Calvin Theological Seminary: An Institution in Motion
Last week CRC Communications reported a new church-planting concentration within Calvin Theological Seminary’s Commissioned Pastor Certificate. On the surface it is a modest announcement. Resonate has assessed and trained church planters for some time. Calvin Seminary has developed learning plans for people seeking ordination as commissioned pastors. Until now those efforts largely operated separately. The new concentration brings them together.
Participants will combine seminary coursework with church-planting assessment and preparation, a cohort, coaching, ministry practice, and an in-person retreat. The program is deliberately attentive to context: church planters are being prepared to embody and express the gospel among particular people in a particular place.
There is no need to make the announcement carry more weight than it does. It does, however, open a clear window onto an institution that has been responding to changing circumstances for a long time.
Over time the Christian Reformed Church has developed more ways to recognize, prepare, and authorize people for pastoral ministry. Technology has made theological education available without requiring everyone to relocate to the same place. Formation has moved closer to particular ministries and communities. Commissioned pastors have assumed forms of pastoral responsibility that were once located more consistently within the Minister of the Word pathway. And the denomination has had to clarify what these different pathways share and how people formed through them are authorized for broader pastoral responsibility.
Each response creates something the institution did not have before. Each also changes what the institution has to attend to next. That is the motion worth following.
A School for Ministers
Calvin Theological Seminary begins in 1876. Before that, prospective ministers in the Christian Reformed Church were prepared through a tutorial system. As early as 1869, Classis Michigan assigned that work to a single teacher in one place. At a special synod meeting in February 1876, Geert Boer was appointed full-time instructor, and the school that would become Calvin Theological Seminary was underway.
Calvin Seminary’s own historical account states the purpose plainly: the seminary was established to meet the CRC’s need for educated ministers. The institutional response did more than prepare someone to fill a particular vacancy.
The church created a common means of preparing ministers before their eventual congregations, locations, and circumstances were known. A student could be formed for ministry in one place and later called to another. The denomination could invest in that preparation because the resulting ministerial capacity was not tied to the congregation that happened to need a pastor when the student began preparing.
The seminary therefore created more than educated ministers. It created capacity for future Needs the denomination could not yet locate. That feature of the traditional seminary model becomes easier to see once other forms of preparation begin growing alongside it.
More Ministers, Differently
The CRC has not simply moved from having too few ministers to having more. Yearbook data compiled by the Church Order Review Task Force show a more interesting change. In 1950, 283 Ministers of the Word served in congregational ministry, 34 in missions, and 29 in other called positions. By 1975 the corresponding numbers were 580, 57, and 147. In 2000 they stood at 612, 45, and 236. By 2023, 808 Ministers of the Word served in congregational ministry, 34 in missions, and 273 in other called positions, with another 93 eligible for call but not currently serving.
Over the same period the number of commissioned pastors grew substantially. By 2024, denominational records showed 90 commissioned pastors serving in solo or lead roles—46 in emerging churches and 44 in established ones.
“The CRC has more ministers” can be true without adequately describing what has happened. Ministerial capacity has increased unevenly. An increase in one kind of capacity does not automatically replace another. A commissioned pastor authorized for a particular ministry and a Minister of the Word eligible for call across the denomination may both exercise substantial pastoral responsibility, but they are not institutionally interchangeable.
Quantities within the same institution can move at different rates and in different directions. The practical question is therefore not merely whether the CRC has enough pastors. It is also what kind of pastoral capacity is increasing, where it is located, and what it can do.
The Person Is Already There
One thing alternate pathways make possible is straightforward. Sometimes the potential pastor is already there.
A congregation or ministry recognizes someone whose gifts are visible in the place where that person is serving. The person may already know the community, carry its trust, understand the ministry, and exercise meaningful leadership. The commissioned-pastor pathway allows the church to begin with those realities rather than requiring every candidate to follow the same sequence before pastoral giftedness can result in authorized ministry.
That is real institutional gain. It gives the CRC additional means to recognize giftedness, form people in relationship to the ministries they may actually serve, and authorize pastoral work in contexts where the traditional pathway may not fit as readily.
But this changes the relationship between preparation and the future. A seminary can prepare a minister without knowing where that minister will eventually serve. Highly contextual Formation begins with much more already known: the person, the ministry, the place, and the Need. That close fit is part of its strength. It is also why succession becomes important.
Suppose a congregation recognizes and forms a commissioned pastor who serves it for many years. Eventually that pastor leaves or retires. Who succeeds that pastor? A pathway built around a known person in a known ministry does not by itself produce the person who will eventually replace them. If the next pastor must likewise emerge through the recognition and Formation of someone closely fitted to that particular ministry, succession depends upon another suitable person being present—or upon another pathway capable of supplying one.
The more effectively Formation corresponds to a particular person and ministry, the more important it becomes to ask how the institution will reproduce that capacity when the person is gone. The unknown has not necessarily disappeared. It may have moved forward in time.
Giftedness Was Already Recognized
A simpler question may be more revealing than the numbers alone can answer: Are we encountering different gifts, or have we changed what we do when we encounter them?
The traditional route never assumed that seminary created pastoral giftedness. The church already understood candidates to possess gifts for ministry. Formal theological education was understood as the fitting stewardship and development of those gifts. Article 7 of the Church Order has long provided the control case. It allows for the ordination of someone whose gifts are evident in a very exceptional measure without the prescribed academic training, while still affirming that the regular route is thorough academic preparation. CRC candidacy materials continue to distinguish Article 6 as the seminary-training route and Article 7 as the exceptional-giftedness route.
The historical logic was therefore not that giftedness belonged to one pathway and its absence to another. Giftedness was ordinarily stewarded through formal theological Formation; Article 7 preserved the recognition that, in rare cases, the gifts and circumstances could warrant ministerial authorization without the normal form of preparation.
What has changed more clearly is the institutional response to recognized giftedness. What was once ordinarily directed toward a common course of formal theological Formation can now, through commissioned ministry, be formed and authorized much closer to the particular person and ministry in which those gifts are already visible. Susan LaClear, director of Candidacy, has described Article 7 as intended for rare cases and noted that the commissioned-pastor pathway has provided ministry opportunities for gifted people whose situations do not allow seminary attendance.
The numbers cannot tell us whether pastoral giftedness has increased. The CRC has always recognized gifted people outside the seminary pathway; Article 7 makes that plain. The change may not be primarily in whom the church recognizes as gifted. It may be in what the church now considers fitting Formation for those gifts.
When the Alternative Becomes Normal
That question matters more when alternate routes to ministry are no longer exceptional accommodations. The CRC can continue to affirm the value of formal seminary education while making it less necessary to becoming an authorized pastor. Those are not contradictory statements. An institution can continue to prefer, praise, and invest in something while simultaneously developing other legitimate ways to accomplish work that once depended upon it.
That changes the institutional position of the traditional pathway even if nobody has decided that theological education matters less. The question then becomes more demanding than whether the CRC still values seminary education. What does seminary Formation provide that the institution still needs? What theological judgment, common knowledge, denominational memory, relationships, habits, or forms of discernment were carried by the traditional pathway? Which of those are also formed through contextual ministry? Which are not? If something remains necessary while the pathway that once carried it becomes less universal, where will the institution form it now?
The normalization of alternate routes does not establish that formal theological Formation is less valuable. It does make it less adequate simply to say that formal theological Formation remains valuable. The institution has to know what work it was doing.
Who Pays for Capacity No One Owns?
The traditional pathway was not sustained by candidates and Calvin Seminary alone. For much of the CRC’s history, congregations collectively supported denominational ministries through Ministry Shares, including the work of preparing ministers. A 2001 Calvin Seminary retrospective reported that ministry shares accounted for 90 percent of the seminary’s budget in 1980 and around 55 percent in 1999. In more recent years the absolute amounts remain material—the 2025 Annual Ministry Report shows Ministry Shares contributing $1.3 million toward the seminary’s $7.7 million in total revenue, about 17 percent—while the underlying logic remains the same: a congregation could contribute to that common capacity without knowing which student it might someday receive as a pastor. That was part of the logic of a denominational system. Churches sustained a capacity whose future benefits could appear somewhere else in the denomination.
That relationship changes when Formation becomes more particular. A congregation that recognizes a gifted person already serving in its community can see the Need, the candidate, and the likely benefit of Formation at the same time. Resources devoted to that person can produce capacity that remains immediately useful to the local ministry.
The contrast matters. Common Formation asks churches to support capacity against Needs whose future location is unknown. Contextual Formation can allow resources to follow a Need whose location and beneficiary are already visible. As contextual pathways become more normal, the institutional case for common financial support therefore cannot simply be assumed. A church may still value Calvin Seminary and denominational theological education while finding the immediate benefit of locally directed Formation easier to see.
That does not tell us what churches should fund. It tells us what the changing architecture asks the denomination to explain. Why should this congregation invest in ministerial capacity whose eventual benefit may belong to another congregation? Historically, one answer was built into the system itself: because other congregations were doing the same, and together they sustained a body of ministers available to the denomination as a whole.
If the common pipeline becomes less necessary to producing pastoral capacity, that answer requires renewed attention. The institution cannot assume that the financial relationships built around a common pathway will remain unchanged while the pathway itself becomes more differentiated. This is not merely a funding question. It is a question about what kind of capacity the churches understand themselves to hold together.
Different Formation Forms Different Things
The CRC’s own candidacy work makes that question difficult to avoid. The 2024 Candidacy Committee report examined commissioned-pastor preparation across classes. Respondents reported stronger evidence among commissioned pastors of a pastoral heart, spiritual and emotional readiness, a Reformed perspective, and pastoral skills than of attributes more tightly tied to formal study—Reformed hermeneutics, CRC polity, and CRC history. The committee linked the stronger attributes to deeply formational relationships with church members, pastors, and classis leaders. The weaker ones, it noted, tend to come through study, and it pointed to Calvin Theological Seminary as a resource for strengthening them.
That should not surprise us. Formation occurs through practices, and different practices form different things. A theology seminar, years spent serving one congregation, supervised ministry, denominational history, a council meeting, sustained conversation with other students, preaching, faculty mentorship, and pastoral care are not simply different ways of delivering the same content. They do different work.
Once an institution differentiates its pathways, it therefore has to pay attention not merely to whether each pathway produces pastors. It must ask what each pathway forms well, what it forms weakly, and where missing Formation will come from. That is not an argument for making every pathway identical. It is an argument against assuming that different forms of preparation produce identical Formation.
Technology Changes the Geography
The changing financial relationship has a physical counterpart. Calvin Seminary is not merely a curriculum that happens to be headquartered in Grand Rapids. The CRC and the seminary have invested substantially in a physical formative center there. In recent years that investment has included a significant renovation of the student center, classrooms, welcome center, chapel, and faculty offices (completed 2021–2022), followed by a more than $20 million student housing facility—the Harry and Bernice Vermeer Family Housing Center—completed across the street from the main campus. Those investments make visible an institutional assumption that has long accompanied residential theological education: place can carry Formation.
Technology changes that relationship. A candidate can now receive more of what Calvin offers without spending the same amount of time at Calvin. Faculty knowledge can travel without requiring the student to move. Theological education becomes available to people whose families, employment, congregations, or ministries make relocation difficult. That increase in reach is real.
But reach and proximity can move in opposite directions. Calvin Seminary can now be educationally present in more places while students spend less time physically present at Calvin Seminary as a formative center. That matters because geography had been doing more than creating inconvenience. Faculty, students, classrooms, worship, library, meals, conversations, disagreements, friendships, and informal encounters were once held together partly because theological education required people to occupy the same place. Technology allows some of those things to be separated. It does not tell us which ones should be.
The practical question is not whether online theological education is good or bad. It is this: when Technology removes the need for proximity, what had proximity been doing? Some of it may have been unnecessary constraint. Some may have carried Formation that now needs to be preserved another way. The recent capital investments make the question concrete. What happens when an institution has invested heavily in a formative center at the same time that Technology makes participation in its Formation increasingly independent of sustained presence at that center?
The new church-planting concentration is interesting precisely because it does not simply choose distance over presence. It combines distributed theological education with a cohort, coaching, ministry in a particular context, and an embodied retreat. Some things travel. Some remain local. Some are deliberately brought back together. Technology has increased reach. The institution must now decide what should travel with that reach.
Decentralization Needs a Center
Moving Formation closer to local ministry might sound like a movement away from centralized institutional control. In one sense it is. But decentralizing Formation does not eliminate the need for a center. It can make some functions of the center even more important.
When most candidates move through a common process, much of the institution’s commonality is carried by the process itself. Candidates encounter similar requirements, faculty, theological expectations, relationships, and forms of evaluation. As Formation becomes more distributed, those commonalities can no longer be assumed simply because candidates occupied the same pathway.
Someone still has to determine what adequate preparation means. Someone has to decide which competencies must be shared across contexts. Someone must recognize whether they have been demonstrated. And the denomination must determine when someone formed for particular ministry is ready to exercise broader ministry.
The CRC has continued working on precisely these questions. Its commissioned-pastor processes distinguish forms of authorization, and Synod 2025 added a bridge-ordination expectation for commissioned pastors entering new solo or lead-pastor calls. The motion is important. Decentralizing Formation can require more central coordination, not less.
Local recognition and contextual Formation can increase the institution’s capacity to respond to particular Needs. But the more varied the routes become, the more work may be required to preserve common recognition, standards, and authorization across them. Decentralization and centralization are not always opposites. They can increase together.
The Need Was Never Just “More Pastors”
This also changes how we understand the problem to which these developments are responding. “Pastoral shortage” sounds like one quantity: there are fewer pastors than churches need. The CRC’s own work describes something more complicated.
The 2024 Candidacy Committee surveyed classes because existing records were not accurate enough. The resulting estimate was approximately 128 to 154 vacant churches and 86 ministers available for call. Forty percent of churches searching for a pastor had been searching for more than two years. Classes pointed to high costs of living in certain rural and urban places, concerns about the quality or willingness of available candidates, difficult congregational dynamics, the need for bivocational arrangements, reluctance to relocate tied to homeownership and dual-income households, and the simple difficulty of finding “a good fit.”
Some congregations struggle to attract Ministers of the Word. Some ministries recognize gifted leaders already present in their communities. Some candidates face geographic, financial, educational, or vocational barriers to the traditional route. Some pastoral roles are deeply particular to a community or ministry. And some commissioned pastors later exercise responsibilities that begin to resemble roles historically associated with Ministers of the Word.
The growth of additional pastoral capacity therefore does more than provide additional responses. It also makes the original description of the Need less adequate. If ministerial capacity can increase while congregations continue searching for pastors, then “more pastors” was never a complete description of what was diminished. Location, fit, authorization, economics, and willingness to relocate are part of the Reality to which the institution is responding.
These conditions are related. They are not identical. And they do not necessarily call for the same response. This matters because an institution can solve one description of a Need while leaving another untouched—or even making it more visible.
Contextual Formation may solve the problem of recognizing and preparing a gifted person already present without solving the problem of who succeeds that person. Technology may solve the problem of access to theological education while increasing distance from a formative center. Alternate pathways may increase the number of people capable of exercising pastoral responsibility while making the once-common pathway less institutionally necessary. Distributed Formation may increase local responsiveness while increasing the amount of coordination required to maintain common authorization.
Saying simply that the CRC “needs more pastors” makes all of that harder to see. The institution has not merely increased the number of possible responses. It has changed the shape of its capacity to respond.
A Response Changes What Comes Next
This is where institutional motion becomes especially important. A response does not disappear after it succeeds. It becomes part of the Reality the institution encounters next.
The seminary itself was once such a response. The CRC needed educated ministers and created a common institution for preparing them. Once created, the seminary became part of what the denomination was and what it could do. Commissioned ministry is another response. It gives the denomination additional ways to recognize giftedness and develop pastoral capacity in close relationship to particular ministries and communities. Technology changes where Formation can occur and whom it can reach.
Each response increases some capacity. Each also rearranges relationships that later decisions inherit. The institution therefore does not encounter the same problem again with more tools. Its previous responses have changed the institution that encounters the problem. A solution to one Need becomes part of the Reality within which the next Need appears.
Back to the Present
Now return to last week’s announcement. A church-planting concentration within Calvin Seminary’s Commissioned Pastor Certificate is a relatively modest institutional development. But it sits at the intersection of much larger movements.
A seminary created to prepare ministers for congregations not yet known is now helping form people whose ministries may already be highly particular. A pathway that allows Formation to remain close to local ministry is being connected more deliberately to formal theological education. Technology allows those things to happen without requiring sustained relocation, while the program deliberately restores some embodied common life through cohort and retreat. And differentiated pathways continue to require common processes through which the denomination recognizes and authorizes pastoral ministry.
The more Formation is fitted to particular people and places, the more succession matters. The more alternate pathways become normal, the more important it becomes to identify what the traditional pathway uniquely carries rather than simply affirming that it remains valuable. The farther Technology extends Formation, the more deliberately the institution must decide which formative goods require proximity. The more Formation is decentralized, the more important common discernment, coordination, and authorization may become. And the more local benefit becomes immediately visible, the more the denomination must renew the case for common financial support of capacity whose eventual benefit may belong elsewhere.
An institution can gain capacity while creating new dependencies. It can solve one problem while moving another forward in time. It can distribute pastoral responsibility while increasing the need for coordination. It can preserve a stated commitment while changing the practices through which that commitment was historically carried. It can invest substantially in a formative center while making sustained presence at that center less necessary for participation.
Those movements should not be treated as failures simply because they create risk. Responding to new institutional realities often comes with new possibilities and new vulnerabilities at the same time. Both deserve our institutional attentiveness.