By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
There is a rhythm to life at the Princeton Theological Seminary, from the 11:30 a.m. weekday chapel services to the time when students graduate.
M. Craig Barnes is familiar with the ways of the 200-year-old Presbyterian institution, first from his days there as a graduate student in the late 1970s, later as a member of its Board of Trustees and now as its seventh president.
”I think institutions need different types of leaders at different times,” he said in his office in the Administration Building, an 1847 structure that once housed a gymnasium. “At this time, I think what the trustees and the seminary as a whole believe is what we need to work on now is the formation of the community here, a kind of rebuilding of community life, helping the Seminary develop stronger relationship with churches and fundraising. Those are things I do.”
Mr. Barnes, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, assumed the post last month. He took over at time when his denomination is shrinking in what he once described an “increasingly secularized culture.”
”Seminaries, typically, are well organized, well structured to train pastors to serve a church in the 1980s. And that’s just not working anymore,” he said. “We do have to change our way of creating church leaders in order to make them capable of handling that new society.”
Founded in 1812, the Seminary today has 518 studentsless than half of whom, 189, are from the Presbyterian Church. Fewer Presbyterian students are coming to the seminary, he said, because the denomination is in decline. Last year, the church reported its national membership had dropped to less than two million in 2011, a downward trend.
The Rev. Barnes, who studied American church history as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, said he wants to be part of the movement that is trying to make Presbyterianism relevant again. He said a growing percentage of Seminary students are blacks, Asians and Hispanics.
”The church is becoming multi-cultural as the society is becoming more multi-cultural. And we’re having to pay attention to that,” he said. “So we’ve got to equip students to lead churches that don’t look like your classic, staid, predominately white Presbyterian Church.”
For Seminary graduates in the 21st century, he said they need to have strategies for church growth, doing so by making the church relevant in the community. He said the Seminary is teaching students how to be more engaged in their communitiesthe strategy for turning around some of the decline in church attendance.
The Rev. Barnes, a native of Long Island, N.Y., came to the Seminary in 1978 to earn his master’s degree, fascinated by theology. Of his student days, he recalled being in awe of his professors”women and men who would pace back and forth in front of the lecture hall as they would just throw out these elegant formulations of God who was at work in the world … .”
During weekends, he served a type of apprenticeship assisting at a church in Pennsylvania. The following Mondays, he and his friends would sit in the Seminary cafeteria talking about their mistakes.
”By the time I left, I was certain that I would continue to be devoted to the study of theology but also devoted to serving the church,” said the Rev. Barnes, 56.
His has been a peripatetic career.
Ordained in 1981, he began as an associate pastor in Colorado, later serving as the senior pastor of churches in Wisconsin, Washington D.C. and Pittsburghhis most recent post before taking the job at the Seminary. Asked if he would still agree with his sermons from his early days of ministry, he said his messages have evolved.
”What’s changed is they were more black and white, clear-cut, right and wrong kind of thinking, less ambiguity,” he said. “Now my sermons tend to spend more time focused on being caught between how it is and how it ought to be, more gray zone.”
Though living in Princeton, he is still making the weekend trips home to Pittsburgh to be with his family, who have not made the move yet. He and his wife, Dawne, have two sons.
He lets out a laugh when asked which job was harder, being the president of a seminary or the father of teenage boys. Both have similarities, he found.
”You love them both and you have a kind of a vision and a goal, yet you’re dealing with strong personalities.”
