Top U.S. evangelical seminaries, and seminaries in general, face critical financial issues

On Memorial Day weekend in 1944 an adventurous group of evangelical Protestants filled the rented Orchestra Hall to launch "Chicagoland Youth for Christ."

The preacher for that day was an unknown greenhorn from a modest suburban church, the Rev. Billy Graham by name. Soon Youth For Christ was staging rallies every week at the Michigan Avenue musical shrine, with Graham as its first full-time evangelist. On Memorial Day weekend 1945, an even more audacious breakthrough event drew 60,000 or more to Soldier Field.

What was the origin of America's oft-rambunctious, complex and remarkably successful evangelical Protestant movement as we have come to know it?

Some will cite the 1942 formation of the National Association of Evangelicals by conservatives — including many in mainline Protestant churches — fleeing the old "fundamentalist" brand. But The Guy contends it was those Chicago spectacles leading into a nationwide "parachurch" organization with Graham as its charismatic leader.

The media and their audiences tend to see evangelicalism in terms of star preachers, megachurches, media, music, missions and more recently immersion in Republican political wars. Oh, yes, and scandals.

But the movement cannot possibly be understood apart from its beliefs as propounded by thinkers at graduate-level divinity schools and the students they trained. Their impact has been profound, and global in scope.

Three multi-denominational seminaries led the way, and their current woes — part of negative trends in theological education as a whole — are worth substantive journalistic analysis.

* Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California was the pioneer, founded in 1947, with Graham as a long-time backer and board member.

It was hard to find any relevant art to accompany this post about the recent New York Times feature that ran with this headline: "Football Among the Old Believers, in Alaska."

That's a compliment. This was a really unique subject for a news story.

I couldn't run the Times art, of course, because it's brand new and under copyright (and the newspaper didn't post a YouTube feature about the piece, as news organizations often do). The subject matter was so strange and specific that it was hard to find other art that combined the various subjects at the heart of the story. I mean, look at the second part of the double-decker headline:

Keeping a high school football team together is tough, between a Russian Orthodox sect leery of the outside world and the chores of life in an isolated village.

So we have high-school football, way up north, in a village that's home to a very specific "sect" -- I would have said "splinter group" -- linked to the Russian Orthodox faith that is a crucial part of the history of Alaska. Remote? We're talking 50 or 60 families on the Kenai Peninsula 200-plus miles south of Anchorage.

It's a classic old-faith wrestles with modernity tale, the kind of semi-National Geographic feature often written after a visit to Amish country.

What is missing? The whole point is that these people practice a bizarre faith that makes it hard to do "normal things" -- like play football -- in the "real" world. Readers are shown many symbolic details that illustrate what that looks like. The problem is that the Times team all but ignored the contents of the faith that defines these lives. It's like reading a sociological report about monks that ignores their prayers and worship. Imagine a story about members of the New York Philharmonic that ignores their love of music.

Here is the overture:

VOZNESENKA, Alaska -- The football players wore their black and yellow jerseys to class last Friday, a day before the home opener for Voznesenka School, the smallest high school in Alaska to field a team.

But a game required at least 11 players. And so far at practice this summer, the Cougars had fielded no more than 10.