Funding theological training: the options

Many churches will support the men and women that they send to college. But few churches are able to find anywhere near £40-£75,000. It is hard to get accurate figures on the amount of support the average student gets from his sending church, but it is often just a few thousand pounds – sometimes less. For many churches even a few thousand pounds is still a considerable sacrifice – but it leaves the student with a lot of money to find.

That means that many students are going into debt in order to fund their training. Many others are forced to ask their wives to work (sometimes full-time) during the training period, perhaps when they would like their wives to train with them. Others spend years employed in secular work, simply saving up the money that they will require. Still others don’t go to college at all, or take a much shorter course than they really need. Can this really be right?

Undoubtedly there are many students who are able to be trained within their own churches, with some input from a part-time course, such as the one offered by the Evangelical Movement of Wales. For some, this is an excellent option, and I don’t want to suggest that full-time residential study is the only way to study, or that it is necessary for everyone. But whether a student is based in his local church or on a bible-college campus, makes little difference to the problem. Surely it must be apparent that training for the pastoral ministry is not normally something that a man should attempt to squeeze in to a few hours a week around a full-time job, his church responsibilities, being increasingly involved in regular preaching , and looking after his wife and children. Even if the student stays based at his own church it is surely best that he devotes a major portion of his time (and hence his income) to training. Even without course fees, living expenses for a two-three year training period could easily top £25,000 – more if he is married.

So whichever way we look at it, full-time training men for the ministry is an expensive business if we are to do it well. At the very cheapest end of the scale a single man who can be trained solely within a church it will need to find perhaps £25,000. For the student who is married, and whose church can’t provide full-time training, the figure is nearer £50,000 from him, and another £7,500 from the college.

The role of the denominations

Where is all this money going to come from? It’s worth remembering that this difficulty in financing training is a more serious problem than it has been for many years. Previous generations often found funding for theological training available from the Presbyterian Church or the Baptist Union. Now that (within Wales at least) most evangelicals training for pastoral ministry are no longer in denominational churches, that route is no longer available. And until around ten years ago, Local Education Authorities would pay a grant to degree candidates, even at independent Bible Colleges. With the introduction of student loans, that avenue too has closed. The rapidly increasing costs of housing, fuel and food are only compounding the problem.

Within many denominations, the problem is much less acute. So within the Church of England, for example, men who are accepted as ordinands have their tuition fees and college maintenance fees paid in full by the Ministry Division of the Church of England each year (usually around £10,000). They will also have a personal grant of over £1,500 (rising to around £10,000 where the student is married and has children) paid for by his diocese. This means a married student is likely to receive over £45,000 during a three year course, single students a little over £30,000. In 2007 the Anglican Church contributed a total £16.5 million towards ordinand training. At a time when many free churches are struggling to find trained men to pastor them, it’s perhaps not a surprise that the Church Times (13 July 2007) reported that the Church of England anticipated having more ordinands applying for training in 2008 than at any time in the last forty years.

A way forward?

I don’t want to make the situation sound hopeless. It’s not. In a later post, I’ll explore some of the solutions to these problems. But one thing is clear. It is primarily the responsibility of churches to ensure that the men who will be leading the church in the next generation (and the present one) are sufficiently well-trained. As Kerry Orchard, Development Manager at WEST, told me, “the church has a responsibility to invest in proper leadership training. Why should a man set apart as a teacher of the flock have inferior preparation for this lofty task than his church members have in their jobs?”

It seems within independency, at least, that is happening only rarely. Gifts from churches to LTS, for example, totalled just 8% of their income for 2007. In 2006, it was 6.5%. Even assuming that much more was given to individual students from their sending churches, these are frighteningly small amounts.

Perhaps – particularly if you are a church leader – you could consider how much support your congregation has invested in training men for pastoral ministry, and towards training men and women for evangelism and mission work. And perhaps we might all pray and ask God whether He would have us do more.

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