South of Zion Bangor Theological Seminary looks to raise its visibility in Portland area

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Sheryl Lee of Portland hopes to be called reverend someday.

She used to teach elementary school, but in her second career Lee, 50, wants to be a pastoral counselor and help people find spiritual direction for their lives.

So she is studying at Bangor Theological Seminary – in Portland.

Because of the seminary’s accreditation requirements, students can take two years of classes at the tiny Portland campus, located in the basement of the State Street Congregational Church.

Then they must spend their final year taking classes on the hill in downtown Bangor where the seminary has been training ministers, missionaries and teachers since 1819.

That means a long commute for New Hampshire and southern Maine residents who could travel more quickly to universities in the Boston area.

Seminary President William Imes has put forth a proposal that, among other things, would increase the visibility and enrollment of the Portland campus over the next five years. Members of the seminary’s board of trustees last fall agreed to the higher profile for the Portland area.

“It’s just a fact that there are more people within a 100-mile radius of Portland than there are within a 100-mile radius of Bangor,” Imes said. “It’s all the about numbers.”

The seminary has been looking for ways to draw people from southern Maine and New Hampshire since its Hanover, N.H., campus was closed in a cost-cutting measure five years ago. For years, faculty members based in Bangor have conducted classes in Portland every semester, and Portland-based faculty have traveled north each week, as have students.

If Imes’ plan is successful, students would be able to earn master of divinity degrees in Portland without having to travel 100 miles north to Bangor to complete their degrees. The president’s goal is to complete the move and gain accreditation for the Portland campus in about three years.

That would require the seminary to occupy more space than it currently does in Portland, so that more than one class could be held at the same time, and to add off-street parking. It also could mean leaving the church basement and parking meters along Portland’s State Street where students study now. The seminary likely would share space with a secular institution since it could not afford to build its own campus in southern Maine.

The host church, however, is anxious for the seminary to stay, Imes said. Facing a growing deficit, the congregation voted earlier this month to phase out its entire staff over the next year and seek an interim pastor to see it through the crisis.

“They want us to stay and anchor the facility,” Imes said Friday. “If they offer us more space, that might be possible.”

Another Bangor Theological Seminary student, Douglas Hjelmstad, 46, travels from his home in Conway, N.H., twice a week to attend classes in Portland. The self-employed carpenter found it an easier commute than driving to and from Greater Boston to work toward his goal of becoming a Lutheran minister.

Ginger Spiro, 63, of Westbrook is studying at the seminary to be a Jewish hospital chaplain. As a part-time student, she will need another five years to complete her master of divinity degree. She doesn’t want to, but would travel begrudgingly to the seminary’s Bangor campus to complete her degree.

Spiro, Hjelmstad and Sheryl Lee are three of about 20 students taking classes in the church basement across the street from Mercy Hospital in Portland. Two professors and three staff members are based on the Portland campus. The location includes a small library, a tiny worship space, five offices and one classroom.

“I’m very, very comfortable here,” said Lee, who identified herself as a Buddhist Christian. “The size of the [Portland] community is very comfortable, but the space seems limited with only one classroom and so little office space.”

Earning the title “reverend” for most Protestant ministers as well as Roman Catholic priests requires about three years of full-time study at a seminary or school of theology. Individual denominations set their own requirements for ordination, and they differ greatly.

For example, students like Hjelmstad seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America must complete their final year of study at a Lutheran seminary.

Bangor Theological Seminary was founded as Maine Charity School in 1814 in Hampden (it moved to Bangor five years later). Its mission was to train Congregational ministers and missionaries.

Today, about 170 people study at the seminary each year, most part time. The seminary averages 70 to 75 full-time-equivalent students each year, with about 55 in Bangor and 15 to 20 taking classes in Portland.

“We need to be at 100 full-time-equivalent students to fully utilize our resources,” Imes said last year.

The 21 new students this semester – classes begin Jan. 30 – make up the highest enrollment in recent memory, Imes said Friday. Eleven of the new students will attend classes in Bangor, while 10 will attend at the Portland campus. Full-time-equivalency figures will not be available until next month, he said.

A majority of recent students identified themselves as mainline Protestants, but evangelical Christians, Jews and self-described pagans have attended classes, according to Imes. Denominations represented by faculty and staff include United Church of Christ (the Congregationalists); American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.; the United Methodist Church; the Episcopal Church; and Roman Catholicism.

In addition to the master of divinity degree – primarily for students headed for ordination – the seminary offers a master of arts degree and a doctor of ministry degree.

Last fall, the seminary did not recruit enough students to make the doctor of ministry program viable in Portland, according to Michael Huddy, the seminary’s admissions director.

The doctoral program typically is made up of 10 to 12 clergy and is held in a different location for three years. In May 2003, six Canadians and five Americans earned their doctor of ministry degrees from the seminary after studying in Calais.

A group of students who have been meeting in Concord, N.H., is expected to graduate in May, Huddy said. A Portland-based group earned degrees in 1999, and the seminary hopes it will have a new class begin work this fall.

The graying of Maine’s population, the population shift to the south identified in the 2000 Census, and a continuing decline in the number of people attending mainline Protestant churches are among the reasons Imes decided to outline a five-year plan for the seminary.

He said studies done by other seminaries indicate that three people for every 100,000 will seek a seminary education.

“Using that figure, we have twice as many students as we should have,” he said. “We’ve gotten everybody we could reasonably get from northern and eastern Maine. Now we need to strengthen the Portland campus and do a better job of recruiting from New Hampshire.”

The numbers also show that the population in southern Maine and southern New Hampshire is much more ethnically and religiously diverse than that in northern Maine. Imes sees as an untapped resource the growing number of African immigrants in the Portland area, many of whom are Christians.

Students attending the Portland campus tend to be younger and more likely to have completed an undergraduate degree than their counterparts to the north.

“Students in Portland tend to be more interested in our master of arts track than our master of divinity program,” Imes said. “We had seven new students on that campus last fall and they are all in the M.A. program.”

Hjelmstad said the Portland campus was “the most viable option for me to get started [on a master of divinity degree] and Boston was just a little too far away. When I attended an open house last February and went to a class, there was every possible denomination represented at the table – including some I wouldn’t have expected to be there.”

The seminary’s main competition for students in southern Maine and New Hampshire is the Boston University School of Theology and Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Mass., a Boston suburb.

The seminary is taking too much money from its endowment to balance its books, Imes said. Nationally, seminaries use 1 percent to 3 percent of their endowments annually to help out with operating expenses. This year, more than a third of the institution’s $2.4 million budget is coming from its endowment. Imes said trustees decided to use the endowment funds to balance the budget to help keep tuition down.

The seminary’s money this year comes from three sources: tuition, fees, housing and bookstore income, $1.1 million; donations, $400,000; and endowment, $900,000. About $150,000 was budgeted for the Portland campus.

Tuition is $312 per credit hour and costs full-time commuter students about $9,000 a year. That is three times more than it cost to attend the school 20 years ago.

About a third of the seminary’s students graduate debt-free, Imes said, but only because many are of nontraditional age who cash in retirement funds or sell property to pay for schooling. The debt of a Bangor Theological Seminary graduate averages about $26,000.

The seminary’s famed Bangor Plan, set up after the Civil War, has been the heart of the seminary’s Bangor campus since its inception, Imes said. Essentially, it allows a student without a bachelor’s degree to pursue a master of divinity degree while earning an undergraduate degree, most often at the University of Maine in Orono.

Imes said one possibility is to set up a similar plan for students on the Portland campus with a college or university in southern Maine.

Meanwhile, the seminary has been encouraged by preliminary talks in the Portland area about room for expansion, but nothing has been made final, Imes said. And the financial situation at the State Street Congregational Church could lead to an expansion in that location.

Like its students, the institution is being guided into an unknown future by a force much larger than the institution or the men and women who lead it.