When the Banker Bugle and the Tradesman Tribune merged more than 100 years ago to form Banker & Tradesman, the publishers created a separate operating unit that not only financed new residential and commercial construction, but also provided carpenters and plumbers to help finish the job.
Hence, bankers and tradesmen.
That’s how many mergers are designed to work – the magical “leverage” that brings together two sets of strengths and creates companies such as the Wells Fargo Financial Services and Stage Coach Co., able to move capital from here to there, even if the locals haven’t signed a peace treaty.
This is a bit different than an “acquisition,” where, despite the talk about a “merger of equals,” things quickly deteriorate and one side of the management team is thrown out of the corporate jet at 30,000 feet.
The Boston metro market is quite familiar and comfortable with a variation of the merger-acquisition game. For example, a few guys working out of a garage launch Cancer Cure Inc. They find a cure, but don’t know how to finance or market the thing. They form a “relationship” with a big drug company in New Jersey, which buries the founders in a deep hole under the garage, moves the business to Jersey – and sends the manufacturing to Puerto Rico.
A recent trend in the merger-acquisition-alliance-partnership game involves schools of theology sniffing around, looking for an ecumenical hug and checks that don’t bounce. The most sexy local negotiation involves Andover Newton Theological Seminary, which has been wooing Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., for years. The tentative plans call for one school with two campuses.
The Andover student body is a mix of Unitarian, United Church of Christ and American Baptist, three vaguely lefty, progressive, social-action denominations that don’t quarrel over dinner, even when talking about politics or religion. Rochester has a collection of Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists of the cuddly variety – again, a kissy-face ecumenical crew that should be able to come together with Andover in one big seminary family, even as they graduate and go off in search of their various denominational idiosyncrasies.
Andover Newton is also talking about establishing a joint institution with Meadville Lombard Theological School in Illinois, which would sort of bring together the United Church of Christ and the Unitarians in one progressive, liberal, non-creedal place that hasn’t seen an evangelical Republican since Adam and Eve bought their first house.
United Philosophy Inc.?
On the face of it, merger/acquisition/partnership arrangements among seminaries seems like a tricky business, even if they are independent from any particular denominational ties. If a Catholic priest gets a divinity degree from Andover, he’s going to have to study extra hard to pass his PSAT (Priestly Scholastic Aptitude Test). An Assemblies of God Pentecostal-type would yearn for more evangelical fervor and Jesus-talk than he would find at some of the mainline Protestant seminaries.
On the other hand, Americans are becoming increasingly vague and squishy about their theological preferences, which might encourage more of the seminaries to take the route of “academic” study, without the bells and whistles of particular denominations.
A recent major “knowledge survey” by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found many of us as clueless about doctrine and Bible and denominations as we are about how to value a securitized collection of mortgage crap. Perhaps we need a minister who has acquired his knowledge at a Black Catholic Mormon Evangelical Jewish nondenominational Mennonite seminary.
There is something to be learned from all this by the godless financial services industry – especially in its “banking” mode. Customers may have become a bit fuzzy about the distinctions among banks, “savings banks” (wasn’t that cute?), private banking, wire-transfer cubby holes in strip malls, credit unions and borrowing a few bucks from grandma. This may inspire MBA programs in “money stuff,” producing a new kind of financial generalist who is sort of like a Presbyterian-Unitarian-Congregational-Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod kind of universal banking guy.
By the way, could you kind readers help me with one of the Pew test questions? “The religion that aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering, is___?”
I thought the answer was, “insurance agent cults selling annuities.” Apparently not.
