You are here: Home > News > The Harvest July/August 2006 > School of Ministry on year's sabbatical

KSM goes on yearlong hiatus

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

The Kansas School of Ministry will take a sabbatical year to explore questions of future funding and an expanded direction for its ministry. Archdeacon Jim Upton, KSM’s director, wrote in late July to the school’s faculty and oversight committee telling them of the decision not to offer residential class weekends during the 2006-2007 school year but to engage in a year of discernment and discussion.

Upton said the move was prompted both by financial constraints and the desire to expand educational offerings to make the school’s curriculum available to more people in the diocese.

The school had been operating with about a third of its expenses paid by student tuition ($600 per person last year), a third from the diocesan budget and a third from a special private grant that helped establish the school in 1997. Costs for the program included faculty members’ travel expenses and a small stipend, as well as student course materials and the cost of housing and feeding the students for nine weekends each school year.

Upton said the grant money was exhausted with the 2005-2006 school year, and it would have been difficult to ask students to assume that extra expense on top of tuition and the books they are required to purchase for their academic coursework.

He said Bishop Dean Wolfe also has been talking to the school’s oversight committee about how KSM can offer an expanded variety of educational offerings for clergy continuing education and expanded lay education.

“While I regret not having regular sessions this year,” Upton said, “I think that we have a great opportunity to strengthen and expand our offerings in the diocese.”

He said the oversight committee will meet with Bishop Wolfe in coming weeks to begin a process of redesigning the school’s curriculum and establishing a stable funding base for future operations.

Two-fold purpose

Since its creation, KSM has had a two-fold purpose — providing classroom and ministry education for those seeking ordination as a deacon, and offering lay people an in-depth education experience. It has done this through a two-year program, with students meeting once a month for a weekend-long residential session at the diocesan conference center in Topeka. The faculty included clergy and lay leaders from the diocese with expertise in the content areas of Scripture, church history, theology and ministry practices.

There have been 50 people in the eight graduating classes since the school started. Of those, 26 are lay people who have not gone on to be ordained, 21 have been ordained as deacons, two were ordained as priests under the old Canon 9 process (also called local priests) and one was ordained as a deacon but since has gone to seminary and been ordained a priest.

Prior to the creation of KSM, deacons and local priests went through an education and training program operated by the Commission on Ministry.

Upton said there are two students affected by the hiatus, having completed the first year of the two-year KSM program.