Bishops Consider Clergy Deployment Issues
Diocesan Press Service. October 22, 1968 [70-8]
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- "Our times call for a radical reconsideration of the ministry," the Rt. Rev. Frederick J. Warnecke told the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops this afternoon, "and we must be open, experimental, and revolutionary in this reconsideration. "
The American Bishops are meeting here in joint sessions with the Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada and Bishop Warnecke spoke to both groups.
Bishop Warnecke, on leave from his Diocese of Bethlehem (Pa.) is giving full time to be chairman of the Episcopal Church's one-year-old Board for Theological Education.
The Board does not intend, he explained, to "take over" or operate the Church's independent seminaries, nor does it intend to merge or close some of them, though it may in time make some such recommendation.
It does not intend to "write another report or carry out another study."
It is not setting out to raise money "to shore up the seminaries," though financing needs will be discussed.
The Board is beginning a three-fold task, he said: To provide Bishops with resources whereby present methods of screening postulants can be improved; to suggest ways of reshaping seminary education to "tailor this training much more flexibly to the individual" and to take advantage of vast resources of universities and ecumenical seminary ventures; and to explore possibilities for continuing education for clergy, both beyond and within their own diocese.
"We see ourselves," Bishop Warnecke said, "not in a compartment, but responsive to and responsible to the Bishops. We see our work against the total background of renewal; only as the whole Church is renewed can the ministry be renewed. "
The Rt. Rev. John H. Burt, Bishop of Ohio and chairman of the Joint Commission on the Deployment of Clergy, discussed an emerging plan for a five-point model which will be a totally new approach to this problem. His Commission expects to have its plan ready to propose to the 1969 General Convention.
"It is quite likely," Bishop Burt said, "that any new deployment plan must include someone or some body of persons to oversee it, a data bank using computerized records of carefully gathered data, a way of evaluating placements, provisions for continuing education for our priests, and some mechanisms by which the termination of a clergyman's stay in one position can be effected."