Toward a Mixed Ecology of Formation: A Word From Diocesan School Deans

“The ordinand training landscape has become a ‘Wild West’ where each diocesan bishop and commission on ministry chooses a different path for their seminarians. The resulting effects on the priesthood, diaconal ministry, and the Episcopal Church are only just being felt.” This quote from page one of Robert Flanagan’s 2025 study, The Varieties of Theological Education: A Study of Episcopal Diocesan Schools and Formation Programs, introduces his organizing metaphor for the current state of theological education in our polity. As leaders of formation programs in dioceses across The Episcopal Church, we would like to offer our view from what he characterizes as the frontier of this work. 

While we agree that the diversity of formation practices across our church raises important questions that deserve serious exploration, we would like to invite a more curious posture. Rather than seeing diversity as evidence of a system that has lost its center, what might we discover if we approached it as evidence of a complex formational ecosystem whose generative edges have too often been overlooked, sidelined, or even stifled by our efforts to maintain what we believe represents rigor and a coherent Anglican identity?

Our own experience suggests that diocesan formation has the potential to be much more than a makeshift outpost for educating students from and for the margins of our polity. We see it instead as a field laboratory where we are learning to attend to—and then tend—the diverse contexts in which the Episcopal tradition has taken root. In this sense, diocesan formation is the opposite of a frontier. It is an ecotone: a vital place of encounter and exchange where different expressions of our ecclesial culture can meet, knowledge and practices can circulate, and new forms of life can emerge. Its distance and difference from traditional centers of learning are not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity—what Ted Smith calls a “gospel affordance”—that can widen our circles of conversation and cooperation. To that end, we are opening a conversation about the possibilities and challenges of diocesan formation—and what they might mean for both lay and clergy formation within the wider church. 

We begin by affirming the essential role that seminaries have long played and will continue to play in forming lay and ordained leaders for the church. The church needs centers of academic excellence where the deposit of the faith can be stewarded through rigorous study, critical inquiry, and informed application to the questions of our time. Seminary formation offers postulants sustained intellectual concentration; access to scholars across disciplines; immersion in theological libraries and traditions of inquiry; encounter with students from contexts unlike their own; distance from the assumptions of their home parishes and diocese; and the formative disruption that comes from being displaced from one’s established ecclesial environment. Diocesan formation cannot and should not attempt to replicate these goods, and the church can ill afford to sacrifice them in the name of accessibility or exigency. 

However, diocesan formation offers the church goods of its own that we believe are also essential to our common life. Its work is to bring the knowledge cultivated in seminaries into encounter with ministry as it is happening—“in the wild”—where that knowledge is tested, nuanced, and sometimes transformed by the many contexts into which it must be translated if it is to remain living knowledge. Diocesan formation offers the church an opportunity to treat context as curriculum: to recognize the people at the center of parish life, pastoral care, administration, worship, conflict, and community engagement as themselves sources of theological knowledge. For students, diocesan formation makes porous the separation between academic theology, field education, and personal formation. The student encounters ecclesiology while serving in a parish, studies pastoral theology while actually accompanying someone through grief, studies liturgy while preparing worship, and studies leadership while navigating a real institutional conflict. The movement is repeatedly from practice to reflection to theological interpretation and back into transformed practice. At their best, locally formed leaders are exquisitely trained theological “naturalists,” observing and then cultivating the conditions most likely to foster life in a given community. The feedback loop they create between congregations and diocesan curricula has the power to widen the church’s imagination for all that ministry is becoming. 

That students tend to remain in place after graduation further strengthens this feedback loop, sustaining attention to the particular communities, contexts, and forms of ecclesial life that make up the diversity of the wider church. A congregation that sponsors someone for formation is changed by having a learner in its midst. Clergy, lay leaders, parishioners, ministry sites, and diocesan structures become participants in formation. The knowledge does not simply flow from school to student to parish. It also flows from parish to school to diocese.

Simply put, diocesan formation asks, “Can theology live here?” Residential seminary asks, “Can you discover that ‘here’ is not the whole church?” These are different gifts. The church needs both.

Diocesan formation has serious challenges, and we owe it to the church to be honest about them. The very embeddedness that makes diocesan formation powerful can also become a liability. Isolation, provincialism, limited faculty depth, restricted curricular breadth, overdependence on particular instructors, and thin peer cohorts can pose genuine risks to the quality of formation our students receive. So does the temptation for local expectations to become self-validating.

However, the vulnerabilities of diocesan formation do not—in and of themselves—make the case for a centralized formational economy. The future will require an ecology of theological formation in which seminaries and diocesan programs function as differentiated but mutually accountable institutions. Some goods are concentrated in seminaries. Some emerge particularly clearly in embedded formation. Neither possesses everything the church needs at this moment in time. The question, then, is not whether every ordinand should have the same formational experience. The question is whether the church can name with sufficient clarity what every ordinand should become capable of knowing, doing, discerning, and embodying—and whether we can demonstrate that formation has actually occurred.

A shared culture of rigorous, competency-based assessment would allow diocesan schools to continue experimenting at the edges of our diverse ecclesial ecosystem while ensuring that the depth and breadth cultivated in our seminaries continues to circulate throughout the church. Meanwhile, it would discipline our tendency to locate ministerial and theological expertise primarily in the academy, recognizing that expertise is also cultivated through the practices of ministry and the wisdom of local communities. Along with broadened access to continuing education and curacy, these measures address the limitations of diocesan and seminary formation while also confronting the “classes of clergy” issue that Flanagan rightly identifies as an unintended consequence of the educational landscape we have created. If unequal access to theological education is a serious problem, we should not assume that its effects begin or end with clergy. Indeed, our concern about “second-class clergy” may reveal a deeper structural assumption: that the formational needs of some congregations count more than others. Diocesan formation asks us to reverse the question: what are we willing to attempt and risk for a church with no second-class congregations?