Bibliographic record
Abstract
The American mainline Protestant church is in crisis.Its decline, in numbers and influence, is precipitous, and its prospects for turnaround, bleak.Such is the diagnosis of one who deeply cares and wishes it otherwise-David McAllister-Wilson (MW), President of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC.MW writes as a United Methodist and primarily for United Methodists, but he aims to speak to, if not for, all mainline churches and, especially, their theological schools.He manages also to speak to many evangelical churches and their schools, and MW thinks he knows what to do.Long gone, MW writes, are the days when Methodist congregations outnumbered post offices, and where the presence of each congregation was deeply felt within its community.Now United Methodist churches bolt the doors at an alarming rate, and ''few people . . .care what we do or say'' (p.xv).This steely-eyed realism is one of the book's strengths.MW faces with candor and courage the symptoms of his denomination's decline: loss of mission, loss of identity, theological divisiveness, growing organizational anxiety, an aging church membership, ill-equipped leadership, massive and growing deficits, and more.He names and then describes these things without flinching, and refuses to indulge in blame, nostalgia, or (for the most part) romanticism.But the sum of these issues is devastating.Any one of them alone would pose a significant threat to an organization; the combination of them is lethal.Can anything be done?Yes, MW says: better education.The cure for what ails America's United Methodist churches, he argues, lies with the 13 Methodist seminaries around the country.Produce better leaders-wiser, braver, more clearly focused, better trained, better resourced-and the churches will once again flourish.The book's subtitle puts it simply and bluntly: Theological Education Is the Solution.I dearly hope it's true.I sorely doubt it is.I teach at an evangelical seminary in western Canada that is rooted in two confessional bodies but which has broadened its base to include most of Canada's various denominations.A large portion of the churches we represent struggle with many of the same issues MW discusses.I sit with pastors on a weekly basis who lament poor giving, personal agendas, spotty attendance,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".