BANGOR – At the Rev Dr. William Imes’ inauguration last week as the ninth president of Bangor Theological Seminary, students, staff, faculty, ministers, community members, trustees and representatives of other academic institutions stood and pledged to help Imes fulfill the seminary’s mission.

Imes knows he will need their help – if he’s not to be the last president of the 187-year-old seminary.

He told the 300 people who gathered Nov. 13 for his inaugural ceremony that the seminary, whose annual budget is $2.47 million, is “three years to a crisis and seven years to doomsday.”

“We have three years to figure out how to attract more people, raise more money and educate more people so we can continue serving God’s mission in the world,” he said.

That’s not a lot of time considering that the average tenure for a seminary president is five years.

Imes, however, did not wait until his inauguration to begin shaping a vision for the seminary. When he applied for the job more than a year ago, Imes knew the seminary was headed for a crisis. He was chosen in April to succeed the Rev. Dr. Ansley Coe Throckmorton, who retired after six years.

For 16 years, Imes had been pastor of First Parish Church in Brunswick, the largest Congregational church in Maine.

In an interview, Imes, 58, said he does not to plan to stray from the seminary’s original mission to train ministers to lead churches in northern New England. A practical theologian, he believes the institution will succeed or fail based on how it goes about expanding that mission.

In Imes’ talks with the hiring committee, it became apparent that his ideas were in line with the direction the board of trustees felt the seminary should be taking, according to the Rev. Richard Ryder Jr., the board’s president.

Since moving to the campus in August, Imes has divided discussions about the seminary’s future into two basic categories: thinking inside the box and thinking outside the box.

Increasing enrollment, creating more opportunities for students and strengthening the seminary’s ties to churches and graduates are what Imes calls inside-the-box concerns. The seminary has 170 students attending full and part time. That equates to 76 full-time students, according to Imes. In his inauguration speech, the new president set the specific goal of attracting the equivalent of 50 new full-time students over the next three years.

He also said the seminary must keep looking for ways to attract students who want to explore religion and spirituality but do not want to be ministers. This idea was crystallized for seminary administrators when a student who was working on a master’s degree in social work decided she also wanted to work on a master of divinity degree at the Bangor seminary’s Portland campus.

Traditionally, the master of divinity degree is used by students who plan to seek ordination to ministry. The seminary’s master of arts degree is for students who do not necessarily want to become ministers.

The seminary long has allowed students to work on a divinity degree while pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Maine. Imes said the seminary needs to expand on that arrangement, known as the Bangor Plan, to meet the needs of 21st century spiritual seekers and the needs of the hundreds of small congregations in northern New England that cannot afford full-time pastors.

“The strength of the seminary has been the training of pastors,” Imes said at his inauguration. “That is a long tradition I wish to see upheld. Yet we also should educate persons who seek a deeper understanding of what they are already trained to do, but want to put it in a bigger context.

“Many of our churches can only afford a part-time ordained leader,” he said during an interview at his office. “A person trained as a minister as well as in a field like social work could be a member of the clergy, serve the community in other ways as well, and be able to support a family.”

The new president suggested that the seminary seriously explore entering into mutual agreements with other colleges and universities, such as Husson College in Bangor, the University of New England in Biddeford and schools within the University of Maine System, so that course credit could be accepted by both institutions.

Like other students earning graduate degrees, students at the Bangor seminary graduate owing an average of $30,000 in student loans. According to Imes, offering students more career options and encouraging men and women already in the work force to explore the faith side of a career such as nursing would help meet the common goals of the churches, the students, the institution and society.

Imes also believes that certificate courses like the seminary’s two-year small-church leadership program represent a way the seminary can help churches in the small towns of New England keep their doors open.

Churches, especially churches in the United Church of Christ denomination, with which the Bangor seminary is affiliated, must come to understand that it is in their best interest to support the seminary financially, he said.

During a faculty presentation the night before Imes’ inauguration, Glenn Miller, professor of ecclesiastical history, put it more succinctly: “We have a supply and demand problem,” Miller said. “The only way to guarantee supply is to work at creating demand.”

Outside-the-box thinking, according to Imes, includes course offerings through the Internet, faculty-led travel to countries where Christianity was born and grew such as Turkey, and intensive summer programs that allow participants to enjoy Maine’s summers and explore the coast.

Even merging with another seminary – while highly unlikely – should be considered, according to Imes.

“We can’t ignore the fact that maintaining property like this campus may not be what we do in the future,” he said. “We need to decide what we need out of this property in the 21st century. Who is on our faculty and what courses we offer may be what’s most important. What does a seminary look like without walls? We need to be willing to look at that and other trends in higher education.”

Imes also wants to improve how the seminary interacts with the community and make more people aware of the fact that its library and bookstore are open to the public, that weekly worship services welcome everyone, and that the seminary does more than just turn students into ministers.

“I’d like to see if the certificate model for small church leadership could fit other possibilities, such as spirituality and healing,” he said. “The mind-body connection is of great interest to many, including the medical community here. Maine is also an ideal place to do more with artists around spirituality issues in their work.”

While Imes and those associated with the seminary are committed to making sure the seminary has a bicentennial celebration, the tragedy of Sept. 11 may be an event that helps the institution survive another 13 years.

“September 11 may be positive for us,” Imes said. “My own sense of the terrorist attacks is that the sheer magnitude of it is overwhelming for people. But as they step back and examine their lives, I believe, they will see the role of the seminary as a place to find perspective. Already, our admissions director is seeing more interest in the seminary than we’ve had in many years.”

As Imes and the faculty recently discussed a new direction for the institution, David Trobisch, New Testament professor, reminded the seminary of its calling: “Our futures may be uncertain, but not our calling – to talk about God in the present tense.”