Background of Seminarian Debt

For many students at Episcopal seminaries, educational debt has become unmanageable.

Burdened with heavy debt from undergraduate studies and unable to find adequate funding sources, aspirants for ordained ministry often accumulate additional debt during their three years in seminary.

Adding to the problem is the fact that The Episcopal Church is the only major denomination in the United States without a central funding source to support seminarians in their education and training.

Some seminarians receive financial assistance from their sponsoring parishes and dioceses. In addition, seminaries work very hard to raise funds for staff, libraries, buildings, special programs and scholarships for their students. However, the funding from churches, parishes and dioceses varies. It is woefully inadequate—a faulty patchwork with no coherent plan.

The recent dramatic increase in seminarian debt comes in part because of higher education costs and partly because recent Episcopal seminarians are younger than their predecessors of the past 30 years.

These younger students have much more undergraduate educational debt than their seminary counterparts of the past 30 years. The previous generation of seminarians often answered their calls after following one or two career paths. They used assets accumulated in other vocations to fund their seminary education and training.

This heavy debt load can limit the ministry choices of new clergy, which, in turn, will affect the future of the Episcopal Church.

For more information on seminarian debt, click here.

To meet the challenge of rising debt for seminary students, The Society for the Increase of the Ministry (SIM), with support from the Episcopal Church Foundation, collaborated with the Church Pension Fund, the Council of Seminary Deans, the Presiding Bishop, the Office of Ministry Development at the Episcopal Church Center, the Evangelical Education Society, and other groups to respond to Resolution A064 passed at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in July 2003. 

SIM also met with the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes, bishops, Episcopal churches and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), which has started a similar fund for its seminarians, to discuss the need and develop a viable solution. 

The outcome of this dialogue is Funding Future Leaders: A National Endowment for Episcopal Seminarians (FFL). The initiative is an awareness campaign to inform all people throughout the church about the Seminarian debt problem and to support the effort to develop enough clergy for strong, creative leadership in the Church.  

The financial goal of Funding Future Leaders is to raise $200 million over the next 20 years. The endowment income of $10 million will provide needs-based scholarship grants.