When In trust magazine last took an in-depth look at deferred maintenance at theological institutions (“The time is now,” Autumn 2015), the primary concern for the schools was building maintenance. That remains a priority a decade later, compounded by issues related to technology, building utilization, and resource sharing.

Results from a recent Association of Theological Schools (ATS) survey show that 34 schools –12% of ATS member schools – have completed a deferred maintenance study in the last decade, with average deferred maintenance of approximately $13 million; nine reported deferred maintenance in excess of $10 million.

Another 70 schools – 25% of ATS member schools – independently reported deferred maintenance averaging $2 million, three of which reported deferred maintenance costs greater than $10 million.

Chris Meinzer, senior director of Administration and Chief Operating Officer at ATS, says many school administrators are posing questions about use of the physical plant and extended infrastructure, asking if they are contributing to the goals of the institution, or is there a potential collision of priorities between facilities and programming?

“Some schools are trying to discern whether they should have a campus, even if there isn’t a deferred maintenance issue,” Meinzer says. “Does the property, actually serve a need, and the mission?”

Each of the five institutions profiled here has a unique story of how they have or are planning for deferred maintenance or building utilization. While there are uncertainties ahead for each school, they see a commitment to long-term maintenance, or the reframing of these costs, as a means to further their educational missions.

Tech Focused

It may seem like an impossible dream to some theological institutions, but Saint Paul School of Theology, a seminary with campuses in Leawood, Kansas, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, owns no buildings. The school serves 100 full-time students in addition to approximately 300 students in its course of study programs, offering both on-site and online/hybrid instruction.

Following the sale of its campus in 2013, the seminary of the United Methodist Church co-located its classroom and faculty space with Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, one of the largest Methodist churches in the nation, and also at Oklahoma City University.

Matthew Mills, Saint Paul’s Chief Financial Officer, came to the seminary in 2017 and says he was drawn to the unique model that allowed the school to prioritize the needs of the students. “I have always had concerns or questions around how universities or schools or seminaries allocate their resources,” Mills says. “And what’s nice about our set-up is that we can invest heavily in our technology, which we have done. We can invest heavily in our students, and it also frees up a lot of resources to make sure that we can invest in strategic initiatives and other pieces that serve our mission, vision and strategic plan.”

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been building expenses along the way. Saint Paul made $1.5 million in capital improvements to its leased Church of the Resurrection facilities in 2018 so faculty could move on-site. In addition to faculty offices, the remodel included a refresh of technology, new learning spaces, classrooms and community areas.

Church of the Resurrection also provides IT support and strategy to Saint Paul. The school’s classrooms were outfitted with cameras, microphones and smart boards before the onset of COVID, allowing a more seamless transition to remote learning when it became necessary. Students still attend classes in-person and virtually as Saint Paul has continued to use its online learning platform.

With a total annual cost for leasing and IT support of $250,000, Mills says the arrangement allows Saint Paul to attend to its primary mission – preparing students for ministry and service.

“We really focus on what we do best,” he says. “What we do best is not upkeeping and maintaining buildings, nor being on the cutting edge of technology. So what we have done is we’ve also outsourced both of these areas so we can focus on student needs.”

No Campus

Church Divinity School of the Pacific, an Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, California, has undergone a seismic shift over the last four years. In early 2019, the school was acquired by Trinity Church Wall Street; since then, the church’s vestry has served as CDSP’s governing board.

The initial commitment to maintaining the degree and program structure of CDSP for training both clergy and laity has changed since the acquisition. In early 2023, the seminary announced it would “transition to a fully hybrid educational model, beginning with the class entering in summer 2025.”

The four-year M.Div. hybrid curriculum includes online learning, in-person intensive programs and a funded two-year curacy (internship) for 12-15 students each year – all tuition-free for students authorized to seek ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. The school will also retain its Center for Anglican Lifelong Learning (CALL) continuing education program.

After the announcement, staff and trustees met to design the new curriculum, agreeing that the existing campus would not be required to support in-person intensives, staff and faculty activities, and other seminary operations.

At the time, the main campus had $40 million in deferred maintenance, and owned two apartment buildings, also with deferred maintenance. There also existed the potential for the City of Berkeley to tax the school for vacant property, even if the campus was only used for three weeks of in-person gatherings.

“The whole thing was starting to look like a financial nightmare,” says Stephen Fowl, Ph.D., president and dean of CDSP since August 2023.

Combined proceeds from the recent sale of the apartment buildings and the anticipated sale of the campus will be invested in the school’s endowment, reducing the reliance on operational capital from Trinity.

“There is some grief around the closing of the residential program among alumni who have really fond memories of their days here,” Fowl says.

The seminary held a blessing of classrooms in the fall of 2024 and will hold its final commencement in the chapel in 2025, offering opportunities for people to gather and reflect.

“It is appropriate that people feel that grief,” Fowl says, “but I think when [alumni] stopped to think about it, they realized we had no alternatives here.”

Collaborative Space

Also located in Berkeley, the interdenominational Pacific School of Religion is looking toward partnerships and collaboration for ways to expand the utilization of its century-old campus as more of its curriculum has moved online. At the same time, the school has invested in a distributed learning network to host its coursework in collaboration with other partners’ offerings.

“We’re trying to reimagine the campus around a collaborative space, just like we are this virtual [learning] space,” says David Vasquez-Levy, president of PSR. “In principle, in mission, in idea, is there an alignment? That vision and alignment drive the decisions about investing in both our campus and virtual offerings.”

With six buildings on its campus, PSR has partnerships in place to help support the ongoing maintenance of its infrastructure. A middle school uses the seminary chapel while UC Berkeley’s Fung Institute for Leadership Engineering leases, and has invested in remodeling, another building.

With a total campus value of approximately $50 million, Vasquez-Levy estimates the minimum scope of deferred maintenance is $22 million. The school’s trustees believe expanding partnerships aligned with the seminary’s mission, investing in modernization and even reconfiguring some of the campus will lead to greater utilization of the campus.

“Part of the reason for the high cost is that the buildings we currently occupy were built for a different mission in a different era,” Vasquez-Levy says. “They don’t emphasize collaboration. They assume residential, full-time students.”

With phase one (right-sizing) and phase two (building a collaborative environment with anchor partners) complete, a more audacious plan for renovating the campus comes with a $50 million price tag and is in the works for phase three.

“How can PSR re-envision its physical resources to support new educational models in the world, and what role can the campus play in that?” Vasquez-Levy asks of this next phase.

With an endowment of $59 million and no operating debt, Vasquez-Levy believes PSR will be able to find partners willing to invest in the campus transformation, more fully utilizing spaces that are now 30-40% occupied.

Vasquez-Levy says a commitment to “radical inclusivity,” justice, environmental stewardship, and mission alignment guides the partnership process for PSR in order to create “a more integrated campus where the resources for both the improvements and the maintenance are shared, not just through a leasing partnership, but also through type of vision that we would do together.”

Eco Theology

As one of North America’s oldest theological institutions, Yale Divinity School’s 200-year presence in New Haven, Connecticut, is reflected in the iconic design of its Sterling Divinity Quadrangle that opened in 1932. By the 1990s, deferred maintenance on the ecumenical campus had accumulated to the point that scaffolding was constructed around the tall steeple of Marmont Chapel, not for repairs, but rather to keep it from collapsing.

Then president, Rick Levin, was faced with a decision. Move the school to a new location with a much smaller footprint or begin to address the long-term needs of the divinity school as it related to how its physical plant could serve YDS’s students’ needs into the future.

Under intense pressure from the community and alumni, Levin pledged to renovate the campus and instituted a capital replace cost (CRC) program, an annual “tax” on each building based on its square footage.

“This figure changes each year, generally it goes up, depending on the nature of the building,” says Greg Sterling, dean of Yale Divinity School. “Overall, we pay 6%of our annual budget into the CRC and to repay a small loan.”

And the CRC program has worked. After an initial renovation cost of $49 million, the school has spent roughly $15 million for ongoing maintenance since 2012 that included the renovation of the refectory and parts of the library; relandscaping the back two quadrangles, repointing the brick for the entire school, and fresh paint and carpets throughout.

With 300 residential students and an endowment exceeding $620 million, all students with a demonstrated financial need are eligible to receive a full-tuition scholarship and a small stipend. To expand access for more students as its programs and enrollment grow, YDS is scheduled to open a new residential building in August 2025 with 49 housing units on land that previously served as the school’s parking lot.

Dubbed “The Living Village,” this new $84.2 million project adheres to YDS’s commitment to ecotheology. Oak trees cut to make space for construction have been milled into furniture for use inside the building. A tiled solar installation will produce 105% of the energy the building consumes. Three different water systems are included to handle and process water for the structure.

Sterling says funds for the project were raised from units from within Yale and from private donors and who believe the Living Village will enhance the educational mission of the divinity school.

“It heartens me, and I’m hoping that it will challenge the way that all schools and universities think about residential structures in the future,” he says. “It’s state of the art. It looks standard, but nothing is standard.”

Long Term Investments

Founded in 1794, the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary took its current form following the consolidation of Presbyterian denominational groups in the late 1950s. Now a seminary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the seminary resides in six primary buildings built between 1952 and 2002, the most recent being a residential hall.

Although the campus doesn’t have the aged pedigree of some schools, Thomas Hinds, vice president of finance and administration at PTS, says the work of modernizing the 70-year-old campus is no less daunting.

As part of a recently required Institutional Master Plan submitted to the city of Pittsburgh every 10 years, PTS called upon the expertise of an architectural firm to do a space planning study. Based on its student and faculty population and educational needs, the firm recommended the seminary consolidate its current operations into two buildings.

The reconfiguration would have resulted in significantly smaller faculty offices and meetings spaces, fewer classrooms with tightly managed schedules, and the elimination of student housing and dining facilities.

“We said, ‘No, we can’t really do that,’” says Hinds, noting the changes would have drastically altered the ethos of learning at the seminary. “So we are headed into a new strategic plan.”

Budgeting for long-term upgrades and the proposed replacement of an aging student apartment building fits into this strategy. A 2023 facilities assessment estimated total maintenance costs of the campus, with no new construction, at $18.5 million broken into categories of need ($4.4 million), want ($8.5 million) and like ($5.6 million). Nearly half of these costs fell in the HVAC category.

Roughly 70-80% of the maintenance budget is covered by proceeds from PTS’s $257 million endowment. Hinds sees value in these long-term facilities investments in service to the educational mission of the seminary and its commitment to provide affordable housing to PTS students and graduate students from other schools.

“Our planning has helped us stay on top of our capital projects each year,” says Hinds. “As we make larger investment in a in a capital project, we always make sure it’s on our long-term trajectory to serve our educational mission.”

Take Aways

These five profiles represent a small fraction of theological institutions and the entrepreneurial ways they are looking at deferred maintenance and building use. The growth of remote and hybrid learning introduces a new set of decisions about building retention and partnerships for some schools. Other schools are looking to expand residential education to continue their legacy or accommodate students who prefer in-person learning.

ATS’s Meinzer believes an honest assessment is the most important starting point for any school in discerning how facilities fit into their mission, what their programming looks like within that facilities plan and how these can best serve the educational goals of the institution.

“At a minimum,” he says, “schools ought to do some analysis of their current deferred maintenance realities.” he says.