Practicing While They Preach
Every Saturday, at his parsonage on an old tobacco farm near the Virginia border, first-year Duke Divinity student Chad Holtz sits down with his morning cup of coffee and worries about the same thing.
"Will God speak to me this week?" Holtz wonders as he writes his sermon. "That's one of the most daunting things about being a pastor. I've been meditating all week, and then miraculously, it comes. And you go, ‘Wow. Thank you, God.' And the next week, you do it all over again."
As a student pastor in Bullock, N.C., Holtz has worries that most of his classmates don't. Besides coming up with ideas for sermons every week, he tends to the daily needs of two congregations and commutes to Duke four days a week.
What's demanding is when you have two papers due and a sermon to write for Sunday," says Holtz. "And then last week I had two people die. I had two funerals in one week."
Because he was meeting with family members and conducting two funerals, Holtz had to miss a class and get notes from a friend. Another day, he found himself rushing to the library to get a paper done between hospital visits, one to a parishioner just diagnosed with leukemia. How does he cope with the demands?
"Prayer comes in handy," Holtz says with a smile. "I was in the Navy for eight years -- I call them my Jonah years -- so I have to remember not to curse like a sailor."
Between 30 and 40 students out of the 576 in the Divinity School also serve as pastors. Rural churches with fewer than 100 congregants have the greatest need, and many students, such as Holtz, are assigned to serve two churches. Student pastors take three courses instead of the usual four, and need an extra year to graduate. But Holtz and his family decided it was worth it.
"We prayed on it and decided that this was where we needed to be," he says of the little white church surrounded by horses and fields.
The arrangement does offer advantages: A student pastor's salary, health insurance and living quarters allow Holtz to support his family while he's in school. And, besides financial support, student pastors say the on-the-job training is invaluable.
"It's like having a laboratory. School is the dry lab and you go home and put it into practice in the church," says first-year student pastor Jason Thornton, who has two congregations in Stem, about 30 minutes from Duke.
"This is as much a classroom as Duke," says student pastor Elizabeth Polk, surrounded by her parishioners after a recent Sunday service at Gibson Memorial Methodist Church in Spring Hope, N.C.
Having full-time access to a pulpit while still being a student can be useful, Holtz says.
"I've heard stories of seminarians who give their first sermon, and they want to throw everything that's been in their heads for three years into one 20-minute speech. They blow their congregation out of the water," he says. "Student pastors don't have to deal with that issue. We get to distill what we're learning and our congregation gets to grow with us."
Members of the churches say they benefit as well.
"We chose to actually request a student minister for several reasons. One of them was financial," says Wanda Hildreth, a lay leader at Gibson Memorial who had a hand in hiring Polk. "And we felt like we needed some new blood, new life, new energy."
The majority of student pastors are Methodists, and are appointed by the Methodist church when they come to Duke. But some, like Tremayne Johnson, are already working pastors when they enter school. Johnson, a fourth-year student, is senior pastor of Brown's Missionary Baptist Church in Clinton, a post he has held for eight years. His arrangement differs from that of his Methodist classmates. His church has a tradition of offering financial and other support to pastors and their families through a special committee.
"I bring to the experience of Duke my background of being in a rural, black, Baptist church. A lot of seminarians have found it interesting -- [members] actually raise money from the congregation and say, ‘How can we care for our servant?'" he says. "They support me in a lot of ways."
While student pastors say they regret missing some aspects of campus life, their congregations provide another kind of fellowship. Church members offer help with everything from travel reimbursements, to bringing over dinner during exams and helping the student pastors proofread papers.
Polk says she's looking forward to the holidays because she'll be able to enjoy the Christmas season with her congregation once finals are over.
"They take a great deal of delight and ownership interest in my studies," Polk says. "That has been a real plus. It wasn't what I really anticipated, so it's been a wonderful surprise."