SIM shares a perspective with us that we just can’t get anywhere else.

Between my wife and me, we have $33,000 in undergraduate debt that we’re paying off one check at a time as they say, and it hurts. I can only imagine adding to that for seminary.

I’ve been very lucky here at Virginia. With their aid plus support from my home parish and diocese and a scholarship from SIM, we have been able to make ends meet. My wife and I are both music teachers, and she’s taken this year off from teaching to stay home with our infant child.

Besides providing the scholarship, SIM comes (twice a year) and shares a perspective with us that we just can’t get anywhere else. I’m willing to say that’s worth as much as the scholarship. It’s refreshing to get a real outside perspective on all of the different organizations (seminaries, dioceses and the national church) that ordinands are enmeshed in. The witness to us from SIM is really fabulous, especially for the on-campus students. It seems really tough for them. Not all of them are just right out of college; some of them have given up a lot, moved in here and are now in totally different financial situations than they were before.

I was surprised to learn from people in my home parish who came from other faith traditions that other denominations have a much more centralized focus to funding seminarians. More of it is handled at the diocese level and by the seminaries. I would have expected a little more of an understanding at the national level of how to fund seminary education.

That’s where SIM is really filling in the gaps. They’re becoming that presence where they keep tabs on what is happening. They’re very vocal in their witness to what’s happening and what people need to be concerned about.