Volume Two    Number Three  Sept/October 2005       

INDEX:

This quarterly electronic newsletter is dedicated to promoting the work and research of over twenty web sites of religion institutes, programs and projects related to the initiatives in religion of the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The newsletter offers informative summaries of research and news contained on these web sites in an effort to make this information more widely known and used. more

Special features in this issue include a report about efforts to nurture religious vocations and a review of the American Religion Data Archive Schools web site.

Visit the links to the left to explore the individual features of the newsletter.  A pdf version of this newsletter is available to print and distribute. more   

Each newsletter issue contains two feature articles. The first feature is a  summary of religion research findings often drawn from several of the web sites covered by this newsletter. A second feature article is an in-depth review of the content offered by one of the more than 20 websites associated with the InSites into American Religion project.

Hearing the Call:Vocational Reflection Gets Renewed Attention

Nevell Owens remembers when he first felt called to pursue a doctorate in theology. He was working as a criminal prosecutor when he looked into the eyes of a 13 year-old boy accused of murder. He saw that they were empty, and he wanted to know where was God in the life of this boy?

“I knew the boy’s mother was active in church,” Owens said. “I wanted to know, why isn’t the minister here? Why aren’t members of the church here?”

With help from The Fund for Theological Education (FTE) he was able to pursue those questions.

Next year, Owens, 46, hopes to complete his doctoral dissertation from Atlanta's Emory University and find a job teaching theology on a college level. For the past three years he has been a recipient of doctoral and dissertation fellowships from FTE, one of many programs offered by the 51-year-old organization to support the next generation of pastors and scholars.

Strengthening vocational reflection and identifying a new generation of talented pastors and theologians has recently begun to receive considerable attention. In addition to supporting the FTE, the Lilly Endowment has awarded grants to private colleges and universities over the past few years to help them develop opportunities for students to explore ministry. The Fund for Theological Education, [www.thefund.org] and the Programs for Theological Exploration and Vocation, (PTEV)[www.ptev.org] have designed attractive web sites with individual testimonies to encourage young people to explore their vocational calling in life.

It’s no secret that mainline denominations are facing a potential shortfall of ordained clergy. Of the students enrolled today in accredited masters of divinity programs, only 60 percent plan to be ordained as pastors, according to a study by Auburn Seminary. On top of that, only 7 percent of clergy in mainline churches are under the age of 35.

Combined, the two forces don’t bode well for the life of the church.

Ann Svennungsen, the president of FTE, said part of the problem is that society privileges higher paying professions such as law, medicine and business over serving professions such as nursing, social work, and the ministry. But another, more fundamental problem, is that the old pipeline that supplied young candidates to seminaries and divinity schools is disappearing.

Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winning novel Gilead captures how the culture has changed. The book’s protagonist, John Ames, is a pastor in 1950s Iowa. His father and grandfather were pastors too. But today, whether in rural or urban areas, it’s increasingly hard to find families with successive generations serving in ministry.

Add to that a decline in the age-old tradition of cultivating caring and committed young people for the vocation of ministry. It used to be that pastors and lay-people would identify young people in their church and suggest they consider ministry. For a variety of reasons, that’s not happening. As a result, said Svennungsen, people often come to ministry later in life.

“People at age 50 will say to me, ‘I wish someone had been there for me when I was 20,’” Svennungsen related.

To help churches identify and nurture young and gifted pastors and theologians, FTE—through the support of the Lilly Endowment — created a matching grant program that enables a congregation of any denomination to provide support for a young members’ first year of seminary. It will also work with the seminary to have tuition reduced or waived entirely during the student’s first year. The Congregational Fellowship program, only three years running, has supported more than 50 students so far.

At the college level, 88 private schools have been the recipients of Lilly Endowment grants aimed at developing programs to examine vocation. Each school designed its own program by introducing the subject of vocation in courses, enhancing worship on campus, or offering summer theology institutes for high-school aged youth, to name just a few examples.

Kimberlee Maphis Early, the program coordinator for PTEV, said the initiative, now in its sixth year, has been extremely popular. (It is no longer accepting applications to this initiative.) This Lilly Endowment initiative has been coordinated through the Fund for Theological Education.

“These programs have succeeded beyond the imagination of the Lilly Endowment and the colleges,” she said.

For example, at Maryville College in Tennessee, parents wanted to participate in the program. At Notre Dame, alumni wanted to take part. And at Boston College, law school students were clamoring to be included, she said.

Now there is hope that the ranks of pastors and theologians will grow.

"We’re beginning to hear from theological schools that younger students are applying,” Maphis Early said. “They’re seeing the impact of these programs.” Helping prospective ministers is a long tradition. The Fund for Theological Education has helped such Christian leaders as the Rev James Forbes, of The Riverside Church in New York City, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes of Harvard University’s Memorial Church, and biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman of Columbia Theological Seminary.

"Good preachers are essential for the health of Christianity," Svennungsen said. “We need good preachers and leaders in order for us be challenged and faithful to our own vocations,” she added, “whatever they may be.

The American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) website is an archival project funded by the Lilly Endowment to preserve quantitative research while also increasing the use and comparison of these datasets. This collection of hundreds of studies includes data on churches, religious professionals, and religious groups (individuals, congregations and denominations). This is data that any user to the site can explore, analyze, and download to their own computer.

In addition to having access to data files on hundreds of religion surveys, it is possible to map congregational membership for the nation or individual states online. Summary membership reports (from the Religious Congregations Membership Study [RCMS] of 1999 & 2000) for all participating denominations can also be compiled by counties, states, metropolitan areas, and the nation. Recently the director Roger Finke, along with Chris Scheitle, published an article offering correctives to the RCMS data. The paper was for the Review of Religious Research. This interesting article is available on the journal's web site.

A new feature to the site allows visitors to trace the heritage and size of American religious movements across mergers and schisms. Select any of the several hundred denominations and you quickly see how that denomination is related to other groups. Was it formed by a merger, did it split from another group, or was it founded independently? Once started, did it merge to form another group, did it generate more schisms, or was it ever renamed?

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Council of Churches, the ARDA also provides denominational data from 1925 to 2001, offering the number of members, clergy, and churches each denomination reported by year.

The site team also recently created learning modules that are topic-driven explorations that guide the user through empirical data studies of American evangelicalism, the relationship between religion and science, views on gender roles, religion and attitudes towards homosexuality, and the religious landscape in the United States.

And ARDA continues to add new survey data all the time. Several recent additions have included Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a 2003 ABC News Views of Islam Poll, and a 2001 Survey of American Catholic Priests. This site is well worth a visit.

The Pastoral Leadership Search Effort www.theplse.org/ contains a superb resource for youth, but especially for youth leaders and pastors who need resources to help young adults explore what ministry is and what a pastor does. Find this list at www.theplse.org/youth/index.cfm?fuseaction=resourcesyouth

You can read a number of interesting and inspiring stories of persons related to one of this issue's featured sites - The Fund for Theological Education at www.thefund.org/great_stories/

The Calvin Institute for Christian Worship web resources for Worship Worldwide have doubled over the past year www.calvin.edu/worship/global. The section has been redesigned to make the resources more available with circular and map-based menus for their book and music lists, photo galleries, multimedia files, and other resources. Their most recent feature is a photo gallery and daily weblog produced by CICW staff in Utrecht at the assembly of the Reformed Ecumenical Council www.calvin.edu/worship/global/utrecht.php

The FTE site contains an electronic journal that is well worth a look. The e-journal is entitled Calling and focuses on information for religious leaders who are interesting in nurturing others into ministerial vocations. Check it out at www.thefund.org/ejournal/

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly October Special

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly will take a fresh look at religion and families with the release of a new national survey and the broadcast of a series of programs on "Faith and Family in America." What is religion's influence on the family and how do diverse family relationships influence religion? How strong are the ties between religion and family behavior, parenting, marriage, divorce, commitment, sexual relationships, different types of household structures, gender roles and American attitudes toward the moral and social issues that affect family life? How are faith communities adapting to the revolutionary changes and shifts in families?

 The Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations of Hartford Seminary just launched a completely redesigned site. The Macdonald Center site http://macdonald.hartsem.edu has greatly expanded offerings their resources about Islam.  Within their large online articles section they include a number of very interesting articles and discussions. The Islam FAQ section is also worth visiting.

The Tech Tips section will include handy items of interest regarding web resources, techniques for Internet searching and browsing and other facts to facilitate doing ministry in our technological world.

Tired of Spam - Do Something About It!

Your ISP might be trying to get rid of spam, your email program may be trying to remove spam, but you too can do something about it if you use Outlook (not outlook express). Download the open-source program SpamBayes http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ and follow its instructions and you can have a hand in the war against spam.

Have something on your computer screen you want to capture as an image but don't know how? Press "alt" and the "Print Screen/SysRq" button (probably near your number pad) and you can capture the screen image you see on the monitor. Then open up Word and a new document and paste (remember the handy "ctrl" and "V" trick?) - what should appear is a screen captured picture of your computer screen. A right mouse click on that image will allow you to bring up the "picture toolbar" to edit and crop the pasted image.

Last issue we talked about The Nonprofit Good Practice Guide at www.npgoodpractice.org/. Several other handy sites to know about that are specifically related to technology for nonprofits include www.Techsoup.org and www.coyotecom.com. For more general information about nonprofits, check out www.nonprofits.org/ - this nonprofit FAQ is full of great information, as is the link resources at www.coyotecom.com/free.html

Did you ever copy and paste some text from a web site or another document and not be able to remove the hidden commands or coding from your new document. There is a very easy way to remove all coding from copied material. Simply open "notepad" - the often forgotten word processing program that comes with Microsoft operating system. Look in the Accessories folder under the "Start" and "Programs" menus. Paste the copied text into Notepad first and then copy that text and paste it into your document. All the unnecessary codes will be gone. This also works great for those of you pasting MS Word text into an html document.

Remember to update the virus definations, programs and operating system on your computer!

About InSites into American Religion:

InSites is a quarterly E-newsletter designed to educate the public about the web resources from religion institutes and projects related to the initiatives in religion of the Lilly Endowment, Inc. This is a joint project of Scott Thumma, Hartford Seminary and Joe Coalter, Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education.  Scott Thumma is the newsletter editor.

An abbreviated version of the e-newsletter is distributed quarterly via email.  If you would like to receive this email please send a subscription email to InSites@hartsem.edu and request either the html or text version.  An Adobe pdf version of the newsletter is available online for printing and distributing.  To open a pdf document you must have the free Adobe reader installed on your computer.  Download the program at  http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.   Everyone is free to print and distribute the newsletter.  Permission to excerpt and reprint portions of the newsletter content is hereby given.

Send an email to InSites@hartsem.edu for more information about the newsletter or to offer suggestions and feedback.

An archive of previous issues is available at the Resources for American Christianity web site at www.resourcingchristianity.org

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