A Religious Calling

Colleges and universities offer new programs to help clerical leaders gain management skills

No matter what their faith, leaders of religious organizations often find themselves managing dozens

of workers and responsible for thousands, if not millions, of dollars. And more and more of them acknowledge that spiritual insight, however deep, cannot compensate for a lack of administrative expertise.

The gap in skills has become particularly noticeable as scandals have broken out and government interest in supporting religious groups has grown.

As a result, several universities have begun creating graduate programs in religious management, usually with support from religious-minded foundations.

“Most people in seminaries don’t go into pulpit ministries, they go into nonprofits,” says Peter Dobkin Hall, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations who specializes in studying Protestant congregations. “And it is a singularly curious thing that ministry schools haven’t made any effort to train them to the task.”

Some people object that the new programs are too much like business school, and that a general nonprofit-management degree is all that is needed. But many universities believe that business-school values can enlighten future religious leaders by teaching them, as the director of Boston College’s ministry institute, Thomas H. Groome, puts it, “the ministerial side of management and the management side of ministry.”

The Genesis

Churches tend to evolve slowly, but American Catholic parishes reacted swiftly after pedophilia scandals involving priests erupted in 2002, because public outrage forced them to.

Jennifer L.S. Bader, an associate director of Boston College’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, notes that while church leaders didn’t cause the scandals, their habit of shuffling criminal priests from parish to parish arguably caused most of the anger.

“The scandal cannot be reduced to bad management,” says Ms. Bader, “But that was certainly something that inflamed it.”

Pained but unsure what to do, her boss, Mr. Groome, attended a conference of Catholic business executives and bishops — a meeting he remembers as less than productive. While bishops spoke of “the reign of God on earth” and “the living sacrament,” the executives talked right past them, he says, countering with “economies of scale” and “human resources.”

Yet Mr. Groome himself found the meeting inspirational, in a way. The noncommunication made him realize that Boston College, a Catholic university with a strong seminary and business school, could train people to be fluent in both theology and management.

This September, Boston College will begin offering courses for a joint master’s degree in pastoral ministry and business administration. The institute will also begin offering a plain pastoral ministry degree with a concentration — three or four courses — in church management.

Villanova University, another Catholic institution, has worked on parallel lines and will begin offering an online-only degree in church management in the fall of 2008.

Both programs expect to attract primarily theology and social-work students without mathematical backgrounds, but professors said none of them will get breaks in quantitative courses like statistics. Both also hope to draw on an international audience.

Faith, Peace, and Budgets

So far, the Catholic programs are only considering applications, but other institutions already combine religious training with a management curriculum. Brandeis University, a secular institution with a Jewish focus, offered a joint degree in nonprofit management and Jewish studies for years, until it switched to a Jewish studies and master’s of business administration degree six years ago.

Like the Catholic programs, Brandeis’s five-semester dual degree blends courses in bookkeeping and marketing with some in Jewish and Israeli history, and sometimes combines them, as in a course titled “Statistics for Jewish Professionals.” Students also receive the equivalent of two years of Hebrew instruction.

In a similar program starting this fall, Spertus College, a Jewish institution in Chicago, will begin offering a graduate-level Jewish professional-studies degree, which couples nonprofit administration with Jewish and Israeli history. But in response to growing demand, it is also now offering courses on managing Christian organizations.

Indeed, Nadia M. Whiteside, an assistant director of recruitment and alumni affairs at Spertus, says people of all faiths increasingly conduct nonprofit work through religious organizations, for two reasons: The Bush administration has steered government aid to religious charities, and houses of worship already have dedicated audiences and fund-raising arms.

Leonard Saxe, a professor of Jewish social policy who teaches the statistics course at Brandeis, said that adding a master’s of business administration component to the joint degree made it much more attractive to students. And while he plays down his program’s connection to religion, almost all of the dozen or so students in the program (with six more coming this fall) do end up at Jewish charities.

Jason A. Soloway, a 2001 graduate of Brandeis’s program, now directs special projects at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, in New York, a foundation that supports many Jewish causes.

He says that while he could have succeeded in a general nonprofit management post, Brandeis’s program was the best training for a Jewish-oriented organization.

“It gave me two different sets of skills, and two lenses for looking at the world that complemented each other,” he says. “That was my hope going in, and that was the reality.”

Just as Mr. Soloway had worked at Jewish nonprofit groups before enrolling, Catholic programs seek a similar student: not recent college graduates, but professionals with charity experience.

For example, Joseph P. Reganato, the first student admitted to Boston College’s pastoral-ministry and M.B.A. program, has worked for four years as a campus minister at Central Catholic High School, in Lawrence, Mass.

A layman, he earned an undergraduate degree in theology from Boston College in 2003, with a concentration in “faith, peace, and justice.” And though he longs to do youth-service work, he also says, “My work requires organization, management. I wasn’t prepared for it with my theology degree. I was prepared to talk about it, but not for planning a year out or making budgets.”

While enrolled in a night accounting course at Boston College — a struggle at first, he admits — he heard about his alma mater’s plans to offer a business and ministry degree. He recalls how an administrator at a workshop told him, “I didn’t know people like you existed. You’re just the student we want in the program.”

However perfectly Mr. Reganato fits the pastoral-ministry aspect of the program, though, he will remain an anomaly among his fellow business students. “I’ll be a minority,” he acknowledges. “I’ll be prepared for that.”

Haphazard Training

Many Protestant ministers do get a bit of financial training in divinity school. But D. Scott Cormode, an associate professor of leadership development at the Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, Calif., found that training haphazard.

In 1996, at his previous job at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, Calif., Mr. Cormode ordered course catalogs from 100 seminaries, circled every course on finance or accounting, and interviewed every teacher. He found lots of redundant effort and little consensus on what to teach.

So Mr. Cormode sought funds from the Lilly Endowment — a major supporter of Christian leadership programs — to found an oversight body, the Academy of Religious Leadership. He also edited its publication, the Journal of Religious Leadership, to promote religious management ideas. Both have found an audience at seminary schools, to the point where Mr. Cormode felt comfortable stepping down from the leadership of each. And he expects interest in church management to accelerate.

At least one university, though, isn’t interested in reviving a religious management degree. Seton Hall University, a Catholic institution in New Jersey, cut the religious-oriented management training it offered in the early 1990s and has no desire to resurrect it.

“We put the courses in the books, but it seems we didn’t get very many students,” recalls Naomi Bailin Wish, director of Seton Hall’s Center for Public Service. Ministry students were taking what they considered to be more important classes, she said, and the laypeople interested in the courses lacked undergraduate degrees.

So Seton Hall folded the courses into its general nonprofit-management program. From her point of view, Ms. Wish says, “the generic nonprofit is just as helpful as one that focused on a narrower religious course.”

Perhaps more so. The general degree lets someone switch jobs easily, and Ms. Wish is not sure it is wise to train religious leaders to think like business students striving for profit: “You have to learn business skills. But I don’t know if management school is the best place to learn those.”

Financial Aid

Even before they obtain financial training, religious-management students recognize a few facts: Their future salaries will be low, and they cannot afford large loans to pay for graduate school. To offset that deficit, officials that run religious-management programs seek private foundation support for scholarships and keep their programs tiny so everyone receives aid. In fact, Villanova’s program, with a projected 25 students each year, would be vastly larger than that offered by any other institution.

“The bargain we make with them,” says Mr. Saxe of Brandeis, “is that we go out and get philanthropic support so they can concentrate on their studies.”

The Brandeis program received $8,500 in 2005 from the Wexner Foundation, in New Albany, Ohio. Villanova has received $400,000 for management programs (including a current summer certificate course), some of it from the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities, in Wilmington, Del.

Even if students graduate without debt, though, they soon realize financial worries are not limited to themselves. Indeed, religious-management programs recognize that students’ employers will often be chronically short on money, too, so they offer courses on soliciting funds.

Ms. Whiteside, of Spertus College, says that “grant writing seems to be the key skill” her nonprofit management students seek.

Mr. Reganato shares that interest. As a Boston College undergraduate, he wrestled with theology and visited Ecuador to work for a charity; lately, he says, “I realized there’s also a great value in terms of providing funding” for religious causes. So during his current stint at Boston College, he is looking to supplement his spiritual education, and even after one accounting course, he sees a difference.

“I’m not just reading about the idea of liberation theology,” he says. “I’m reading about the way things work.”