Educational standards

Dear editor:

Most professions have education and licensing standards. An accountant may be a CPA or a physician may be and medical doctor and licensed to practice. Licensing and certification take years of schooling and advanced degrees. We do not want an accountant that failed math or a physician with only a Boy Scout First Aid Merit Badge. Standards are required of professionals.

This is not the case for Protestant ministers. Research by The Harvard Divinity School, shared data of the Protestant ministry in the United States. Data show only 20% of the Protestant ministers in North America have had a college and postgraduate divinity school course. The other

80% do not have to have an education beyond high school and no theological training at all. This is how our

6,222 protestant denominations in this country can be led by spiritual quacks and theological illiterates. In contrast, Catholic priests have six years of rigorous training before they are permitted to be priest. This requires theological training and multiple languages.

“In the Protestant ministry, a theological degree after a college degree does not make a person a minister. One must be ordained by a church. As long as Protestant denominations are willing to ordain the uneducated in their ministries, the seminaries are helpless. The responsibility for the present deplorable situation rests primarily upon churches rather than upon divinity schools.” This ordination is often by board members

equally undereducated. People can even be ordained online. This is the weak link to improving the standards of the ministry and education in churches. “Theological seminaries want Protestant denominations to limit and ultimately 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.”

The lack of formal theological education is a major problem contributing to the decline of churches and Christianity. The fundamentalists and evangelicals are increasing the speed of this decline with a failure to recognize the problem. Data show that churches have lost 5 million members, that 4,000 new churches start each year but 7,000 close, that 1,500 pastors leave the ministry each year and that churches lost 3,500 members per day last year. This denial and wishing it were not so will not change the facts of what is happening — https://www.pastoralcareinc.com/statistics/.

The lack of educational requirements for Protestant ministers contributes to significant damage to society. This perpetuates prejudice, divisiveness, and ignorance for Christians. Why would Churches and members choose the uneducated to lead them in something as important as religion?