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| Meadville-Lombard's campus from 1930 to 2011 in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood was made possible by a sweet and rare tax incentive from the state of Illinois. |
Today
there are only two recognized seminaries affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)—Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkley, California and Meadville-Lombard
Theological School in Chicago. Both of them have struggled to stay alive in
recent years battered by high operating costs, the high cost of seminary
education resulting in the need for scarce scholarship and fellowship money for
students, and a movement by some on the UUA board to de-fund the schools in
favor of giving aid to individual ministerial students, most of whom now train
at non U.U. schools
Harvard, the
theological school most identified in the public mind with Unitarians long ago abandoned ties to it and until two years ago
went for over a decade without a Unitarian holding a tenured
professorship. Despite that many U.U.
ministerial students continue to study there and the pink gown of a Harvard Doctorate of Theology still puts its
graduates on the fast track for prestigious pulpits and leadership positions in
the Association. That puts ambitious
students at the denominational schools, no matter how gifted, at a disadvantage in an
environment where many more candidates are emerging from theological schools of
all stripes than there are pulpits to fill.
But
a lot of us feel that the affiliated schools play a role in preserving UU
history and theology through their libraries and collections and in preparing
students for the challenges of the UU ministry, which is very different than
those of even the most liberal of Protestant
Denominations.
The
Chicago school traces its roots far from the gleaming building on Michigan Avenue where it now rents
space from the Jewish Spertus Institute.
By
the 1840’s Unitarianism was well
established, if still controversial among conventionally orthodox
Christians. It was firmly ensconced in
the Boston, the Hub of the Universe, and
its nearby environs and among its ranks counted the cream of the very active New England Renaissance. It had spread across most of New England and
into New York State. Boston merchants had even established
congregations in further afield ports,
trading centers, and political capitals—New
York City; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; and
New Orleans, Louisiana. Hardy members of the New England diaspora had even founded congregations inland on the
great rivers—Cincinnati, Ohio in
1830 and St. Louis, Missouri in
1835.
But
the rest of the great continent stretching west of the Appalachians was utterly devoid of Unitarian worship. But that same territory was being flooded by
fervent evangelical missionaries as the country was plunged into one of its
periodic Revivalist frenzies. Methodists, Baptists, Universalists,
and home grown sects led by Barton Stone
and Alexander Campbell were saving
souls at every village, cross roads, and riverboat landing in the west.
The
high minded ministers in Boston were aghast that these folks could not hear the
good news of a calmer, more rational religion of the cultivated mind. But neither they nor any of the new graduates
of Harvard were personally willing to forgo the comforts of civilization and
plunge into the “wilderness” like the saddle-bag evangelists of the other denominations.
Then
suddenly, as if manna from heaven
itself, an unexpected donation by Dutch born
businessman Harm Jan Huidekoper made
it possible for to establish a new theological school west of the mountains
just for the “rustics.” Raised a Calvinist Huidekoper was a late
“convert” to liberal religion and Unitarianism.
Earlier he had helped move the Independent
Congregational Church of Meadville,
Pennsylvania, which his family had helped found in 1830, into theological
Unitarianism. Now he was prepared to
donate a substantial sum of money if the Unitarians in Boston would agree to
establish a seminary in his town. The
Congregationalist Church would provide its first home and support such as
lodging for masters and scholars.
On
January 27, 1844 James Freeman Clarke,
one of the leading Unitarian ministers in Boston, announced the launching of
the new Meadville Theological School.
In
addition to the local congregation the new school had one more initial partner,
the infant denomination known both as the Disciples
of Christ and The Christian Church,
made up of the followers of Stone and Campbell, also wanted a formal school for
their ministry, which they had never had before, relying on lay preachers
ordained by consensus when they had proved worthy. This group was relatively religiously liberal
although evangelical in style. But like
the Unitarians, they fancied themselves beyond denominational divisions,
re-creating the community of brotherhood of the early church.
The
association did not last past the earliest years of the new school. The theology of the Unitarians and the
Disciples was too different and for a tradition that espoused universality, the
Campbellites, as their detractors
called them, showed a remarkable talent for schizmatizing over minor points
such as the use of instruments for worship music or whether to support
missionary societies. Eventually the
main body abandoned Meadville and established their own school at Hiram, Ohio.
The
new school struggled, but persisted.
Unitarian congregations in the East failed to subscribe to regular
appeals for support and the loose American
Unitarian Association consisting of individual members interested in tract
ministry and missionary work struggled to make annual contributions of support.
But
the school did its job, and in a few years its graduates were filling new
pulpits dotting the old Northwest
Territory—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin,
Minnesota and across the river into Iowa. But graduates were looked down upon by the
Harvard educated elite in the east few, very few, were called to pulpits on the
Coast. And when they were it was generally
to congregations too poor to support a gentleman minister and his family or
ones in crisis and turmoil.
In
1852 there was enough growth in the West for the establishment of the Western Unitarian Conference to support
congregations and reduce reliance on Eastern “charity” for support. Ironically the leader of the movement and its
first President was William Greenleaf Eliot, the minister
of the prestige pulpit in St. Louis, a Harvard graduate, and a member of the
extended Eliot and May clans that would cut such a wide swath through Unitarianism. Eliot was one of the most conservative of
Unitarian ministers and fought encroaching heresies like Transcendentalism and the freethinking
of the rebellious Free Religious
Society tooth and nail.
Unfortunately
for Eliot, it was a battle he was destined to lose. Big time.
That
was largely the work of one man, Jenkin Lloyd
Jones,
a Welsh born Union Army veteran who graduated from Meadville in 1870 at the age
of 28. 5 years later while serving a
congregation in Janesville, Wisconsin he
took on an additional part time job as Missionary
Secretary of the Western Conference and by 1880 was working there full
time. He also energetically founded Unity a parallel organization for
discussion and exploration of social ideas whose chapters usually met on
weeknights at Unitarian churches and launched Unity, a magazine of
radical ideas and reform and a publishing house which was soon turning out
hundreds of tracts an pamphlets on religious
and social reform issues. Under
Jones’s long leadership the Western Conference became not only more independent
of Boston, but pushed the
theological boundaries of Unitarianism beyond Christianity and embraced activism on behalf of the poor and
oppressed—a muscular reading of the social
gospel.
Theological
training at Meadville adapted to preparing ministers for this new kind of
vision and Jones would help match them to congregations. By the turn of the 20th Century Meadville graduates were changing Unitarianism
forever. I have long argued that UUism
of today with its emphasis on progressive
activism and its comfort with many religious traditions beyond liberal
Christianity owes more to Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the Western Conference than to
the Broad Church respectability of
the respectable eastern establishment.
Whatever
its successes in filling hungry pulpits with I-mean-business liberals, the
little school at Meadville with no endowment to speak of was always skating on
thin ice. Crises came and went with alarming regularity.
After
years of acrimony and holding each other off at arm’s length, the Western Conference
and the National Conference, the
Unitarian body made up of congregations rather than individuals, finally
reunited in in 1894, although the mostly Midwestern congregations retained
their distinctive liberalism and style.
The National Conference was able to raise contributions from member
congregations, most of which it turned over the AUA to use in support of
missionary work, tracts and publications, and support for the education of
ministers.
With
the rise of central authority in the person of Samuel Atkins Eliot II, first executive President of the old AUA, Meadville found itself mortally
endangered. Eliot was a classic Brahmin who wanted Unitarianism to
conform the supposed meritocracy of
the Eastern elite. That meant pressure to get into line for the scruffy,
independent westerners nearly matched by his mission to drive women from the ministry. Since the AUA was a primary funder for the
seminary, this was an existential threat.
In
1925 Elliot completed his mastery of the Unitarian universe by merging the AUA
with the National Conference, retaining the older name and organizational style
and imposing it somewhat clumsily on an association of congregations. Elliot stayed on as the powerful President of
the new AUA. That meant Meadville would
be doomed unless it could upgrade to what Elliot considered the professional
standards set by his beloved Harvard.
In
1926 the school abandoned its old Pennsylvania home and relocated to Chicago
where it was granted the status of an affiliate
theological school with the already sufficiently prestigious University of Chicago. As a further inducement to move the State of Illinois offered the school a
nifty break “full tax-exempt status in perpetuity for all college-owned
property”, a status shared with only two other schools, Monmouth College and Northwestern
University.
Work
soon started on Meadville’s new home, a handsome gray stone building across the
street from the “Unitarian Cathedral,” First Unitarian Church of Chicago. Enrolment
surged.
But
the reborn school did not blindly follow the Eliot’s vision. It still retained the scrappy independence of
the old Western Conference. It became
the primary source of newly minted Humanist
ministers who over the next twenty years would overwhelm traditional theists and come to dominate
Unitarianism for two or three generations.
The
Crash of ’29 and subsequent Great Depression plunged Meadville back
into crisis mode.
It
was even harder on a downstate Illinois
Universalist school. Lombard College, founded by the
Universalists in 1853 in Galesburg was
perhaps best known at poet Carl
Sandburg’s alma matter. When it
collapsed in 1930, Meadville absorbed its seminary, the Ryder School of Divinity and a comfortable purse of Universalist
endowment. Re-Christened the
Meadville-Lombard School of Theology was thus officially the first school to
train ministers in both liberal denominations.
But it must be said that the Universalists quickly took a back seat, and
as would happen again and again, the Unitarians took the money and took over.
The AUA and the Universalist
Church in America consolidated into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961. The new organization suddenly found itself
with “too many seminaries.” After a
still controversial study, the UUA decided to close the Universalist schools
Crane Theological School at Tufts University and the theological
school of St. Lawrence University in
Up State New York leaving on Meadville-Lombard and Starr King with unaffiliated
Harvard Divinity School an unspoken elephant in the room.
In
the 1950’s and early ‘60’s despite over 100 years of history and the rise of
Humanists to almost unquestioned domination among Unitarians, Meadville
graduates were still passed over for plumb pulpits and denominational
leadership. It was not until the
election of O. Eugene Pickett as
President of the UUA in 1979 and his successor William F. Schulz in 1985 that graduates finally entered the top
ranks of denominational leadership.
Both
of the surviving schools have fallen on hard times lately under the pressure of
possible defunding by the UUA Board.
Meadville-Lombard floundered and desperately sought partners. A proposed merger with California based Starr
King fell through when both parties withdrew from talks in 2006. Latter a proposal to create a new theological
university in cooperation with the United Church of Christ’s and American Baptist’s Andover Newton
Theological School with other possible partners in the wings collapsed in
2011.
There
was much descent among faculty, students and alumni as the school seemed to be
teetering on the edge of extinction.
After
years of study, the school announced a new curriculum called the Meadville Lombard Educational Model
which began for students entering the Masters
of Divinity degree program in Fall 2009. The model de-emphasized residential
study with options of distant learning and blends traditional rigorous academic
learning with experiential learning in community and congregational settings.
Some
feel that the reduction in traditional class time will weaken the rigor of
academic preparations. Others feel that
the hands-on-in-the-field approach will better prepare ministers for the
demands of the modern religious environment.
With
reduced residency and the high cost of maintenance of an 80 year old building,
Meadville-Lombard decided to sell its Hyde
Park campus and move into two rented floors of the new Spertus Institute
building in 2011.
After
years of dizzying change and dissent, a venerable institution looks forward to
supplying ministers for a new kind of wilderness.
