PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Much has changed since then. Today, even the largest and wealthiest "big steeple" churches would be hard-pressed to provide the specialized ministerial training required for clergy candidates in their own denominations -- never mind students from other traditions or with vocational goals outside of ministry. Clearly, independent seminaries and university divinity schools are much needed and here to stay.
Even so, after 500 years of outsourcing theological education, could it be time for the church to also try a different approach? Could the future of theological education be found, at least in part, deep within the church's past?
Read more from Ryan Bonfiglio »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Ryan P. Bonfiglio: Let's make the church a center of theological education again
The author speaks at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta's "TheoEd Talks," a creative example of church-based theological education. Photo courtesy of First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta
For almost 500 years, the church has been outsourcing theological education to seminaries and divinity schools. It’s time to return some of that task to local churches, says a seminary scholar and teacher.Before 1563, when the first “modern” seminary opened, academic institutions weren’t really involved in providing theological education. Instead, that task fell primarily to local churches, especially large, urban cathedrals, which were both places of worship and sites for clerical training and lay-focused education. Though they didn’t offer formal degrees, cathedral churches and a few monasteries were where theological study and scholarship happened.
Much has changed since then. Today, even the largest and wealthiest “big steeple” churches would be hard-pressed to provide the specialized ministerial training required for clergy candidates in their own denominations -- never mind students from other traditions or with vocational goals outside of ministry. Clearly, independent seminaries and university divinity schools are much needed and here to stay.
Even so, after 500 years of outsourcing theological education, could it be time for the church to also try a different approach? Could the future of theological education be found, at least in part, deep within the church’s past?
I believe the answer to both questions is a resounding yes. The church can gain much by returning at least some aspects of theological education to local congregations -- “insourcing” them, you might say. The cathedral church model prompts us to think in new ways about where and how theological education will happen in the 21st century. It calls us to reimagine local churches as viable sites for seminary-level education.
Here are three potential benefits to making the local church a new place for theological education:
First, by offering courses off-campus in accessible, familiar locations, the cathedral model can expand the potential audience for theological education, giving seminary leaders an additional strategy in their efforts to boost enrollment.
This is exactly what we did at Columbia Theological Seminary. In the spring 2016 semester, I taught a three-credit course in Old Testament theology at the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta, where I serve as the scholar-in-residence. The course met in the evenings and was open to both Columbia seminary students and up to 10 church members.
The class was a win-win for both institutions. For First Presbyterian, congregants got to take a deep dive into seminary learning in the context of their own church. For Columbia seminary, divinity students were able to learn alongside -- and from -- smart and engaged lay members. By holding a seminary class in a local congregation, we were able to open up space for contextualized learning. In this class, the starting point was not a body of academic literature but rather the ministries of the church and the needs of the community it serves.
By bringing rich theological content to where Christians already gather, this model has the potential to engage a much wider audience, including congregation members and staff from regional denominational bodies such as presbyteries and synods. Taking seminary off campus can reinvigorate the theological formation of lay members who would otherwise never enroll in seminary while also serving as an effective recruitment tool. Of the 10 lay members who participated in our Old Testament course, two are now full-time students at Columbia seminary.
Second, if the potential audience for theological education is the entire church, we will be spurred to rethink how we package and present our content.
Here’s where we can learn from TED. With more than 1 billion views a year, this wildly popular online speaker series owes its success not only to fascinating presenters and topics but also to its polished short-talk format. In the time it takes to walk the dog, drop the kids off at soccer or, here in Atlanta, drive one exit on the Connector at rush hour, listeners can hear an inspiring talk from a near-endless list of topics. The medium, as it turns out, matters quite a bit when it comes to lay education.
What if the short-talk format was adapted for theological education? Inspired by TED Talks, First Presbyterian last year launched a new speaker series called TheoEd Talks. In this series, we brought together leading thinkers in the church and the academy to give “the talk of their lives” in 20 minutes or less. By packaging powerful ideas in bite-size presentations, such talks provide a fresh and compelling way for diverse audiences to explore important questions about God, theology, and the power of faith to shape lives and communities.
With live events and high-quality videos available online, the TheoEd Talks series recognizes that church-based theological education requires more than just transferring traditional seminary classes to local congregations. It means finding creative ways to translate content into formats that are accessible and engaging for a broader audience of believers and seekers alike.
Third, the cathedral church model can challenge us to rethink the purpose of theological education, re-envisioning it as not merely a pathway to an M.Div. or other degree but an act of discipleship in its own right.
You can find hints of that idea in the final chapter of Luke, in the story of Christ’s appearance to two travelers on the road to Emmaus. Mistaking the resurrected Jesus for a stranger, the travelers told him about the recent events in Jerusalem, including rumors of an empty tomb.
Obviously, the two had much to learn. Yet rather than encouraging the travelers to go enroll in studies at a local synagogue, Jesus brought theological education to them. As they journeyed together, Jesus interpreted the Scriptures for them, and soon their hearts were stirred and their eyes were opened. For the travelers, the road to Emmaus was a road to theological formation.
If we dare to see the church once again as a viable site for theological education, the implications of Luke 24 will be even clearer. The road to Damascus -- conversion -- has always led to the road to Emmaus -- theological education. That latter road, the path of theological education, is not only for those who feel called to ministry. It is for everyone who feels compelled to follow Jesus Christ. The two roads are successive steps, first one and then the other, that many -- more than we can imagine -- are called to take on the journey of discipleship.
CAN THESE BONES: YOLANDA PIERCE
Why would someone give up a faculty position at Princeton Theological Seminary to become the dean of a divinity school? The Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce offers two answers. One is that God said go. The second reason, as she explains to co-host Bill Lamar, is that she wants to be at the table as theological education is shifting. She also talks about her identity as a Pentecostal who believes that the Holy Spirit is still speaking, what it means to be a public intellectual, and the need for conversations about justice and reparations.Read or listen to the podcast »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Episode 9: Yolanda Pierce on answering God's call to lead the Howard University School of Divinity
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Bill Lamar talks with the Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the new dean of Howard’s divinity school, about why she’s excited about the challenges of theological education.
Why would someone give up a faculty position at Princeton Theological Seminary to become the dean of a divinity school? The Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce offers two answers. One is that God said go. The second reason, as she explains to co-host Bill Lamar, is that she wants to be at the table as theological education is shifting. She also talks about her identity as a Pentecostal who believes that the Holy Spirit is still speaking, what it means to be a public intellectual, and the need for conversations about justice and reparations.
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More from Yolanda Pierce
Website: www.yolandapierce.com, with links to her writing
Twitter:@YNPierce
Address, Jan. 16, 2018, at Georgetown University: “Righteous Anger, Black Lives Matter, and the Legacy of King”
Chance the Rapper: “Blessings (Reprise)”
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.
Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is the ninth episode of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields.
Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in their own “valley of dry bones.”
Today, Bill, you’re talking with the Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, who is in her first year as the new dean of Howard University’s School of Divinity. What should we know about Dr. Pierce?Bill Lamar: Laura, Dr. Pierce is a superstar. She really is. She is included in The Root’s 100 Most Influential African-Americans. She is an ordained Christian minister with deep, deep roots in the wonderful Church of God in Christ. She’s a public intellectual, and she has a very, very wide-ranging intellectual interest, including literature and Africana studies and race, as well as womanist theology. She’s a Renaissance woman and an intellect of no mean ability.
Laura Everett: God bless the theologian who decides to enter into administration in theological education in this moment. Let’s listen to your interview.
Bill Lamar: Yolanda Pierce of Howard Divinity School is joining us on “Can These Bones.” Dean Pierce, thank you very much.
Yolanda Pierce: Thank you for having me.
Bill Lamar: What does it mean to be a public intellectual? You’ve been described as such. What does that mean?
Yolanda Pierce: So, Chance the Rapper says, “I speak to God in public,” right? I want to have conversations about God in public life.
Bill Lamar: Could you get me an interview with him?
Yolanda Pierce: Yes, yes, I would love to. I hope he listens to this and we can all go to Chicago and hang out with him.
Bill Lamar: I hear he writes big checks.
Yolanda Pierce: And we could use one: Howard University School of Divinity.
So I’m on Twitter a lot, and Facebook, and cable news and blogs and podcasts and TV, including a TV show on TV One.
The reason I do that is not because I have anything in particular to say that’s extraordinary. It’s simply to say that we need more public voices who are claiming their faith, who are unapologetically black, unapologetically Christian and willing to say there’s a different way. There’s another way to do this. There’s a way that you can walk with Christ that actually looks different than these other models out there.
So to me, to be a public intellectual is to allow myself to actually be vulnerable in public, to talk about my faith, to talk about the work that I do, and to recognize that more people will see me on a television show or will read something that I write for Time magazine than will ever read all of the academic articles and books and essays that I’ve written.
In the classroom, I have 15, 20, 30 students, maybe, per semester, but in the public sphere, if I’m on MSNBC or CNN, millions of people view me. The problem, of course, with that, is you get the backlash, right? You get the people who write you, and you get the hate mail, and you get the death threats even. But I believe that we are, as Christians, called to do this publicly and unapologetically.
Bill Lamar: You are described, in almost all the literature that I’ve researched, as a Pentecostal, that you name and own that tradition. And I think it is one that is misunderstood, and in some precincts maligned. Can you help thicken what Pentecostalism means, for those who really don’t know?
Yolanda Pierce: I was born and raised in the Church of God in Christ. It is the largest African-American Pentecostal denomination in the world. And that will be and always is my home, where I identify myself. I grew up in a very rich, deeply Pentecostal tradition.
It is a tradition that has been maligned for a number of different reasons. I think that there are often people who don’t think that Pentecostals are interested in education, and I am someone who has pursued several degrees and has a Ph.D. So I want to say that that’s a certain kind of stereotyping that has often happened with Pentecostalism.
I think that there’s a way that people only understand Pentecostalism as a static, bodily worship, without an understanding that undergirding Pentecostalism is a deep pneumatology, a theology of the Holy Spirit. And many Pentecostals themselves have a deeply nuanced understanding of their theology.
But I think that I still identify and remain a Pentecostal today because I believe in the work and the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that God is still moving in the world. I believe that the Holy Spirit is still speaking. I believe that it’s only the power of the Holy Spirit that allows us the possibility of breaking down some of the barriers that we’ve created and erected in our nation and in our world.
So God is moving. And the Holy Spirit is present and alive. And instead of, for Trinitarian Christians, the Holy Spirit being the redheaded stepchild of the Trinity, as a Pentecostal, I affirm its rightful place in the Godhead as active, alive, present and here with us.
Bill Lamar: So there are seismic shifts in theological education. Will it be brick-and-mortar? Will it be online? The economic model for theological education is shifting, changing, maybe broken. Students are amassing massive amounts of debt. There’s a lot going on.
Yolanda Pierce: There is.
Bill Lamar: And you said yes to a deanship. Share with us why.
Yolanda Pierce: So one part of the story of saying yes to a deanship is that I’ve learned to obey God. God said go, and I said yes.
The other part of the story is that, as you mentioned, theological education is in crisis. It will look radically different in 10 years than it looked a generation ago. So I decided I actually wanted to be at the table as it’s shifting, as it’s changing, growing and perhaps even declining.
What should it look like? What should it look like in a landscape when we have people who are spiritual but not religious? What should it look like when we have a lot of people who consider themselves “nones” -- n-o-n-e-s -- not belonging to any particular religious tradition? What should it look like when we know that now less than 50 percent of those who have theological education will actually end up doing primary pastoral ministry? Most are not going to be pastors or preachers or ministers at churches anymore. So what does theological education look like when you are no longer training primarily pastors?
As I was asking myself these questions for the years that I was a professor at Princeton, I decided I needed to be on the other side of the table helping to shift it, helping to change it, helping to make space and room for those who very much feel that they have a vocation, a calling from God, but that vocation might not necessarily lead them to the pulpit on Sunday mornings.
Bill Lamar: You know, some years ago when I first went back to work at Duke Divinity School at Leadership Education, one of the things that my colleagues were considering was, How do you train people to be Christian institutional leaders?
One of the anecdotes that I shall never forget is Will Willimon, once he was elected bishop in the United Methodist Church from the deanship at Duke Chapel -- he said once he was elected, he was given a set of keys and he was given a lawyer’s telephone number. That was the conclusion of his training to be a bishop.
What would you say about the training for this work, the preparation for this work, and also the change, the shift in scale and scope, from being a professor to leading a school?
Yolanda Pierce: So here I would say that the African-American Christian context actually has a leg up on the crisis situation, by which I mean that many of our pastors have traditionally been bivocational. Many of our pastors have always occupied a vocational calling for the church, but also something else. They’ve learned how to merge their “something else” -- their other identities as a schoolteacher, a principal, a business person -- and also what they do in terms of their labor for the body of Christ.
So what I’m interested in are those conversations with people who have been able to see that the work that they do for ministry may not be their primary job. It may not be the job that pays the bills, and yet it is also what their heart is. It’s where their purpose meets them; it’s where their joy is. How do we prepare people to pursue their joy? It’s not easy. There’s no Joy 101 class.
Except the people who come to seminary, who come to divinity school, very much do so because they have a calling. They sense that God is moving in their lives. They want to respond to that calling, even if they know that that calling might not lead them to leadership within a church setting.
So the transition for me was -- instead of thinking about, in my own classroom, as a professor, “What classes am I going to teach? What is my own personal research? What would I like to talk to my students about?” -- to thinking about, “In 10 years, will my students have a job? In five years, will these increasing numbers of women who cannot find a church position find a place to use their theological education?” The question that I occupy myself with now is, “Is the loan debt burden of an M.Div. actually worth the degree?”
Those are the questions that occupy me in a way that I never actually had to think about as a faculty member whose focus was her own research and writing and teaching.
Bill Lamar: What if the answer to that question is, “It’s not worth it”?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s a tough, tough answer. For some people, it may not be worth it. We might actually have to see the decline of some seminaries and divinity schools, the way that we’ve seen declines in mainline denominations.
Some things might die, but other things will grow. And if as Christians we consider ourselves a resurrection people, some things die so that other things can be called to life.
I think that theological education has to be streamlined. I think it will look radically different. I think it will be smaller. I think we will continue to see the closing of schools, and we’ll see the mergers of other schools. That actually doesn’t worry me. Instead of us thinking about that as crisis, let’s think about that as potential and possibility.
Bill Lamar: So you see it as opportunity?
Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely. Opportunity. And so what the world needs now are people who are not only theologically trained but who are open to the realms of politics and sociology and business and health care. All of these different realms where we need people who have a vocational calling. And that vocational calling, like I said, might not be the pulpit.
What would our health care system look like if not only did we have single payer health care, but if we had theologically trained people who were working in tandem as chaplains, as bioethicists, as people who are literally on the front lines of health care? Because you’re caring for both the body and the soul. So let’s talk about health care and theological education as a growth area.
Bill Lamar: I remember years ago I would read “Theology Today” and Princeton would advertise their doctor of ministry program, and the language they used was that of weaving. It seems like you are casting a vision of weaving, of an interdisciplinarity -- that a theological education can be a centering, a ballast for deepening conversations in other fields of inquiry and in other areas of practice. Am I hearing that?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s exactly what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that people will think about the things that they are passionate about -- like I said, be it health care, be it ethics and business -- and say, “What does my theological education say about this? What does our theological education say in terms of interreligious dialogue? What is our theological education teaching us about how do we deal with politics in the 21st century?”
And so there’s this weaving and meshing and quilting together of various disciplines, but theological education can be at the center of that. I want more men and women of faith, whatever faith tradition that may be, to be at the center of important national and international conversations.
Bill Lamar: Traditions such as ours -- I mean, people speak of the black church, but it’s more appropriate to say the black churches -- it’s a very diverse tradition.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s right, exactly.
Bill Lamar: But in the precincts where our tradition is conservative, and not just in our tradition but in others, how do you think about interreligious dialogue? Because the landscape has become much more diverse, in terms of practice. You mentioned earlier about the nones. How does theological education shift, when before, we were in an imaginary -- a Christendom where the culture belonged to Christianity? How do you help to do that kind of work?
Yolanda Pierce: I love what you’re saying about the rich diversity of black churches, and I think that that’s worth sort of pausing for a second, because there is no monolithic black church experience, nor is there a monolithic white church experience, as well. There are varieties of Christianity.
And so one of the things that I see is, within many African-American contexts, a deep theological conservatism, but socially, politically, quite liberal, right? What that allows for are opportunities to come together, opportunities to rally, to protest, to have conversation partners.
What do African-American Christian churches, of whatever variety of denomination, have in common with their Muslim brothers and sisters? Quite a bit, right? And it’s not just about shared theological texts, but for many, it’s their experience of being peoples at the margins. What it means to constantly be under surveillance, what it means to be the threat, the national threat.
And so under all of these structures are opportunities to do interreligious dialogue, and the interreligious dialogue matters because people’s lives are impacted because of their faith. That’s what matters. So I see interreligious dialogue as absolutely necessary for the flourishing of the church.
Bill Lamar: For our listeners who have either found themselves or will find themselves in a very similar situation, where you go from pastoring a church to leading a district as a superintendent, or a conference or a diocese as a bishop, what very practical things did you have to shift in your mental model to move from that classroom experience to managing budgets, managing people, dealing with cultivation of resources, friend raising, fundraising?
Talk to me about that, because many of our leaders have those kinds of transitions, and I’m sure you can teach us something.
Yolanda Pierce: Nothing prepares you for that.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: So all my years of education, and Ph.D., and years teaching as a professor -- nothing prepared me for that. It is wholly other. And because nothing prepared me for that, I now realize we have to actually create a framework to prepare people for that. We need to teach people how to deal with budgets. Many pastors, of course, are already dealing with budgets, but budgets at an even higher scale.
We need to teach people some very practical skills about fundraising and philanthropy. We need to teach people, How do you write grants? How do you solicit grants? How do you fundraise? How do you find resources for your churches or your religious organizations? Those are actual classes that we can implement. Those are actually skills that we can teach. We just haven’t done it.
And so I’m looking back on my own experience. I fell into this, and I’m learning as I go. And I’ve had great teachers and mentors. The mentorship model is important. The way that, for seminaries and divinity schools, we send students to churches to do a field education experience. We assign them a mentor; we understand that they’re under a system of apprenticeship, for better or for worse. We need that in organizational structures.
I need a mentor to be able to walk me through some of the crises that are inevitably going to come, as I am now running an organization and no longer just a teacher in the classroom. But classes can prepare people to do that.
I remember my challenge sitting before an Excel budget spreadsheet. Like, “OK, Lord, I need you now.” And the Lord was like, “The answer to your question is go take a class and learn how to do some Excel spreadsheets.”
And I really did. I really had to learn some basic skills that, frankly, I would wish that we were teaching in college, let alone in graduate school, as preparation for what the work actually looks like.
I say to pastors, I ask them, “How much time do you spend sitting quietly listening to God, you know, preparing your sermons, versus how much time do you spend fielding phone calls from plumbers and someone working on the roof and someone …?” And you laugh, but I know the case is, right, is that ...
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: I fixed a toilet the other day.
Yolanda Pierce: So precious little time in that golden space of waiting to hear God speak for your Sunday sermon, and a lot of practical time dealing with just the issues of life. We can teach those skills, but we have to be honest that those are skills that need to be taught.
Bill Lamar: One of the things you remind me of is I have to tell myself very frequently that those things, too, are holy.
Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely.
Bill Lamar: And those things make possible the heart of the life of the church. Hearing the voice of God, following God, being swept up into the mystery, and swept up in the transformation of the world as God leads us in that direction.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s such a beautiful thought, to think about that form of labor as holy. My first few weeks as dean, I think, I was frustrated because I wanted to sit at the table. I had such grandiose ideas: “We’re going to transform theological education.” And instead, I’m going through 150, 200 emails a day. And I’m like, “So how is this transformative?”
But that work is holy. It matters that our students have transcripts. It matters that we talk to the financial aid office. And so I’m learning on the ground that all of the tasks that I am giving unto God actually contribute to my students’ vocation.
Bill Lamar: What brings you the most joy in this new work?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s a tough question. For a long time, I don’t think I could answer it, because I just had a lot of fires and frustrations, and so it didn’t feel like much joy.
What I say now is that I know I’m planting seeds. I’m planting seeds of crops that I might not even see grow or come to fruition, but the small changes that I’m making at Howard, the skills that I’m learning which help me to grow as a scholar, a professor, as an administrator, are seeds, and they are being planted. And I will continue to water them, and I might not see the crops grow.
So it brings me joy to know that in every little small area, progress is being made, even if I can’t necessarily put my hands quite yet on the progress.
Bill Lamar: What is frustrating you?
Yolanda Pierce: OK, so what is frustrating me? This is my first experience at an HBCU, historically black college or university. There are only in the country now six HBTIs -- that stands for historically black theological institutions.
It is frustrating for me to see that there are only six, because the vast majority of HBCUs were actually founded as training grounds for ministers and teachers. And so hundreds of [institutions] in the 19th century were founded to train black men and women for teaching, for ministry. And we are now down to six. And so it’s frustrating to me that we don’t sometimes recognize the legacy and the foundation of these institutions, and value them.
I left a very resource-rich institution, Princeton, where I learned so much and gained so much, and I am now at a very resource-strapped institution, whose legacy is so incredible.
But I’m frustrated with how there isn’t a narrative that theological education owes its debt to these men and women of African descent who sent their sons and daughters to these schools in the 19th century and said, “Learn the word of God.” We owe a debt to that, and we don’t recognize and we don’t repay the debt that we owe.
Bill Lamar: I am always intrigued by people who can take the sentimental and flip it, who can look at things at a slant. So one of your quotes: “I’m not interested in most conversations about equality. To whom would you like to be equal, given a broken and morally bankrupt system? Do you want to be equal to the persons, forces and systems which generate the very terms of your oppression? I am, however, interested in the weightier matters of law, justice and freedom. How can we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly?”
That’s heavy. Talk to us about that quote.
Yolanda Pierce: So I’m a theologian. And I spend a lot of time thinking and writing and speaking about the heart of the matter, for me, which is how we talk about God, how we talk to God, how we listen to God. And these past couple of years in particular in the United States, given our political climate, I’ve been thinking about what really matters.
We have a lot of conversations about equity, a lot of conversations about fairness, a lot of conversations about equality, and I don’t feel like those conversations get us to the heart of the matter. And so let’s talk about justice. Let’s talk about reparations. Let’s talk about repairing and restoring.
It’s the way in which people want to have a conversation about forgiveness, but they don’t want to have a conversation about reparations. They want to talk about how do we get along, but they don’t want to talk about the wounds and the deep hurts that undergird the disease that keeps so many of us apart.
So I’m for plain talking and for truth telling. I think, actually, this is the work of the gospel. How do we begin to tell the truth? How do we begin to let those who have been silenced actually speak?
I’d love to talk to people about reconciliation, but reconciliation is the end of the process. Reconciliation is at the very end; that’s what you do right before you go home. Instead, the conversation has to be about this truth telling. It has to be about examining and cleaning the wounds. It has to be about repairing and restoring.
And I find that many Christians are actually uncomfortable with those conversations, even though we have this theological language. We are so quick to point to the healing; we’re so quick to want to get together and have a wonderful ecumenical prayer meeting where everyone leaves thinking, “Look at all of us, and look how wonderful we are.”
Instead, the deep-down, dirty work of what it means to be in community and fellowship with one another, that will require tears and will require sacrifice and will require some people giving up their privilege -- very few people want to talk about that. So that’s where I insert myself.
Bill Lamar: I want to ask again the question you ask at the end of that quote. So many people are trying to get traction around these questions: How can we act justly? How can we love mercy? How can we walk humbly? How?
Yolanda Pierce: We have to believe that that framework actually will take us somewhere. I think it starts there. And so the questions of justice -- we also have to talk about justice for whom, right? And we often don’t want to talk about that.
What I’m trying to suggest here are uncomfortable conversations that take for granted that we want to see a more just world, that take for granted that at the heart of the Christian vocation is this vocabulary of love. And so if we take that for granted, and if we actually believe that humility and humbleness are values and virtue, then these conversations about justice fundamentally shift.
So we can’t, for instance, talk about law enforcement or the criminal justice or injustice system, right, unless we’re talking about justice for whom, by whom, to benefit whom.
I’m taking for granted that there are men and women who very much have at their foundation a sense of this corporate identity rooted and grounded in love and humility and justice. And those are the people that I very much want to call my family of faith. I am deeply concerned about how the title, the language, the label of Christian gets co-opted by a group that is at the far right, and those of us who deeply value what it means to be called, to be a Christian, to be a follower of Christ, somehow don’t get to insert ourselves in those conversations.
So I’m saying, “No, I will not yield the language of Christianity, the language of love, the language of justice, the language of humility and humbleness, to one group. That is my language, and it belongs to me, and I get to insert myself into that conversation.”
Bill Lamar: Finally, I am sure that part of the reason that you are as ebullient and hopeful as I find you to be is because in your mind you’re carrying some students, students currently enrolled at Howard Divinity School, who are bright, gifted, who you think really can change the church in the world. Without giving names, protecting the identity of innocents …
Yolanda Pierce: I have so much hope when I meet young people, not just folks in seminary and divinity school. When I meet the young men and women who are chanting in the streets of Ferguson, and they’re 16 and 17 years old; when I meet undergraduates at Howard who are serving as chaplain assistants and at 20 years old are still saying, “There’s something here in this faith for me”; when I meet the men and women who leave behind everything, sometimes including their own families, to pursue theological education, to go to divinity school, to go to seminary, to take on the loans and the debt, to simply say, “God has called me to do a work, and that work is urgent,” it gives me such deep hope.
I see that right now, even though we are at this crisis point, it is also a “potential” moment. It is also a kairosmoment, in a sense. And so I have a lot of hope when I see folks out at a Black Lives Matters rally, when I see them protesting at Capitol Hill, and being here in D.C., the center of so much protest, the center of so much of the resistance movement.
I have so much hope when I see young people who are 14 and 15 or 25 and 30, because they are not giving up on the idea that their faith, that their deep involvement in religious communities, matters. That gives me a great deal of hope for what the future of religion looks like, what the future of faith looks like, and the idea that this interreligious dialogue of which we have to be a part is the possibility for freedom for a lot of different groups of people.
Bill Lamar: Dean Pierce, this has been wonderful. As we say in the tradition of the black churches, “May the Lord God bless you real good.”
Yolanda Pierce: Real good. Real good. Thank you so much.
Bill Lamar: Hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: Thank you, Rev. Lamar.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity. Bill, there is so much to discuss in this, but first I want to say that any theologian who starts her exploration of what it means to be a public intellectual by quoting Chance the Rapper, to me, is an exceedingly good place to start: “I speak to God in public, I speak to God in public / He keep my rhymes in couplets.” It’s so good, Bill, and it’s so right.
Bill Lamar: I was really taken away by Dean Pierce’s ability to be able to speak the language of the theological academy and the language of administration, but also the language of some of the highest forms of popular culture. She’s able to synthesize so many things so well, and that’s part of the reason we’ve spoken with her on “Can These Bones.”
Laura Everett: Let’s talk about what it means to be a public intellectual. It’s a risky move, especially in a field that prizes surety and declarative statements.
I’ve followed Dean Pierce on Twitter for a while -- she’s @YNPierce -- a really remarkable woman who both asks questions in public and engages with her community. What do you think is at stake for someone who’s a new dean of a seminary serving intentionally in the role as a public intellectual?
Bill Lamar: I think a lot is at stake, because when she speaks, she speaks also for an old and storied institution. And so she always has to be very careful, in my opinion, about what she says and how others may read it, and then how it may cast light or potential shadow upon the school.
I think because of her constituency and the persons with whom she speaks, and those she’s recruiting, that her social media presence is probably helping to enlarge the footprint of Howard University School of Divinity. As I take a look at her Twitter feed, there are very light things that she may tweet about; there are also political and theological things. So it seems to me that her strategy is to just be authentic and comfortable. And that same authenticity seems to be what guides her deanship.
Laura Everett: This is so resonant for me, that question about authenticity and interactivity. When I teach church leaders about using social media for ministry, I remember the time I was teaching a group of bishops of a denomination that shall remain nameless to protect them on this. I was trying to help them learn how to speak to God in public, how to speak a word of blessing to the people, and ask questions. And I was trying to teach that sometimes that means being vulnerable, asking questions, acknowledging what we don’t know and learning from the people that we’re interacting with in public.
I made this grand presentation, and one of the bishops told me that in his tradition, after being elected, the chief lawyer pulled him aside and said something to the effect of, “Now that you are a bishop, everything you say must be a declarative sentence. Do not wonder aloud, because people will take your word as gospel.” It didn’t give him the space. He had been explicitly told by his tradition, “Do not ask questions in public, because of your status.”
And so I think about the balancing act of someone like Dean Pierce, who is asking questions and interacting with people at the same time as she is interacting and representing an institution -- how hard that is. I know you’ve had that challenge, as well, or you’re thinking about it, also leading a storied institution and trying to speak of God in public.
Bill Lamar: I would say this, Laura, that whoever gave that advice -- this is very, very poor advice. I mean, when you cease to wonder, when you only lead in prose and think in flat, one-dimensional ways, and you can’t stir the poetry in the soul, or the grand visions of the world as we think it ought be, or as we speculate that God intends for it to be, that’s the death knell.
When I think about leading a place like Metropolitan, really being blessed by our church to lead this church, I think about wanting to be as authentic as I am both in the church and in other spheres, so that I don’t have the burden of trying to be three or four Bill Lamars.
The Bill Lamar at home; the churchy, preachy Bill Lamar; the Bill Lamar the advocate or the guy testifying at city council; or the Bill -- you know, it’s just too much to try to keep up with three or four different people in one dark body, as Du Bois might say. So I’m trying to be one whole person.
I want there to be joy. I want there to be laughter. I never forget that I’m serving Metropolitan. I mean -- really, this may be too nerdy and in the weeds, and this is why there’s the magic of editing -- but I’ll never forget in theology talking about the hypostatic union of the divinity and humanity of Christ.
So for me, I feel like there is a hypostasis between just Bill Lamar the regular guy and Bill Lamar the pastor, institutional guy. I don’t really separate it. And it means I’m not carrying a burden; it means that I’m integrated, or at least becoming as integrated as healthily as I can be. I think that Dean Pierce offers us a really, really good model in that.
Laura Everett: I so appreciated her awareness, too, that there is an evangelical role she plays by speaking in communities that would never read her books or her essays or hear her preach, but because she is being intentional about interacting with folks on social media, that she’s in conversation with people who will never enter the church, and that’s OK, and that she actually needs to be doing that in order to be fulfilling her vocation and preparing pastors to serve in a religiously diverse world. I really appreciated that wisdom.
Bill Lamar: You know, one of the things, Laura -- and you were one of the persons I talked with early on -- I was very, very reticent about joining the social media movement, because I saw it as, well, I don’t know, like, ego-driven.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: Like, who would care what I’m thinking, what I’m eating, where I am? But what I’ve realized is that if there is something that is of import to you and you want to it and you want conversation partners to deepen your thought or to extend it, that social media becomes an excellent tool.
So one of the things I’d say to our listeners is it doesn’t matter how big or small you think your platform is, the ideas that animate you probably animate other people. And social media, for me, has been a great place to engage that.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: I think that iron does indeed sharpen iron, and it’s not the perfect venue for all kinds of conversations, but social media has been helpful. I think I could probably engage it more. But there are things that happen in the course of a day or a week, or if something says to me, you know, you should tweet this, you should put this on Facebook -- and I think it really has helped some conversations that I’ve had with folks along the way, with people that I see regularly and those I don’t see regularly.
And so there’s this weaving and meshing and quilting together of various disciplines, but theological education can be at the center of that. I want more men and women of faith, whatever faith tradition that may be, to be at the center of important national and international conversations.
Bill Lamar: Traditions such as ours -- I mean, people speak of the black church, but it’s more appropriate to say the black churches -- it’s a very diverse tradition.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s right, exactly.
Bill Lamar: But in the precincts where our tradition is conservative, and not just in our tradition but in others, how do you think about interreligious dialogue? Because the landscape has become much more diverse, in terms of practice. You mentioned earlier about the nones. How does theological education shift, when before, we were in an imaginary -- a Christendom where the culture belonged to Christianity? How do you help to do that kind of work?
Yolanda Pierce: I love what you’re saying about the rich diversity of black churches, and I think that that’s worth sort of pausing for a second, because there is no monolithic black church experience, nor is there a monolithic white church experience, as well. There are varieties of Christianity.
And so one of the things that I see is, within many African-American contexts, a deep theological conservatism, but socially, politically, quite liberal, right? What that allows for are opportunities to come together, opportunities to rally, to protest, to have conversation partners.
What do African-American Christian churches, of whatever variety of denomination, have in common with their Muslim brothers and sisters? Quite a bit, right? And it’s not just about shared theological texts, but for many, it’s their experience of being peoples at the margins. What it means to constantly be under surveillance, what it means to be the threat, the national threat.
And so under all of these structures are opportunities to do interreligious dialogue, and the interreligious dialogue matters because people’s lives are impacted because of their faith. That’s what matters. So I see interreligious dialogue as absolutely necessary for the flourishing of the church.
Bill Lamar: For our listeners who have either found themselves or will find themselves in a very similar situation, where you go from pastoring a church to leading a district as a superintendent, or a conference or a diocese as a bishop, what very practical things did you have to shift in your mental model to move from that classroom experience to managing budgets, managing people, dealing with cultivation of resources, friend raising, fundraising?
Talk to me about that, because many of our leaders have those kinds of transitions, and I’m sure you can teach us something.
Yolanda Pierce: Nothing prepares you for that.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: So all my years of education, and Ph.D., and years teaching as a professor -- nothing prepared me for that. It is wholly other. And because nothing prepared me for that, I now realize we have to actually create a framework to prepare people for that. We need to teach people how to deal with budgets. Many pastors, of course, are already dealing with budgets, but budgets at an even higher scale.
We need to teach people some very practical skills about fundraising and philanthropy. We need to teach people, How do you write grants? How do you solicit grants? How do you fundraise? How do you find resources for your churches or your religious organizations? Those are actual classes that we can implement. Those are actually skills that we can teach. We just haven’t done it.
And so I’m looking back on my own experience. I fell into this, and I’m learning as I go. And I’ve had great teachers and mentors. The mentorship model is important. The way that, for seminaries and divinity schools, we send students to churches to do a field education experience. We assign them a mentor; we understand that they’re under a system of apprenticeship, for better or for worse. We need that in organizational structures.
I need a mentor to be able to walk me through some of the crises that are inevitably going to come, as I am now running an organization and no longer just a teacher in the classroom. But classes can prepare people to do that.
I remember my challenge sitting before an Excel budget spreadsheet. Like, “OK, Lord, I need you now.” And the Lord was like, “The answer to your question is go take a class and learn how to do some Excel spreadsheets.”
And I really did. I really had to learn some basic skills that, frankly, I would wish that we were teaching in college, let alone in graduate school, as preparation for what the work actually looks like.
I say to pastors, I ask them, “How much time do you spend sitting quietly listening to God, you know, preparing your sermons, versus how much time do you spend fielding phone calls from plumbers and someone working on the roof and someone …?” And you laugh, but I know the case is, right, is that ...
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: I fixed a toilet the other day.
Yolanda Pierce: So precious little time in that golden space of waiting to hear God speak for your Sunday sermon, and a lot of practical time dealing with just the issues of life. We can teach those skills, but we have to be honest that those are skills that need to be taught.
Bill Lamar: One of the things you remind me of is I have to tell myself very frequently that those things, too, are holy.
Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely.
Bill Lamar: And those things make possible the heart of the life of the church. Hearing the voice of God, following God, being swept up into the mystery, and swept up in the transformation of the world as God leads us in that direction.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s such a beautiful thought, to think about that form of labor as holy. My first few weeks as dean, I think, I was frustrated because I wanted to sit at the table. I had such grandiose ideas: “We’re going to transform theological education.” And instead, I’m going through 150, 200 emails a day. And I’m like, “So how is this transformative?”
But that work is holy. It matters that our students have transcripts. It matters that we talk to the financial aid office. And so I’m learning on the ground that all of the tasks that I am giving unto God actually contribute to my students’ vocation.
Bill Lamar: What brings you the most joy in this new work?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s a tough question. For a long time, I don’t think I could answer it, because I just had a lot of fires and frustrations, and so it didn’t feel like much joy.
What I say now is that I know I’m planting seeds. I’m planting seeds of crops that I might not even see grow or come to fruition, but the small changes that I’m making at Howard, the skills that I’m learning which help me to grow as a scholar, a professor, as an administrator, are seeds, and they are being planted. And I will continue to water them, and I might not see the crops grow.
So it brings me joy to know that in every little small area, progress is being made, even if I can’t necessarily put my hands quite yet on the progress.
Bill Lamar: What is frustrating you?
Yolanda Pierce: OK, so what is frustrating me? This is my first experience at an HBCU, historically black college or university. There are only in the country now six HBTIs -- that stands for historically black theological institutions.
It is frustrating for me to see that there are only six, because the vast majority of HBCUs were actually founded as training grounds for ministers and teachers. And so hundreds of [institutions] in the 19th century were founded to train black men and women for teaching, for ministry. And we are now down to six. And so it’s frustrating to me that we don’t sometimes recognize the legacy and the foundation of these institutions, and value them.
I left a very resource-rich institution, Princeton, where I learned so much and gained so much, and I am now at a very resource-strapped institution, whose legacy is so incredible.
But I’m frustrated with how there isn’t a narrative that theological education owes its debt to these men and women of African descent who sent their sons and daughters to these schools in the 19th century and said, “Learn the word of God.” We owe a debt to that, and we don’t recognize and we don’t repay the debt that we owe.
Bill Lamar: I am always intrigued by people who can take the sentimental and flip it, who can look at things at a slant. So one of your quotes: “I’m not interested in most conversations about equality. To whom would you like to be equal, given a broken and morally bankrupt system? Do you want to be equal to the persons, forces and systems which generate the very terms of your oppression? I am, however, interested in the weightier matters of law, justice and freedom. How can we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly?”
That’s heavy. Talk to us about that quote.
Yolanda Pierce: So I’m a theologian. And I spend a lot of time thinking and writing and speaking about the heart of the matter, for me, which is how we talk about God, how we talk to God, how we listen to God. And these past couple of years in particular in the United States, given our political climate, I’ve been thinking about what really matters.
We have a lot of conversations about equity, a lot of conversations about fairness, a lot of conversations about equality, and I don’t feel like those conversations get us to the heart of the matter. And so let’s talk about justice. Let’s talk about reparations. Let’s talk about repairing and restoring.
It’s the way in which people want to have a conversation about forgiveness, but they don’t want to have a conversation about reparations. They want to talk about how do we get along, but they don’t want to talk about the wounds and the deep hurts that undergird the disease that keeps so many of us apart.
So I’m for plain talking and for truth telling. I think, actually, this is the work of the gospel. How do we begin to tell the truth? How do we begin to let those who have been silenced actually speak?
I’d love to talk to people about reconciliation, but reconciliation is the end of the process. Reconciliation is at the very end; that’s what you do right before you go home. Instead, the conversation has to be about this truth telling. It has to be about examining and cleaning the wounds. It has to be about repairing and restoring.
And I find that many Christians are actually uncomfortable with those conversations, even though we have this theological language. We are so quick to point to the healing; we’re so quick to want to get together and have a wonderful ecumenical prayer meeting where everyone leaves thinking, “Look at all of us, and look how wonderful we are.”
Instead, the deep-down, dirty work of what it means to be in community and fellowship with one another, that will require tears and will require sacrifice and will require some people giving up their privilege -- very few people want to talk about that. So that’s where I insert myself.
Bill Lamar: I want to ask again the question you ask at the end of that quote. So many people are trying to get traction around these questions: How can we act justly? How can we love mercy? How can we walk humbly? How?
Yolanda Pierce: We have to believe that that framework actually will take us somewhere. I think it starts there. And so the questions of justice -- we also have to talk about justice for whom, right? And we often don’t want to talk about that.
What I’m trying to suggest here are uncomfortable conversations that take for granted that we want to see a more just world, that take for granted that at the heart of the Christian vocation is this vocabulary of love. And so if we take that for granted, and if we actually believe that humility and humbleness are values and virtue, then these conversations about justice fundamentally shift.
So we can’t, for instance, talk about law enforcement or the criminal justice or injustice system, right, unless we’re talking about justice for whom, by whom, to benefit whom.
I’m taking for granted that there are men and women who very much have at their foundation a sense of this corporate identity rooted and grounded in love and humility and justice. And those are the people that I very much want to call my family of faith. I am deeply concerned about how the title, the language, the label of Christian gets co-opted by a group that is at the far right, and those of us who deeply value what it means to be called, to be a Christian, to be a follower of Christ, somehow don’t get to insert ourselves in those conversations.
So I’m saying, “No, I will not yield the language of Christianity, the language of love, the language of justice, the language of humility and humbleness, to one group. That is my language, and it belongs to me, and I get to insert myself into that conversation.”
Bill Lamar: Finally, I am sure that part of the reason that you are as ebullient and hopeful as I find you to be is because in your mind you’re carrying some students, students currently enrolled at Howard Divinity School, who are bright, gifted, who you think really can change the church in the world. Without giving names, protecting the identity of innocents …
Yolanda Pierce: I have so much hope when I meet young people, not just folks in seminary and divinity school. When I meet the young men and women who are chanting in the streets of Ferguson, and they’re 16 and 17 years old; when I meet undergraduates at Howard who are serving as chaplain assistants and at 20 years old are still saying, “There’s something here in this faith for me”; when I meet the men and women who leave behind everything, sometimes including their own families, to pursue theological education, to go to divinity school, to go to seminary, to take on the loans and the debt, to simply say, “God has called me to do a work, and that work is urgent,” it gives me such deep hope.
I see that right now, even though we are at this crisis point, it is also a “potential” moment. It is also a kairosmoment, in a sense. And so I have a lot of hope when I see folks out at a Black Lives Matters rally, when I see them protesting at Capitol Hill, and being here in D.C., the center of so much protest, the center of so much of the resistance movement.
I have so much hope when I see young people who are 14 and 15 or 25 and 30, because they are not giving up on the idea that their faith, that their deep involvement in religious communities, matters. That gives me a great deal of hope for what the future of religion looks like, what the future of faith looks like, and the idea that this interreligious dialogue of which we have to be a part is the possibility for freedom for a lot of different groups of people.
Bill Lamar: Dean Pierce, this has been wonderful. As we say in the tradition of the black churches, “May the Lord God bless you real good.”
Yolanda Pierce: Real good. Real good. Thank you so much.
Bill Lamar: Hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: Thank you, Rev. Lamar.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity. Bill, there is so much to discuss in this, but first I want to say that any theologian who starts her exploration of what it means to be a public intellectual by quoting Chance the Rapper, to me, is an exceedingly good place to start: “I speak to God in public, I speak to God in public / He keep my rhymes in couplets.” It’s so good, Bill, and it’s so right.
Bill Lamar: I was really taken away by Dean Pierce’s ability to be able to speak the language of the theological academy and the language of administration, but also the language of some of the highest forms of popular culture. She’s able to synthesize so many things so well, and that’s part of the reason we’ve spoken with her on “Can These Bones.”
Laura Everett: Let’s talk about what it means to be a public intellectual. It’s a risky move, especially in a field that prizes surety and declarative statements.
I’ve followed Dean Pierce on Twitter for a while -- she’s @YNPierce -- a really remarkable woman who both asks questions in public and engages with her community. What do you think is at stake for someone who’s a new dean of a seminary serving intentionally in the role as a public intellectual?
Bill Lamar: I think a lot is at stake, because when she speaks, she speaks also for an old and storied institution. And so she always has to be very careful, in my opinion, about what she says and how others may read it, and then how it may cast light or potential shadow upon the school.
I think because of her constituency and the persons with whom she speaks, and those she’s recruiting, that her social media presence is probably helping to enlarge the footprint of Howard University School of Divinity. As I take a look at her Twitter feed, there are very light things that she may tweet about; there are also political and theological things. So it seems to me that her strategy is to just be authentic and comfortable. And that same authenticity seems to be what guides her deanship.
Laura Everett: This is so resonant for me, that question about authenticity and interactivity. When I teach church leaders about using social media for ministry, I remember the time I was teaching a group of bishops of a denomination that shall remain nameless to protect them on this. I was trying to help them learn how to speak to God in public, how to speak a word of blessing to the people, and ask questions. And I was trying to teach that sometimes that means being vulnerable, asking questions, acknowledging what we don’t know and learning from the people that we’re interacting with in public.
I made this grand presentation, and one of the bishops told me that in his tradition, after being elected, the chief lawyer pulled him aside and said something to the effect of, “Now that you are a bishop, everything you say must be a declarative sentence. Do not wonder aloud, because people will take your word as gospel.” It didn’t give him the space. He had been explicitly told by his tradition, “Do not ask questions in public, because of your status.”
And so I think about the balancing act of someone like Dean Pierce, who is asking questions and interacting with people at the same time as she is interacting and representing an institution -- how hard that is. I know you’ve had that challenge, as well, or you’re thinking about it, also leading a storied institution and trying to speak of God in public.
Bill Lamar: I would say this, Laura, that whoever gave that advice -- this is very, very poor advice. I mean, when you cease to wonder, when you only lead in prose and think in flat, one-dimensional ways, and you can’t stir the poetry in the soul, or the grand visions of the world as we think it ought be, or as we speculate that God intends for it to be, that’s the death knell.
When I think about leading a place like Metropolitan, really being blessed by our church to lead this church, I think about wanting to be as authentic as I am both in the church and in other spheres, so that I don’t have the burden of trying to be three or four Bill Lamars.
The Bill Lamar at home; the churchy, preachy Bill Lamar; the Bill Lamar the advocate or the guy testifying at city council; or the Bill -- you know, it’s just too much to try to keep up with three or four different people in one dark body, as Du Bois might say. So I’m trying to be one whole person.
I want there to be joy. I want there to be laughter. I never forget that I’m serving Metropolitan. I mean -- really, this may be too nerdy and in the weeds, and this is why there’s the magic of editing -- but I’ll never forget in theology talking about the hypostatic union of the divinity and humanity of Christ.
So for me, I feel like there is a hypostasis between just Bill Lamar the regular guy and Bill Lamar the pastor, institutional guy. I don’t really separate it. And it means I’m not carrying a burden; it means that I’m integrated, or at least becoming as integrated as healthily as I can be. I think that Dean Pierce offers us a really, really good model in that.
Laura Everett: I so appreciated her awareness, too, that there is an evangelical role she plays by speaking in communities that would never read her books or her essays or hear her preach, but because she is being intentional about interacting with folks on social media, that she’s in conversation with people who will never enter the church, and that’s OK, and that she actually needs to be doing that in order to be fulfilling her vocation and preparing pastors to serve in a religiously diverse world. I really appreciated that wisdom.
Bill Lamar: You know, one of the things, Laura -- and you were one of the persons I talked with early on -- I was very, very reticent about joining the social media movement, because I saw it as, well, I don’t know, like, ego-driven.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: Like, who would care what I’m thinking, what I’m eating, where I am? But what I’ve realized is that if there is something that is of import to you and you want to it and you want conversation partners to deepen your thought or to extend it, that social media becomes an excellent tool.
So one of the things I’d say to our listeners is it doesn’t matter how big or small you think your platform is, the ideas that animate you probably animate other people. And social media, for me, has been a great place to engage that.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: I think that iron does indeed sharpen iron, and it’s not the perfect venue for all kinds of conversations, but social media has been helpful. I think I could probably engage it more. But there are things that happen in the course of a day or a week, or if something says to me, you know, you should tweet this, you should put this on Facebook -- and I think it really has helped some conversations that I’ve had with folks along the way, with people that I see regularly and those I don’t see regularly.
Laura Everett: So Bill, let’s shift just a second to move from Twitter to toilets, because you and Dean Pierce were joking about the holy labor of the mundane, of things -- for you, fixing the toilet.
And, Lord Jesus, did I resonate with the idea of trying to do the work that is in front of me when there are 150 emails! I’m good at many parts of my ministry, but email is not one of them. And I really appreciated hearing Dean Pierce speak about how all of those things can be tasks given unto the glory of God.
Bill Lamar: You know, I think first of all about your frightening alliteration of “toilets” and “Twitter.” I’m sure that there’s someone who is not very happy about that.
Laura Everett: I learned to alliterate from you, Bill.
Bill Lamar: But anyway, I really appreciated Dean Pierce talking about all of the very small things, the mundane things, the minutiae. I remember one of my professors talking about the tyranny of the immediate, all of those immediate things that need to be tended to.
And I think as leaders -- many of those listening, I’m sure, will resonate with this -- you do what you have to do. You know, there are things that I could have called someone else to do, but it needed to be done, and I do it. I think the challenge is that you can lose the energy necessary for leadership if you do that all the time. I think you have to learn how to manage it.
Part of it, I think probably for both Dean Pierce and for us, as we strive to become better leaders, Laura, is you want to be willing to do the things that everybody else in the organization is doing so that you can show that you’re a servant, so that you can show that you are willing to put as much skin in the game as others.
But then there comes a time when if you continue to do those things, then there’s a mission creep, a possible brain drain, and you’re focusing on things that could take you off mission, off vision, off focus. So for me, it becomes a balancing act.
And I think for both Dean Pierce and for us, it means we’ve got to find the secret sauce for the team that we build around us, both paid and volunteer, clergy and lay, that really, really helps to get that work done. I know that Dean Pierce and her colleagues are trying to find the people who can become a part of that vision, to really embrace the vision she has for the School of Divinity at Howard.
Laura Everett: Well, and she’s someone who so clearly has a strong vision that is animating your work. When you were speaking with Dean Pierce, what did you notice about how she holds on to that vision of what a Christian institution like the Howard University School of Divinity can be?
Bill Lamar: Well, I’ll tell you this, Laura. If you’re in Dean Pierce’s presence, you feel this exuberance, this energy; she embodies it. I mean, her physicality just exudes this love for the church and this love for -- if you remember a portion of that interview after I was trying to figure out why on God’s earth would she take such a difficult challenge as theological education is undergoing so many shifts, she was very clear that she wanted to be a part of the new as it emerged, that some things may need to die so that other things live.
So she’s got a clear sense of wading into waters that are not necessarily tranquil seas. And I think, for many of us, we’ve got to understand that we are called into seas that are not always tranquil.
And her early answer, from the beginning of the interview, about why would you do this -- she said, “Because God called me to it.” And on the one hand, you hear that, and that sounds, you know, trite, Sunday schoolish, but it came from a deep, deep place of knowing when God indeed is sending you forth for work and trusting that you will not be abandoned while you’re trying to accomplish that mission.
So I walked away from her as a leader believing that if anybody could wade through these tumultuous waters, it would indeed be Dean Pierce.
Laura Everett: She has such a strong sense of the active, dependable power of the Holy Spirit.
Bill Lamar: Yes.
Laura Everett: I heard her say only the power of the Holy Spirit allows us to break down the barriers that have divided us. I really appreciated that animating sense in her, that the spirit of God is active, active still.
I would argue a little about it being a “redheaded stepchild” -- as a redhead.
[Laughter]
Just to quibble a little bit.
But no, seriously, that she -- it came through so clearly in your interview, Bill, that what allows her to do this work is a sense that God’s provision is present and that she is planting seeds, and she might not see the crops. That she is holding both of those things in her hands, this sense of God’s provision, but also that she is working a good work that she may not see the fruit of. And that mindset is something that I want to hold on to as I also strive to lead a historic institution that is trying to find its second or even third act at this point.
Bill Lamar: And, I think, her profound faith that God is the one who will bring the work to completion.
And it reminded me, as I asked her the question about being a Pentecostal -- because so many people have characterizations about what that means that are just based in ignorance and caricatures that are very, very unimaginative -- her talking about the Spirit reminded me of what Willie Jennings shared with me about a commentary he was writing as a theologian about the book of Acts, where he says that the Holy Spirit ultimately does a couple of things. One, the Spirit blows us into places where we would not normally go -- and I find that to be very true. And the Spirit blows us into people with whom we would not normally dialogue.
And so I really think as we do the work of leadership, expecting the Spirit to be alive and at work, we can expect God to blow us into places we may never have considered, as the Spirit did indeed blow Dean Pierce into Howard School of Divinity, and to blow us into people, resources, conversations in a religious dialogue that we might not normally choose. So I really feel like the Spirit’s at work in what we are trying to do and what our listeners are trying to do as they sense God’s hope of life in some “dry bones” situations.
Laura Everett: Listeners, we hope you hear that vision of trusting the Spirit at work in your life, as we heard it at work in Dean Yolanda Pierce’s. Thanks for the interview, Bill.
Bill Lamar: Thank you, Laura. And thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” This was a whole lot of fun. There’s more about Dean Yolanda Pierce, including links to her writing, at www.canthesebones.com.
Who are we talking to next time?
Laura Everett: Bill, I had a great conversation with the Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto. He’s a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Bill Lamar: Can’t wait to hear it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Yolanda Pierce’s interview was recorded at Howard University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV, and you can reach my colleague Laura on Twitter @RevEverett. You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com.
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Read more >>
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION
In the face of challenges, there is hope for theological education
The executive director of The Association of Theological Schools talks about his vision for the organization and why he is hopeful about the future of the church and theological education.
Read more from Frank Yamada »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Frank Yamada’s faith journey has been unconventional.
And, he said, it has provided great training for his new role as executive director of The Association of Theological Schools.
“I have always been someone who was eager to learn about the different ways that Christian faith was practiced in community,” he said. “My faith journey has prepared me well for ATS’ ecumenical work to promote excellence in theological education.”
Raised in a Buddhist family, Yamada became a Christian at the age of 19. This set him on a path that has included a charismatic, evangelical megachurch, a nondenominational church plant, a Korean immigrant church, an Assemblies of God college, Presbyterian and Episcopal seminaries, and ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In 2011, he became president of McCormick Theological Seminary -- the first Asian-American to lead a PCUSA seminary.
On July 1, he took over as executive director of ATS, the accrediting body for graduate schools of theology in the United States and Canada.
Yamada spoke to Faith & Leadership in the first weeks of his tenure at ATS. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Is there anything you’ve been surprised by in the six months or so since your selection as ATS executive director?
There’s very little that surprises me -- that probably has something to do with my faith formation. If I had deeper roots in any one tradition, generations old, I would be more surprised by some things that happen.
I’m pretty enthusiastic when it comes to theological education -- and pretty hopeful. I mention that because that’s a surprise for me.
I pay a lot of attention to my news feed and social media, and I’ve almost had to take a break from it sometimes, because it feels like bad news.
It’s very cynical. It’s not hopeful. In the Christian language, we would call this the specter of death.
But one thing that continually surprises me is that in the face of all this, there is hope.
I understand that these aren’t easy times for theological education or for the church. When one sees the enormously daunting challenges that schools are facing, one wouldn’t always expect to see so much hope.
I’ve heard from a lot of people about their schools -- usually under the umbrella of congratulating ATS and me on this new relationship -- but in it, then, these little stories come out.
And all these stories are pointed with hope -- hope for what they see in the future, hope for what they’re seeing emerge in their schools, hope for what they think ATS can be, hope for this future that for the most part is catching everybody off guard and is creating a lot of anxiety in our society and in the broader church.
It gives me great, great hope. That is also part of the larger Christian hope that the church will weather this, too.
Whatever shape the church takes in the next 20 years, it’s the hope of those leaders that’s going to help build what the future is going to look like.
That, I can honestly say, continues to be a pleasant surprise.
Q: What are your priorities in this first year as ATS executive director?
My first priority will be to do a lot of learning.
My first couple of years are going to be focused on visiting the schools, learning about them on the ground, so I can develop an experiential base of how schools are leaning into these changing times.
ATS also will be celebrating its centennial in 2018, so it gives us a chance to look back over what theological education has been and where it needs to be going forward.
We want to be able to send a clear message that with Dan Aleshire’s retirement, ATS is going to continue to do two things.
One is to again commit ourselves to excellence in theological education and the ecumenical cooperation that’s been part of ATS -- that’s our legacy.
And the second is figuring out a way to really innovate what we’ve done, innovate what we do, so that we can lean into the changing times.
Q: What interested you about this position?
One of the challenges of being in an executive role is that you have to have this double vision.
You have to have your sight set on the horizon and where things are headed -- the big picture.
At the same time, you have to figure out on the ground how things operate on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis.
When you’re working with an individual school, the challenge is often how to keep your sightline on the bigger picture.
One of the things that attracted me to this position is that by definition, the association -- which is made up of 270 very diverse [member schools] -- is much more of a big-picture organization. We really have to be thinking about where theological education is headed for the next decades.
That kind of horizon was a big appeal.
Also, what has always invigorated me about the church is the diversity of expressions that make up the Christian faith.
In some ways, that’s one of the hallmarks of what ATS is. It’s one of the very few places where ecumenical and faith differences are actually constructive and work together toward a common goal: excellence in theological education.
That ecumenical diversity has always been something that energizes me and something that I very much looked forward to when I thought about applying for this position.
Q: Tell us about your faith journey, and how it influences you as a leader.
I was not raised in any particular church community, but many different traditions -- nondenominational, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Episcopal, high church, low church, etc. -- informed my Christian discipleship.
I grew up in a family that was nominally Buddhist. I like to say that we were twice-a-year Buddhists -- that is, we would only go to the temple/church when someone was getting married or when someone died, which amounted to about two times a year.
I converted to Christianity in 1985, when I was 19. I attended a 20,000-person charismatic, evangelical megachurch in Costa Mesa, California.
After about two years, I joined two of my friends who started a different nondenominational church plant. I met my spouse of 27 years at this church.
I transferred from the University of California at Irvine to Southern California College, an Assemblies of God liberal arts school (now Vanguard University), and changed my major from pre-med to religion with an emphasis on biblical studies. This decision was not popular with my parents.
Later, I went to seminary, because I wanted to deepen my roots in the faith. In 1992, I went to Princeton Theological Seminary for the M.Div. and then continued for my Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
After I did my field studies at a Presbyterian church, [my wife and I] became members, and I entered the ordination process.
During my doctoral studies, I served on staff at a small Korean immigrant church. After I completed my Ph.D., I was ordained as a minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
My first call as a PCUSA minster was in theological education. I taught Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, a seminary of the Episcopal Church.
At Seabury, I learned how to pray differently through the seminary’s daily Eucharist and daily offices. After Seabury declared financial exigency in the spring of 2008, I went to McCormick Theological Seminary, where I directed the Center for Asian American Ministries and taught Hebrew Bible before becoming the president in 2011.
McCormick’s worship also had a profound impact on my faith. It was the first intentionally cross-cultural worshipping community of which I had been a part. McCormick worship services were a blend of Presbyterian liturgy, global worship and the black church.
There are at least three ways that this set of experiences has influenced me as a leader.
One is ecumenical diversity. Though I am a Presbyterian, I was certainly not a cradle Presbyterian who’d had the Reformed heritage in my family for multiple generations. Because of that, I have always been someone who was eager to learn about the different ways that Christian faith was practiced in community.
ATS is a wonderfully ecumenical organization, comprising schools from many different faith traditions. My faith journey has prepared me well for ATS’ ecumenical work to promote excellence in theological education.
Second is adaptability. The congregations of which I have been a part have all sought, in different ways, to be relevant to the changing times that confront religion in the U.S.
Creating cultures of leadership is the third. Many of these communities, though very different in their beliefs and contexts, shared a trait. That trait was that they were cultures that nurtured leadership.
The megachurch youth group’s leadership was organized around a dozen or more “counselors.” From that core group, over 10 future senior pastors emerged.
Disciples Church, the church plant, also produced several leaders who would go on to be heads of staff at their churches or at church plants like the founding church.
Princeton Seminary’s Ph.D. program has produced dozens of seminary presidents and deans, and McCormick Seminary’s faculty has also produced several presidents and deans since 2000.
Good leadership tends to multiply itself. Leaders beget leaders.
Q: When you look at the variety among ATS member schools, what do they have in common?
From school to school, they actually don’t have very much in common. So one of the challenges is how to create a series of standards for excellence among such different schools.
What they share in common is this spirit of resiliency and change.
The church has always adapted to its times. One of the things that I see a lot in our institutions is that in these challenging times, they get very creative and they’re very resilient.
Theological institutions figure out ways to endure and stay committed to their vision -- and in fact, sometimes are even more strongly committed to their vision in the face of these challenges.
If we think about it from a Christian faith perspective, this is also a characteristic of our faith.
Q: You’re in the midst of a project to assess practices in theological education. What are you learning?
We’re learning about the different ways that our schools are developing models that differ from the traditional three-year residential master of divinity program.
For example, we had allowed some schools an exception to the residency requirement. We had allowed a few schools to have an exception for experimentation, to learn about a completely online degree program and what formation [in that context] looked like.
We’re learning from each about different ways of creating change or innovation in the ways that our schools deliver programs and the audiences that they deliver these programs for.
There are so many different clusters of ways that our schools are trying to do their mission differently.
We’ve gotten these folks together and put them in cohort groups around different educational models. Then they learn from each other about what’s working, what’s not working. They’ve been developing papers and reports that we’re publishing to help other schools.
We’ve learned a little bit about process, too, and how we can create change within our schools in a field that is not known necessarily for change. This is not something that has always been the hallmark of theological education, but to see and be inspired by what these different schools are doing has been a rich process.
Q: Within this variety, what do you see that holds ATS together, and what are the challenges that threaten to pull it apart?
What holds ATS together is our shared commitment to excellence in theological education, and also our commitment to the formation of quality leadership.
We believe that well-trained leadership is a necessity for the future of the church and for the future of our religious institutions.
This allows us to focus in and hold on to a common set of values [within broader commitments] that otherwise we don’t necessarily share, whether it’s certain faith commitments or doctrinal commitments.
These are things that have typically tended to divide the church. But by having the shared commitment to these values of excellence in a well-trained and well-educated, not just clergy, but leadership, we naturally cohere.
Now that’s not to say that we don’t have differences of opinion about what counts for excellence.
In an environment of change, what do schools want? They want flexibility. They want more freedom to be able to try things and experiment with things and fail, which is sometimes a very difficult tension to keep in balance when we’re dealing with educational standards. So that’s one example where it’s a challenge to keep that together.
But the other challenges are the ones that you would expect.
As our country has shown us over the past several years, faith commitments and social commitments -- which are often united -- have the ability to divide us.
For example, regarding gender, our current standards say that we will encourage leadership according to our different faith traditions.
But if you think about how that’s embodied in, say, an evangelical tradition or a fundamentalist tradition or a Roman Catholic tradition or a progressive Protestant mainline tradition, it’s very different.
So when you begin to try to commit yourselves to a standard of excellence around gender, paying attention to the leadership of women, it’s going to look very, very different from school to school.
That’s an example of one of the things that is both a strength -- because it helps us define [standards] more clearly according to our different traditions -- but also where we find ourselves threatened by forces that could divide us.
Q: What’s your analysis of ATS’ track record on being inclusive of underrepresented communities? What do you think you should be paying attention to as a new leader in this organization?
My first engagement with ATS was with the Committee on Race and Ethnicity, a group of ATS faculty and administrators who would come together and help ATS think about how it can set an agenda for the rest of its membership with regard to racial/ethnic diversity.
One of the projects that I remember working on was called the 2040 Project. It was developed around the idea that most demographers believe that by the year 2040 we will no longer have a racial/ethnic majority in this country.
So the reality of our schools has been that most of them have long legacies to Western European Christian traditions.
But what we’re seeing in our data is that all of our schools as an aggregate, and most of our schools as individual institutions, are finding that the student bodies are diversifying along the lines of the demographics that we would expect by 2040.
The challenge for our schools then becomes, how do we change our environments to address these cultural realities? And how do we help them adapt so that they can be schools that are not just hospitable to different racial and ethnic groups but are actually intentionally planned and committed to excellence in theological education and formation for these particular groups?
To use McCormick as an example, here’s a school that was founded on what was then the Western frontier to provide training for Presbyterian ministers who were always assumed to be not just white but usually of Scottish heritage.
Now as we look at it in the 21st century, it is serving a student population that is over 80 percent persons of color.
At some point, you would think that the model and the delivery and the content of theological education and the formation for leadership has to adapt to those changes.
That’s one of the things we were able to do, and that’s also one of the things that our schools are going to have to figure out how to do as they lean into these futures. Because it’s not uncommon to have, say, a United Methodist seminary training a Latino Pentecostal pastor.
These are the realities of the 21st century, and they’re going to increasingly be the reality of our schools as we move forward.
Read more >>
A mastery model for theological education
Northwest Baptist Seminary in Vancouver collaborated with its denomination and churches to create Immerse, an M.Div. program built on a set of outcomes that are learned and practiced in the church. In this Q&A, the president talks about the program and the process that produced it.
Read more from Kent Anderson »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
The Immerse program is a “fully context-based, competency-based, mastery model degree,” developed in collaboration with the seminary’s primary denominational body and the roughly 100 churches it serves, said Kent Anderson, the seminary president.
And, Lord Jesus, did I resonate with the idea of trying to do the work that is in front of me when there are 150 emails! I’m good at many parts of my ministry, but email is not one of them. And I really appreciated hearing Dean Pierce speak about how all of those things can be tasks given unto the glory of God.
Bill Lamar: You know, I think first of all about your frightening alliteration of “toilets” and “Twitter.” I’m sure that there’s someone who is not very happy about that.
Laura Everett: I learned to alliterate from you, Bill.
Bill Lamar: But anyway, I really appreciated Dean Pierce talking about all of the very small things, the mundane things, the minutiae. I remember one of my professors talking about the tyranny of the immediate, all of those immediate things that need to be tended to.
And I think as leaders -- many of those listening, I’m sure, will resonate with this -- you do what you have to do. You know, there are things that I could have called someone else to do, but it needed to be done, and I do it. I think the challenge is that you can lose the energy necessary for leadership if you do that all the time. I think you have to learn how to manage it.
Part of it, I think probably for both Dean Pierce and for us, as we strive to become better leaders, Laura, is you want to be willing to do the things that everybody else in the organization is doing so that you can show that you’re a servant, so that you can show that you are willing to put as much skin in the game as others.
But then there comes a time when if you continue to do those things, then there’s a mission creep, a possible brain drain, and you’re focusing on things that could take you off mission, off vision, off focus. So for me, it becomes a balancing act.
And I think for both Dean Pierce and for us, it means we’ve got to find the secret sauce for the team that we build around us, both paid and volunteer, clergy and lay, that really, really helps to get that work done. I know that Dean Pierce and her colleagues are trying to find the people who can become a part of that vision, to really embrace the vision she has for the School of Divinity at Howard.
Laura Everett: Well, and she’s someone who so clearly has a strong vision that is animating your work. When you were speaking with Dean Pierce, what did you notice about how she holds on to that vision of what a Christian institution like the Howard University School of Divinity can be?
Bill Lamar: Well, I’ll tell you this, Laura. If you’re in Dean Pierce’s presence, you feel this exuberance, this energy; she embodies it. I mean, her physicality just exudes this love for the church and this love for -- if you remember a portion of that interview after I was trying to figure out why on God’s earth would she take such a difficult challenge as theological education is undergoing so many shifts, she was very clear that she wanted to be a part of the new as it emerged, that some things may need to die so that other things live.
So she’s got a clear sense of wading into waters that are not necessarily tranquil seas. And I think, for many of us, we’ve got to understand that we are called into seas that are not always tranquil.
And her early answer, from the beginning of the interview, about why would you do this -- she said, “Because God called me to it.” And on the one hand, you hear that, and that sounds, you know, trite, Sunday schoolish, but it came from a deep, deep place of knowing when God indeed is sending you forth for work and trusting that you will not be abandoned while you’re trying to accomplish that mission.
So I walked away from her as a leader believing that if anybody could wade through these tumultuous waters, it would indeed be Dean Pierce.
Laura Everett: She has such a strong sense of the active, dependable power of the Holy Spirit.
Bill Lamar: Yes.
Laura Everett: I heard her say only the power of the Holy Spirit allows us to break down the barriers that have divided us. I really appreciated that animating sense in her, that the spirit of God is active, active still.
I would argue a little about it being a “redheaded stepchild” -- as a redhead.
[Laughter]
Just to quibble a little bit.
But no, seriously, that she -- it came through so clearly in your interview, Bill, that what allows her to do this work is a sense that God’s provision is present and that she is planting seeds, and she might not see the crops. That she is holding both of those things in her hands, this sense of God’s provision, but also that she is working a good work that she may not see the fruit of. And that mindset is something that I want to hold on to as I also strive to lead a historic institution that is trying to find its second or even third act at this point.
Bill Lamar: And, I think, her profound faith that God is the one who will bring the work to completion.
And it reminded me, as I asked her the question about being a Pentecostal -- because so many people have characterizations about what that means that are just based in ignorance and caricatures that are very, very unimaginative -- her talking about the Spirit reminded me of what Willie Jennings shared with me about a commentary he was writing as a theologian about the book of Acts, where he says that the Holy Spirit ultimately does a couple of things. One, the Spirit blows us into places where we would not normally go -- and I find that to be very true. And the Spirit blows us into people with whom we would not normally dialogue.
And so I really think as we do the work of leadership, expecting the Spirit to be alive and at work, we can expect God to blow us into places we may never have considered, as the Spirit did indeed blow Dean Pierce into Howard School of Divinity, and to blow us into people, resources, conversations in a religious dialogue that we might not normally choose. So I really feel like the Spirit’s at work in what we are trying to do and what our listeners are trying to do as they sense God’s hope of life in some “dry bones” situations.
Laura Everett: Listeners, we hope you hear that vision of trusting the Spirit at work in your life, as we heard it at work in Dean Yolanda Pierce’s. Thanks for the interview, Bill.
Bill Lamar: Thank you, Laura. And thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” This was a whole lot of fun. There’s more about Dean Yolanda Pierce, including links to her writing, at www.canthesebones.com.
Who are we talking to next time?
Laura Everett: Bill, I had a great conversation with the Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto. He’s a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Bill Lamar: Can’t wait to hear it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Yolanda Pierce’s interview was recorded at Howard University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV, and you can reach my colleague Laura on Twitter @RevEverett. You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com.
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Read more >>
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION
In the face of challenges, there is hope for theological education
The executive director of The Association of Theological Schools talks about his vision for the organization and why he is hopeful about the future of the church and theological education.
Read more from Frank Yamada »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Frank Yamada: In the face of challenges, there is hope for theological education
Frank Yamada took over as executive director of The Association of Theological Schools on July 1. Photo by Lynda Scahill/Simply Sisters Photography
The new executive director of The Association of Theological Schools talks about his vision for the organization and why he is hopeful about the future of the church and theological education.Frank Yamada’s faith journey has been unconventional.
And, he said, it has provided great training for his new role as executive director of The Association of Theological Schools.
“I have always been someone who was eager to learn about the different ways that Christian faith was practiced in community,” he said. “My faith journey has prepared me well for ATS’ ecumenical work to promote excellence in theological education.”
Raised in a Buddhist family, Yamada became a Christian at the age of 19. This set him on a path that has included a charismatic, evangelical megachurch, a nondenominational church plant, a Korean immigrant church, an Assemblies of God college, Presbyterian and Episcopal seminaries, and ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In 2011, he became president of McCormick Theological Seminary -- the first Asian-American to lead a PCUSA seminary.
On July 1, he took over as executive director of ATS, the accrediting body for graduate schools of theology in the United States and Canada.
Yamada spoke to Faith & Leadership in the first weeks of his tenure at ATS. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Is there anything you’ve been surprised by in the six months or so since your selection as ATS executive director?
There’s very little that surprises me -- that probably has something to do with my faith formation. If I had deeper roots in any one tradition, generations old, I would be more surprised by some things that happen.
I’m pretty enthusiastic when it comes to theological education -- and pretty hopeful. I mention that because that’s a surprise for me.
I pay a lot of attention to my news feed and social media, and I’ve almost had to take a break from it sometimes, because it feels like bad news.
It’s very cynical. It’s not hopeful. In the Christian language, we would call this the specter of death.
But one thing that continually surprises me is that in the face of all this, there is hope.
I understand that these aren’t easy times for theological education or for the church. When one sees the enormously daunting challenges that schools are facing, one wouldn’t always expect to see so much hope.
I’ve heard from a lot of people about their schools -- usually under the umbrella of congratulating ATS and me on this new relationship -- but in it, then, these little stories come out.
And all these stories are pointed with hope -- hope for what they see in the future, hope for what they’re seeing emerge in their schools, hope for what they think ATS can be, hope for this future that for the most part is catching everybody off guard and is creating a lot of anxiety in our society and in the broader church.
It gives me great, great hope. That is also part of the larger Christian hope that the church will weather this, too.
Whatever shape the church takes in the next 20 years, it’s the hope of those leaders that’s going to help build what the future is going to look like.
That, I can honestly say, continues to be a pleasant surprise.
Q: What are your priorities in this first year as ATS executive director?
My first priority will be to do a lot of learning.
My first couple of years are going to be focused on visiting the schools, learning about them on the ground, so I can develop an experiential base of how schools are leaning into these changing times.
ATS also will be celebrating its centennial in 2018, so it gives us a chance to look back over what theological education has been and where it needs to be going forward.
We want to be able to send a clear message that with Dan Aleshire’s retirement, ATS is going to continue to do two things.
One is to again commit ourselves to excellence in theological education and the ecumenical cooperation that’s been part of ATS -- that’s our legacy.
And the second is figuring out a way to really innovate what we’ve done, innovate what we do, so that we can lean into the changing times.
Q: What interested you about this position?
One of the challenges of being in an executive role is that you have to have this double vision.
You have to have your sight set on the horizon and where things are headed -- the big picture.
At the same time, you have to figure out on the ground how things operate on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis.
When you’re working with an individual school, the challenge is often how to keep your sightline on the bigger picture.
One of the things that attracted me to this position is that by definition, the association -- which is made up of 270 very diverse [member schools] -- is much more of a big-picture organization. We really have to be thinking about where theological education is headed for the next decades.
That kind of horizon was a big appeal.
Also, what has always invigorated me about the church is the diversity of expressions that make up the Christian faith.
In some ways, that’s one of the hallmarks of what ATS is. It’s one of the very few places where ecumenical and faith differences are actually constructive and work together toward a common goal: excellence in theological education.
That ecumenical diversity has always been something that energizes me and something that I very much looked forward to when I thought about applying for this position.
Q: Tell us about your faith journey, and how it influences you as a leader.
I was not raised in any particular church community, but many different traditions -- nondenominational, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Episcopal, high church, low church, etc. -- informed my Christian discipleship.
I grew up in a family that was nominally Buddhist. I like to say that we were twice-a-year Buddhists -- that is, we would only go to the temple/church when someone was getting married or when someone died, which amounted to about two times a year.
I converted to Christianity in 1985, when I was 19. I attended a 20,000-person charismatic, evangelical megachurch in Costa Mesa, California.
After about two years, I joined two of my friends who started a different nondenominational church plant. I met my spouse of 27 years at this church.
I transferred from the University of California at Irvine to Southern California College, an Assemblies of God liberal arts school (now Vanguard University), and changed my major from pre-med to religion with an emphasis on biblical studies. This decision was not popular with my parents.
Later, I went to seminary, because I wanted to deepen my roots in the faith. In 1992, I went to Princeton Theological Seminary for the M.Div. and then continued for my Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
After I did my field studies at a Presbyterian church, [my wife and I] became members, and I entered the ordination process.
During my doctoral studies, I served on staff at a small Korean immigrant church. After I completed my Ph.D., I was ordained as a minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
My first call as a PCUSA minster was in theological education. I taught Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, a seminary of the Episcopal Church.
At Seabury, I learned how to pray differently through the seminary’s daily Eucharist and daily offices. After Seabury declared financial exigency in the spring of 2008, I went to McCormick Theological Seminary, where I directed the Center for Asian American Ministries and taught Hebrew Bible before becoming the president in 2011.
McCormick’s worship also had a profound impact on my faith. It was the first intentionally cross-cultural worshipping community of which I had been a part. McCormick worship services were a blend of Presbyterian liturgy, global worship and the black church.
There are at least three ways that this set of experiences has influenced me as a leader.
One is ecumenical diversity. Though I am a Presbyterian, I was certainly not a cradle Presbyterian who’d had the Reformed heritage in my family for multiple generations. Because of that, I have always been someone who was eager to learn about the different ways that Christian faith was practiced in community.
ATS is a wonderfully ecumenical organization, comprising schools from many different faith traditions. My faith journey has prepared me well for ATS’ ecumenical work to promote excellence in theological education.
Second is adaptability. The congregations of which I have been a part have all sought, in different ways, to be relevant to the changing times that confront religion in the U.S.
Creating cultures of leadership is the third. Many of these communities, though very different in their beliefs and contexts, shared a trait. That trait was that they were cultures that nurtured leadership.
The megachurch youth group’s leadership was organized around a dozen or more “counselors.” From that core group, over 10 future senior pastors emerged.
Disciples Church, the church plant, also produced several leaders who would go on to be heads of staff at their churches or at church plants like the founding church.
Princeton Seminary’s Ph.D. program has produced dozens of seminary presidents and deans, and McCormick Seminary’s faculty has also produced several presidents and deans since 2000.
Good leadership tends to multiply itself. Leaders beget leaders.
Q: When you look at the variety among ATS member schools, what do they have in common?
From school to school, they actually don’t have very much in common. So one of the challenges is how to create a series of standards for excellence among such different schools.
What they share in common is this spirit of resiliency and change.
The church has always adapted to its times. One of the things that I see a lot in our institutions is that in these challenging times, they get very creative and they’re very resilient.
Theological institutions figure out ways to endure and stay committed to their vision -- and in fact, sometimes are even more strongly committed to their vision in the face of these challenges.
If we think about it from a Christian faith perspective, this is also a characteristic of our faith.
Q: You’re in the midst of a project to assess practices in theological education. What are you learning?
We’re learning about the different ways that our schools are developing models that differ from the traditional three-year residential master of divinity program.
For example, we had allowed some schools an exception to the residency requirement. We had allowed a few schools to have an exception for experimentation, to learn about a completely online degree program and what formation [in that context] looked like.
We’re learning from each about different ways of creating change or innovation in the ways that our schools deliver programs and the audiences that they deliver these programs for.
There are so many different clusters of ways that our schools are trying to do their mission differently.
We’ve gotten these folks together and put them in cohort groups around different educational models. Then they learn from each other about what’s working, what’s not working. They’ve been developing papers and reports that we’re publishing to help other schools.
We’ve learned a little bit about process, too, and how we can create change within our schools in a field that is not known necessarily for change. This is not something that has always been the hallmark of theological education, but to see and be inspired by what these different schools are doing has been a rich process.
Q: Within this variety, what do you see that holds ATS together, and what are the challenges that threaten to pull it apart?
What holds ATS together is our shared commitment to excellence in theological education, and also our commitment to the formation of quality leadership.
We believe that well-trained leadership is a necessity for the future of the church and for the future of our religious institutions.
This allows us to focus in and hold on to a common set of values [within broader commitments] that otherwise we don’t necessarily share, whether it’s certain faith commitments or doctrinal commitments.
These are things that have typically tended to divide the church. But by having the shared commitment to these values of excellence in a well-trained and well-educated, not just clergy, but leadership, we naturally cohere.
Now that’s not to say that we don’t have differences of opinion about what counts for excellence.
In an environment of change, what do schools want? They want flexibility. They want more freedom to be able to try things and experiment with things and fail, which is sometimes a very difficult tension to keep in balance when we’re dealing with educational standards. So that’s one example where it’s a challenge to keep that together.
But the other challenges are the ones that you would expect.
As our country has shown us over the past several years, faith commitments and social commitments -- which are often united -- have the ability to divide us.
For example, regarding gender, our current standards say that we will encourage leadership according to our different faith traditions.
But if you think about how that’s embodied in, say, an evangelical tradition or a fundamentalist tradition or a Roman Catholic tradition or a progressive Protestant mainline tradition, it’s very different.
So when you begin to try to commit yourselves to a standard of excellence around gender, paying attention to the leadership of women, it’s going to look very, very different from school to school.
That’s an example of one of the things that is both a strength -- because it helps us define [standards] more clearly according to our different traditions -- but also where we find ourselves threatened by forces that could divide us.
Q: What’s your analysis of ATS’ track record on being inclusive of underrepresented communities? What do you think you should be paying attention to as a new leader in this organization?
My first engagement with ATS was with the Committee on Race and Ethnicity, a group of ATS faculty and administrators who would come together and help ATS think about how it can set an agenda for the rest of its membership with regard to racial/ethnic diversity.
One of the projects that I remember working on was called the 2040 Project. It was developed around the idea that most demographers believe that by the year 2040 we will no longer have a racial/ethnic majority in this country.
So the reality of our schools has been that most of them have long legacies to Western European Christian traditions.
But what we’re seeing in our data is that all of our schools as an aggregate, and most of our schools as individual institutions, are finding that the student bodies are diversifying along the lines of the demographics that we would expect by 2040.
The challenge for our schools then becomes, how do we change our environments to address these cultural realities? And how do we help them adapt so that they can be schools that are not just hospitable to different racial and ethnic groups but are actually intentionally planned and committed to excellence in theological education and formation for these particular groups?
To use McCormick as an example, here’s a school that was founded on what was then the Western frontier to provide training for Presbyterian ministers who were always assumed to be not just white but usually of Scottish heritage.
Now as we look at it in the 21st century, it is serving a student population that is over 80 percent persons of color.
At some point, you would think that the model and the delivery and the content of theological education and the formation for leadership has to adapt to those changes.
That’s one of the things we were able to do, and that’s also one of the things that our schools are going to have to figure out how to do as they lean into these futures. Because it’s not uncommon to have, say, a United Methodist seminary training a Latino Pentecostal pastor.
These are the realities of the 21st century, and they’re going to increasingly be the reality of our schools as we move forward.
Read more >>
A mastery model for theological education
Northwest Baptist Seminary in Vancouver collaborated with its denomination and churches to create Immerse, an M.Div. program built on a set of outcomes that are learned and practiced in the church. In this Q&A, the president talks about the program and the process that produced it.
Read more from Kent Anderson »
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Kent Anderson: A mastery model for theological education
Photo by Loren Warkentin/Northwest Baptist Seminary
Northwest Baptist Seminary in Vancouver collaborated with its denomination and churches to create Immerse, an M.Div. program built on a set of outcomes that are learned and practiced in the church. In this Q&A, the president talks about the program and the process that produced it.
It took a lot of planning and some difficult conversations, but Northwest Baptist Seminary in Vancouver created and launched a new model for theological education.The Immerse program is a “fully context-based, competency-based, mastery model degree,” developed in collaboration with the seminary’s primary denominational body and the roughly 100 churches it serves, said Kent Anderson, the seminary president.
“We reverse-engineered seminary,” Anderson said. “We said to ourselves, “If there are no sacred cows here -- institutionally, structurally -- what can we change?”
They changed almost everything -- there are no more traditional courses or semesters, for example. The program has been a “game changer” for his small denomination, Anderson said, and he hopes it will serve as a model for others in theological education.
The project was approved in 2014 as an experiment by the Association of Theological Schools.
Anderson spoke to Faith & Leadership about the program and the painful but fruitful process of creating it. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: How did you get started on this process? Did the churches come to you or the denomination? Or did you go to them?
It’s hard to say exactly how it started. There was a sense of concern and dissatisfaction on both our part, in the seminary, and that of our churches. We just started asking the question, “What would it look like if we really partnered on this?”
If this is the “product” we need, what do we have to do to ensure that we achieve this result?
Q: How is Immerse unique?
It’s quite different from classic programs in that there are no courses. There are no semesters. It’s literally, “Here is your context; here are your mentors; here are your outcomes; let’s see what you can do.”
We’ve been working in collaboration with our churches and some other networks and come to the conclusion that some of the things you need to know to be effective in ministry are best learned in ministry and not in classrooms.
We’ve put a lot of structure behind that, and there’re all kinds of checks and balances and systems that make it possible. So we haven’t given up the farm with respect to academic standards.
Q: Does every student have the same expected outcomes? Or are they customized?
We have a standardized set of expectations, but it is customizable.
We began with our primary denominational body, Fellowship Pacific. It’s a uniquely Canadian group of churches [in British Columbia and the Yukon].
We developed a very carefully designed set of outcomes in concert and collaboration with the churches themselves, and came out with a pretty significant set of expectations -- 27 “ministry leadership outcomes.”
We have “outcome development assignments,” and these are projects that allow the student to show and display and prove mastery of the larger outcome.
We have three-person mentoring teams. One is an academic mentor, another is a pastoral mentor on the ground, and the third is a big-picture, network mentor. They really work as a team.
We’ve set all that up in a standardized way for the entire network of churches and any students who are engaged with those churches. Then the mentor team that works with the student has full freedom to customize as necessary for the good of the particular student.
I’ll give you one example. We have an outcome that deals with working with small group ministry.
Well, one student I’m working with is an acknowledged expert in small group ministry in his region. He has, for a number of years, been training others. For us to require him to do all the detail work that might be expected of other students is just not necessary. So we were able to sign off pretty quickly on that one and customize our expectations for him.
Q: Is there an academic component?
When I say there are no courses, what I mean by that is students are not coming into the classroom and receiving a syllabus for which they have expectations that will last for three and a half months, and then writing exams, or the classic course setup.
We have learned that it’s valuable to bring students together for what we call “instructional seminars.”
But we’re very careful to indicate to the students that these are not courses in the classic sense, because we really want to distinguish between what goes on when the student sits in the classroom and what goes on in ministry on the ground.
We do academic presentations. But the fact that they sat there in the classroom doesn’t really cut any ice for us. What matters is what they do with that material when they go back into their contexts.
The students will prove what they’ve learned through the teaching that they do in their contexts, whether it be with groups or in preaching or working with individuals.
They will get a grade for their performance with respect to the outcome. The mentors will collaborate together to give a grade for the overall outcome when it’s completed.
One of the things that’s unique and interesting is that it takes a long time for students to actually start getting grades in the program. What typically happens is they come in at the start and they’re faced with these 27 outcomes.
They get the entire curriculum on day one, and they will work at a variety of things at the same time. But often, they won’t actually complete an outcome for a year or more.
Q: How long does it take to complete the program?
To some degree, it’s at their own pace, although there’s some pressure to keep moving and keep active. We tell students that we think it’s reasonable for them to complete it in four years, and many of our students are tracking with that.
Rather than having to spend three or four years of study before they can get the job, they’re getting to be actively engaged in the ministry for which they feel called from the very beginning.
Q: Are they paid for the work they do?
Usually they’re paid something. Every situation’s a little bit different. We’ve had a variety of situations. We have a woman who used to be a missionary, so she’s used to living on little money. So this particular church has provided room and board for her, and they give her a small stipend, and that has worked quite well for her.
There are some other cases where the students were actually already hired by the church, and that really appeals to the churches, because they get to be actively involved in the shaping of the students’ training.
Q: What are the costs?
The delivery cost is around half to two-thirds of what it costs to deliver a classic program. This has been highly attractive to donors, and so we’ve been able to make financial aid available to students, to make this quite a bit cheaper for them.
Q: You serve a single denomination, and the denomination and the seminary work together as partners. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that relationship?
First of all, we have to work together, because that’s our job. We are a denominational school.
I’m very happy about that, because I believe that what we do has to pay dividends for the ministries we serve. That has challenges attached to it, for sure.
I would have said going in that we had a pretty high level of trust between the two groups, but boy, we tested that. There were tears shed. There were some hard, hard conversations where you heard about the distrust between the church and the seminary.
I was surprised how much was there. I thought we were doing better than that. We had to work that through, and that was a really healthy thing, but it was a very hard thing, and it took us a long time and a lot of dialogue.
One of the things that really made it possible, I think, was that the head of the denomination -- Fellowship Pacific -- and myself are old friends, and we go back 35 years. There’s a lot of trust between the two of us.
At one point, he looked at me and he said, “OK, Kent, we’ve got these two jobs, and we need to steward our relationship for the good of the work that we do here.” And I said, “Yes, we do.”
He said, “One thing I can promise you is we’ll never doubt each other’s hearts.” And I said, “That’s true.”
And he said, “So you know what that means? It means we can fight.” And we did.
We had hard conversations, but we never doubted each other’s heart, and so we were able to get to where we needed to go, and that was pretty amazing.
Q: What were the difficult things?
Well, it was mostly the church telling us how we’d failed. That’s real, and the truth is, we knew we were failing in many ways.
It’s not that we were doing bad things in the classic approach or that we weren’t trying hard or that we didn’t care or anything like that. But we’ve been doing things pretty much the same way for a very long time, and the world has changed.
The churches have changed, and we haven’t really changed a lot with them. One of the phrases that they used is, “You guys in the seminary, you sit in your classrooms and you haven’t really ‘felt the burn.’ You really don’t know what it feels like to go and have to deal with an angry parishioner.”
Now, the fact is, we do know that, because pretty much everybody on our faculty has had significant pastoral experience. But for most of us, it was a long time ago. For me personally, I had 12 years in the parish as a pastor, but that was more than 20 years ago now.
What it came down to is the seminary saying to the churches, “Yes, we agree with that assessment. You guys bring something that we can’t bring, and we value what you bring, and want to respect it and build it into the system by which we train our leaders. But at the same time, you have to understand that we bring some things that you can’t bring very well.”
They did understand that, and they respected it.
There was a moment where the denominational leader -- having recognized just how hurtful some of this dialogue had had to be -- came and met with the faculty, and on behalf of the churches and behalf of himself, apologized for years of disrespect.
That was incredibly meaningful to our faculty. I mean, people were crying. It was a really powerful moment, and allowed for a huge amount of trust to develop.
Q: Were there concerns from faculty that the program wasn’t rigorous or academic enough?
Sure, it was a concern at the beginning, but we made promises that we would sustain the values that faculty cared about, and I think we delivered on that.
I think there was enough trust there with our faculty. Now we’re about three years into actually delivering, and there’s been growth and adaptation along the way.
Q: How many students do you have?
We have approximately 40 students working through it right now, and that’s about to increase, because we brought in two or three new [partner] networks.
That’s not a massive number, but on the other hand, those 40 students were from a network of about 100 churches. It already has had a massive impact on the quality of the ministry of our churches. It’s been game-changing.
There’s no going back; this is absolutely the way [the churches and denomination] want to go. Our donation income is up; our buy-in from the churches is way up; even our student counts are up.
I mean, we’re firing on all cylinders now. This has been amazing, the journey we’ve been on here. We’re really encouraged.
Read more >>
Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy
by George Mason
Amid the widespread discussion about 'the future of the church,' an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow's church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead.
George Mason's Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place. The book highlights an exciting development in the training of pastors: pastoral residency programs and mentoring. Mason demonstrates that these programs work best when the congregations themselves, not just leadership or staff, are an active participant in the training. In this way, churches begin to reclaim their rightful role in the formation of the ministers that will serve them. And, at the same time, they become healthier and more effective churches.
Mason gives us the analogy of physician training. Medical school produces graduates with extensive knowledge of the body, but a practicing doctor will require several more years of internship and residency. Similarly, our seminaries and divinity schools produce men and women with good biblical knowledge, but they might not prepare a graduate for the task of helping a bereaved parishioner cope with the sudden loss of a loved one. Moreover, such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Mason shows that congregation-based mentoring and residency are excellent ways to bridge this gap.
Learn more and order the book »
They changed almost everything -- there are no more traditional courses or semesters, for example. The program has been a “game changer” for his small denomination, Anderson said, and he hopes it will serve as a model for others in theological education.
The project was approved in 2014 as an experiment by the Association of Theological Schools.
Anderson spoke to Faith & Leadership about the program and the painful but fruitful process of creating it. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: How did you get started on this process? Did the churches come to you or the denomination? Or did you go to them?
It’s hard to say exactly how it started. There was a sense of concern and dissatisfaction on both our part, in the seminary, and that of our churches. We just started asking the question, “What would it look like if we really partnered on this?”
If this is the “product” we need, what do we have to do to ensure that we achieve this result?
Q: How is Immerse unique?
It’s quite different from classic programs in that there are no courses. There are no semesters. It’s literally, “Here is your context; here are your mentors; here are your outcomes; let’s see what you can do.”
We’ve been working in collaboration with our churches and some other networks and come to the conclusion that some of the things you need to know to be effective in ministry are best learned in ministry and not in classrooms.
We’ve put a lot of structure behind that, and there’re all kinds of checks and balances and systems that make it possible. So we haven’t given up the farm with respect to academic standards.
Q: Does every student have the same expected outcomes? Or are they customized?
We have a standardized set of expectations, but it is customizable.
We began with our primary denominational body, Fellowship Pacific. It’s a uniquely Canadian group of churches [in British Columbia and the Yukon].
We developed a very carefully designed set of outcomes in concert and collaboration with the churches themselves, and came out with a pretty significant set of expectations -- 27 “ministry leadership outcomes.”
We have “outcome development assignments,” and these are projects that allow the student to show and display and prove mastery of the larger outcome.
We have three-person mentoring teams. One is an academic mentor, another is a pastoral mentor on the ground, and the third is a big-picture, network mentor. They really work as a team.
We’ve set all that up in a standardized way for the entire network of churches and any students who are engaged with those churches. Then the mentor team that works with the student has full freedom to customize as necessary for the good of the particular student.
I’ll give you one example. We have an outcome that deals with working with small group ministry.
Well, one student I’m working with is an acknowledged expert in small group ministry in his region. He has, for a number of years, been training others. For us to require him to do all the detail work that might be expected of other students is just not necessary. So we were able to sign off pretty quickly on that one and customize our expectations for him.
Q: Is there an academic component?
When I say there are no courses, what I mean by that is students are not coming into the classroom and receiving a syllabus for which they have expectations that will last for three and a half months, and then writing exams, or the classic course setup.
We have learned that it’s valuable to bring students together for what we call “instructional seminars.”
But we’re very careful to indicate to the students that these are not courses in the classic sense, because we really want to distinguish between what goes on when the student sits in the classroom and what goes on in ministry on the ground.
We do academic presentations. But the fact that they sat there in the classroom doesn’t really cut any ice for us. What matters is what they do with that material when they go back into their contexts.
The students will prove what they’ve learned through the teaching that they do in their contexts, whether it be with groups or in preaching or working with individuals.
They will get a grade for their performance with respect to the outcome. The mentors will collaborate together to give a grade for the overall outcome when it’s completed.
One of the things that’s unique and interesting is that it takes a long time for students to actually start getting grades in the program. What typically happens is they come in at the start and they’re faced with these 27 outcomes.
They get the entire curriculum on day one, and they will work at a variety of things at the same time. But often, they won’t actually complete an outcome for a year or more.
Q: How long does it take to complete the program?
To some degree, it’s at their own pace, although there’s some pressure to keep moving and keep active. We tell students that we think it’s reasonable for them to complete it in four years, and many of our students are tracking with that.
Rather than having to spend three or four years of study before they can get the job, they’re getting to be actively engaged in the ministry for which they feel called from the very beginning.
Q: Are they paid for the work they do?
Usually they’re paid something. Every situation’s a little bit different. We’ve had a variety of situations. We have a woman who used to be a missionary, so she’s used to living on little money. So this particular church has provided room and board for her, and they give her a small stipend, and that has worked quite well for her.
There are some other cases where the students were actually already hired by the church, and that really appeals to the churches, because they get to be actively involved in the shaping of the students’ training.
Q: What are the costs?
The delivery cost is around half to two-thirds of what it costs to deliver a classic program. This has been highly attractive to donors, and so we’ve been able to make financial aid available to students, to make this quite a bit cheaper for them.
Q: You serve a single denomination, and the denomination and the seminary work together as partners. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that relationship?
First of all, we have to work together, because that’s our job. We are a denominational school.
I’m very happy about that, because I believe that what we do has to pay dividends for the ministries we serve. That has challenges attached to it, for sure.
I would have said going in that we had a pretty high level of trust between the two groups, but boy, we tested that. There were tears shed. There were some hard, hard conversations where you heard about the distrust between the church and the seminary.
I was surprised how much was there. I thought we were doing better than that. We had to work that through, and that was a really healthy thing, but it was a very hard thing, and it took us a long time and a lot of dialogue.
One of the things that really made it possible, I think, was that the head of the denomination -- Fellowship Pacific -- and myself are old friends, and we go back 35 years. There’s a lot of trust between the two of us.
At one point, he looked at me and he said, “OK, Kent, we’ve got these two jobs, and we need to steward our relationship for the good of the work that we do here.” And I said, “Yes, we do.”
He said, “One thing I can promise you is we’ll never doubt each other’s hearts.” And I said, “That’s true.”
And he said, “So you know what that means? It means we can fight.” And we did.
We had hard conversations, but we never doubted each other’s heart, and so we were able to get to where we needed to go, and that was pretty amazing.
Q: What were the difficult things?
Well, it was mostly the church telling us how we’d failed. That’s real, and the truth is, we knew we were failing in many ways.
It’s not that we were doing bad things in the classic approach or that we weren’t trying hard or that we didn’t care or anything like that. But we’ve been doing things pretty much the same way for a very long time, and the world has changed.
The churches have changed, and we haven’t really changed a lot with them. One of the phrases that they used is, “You guys in the seminary, you sit in your classrooms and you haven’t really ‘felt the burn.’ You really don’t know what it feels like to go and have to deal with an angry parishioner.”
Now, the fact is, we do know that, because pretty much everybody on our faculty has had significant pastoral experience. But for most of us, it was a long time ago. For me personally, I had 12 years in the parish as a pastor, but that was more than 20 years ago now.
What it came down to is the seminary saying to the churches, “Yes, we agree with that assessment. You guys bring something that we can’t bring, and we value what you bring, and want to respect it and build it into the system by which we train our leaders. But at the same time, you have to understand that we bring some things that you can’t bring very well.”
They did understand that, and they respected it.
There was a moment where the denominational leader -- having recognized just how hurtful some of this dialogue had had to be -- came and met with the faculty, and on behalf of the churches and behalf of himself, apologized for years of disrespect.
That was incredibly meaningful to our faculty. I mean, people were crying. It was a really powerful moment, and allowed for a huge amount of trust to develop.
Q: Were there concerns from faculty that the program wasn’t rigorous or academic enough?
Sure, it was a concern at the beginning, but we made promises that we would sustain the values that faculty cared about, and I think we delivered on that.
I think there was enough trust there with our faculty. Now we’re about three years into actually delivering, and there’s been growth and adaptation along the way.
Q: How many students do you have?
We have approximately 40 students working through it right now, and that’s about to increase, because we brought in two or three new [partner] networks.
That’s not a massive number, but on the other hand, those 40 students were from a network of about 100 churches. It already has had a massive impact on the quality of the ministry of our churches. It’s been game-changing.
There’s no going back; this is absolutely the way [the churches and denomination] want to go. Our donation income is up; our buy-in from the churches is way up; even our student counts are up.
I mean, we’re firing on all cylinders now. This has been amazing, the journey we’ve been on here. We’re really encouraged.
Read more >>
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
by George Mason
Amid the widespread discussion about 'the future of the church,' an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow's church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead.
George Mason's Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place. The book highlights an exciting development in the training of pastors: pastoral residency programs and mentoring. Mason demonstrates that these programs work best when the congregations themselves, not just leadership or staff, are an active participant in the training. In this way, churches begin to reclaim their rightful role in the formation of the ministers that will serve them. And, at the same time, they become healthier and more effective churches.
Mason gives us the analogy of physician training. Medical school produces graduates with extensive knowledge of the body, but a practicing doctor will require several more years of internship and residency. Similarly, our seminaries and divinity schools produce men and women with good biblical knowledge, but they might not prepare a graduate for the task of helping a bereaved parishioner cope with the sudden loss of a loved one. Moreover, such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Mason shows that congregation-based mentoring and residency are excellent ways to bridge this gap.
Learn more and order the book »
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