Spiritual Unemployment?

Monday is the parish clergyman's usual day off. But the rest of his week is apt to be a hectic succession of committee meetings, Boy Scout jamborees, ladies' auxiliary suppers. From the pulpit of Harvard's Memorial Church last week, Dr. Samuel H. Miller, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, launched into a blistering tirade against Protestant clergy who, at the insistence of their congregations, reduce their office to a "mad dervish dance of unenlightened public activities."

Said Baptist Miller: "One of the tragedies of our time is that the minister is both overworked and unemployed; overworked in a multitude of tasks that do not have the slightest connection with religion, and unemployed in the serious concerns and exacting labors of maintaining a disciplined spiritual life among mature men and women. It is a scandal of modern Protestantism that young men called to the high venture of the Christian way . . . are graduated into churches where the magnitude of their vocation is macerated . . . by the pressure of the petty practices of so-called parish progress."

U.S. seminaries, argued Dean Miller, must take some of the blame. Theological education has become "a vulgarized form of a trade school," failing to develop the young clergyman's intellect or make him sensitive to the heights and depths of human experience. Today's minister, warned Miller, "must be sure his mind is sharpened to its utmost, lest he blunder about the world with a rough and stupid carelessness, hoping that he might hit upon the will of God merely because of his good intentions."

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