”
“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.”
increasingly, science will be the vehicle for theological institutions to quietly fade away.
Robert Grove-Markwood is a wonderful individual. I wish him the very best, and am reassured that — whatever changes the Seminary must face — it will benefit from his stewardship.
Bangor Seminary represents an old type of mainline liberalism, that needs some new energy…I suspect the conservative churches of the Bangor area, are doing very well financially, as well as their education programs. I grew up in Northern Maine, and have had the best of both educational worlds, liberal and conservative. There have been “seismic” economic rifts along with the Social, Political, Theological ones, particularly in Northern Maine. This is our country. This is our creation from both!
As a chaplain (I now live in Maryland), I sleep with the Bible beside me, as well as Science books, Pastoral Psychology, and others. The task of interpreting scripture along with the other disciplines, let alone culture, can be Hellish in itself, especially to people and institutions in pain. Sometimes, there is no difference between a liberal and a fundamentalist except in content. Learning what the Spirit is saying to the Churches and its Seminaries requires discernment and dialogue. My hope is there could be greater integration in the new model, the seminary proposes. That creation will probably take more then six days!
Meanwhile, the Scriptural question remains to all people on both sides, “Can the eye say to the foot, I have no need of thee?, needs to be encountered. Not to be right, but to sustain the churches and community! I believe this to be the hermenuetical process, for the Secular and the sacred, as well as the liberal and fundamentalist. And we desparately need to depend on God’s Holy Spirit to breathe in us, all, to accomplish that!
Speaking only for myself, I would hope this committee would also be considering some vehicle where the essence of BTS, as well as the name as a “school”, could be subsumed by Husson; which could deal with all the “back room” issues of Financial Aid, Admissions, Transfer Credits, etc.
NESCOM appears to have kept most of its original identification, while enjoying the perks of association with the collegiality of Husson University.
The economies of scale of such a strategy would, most certainly, improve the cost structure that’s unable to be sustained.
It’s my belief that Business, Accounting and Medical students could benefit from exposure to Ethics as well as Seminarians could benefit from a healthy exposure to Accounting and keeping the books for a small church.
I’d think the Liberal Theologians could learn as much from the Conservative Accountants, visa versa.
It would be too bad to have BTS literally “disappear”, or become just another “online” scheme after all these eons…