Resources by William Yoo

In a previous blog, I surmised that the diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. One reason that theological institutions comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education is access. Comparatively speaking, theological schools have fewer barriers to enrollment versus other graduate schools in terms of acceptance rates and tuition costs.In 2023, the average acceptance rates for Master of Divinity and Master of Arts admissions across all member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools was 68 percent and 72 percent respectively. In the same year, the average acceptance rate for law school admissions in the United States was roughly 42 percent. Some law schools, such as Yale and Harvard, had acceptance rates under 10 percent. The cost of theological education is also significantly lower than many other graduate programs. For example, the annual tuition of Harvard Law School ($77,000) is more than double the annual tuition of Harvard Divinity School ($31,000) and more than triple the annual tuition of Columbia Theological Seminary ($22,000), the school where I teach.Theological schools therefore enroll students of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and nationalities. Over the past twenty years or so, many theological institutions have also taken further steps to include a wider range of students through the implementation of additional learning modalities, such as fully online degree programs, alongside in-person education.I have witnessed several evolutions in my seminary classroom over the last dozen years. The first change largely consisted of more diversity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and denomination. Straight cisgender white Presbyterian students comprised the majority, but I was teaching more students of color, more LGBTQ+ students, and more students from various Christian traditions.The second change entailed increasing generational and vocational diversity alongside the ongoing demographic shifts due to the first change. There is now no one clear and discernable identity marker that represents the majority student population in my classroom. In terms of age, some students are in their twenties and thirties and others are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Some will preach their first sermon at my seminary whereas others have been preaching for years. Some are working full-time in congregational ministries and other professions as they study at my seminary. Some are from the United States and others are from Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and other nations. Some belong to theologically liberal and progressive denominations whereas others worship in conservative and fundamentalist churches.These differences present rich opportunities for mutuality and reciprocity as well as potential pitfalls of misunderstanding and conflict in theological education. I plan to further engage these matters in future blogs, but I want to conclude this reflection with one aspect of diversity that I find simultaneously inspiring and perplexing: The rise of multivocational students who are pursuing their seminary education while also working full-time as well as caring for their families and fulfilling other important obligations.I am grateful that these students are in my classroom, and many have joyfully shared with me that my seminary’s commitment to greater access has made it possible for them to enroll. Because these students carry multiple responsibilities, some understandably struggle to complete assignments on time and adequately prepare for class sessions. Nearly all my students take three or more courses in our fall and spring terms because my seminary’s most generous scholarships covering the entire cost of tuition (and the entire cost of tuition and fees for African American students) are not available with part-time enrollment.When encountering unsteady student performance, it would be immature and harmful for theological educators like me to respond with petty expressions of anger and annoyance. Yet I also feel that it is my pedagogical imperative to effectively manage class participation and course engagement. I am keenly aware that a good number of my students, including some with the busiest schedules, are faithfully doing their work, and they are rightly discouraged when some of their peers are ill-equipped for face-to-face discussions and absent or perpetually tardy in online forums. Small group activities are probably the most dismaying and frustrating when there are varying levels of student preparation. I continue to grapple with how to lean into access and compassion without compromising my standards of academic integrity and excellence.

I think every theological educator asks themselves some form of the following question: What is the raison d’être for my teaching? Sometimes this reflection manifests in a functional way amid the immediacy of constructing a syllabus as we interrogate our learning objectives. But there are also moments where we take a step back and think about the ultimate aims of our vocation. We render for ourselves an accounting of dreams fulfilled, deferred, and denied. I teach at a denominational seminary with an increasingly diverse student population such that there are many ecclesial and social contexts represented in my classroom. One context is the “purple church.” The simplest definition of the purple church is a congregation in the United States with red Republicans and blue Democrats worshiping together. Other articulations extend the metaphor beyond political polarization to encompass a community of faith with Christians who disagree on a variety of social issues, theological matters, and worship styles. Some believe that a necessity for pastoring in a purple church is the capacity to simultaneously exercise pastoral care and prophetic leadership. One interpretation of purple church ministry finds the “pastoral” focus addresses the personal needs of congregants and the “prophetic” focus seeks to inform congregants on how to faithfully engage their civic responsibilities. Yet even clergy themselves concede that effective ministry in this context requires biting one’s tongue sometimes and purposefully steering clear of some societal injustices. As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I encourage my students to examine the fullness of the past in all its wonders, horrors, complexities, and contradictions. In thinking about the purple church now, I want us to discern what it meant to pastor such a congregation then. In 1961, Jimmy Gene Peck, a graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary (where I teach today), accepted a call to serve as the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Enterprise, Alabama. At that time, every graduate was a white man and most were in their twenties and thirties. Peck was born in 1934 and enrolled at Columbia in 1958 upon completion of his undergraduate degree from Presbyterian College. The town of Enterprise in southeastern Alabama had roughly 13,000 residents and First Presbyterian Church drew members from the town and from the military community at nearby Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker). Prior to Peck’s arrival, the church had split as several members departed over their frustrations with what they viewed as the leadership’s lack of attention to military families. Peck therefore began his ministry feeling the deep wounds of division and promised to pursue a “healing ministry in Enterprise.” But there were other pains and divisions in Enterprise, a town in which thirty percent of the residents were Black, and the young pastor could not ignore the realities of anti-Black discrimination and white opposition to integration. On February 10, 1962, eight months into his ministry, Peck preached on racism. He selected several passages from the New Testament about Jews and Samaritans. He explained how Jesus conversed with a Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:9 and observed how opponents of Jesus in John 8:48 derisively called him a “Samaritan.” Peck compared the usage of Samaritan in the latter scriptural verse to “our popular terms of disrespect” – “nigger” and “nigger lover” – and hoped that white Christians would cease uttering these hateful racial slurs. He continued with a few words about the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37 and an exposition of the risen Christ’s promise in Acts 1:8 that the message of God’s love will spread across Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. Peck’s seminary professors surely would have been proud of his skillful deployment of the Bible to compellingly connect how Jesus addressed enmity between Jews and Samaritans in the first-century Greco-Roman world to the twentieth-century context of Black and white Americans in Alabama. Peck was also careful to balance the pastoral alongside the prophetic in his sermon. He shared that he did not “speak excessively on the race question” from the pulpit because he too was wary of freshly minted seminary graduates who aspire “to redeem the world before the ink of his diploma is dry.” And Peck understood how the congregation was still hurting from the trauma of painful infighting. Yet he did not see how he could remain silent about the “race question” because it was omnipresent in schools, restaurants, newspapers, and everyday conversations. Peck desired to lovingly help prepare his congregants for civic engagement with gospel instruction: “Hard days are ahead, and God is counting on the church to lead society, not to lag behind it. May God grant us convictions which honor Christ, and grant us the courage of our convictions.” The quandary Peck encountered was that the convictions of some of his congregants as well as other local white Christians did not align with his. In an era before the internet and social media, the “Letters to the Editor” section within printed newspapers was a significant avenue for public discourse. After reading a letter from a segregationist Presbyterian minister in the Montgomery Advertiser, Peck submitted his own letter to express that he and some other white clergy supported integration. He noted that he did not speak for his congregation and did not wish to express political opinions. Rather, Peck simply wanted readers to know about the existence of white pastors who believed segregation was antithetical to the Christian gospel. Though Peck was cautious in his writing, the Montgomery Advertiser made an editorial decision that led to the demise of his ministry in Enterprise. When publishing Peck’s letter in 1963, the newspaper included its own title for the letter, “Christians Should Speak Out,” in bold print. The newspaper subsequently published an angry response to Peck. Annie Laurie Reaves, a white woman from Eufaula, criticized Peck for misconstruing the “plain teachings of the Bible,” which endorsed “the separation barriers between the races,” and admonished the pastor for deficient theological training: “I urge him, as his sister in Christ, to attend a better school, one where he can be taught of Holy Spirit.” Word spread about Peck’s letter, especially the backlash to it, and created the conditions of whatever the equivalent of going viral today was in the 1960s. After eighteen months of tumult in the church, which included lay leaders advising Peck to cease speaking about race, Peck submitted his resignation and asked the East Alabama Presbytery in 1964 to dissolve the pastoral relationship between him and the congregation. As a theological educator today, I wrestle with the lessons to be learned from Peck’s experience as a young pastor. Peck and other white clergy certainly ministered in a challenging context of intense political polarization and pressing societal injustices. It is clear to me that Peck’s ministry simultaneously reveals a shining example of individual courage and a searing condemnation of institutional sinfulness within the broader white Church. Yet I also wonder if some of my students treat Peck as a cautionary tale more than an imitable witness. More than a few clergy colleagues have recommended to me that Columbia and other seminaries like it must do better about educating students for leadership in purple churches. I am aware that one potential application, in view of the purple church, is to explore with my students what Peck might have done differently. But the more obvious lesson to me from this history is that the problem is less about the pastor’s capacities and more about the purple church’s limitations.

On October 7, 1962, Robert H. Walkup preached from the book of Job at First Presbyterian Church in Starkville, Mississippi. Walkup graduated from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1941 and had been the pastor of this congregation for nine years. Before Walkup accepted the ministerial position in Starkville, Walkup made clear to the church officers that he had “a very tender conscience on the race question.” In the days prior to Sunday worship, there were riots ninety miles away in Oxford protesting the enrollment of the first African American student, James Meredith, at the University of Mississippi. More than two hundred Mississippi national guardsmen and U.S. army soldiers were injured, and two white civilians were killed, across three days of violent skirmishes on the college campus. Roughly three hundred white persons were arrested for their participation in these uprisings seeking to prevent Meredith’s enrollment. Walkup recognized the “widely shared opinion” that the wisest pathway for white ministers was to be silent on the increasing pressures of racial integration. It was an emotional issue and even the slightest mention of integration on a Sunday morning could inflame some congregants. Some clergy were concerned about the pervasive anxieties and simmering tensions that church members brought with them into worship services. And many preachers understood that it did not take much for some members to bemoan a sermon that made them uncomfortable and criticize a pastor for ushering disunity and division into their beloved congregation. Yet Walkup was convinced that silence was not an option. He had accompanied church members through times of joy and sorrow for nine years, and the task before him was to speak the truth in love. Walkup found in Job’s questioning of God, especially in Job’s confusion and anger about why he was experiencing such calamities, a message for the congregation he was leading. Walkup observed that white people throughout the southern states were also wondering why the push for integration was disrupting their lives. He then explained that divine providence is penal, educational, and redemptive. For far too long, white Americans had oppressed Black Americans in unjust systems of slavery and segregation. Walkup interpreted the riots at the University of Mississippi that resulted in two deaths as punishment from God for “the long years of our semi-quasi approval of lynching.” He encouraged his congregation to behold the unfolding civil rights movement as an opportunity to learn about the consequences of racism, repent for these sins, and pursue the redemptive purposes of God. Walkup’s sermon was published three years later in Donald W. Shriver Jr.’s first book, The Unsilent South: Prophetic Preaching in Racial Crisis. Shriver was educated at Union Presbyterian Seminary and pastored a congregation in Gastonia, North Carolina before entering the doctoral program at Harvard University. Shriver therefore witnessed firsthand both the possibilities and challenges toward racial justice in white congregations. In publishing a collection of sermons that white clergy such as Walkup had actually preached in southern pulpits, Shriver endeavored to highlight what was possible. Ten years after publishing this book, Shriver became the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City and helped to steer the institution through severe financial obstacles and sustain a bold educational mission integrating faith and social justice. Progressive seminaries continue to educate pastors, chaplains, counselors, and faith leaders in myriad ministry contexts. There are certainly other theological schools, including evangelical seminaries, that are seeking to confront white supremacy and enact racial justice, but I find progressive seminaries are distinctive because they possess an intersectional commitment to persons of color, women, and LGBTQIA+ persons that is closer to embracing the fullness of God’s shalom, Christ’s love, and the Holy Spirit’s welcome. Progressive seminaries are flawed and imperfect (more on that in a moment), but I delight in the testimonies and transformations of students, staff, and faculty within these learning communities. In my seminary classroom, it was powerful to recently listen to one queer student share about their experience in a book club with queer and transgender friends. This student told us of how they often mentioned that they are in graduate school without divulging it is a seminary because of the harm and hate several in their group had encountered in churches and from self-professing Christians. After the student revealed they were in fact studying at a seminary, and found there a supportive and empowering environment, one friend expressed surprise but added that it was good to know that such a place actually existed. Some progressive seminaries, however, are in precarious situations. I teach at a denominational seminary (Columbia Theological Seminary) that has decreased from 428 students in 2003 to 247 students presently. Several other PC(USA) seminaries have had similar declines. In 2003, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary had 280 students, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary had 193 students, McCormick Theological Seminary had 399 students, and Union Presbyterian Seminary had 384 students. The most recent data shows 173 students at Austin, 99 students at Louisville, 162 students at McCormick, and 181 students at Union. Beyond PC(USA) seminaries, two other examples are Brite Divinity School (281 students in 2003 to 109 presently) and Claremont School of Theology (480 students in 2003 to 201 students presently). At one level, I recognize that the lower enrollment at these seminaries reflects membership declines within several mainline denominations. And I believe nearly every theological educator has heard some version of the mantra that closures and consolidations are to be expected since the high number of historically mainline seminaries is an unsustainable vestige of a past era. Yet I lament the low morale and lack of vitality at some progressive seminaries. I am also concerned that some students seeking an in-person liberal theological education will perhaps have fewer local, or even regional, options. Finally, I am attentive to the potential loss of scholarly contributions with less faculty positions at progressive seminaries. Scholarly production is by no means confined to an academic post, but I am acutely aware of the institutional support that some faculty need to conduct painstaking research, write numerous drafts, and ultimately publish their work. At another level, I must include honest criticism alongside my affirmation. Progressive seminaries need to take a hard look at themselves and acknowledge their stumbles and failings. Evidences of institutional complacency are seen in outdated websites, limited social media presence, and an over-reliance on familiar yet insular networks for recruitment. Several progressive seminaries have also suffered from either choosing or not removing quickly enough the wrong administrative leaders. One sad irony is the dissonance between the radical lessons in the classroom and the conservative operations of the schools themselves in some progressive seminaries. Students are taught to apply all the subaltern wisdom, womanist vision, and liberation theology they learn from their seminaries, but the seminaries retain the same hierarchical structures and exclusionary silos that have long hampered collaborative processes and creative pathways. I am rooting for progressive seminaries, and I hope you are, too. I also want progressive seminaries to be as interested in dismantling oppressive systems in their own institutions as they are in the church and the world.

In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a story about slavery. Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher, was a pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational congregations in New York and Connecticut before moving with his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, to serve as president of Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, in 1832. As a young adult, Stowe attended a series of debates on abolition, colonization, and slavery at the seminary. These debates in 1834 stirred the fires of abolitionism among many of the students, which agitated the board of trustees, and Stowe’s father sought a compromise between the students seeking to be bolder and more strategic in their activism and the trustees urging the school to focus on theological subjects and training future clergy for pastoral leadership. Ultimately, fifty-one students decided to withdraw from the seminary. They published a statement protesting the institutional leadership of both the trustees and Beecher. The students detested institutional attempts to censor their activism on campus and accused the school’s leaders of cowardice and betraying the call of Jesus Christ: “Are our theological seminaries to be awed into silence upon the great questions of human duty? Are they to be bribed over to the interests of an unholy public sentiment, by promises of patronage or threats of its withdrawal?” Stowe’s literary career began to flourish around the same time as she began publishing many essays in various periodicals, but she returned to the topics discussed at Lane for her most famous and influential work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper in 1851, and then in book form the following year. I presently teach at a different Presbyterian seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Though hundreds of miles and almost two centuries separate Columbia Seminary in 2023 from Lane Seminary in 1834, I believe the searing questions from the students departing Lane are hauntingly relevant at Columbia and other seminaries. Many of the conversations among faculty and administrators at Columbia are about the future of theological education. We talk about the promises and perils of online education, the joys and challenges of teaching multi-vocational students, and the pros and cons of reducing credit hours in certain degree programs. These are rich and necessary dialogues, but I also know that we are not addressing all of the “great questions of human duty.” I can’t help but feel that the busyness of strategic planning, with its accompanying committee meetings, listening sessions, bar graphs, and pie charts, has awed us into silence on Columbia’s historic sins and reparative justice. On June 15, 2020, the board of trustees and president’s council of Columbia issued a statement that entailed a “commitment to repair the breach.” Columbia’s leadership confessed that the seminary “came into being in the context of and participated in the subjugation and oppression of Black people.” This is an important acknowledgement of Columbia’s sinful past. But confession also requires addressing the totality of wrongdoing that lies at the foundational roots of the seminary. In 1834, six years after its founding and three years after its first classes, Columbia received $3,603.25 in its endowment from the sale of eighteen enslaved African Americans. Charles C. Jones, a white member of Columbia’s board who joined the faculty one year later, inherited four enslaved persons, a young woman named Cora and her three children, from Andrew Maybank, a white plantation owner in Liberty County, Georgia. In his will, Maybank also instructed Jones to sell fourteen of his other enslaved persons, with the proceeds directed to Columbia Seminary. Jones sold Cora and her three children in a private sale for $1,000. He also arranged for the other fourteen enslaved persons to be sold in a public auction for $2,603.25. This is but one of numerous instances in which money derived from the sale of enslaved persons flowed into Columbia’s endowment. In 1845, a journal published by the Associate Reformed Synod of the West excoriated Columbia for benefiting from a public auction of enslaved persons. The journal found it tragic to see human beings—“the following negro slaves, to wit: Charles, Peggy, Antonett, Davy, September, Maria, Jenny, and Isaac”—listed as property akin to animals, lands, and other capital in a local Savannah newspaper. But it was especially infuriated to behold a Presbyterian seminary in the listing as the recipient of the funds derived from the sale. The journal criticized the lack of shame or remorse from the seminary as “scandalous.” Columbia’s commitment to racial repair includes new scholarships that cover the entire cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. As I have shared in an earlier reflection, I am exceedingly grateful to teach at a seminary that has the financial resources to support the students in my classroom. But there is one glaring omission in Columbia’s efforts to repair the breach: The absence of reparations to Cora’s descendants and the descendants of other enslaved persons who were sold to enrich the seminary’s endowment. In 2019, Virginia Theological Seminary designated 1.7 million dollars as a reparations endowment fund to identify and pay the descendants of Black persons who labored on its campus during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation. Three years later, the seminary reported that this fund increased to 2.2 million dollars and nearly 200 descendants had received payments. Virginia Seminary’s work toward reparative justice is simultaneously a model and an indictment of theological education. Surely it is not the only theological school that must atone for its historic sins of slavery and racial oppression. Both Columbia and Virginia are among the wealthiest theological institutions in the nation. In 2022, one magazine published a list with the ten schools holding the largest endowments: Princeton Seminary ($1.45 billion), Harvard Divinity School ($845 million), Yale Divinity School ($597 billion), Candler School of Theology ($352 million), Duke Divinity School ($291 million), Columbia Seminary ($284 million), Vanderbilt Divinity School ($277 million), Pittsburgh Seminary ($262 million), Perkins School of Theology ($248 million), and Virginia Seminary ($215 million). One question I sometimes encounter revolves around how institutions can make amends for injustices that happened so long ago. I often respond with an observation and a question. I recognize that many years have passed, and we have certainly witnessed some progress in the pursuit of racial justice. I then ask when a specific institution made things right and repaired relations with the families and descendants of the people it directly harmed. In the case of Columbia, the answer is not yet. There is much excitement about Columbia’s future with a desire to boldly step into the future of theological education with renewed purpose and new vision. But before revival there must be a reckoning.

The seminary professor, a man of color, just walked out of the academic dean’s office. He had been teaching at the mainline Protestant theological institution for eleven years. The academic dean, a white woman, called him into her office to talk about a recent article he published in a mainstream magazine. He had written about white supremacy within American Christianity and the manifestations of racism in Protestant churches, including in churches that supported the seminary. The dean noted that she had received several complaints about his article. The professor asked the dean if she disagreed with anything that he wrote. She evaded the question and changed the subject to how the professor might repair relationships with some donors. She also reminded him that his review for promotion was coming up shortly and that she worried how this “controversy” could disrupt the review. The conversation ended with no resolution, but the dean said they could revisit “next steps” in a day or two after some prayer and reflection. The seminary professor was enraged, exhausted, and frustrated. In a word, he felt defeated. The professor began teaching at the seminary immediately after graduate school. He loved teaching his students and especially appreciated the increasing racial and ethnic diversity within the student population. But over the years, the racism that he experienced, and the racial harm that he witnessed his colleagues and students of color encounter, had taken a deleterious toll on his wellbeing and health. Being called into the dean’s office was the latest in a long series of episodes in which he and other colleagues of color were assailed because of what they taught, how they advocated for students of color, and how they challenged their institution to live up to its moral, pedagogical, and spiritual commitments to racial diversity, equity, and inclusion. In recent years, seminaries throughout the United States have grappled with racial discrimination. At some seminaries, there have been a handful of discriminatory incidents whereas at other schools the problems of racial prejudice have been widespread. Immediately after departing the dean’s office, this professor sat down on a bench outdoors and wrestled with whether his meeting with the dean was racially discriminatory. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that “it is unlawful to harass a person because of that person’s race or color” and explains that “harassment can include, for example, racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person’s race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols.” The law does not forbid “simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious,” but it also outlines how racial discrimination is “illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).” The professor acknowledged to himself that the meeting may not have fallen into the legal delineation of harassment, but he knew it was racially harmful and he could feel the pain coursing through his body. The professor concluded that he had three options. The first option was to compromise and agree to a plan to talk with some of the offended donors. He would not apologize for his scholarship, but he would discuss his article with them and listen to why they thought he was wrong. The second option was to seek the support of his colleagues of color. The faculty of color had confronted the administration before, and he believed they were prepared to do so again on his behalf. The professor thought that his resistance might also garner media attention and perhaps he could write another article for the magazine explaining what happened. But the professor was weary. He thought about his health and his family. He did not know if he, or his family, had the energy required to enact the second option. Therefore, the professor was strongly considering the third option, which was to simply resign from the seminary. He would miss the classroom dearly, for it was his sanctuary, his refuge, and a holy site where he experienced rejuvenation through the wonder of learning together with his students. But in this moment, the professor did not know how much longer he could bear the pain in his teaching body. Questions What does this case study tell you about the seminary and how it engages matters of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion? What would you do if you were the professor? Are there other options the professor should consider? If you were the academic dean, would you have done anything differently in this situation? If so, what? If not, why not?

Earlier this year, the song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” from the animated film, Encanto¸ emerged as a viral sensation. The film’s protagonist, Mirabel, is seeking counsel from her reclusive uncle, the aforenamed Bruno, who is difficult to find because their family has ostracized him for his propensity to speak uncomfortable truths. Both of my children, one in middle school and the other in elementary school, reported that nearly everyone was singing this track. My eldest child even offered to show me some of the countless covers of the song on TikTok and YouTube.        In my experience teaching at a freestanding seminary, I have observed that there are also students that theological educators don’t talk about, or talk less about, whether within our own institutions or across guild contexts, such as the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. Our conversations often focus upon two kinds of students: the ones who inspire us and the ones who terrorize us. Amid what almost always feels like a demanding academic semester, it is easy to talk about the students who are enlivening our classrooms and motivating us to sharpen our pedagogical skills. And we rightly seek collegial support concerning those students who abuse, antagonize, and aggravate us for a myriad of reasons, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, ability, nationality, and sexuality.   I can think of two kinds of students that we don’t talk about as much as the terrific and the terrible. The first is the tired student. I teach at a denominational seminary with increasing ecumenical, ethnic, and racial diversity within our student population. The Master of Divinity degree is required for ministerial ordination in the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Therefore, our Presbyterian students are generally not full-time pastors during their studies with us. More of our students from different ecclesial traditions are already full-time pastors and seeking further education to augment their capacities for ministry. Some are bi-vocational pastors leading congregations and balancing multiple responsibilities. In addition to working at least two jobs, they are also primary caregivers for young children, aging parents, and other family members. The tired student I am describing is also exceedingly thankful. During the nationwide racial reckoning in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd two years ago, my seminary implemented a broad and comprehensive plan for Black reparations, which included new scholarships that cover the full cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. In addition, my seminary offers generous scholarships that support the entire cost of tuition for every other non-Black student in a first-level master’s degree program. For some of the students in my classroom, these scholarships have made it possible for them to pursue a theological education. But because all these scholarships require full-time enrollment, I encounter the tired student who is juggling my syllabus along with other family, ministry, and work commitments. One pastor who I admire shares this wise counsel utilizing the metaphor of juggling: One must discern which balls are made of rubber and which are made of glass when prioritizing one’s schedule. The “glass” tasks must not be dropped because they will shatter whereas the tasks that are made of rubber can fall to the ground. For the tired student, I am aware that my assignments and class sessions are more like rubber than glass, especially in comparison to their other responsibilities. The tired student is sometimes unable to show up or perform well on an assignment. Or the cost of showing up and performing well requires a herculean effort with substantial costs in terms of the tired student’s mental, physical, and psychological health. The second kind of student we don’t talk about is the triumphalist student. It is more precise to describe this student as one who comes from a more theologically conservative ecclesial context in comparison to my seminary. Some of my students are unfamiliar with historical-critical methods of biblical interpretation, postcolonial theology, and progressive Christianity. They have not heard of scholars such as Katie Geneva Cannon, Walter Brueggemann, and Kwok Pui-lan. They are unaccustomed to theological inquiry that identifies and criticizes some Christian doctrines and practices. Their conceptions of church history revolve around a search for examples of Christians enacting courageous witness and exemplifying the triumph of God’s goodness over evil. Yet renowned church historian Justo González observes the story of Christianity, when told fully and honestly, includes beautiful moments of awe-inspiring faith and ugly episodes where it is difficult to discern the divine presence. As an historian of Christianity in the United States, the only way that I can teach a full and honest history is to confront the active participation and complicity of Christians who committed and perpetuated the sins of settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, nativism, and other oppressive injustices. And my lessons do not always have heartwarming endings that uplift the soul. There are certainly moments of reflection and application, but some chapters of Christian history are sinful and irredeemable.      There is diversity with the “triumphalist student” I am describing such that I do not want to present this kind of student as a monolith. Some students experience our seminary classrooms as liberative spaces where they can expand their ways of thinking theologically about themselves, God, and Christian ministry. Other students undergo a complex process of educational formation with stages of disorientation and deconstruction preceding reorientation and reconstruction. And a few students remain resistant to our methods of pedagogy. We talk some about the “triumphalist student” who testifies to a metanoia from our curriculum, but we need to talk more about how these students return to congregations that are unprepared to receive their transformed approaches to ministry and theology.          

My family spent a lot of time this summer traveling in our car. As we drove up and down several eastern and southern states, with stops in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the thing we dreaded most was traffic. We groaned and sighed when coming to a sudden stop as the smartphone displayed a bright red line along our route. Even when Siri tried to comfort us, indicating that we were still on the fastest route, we exchanged looks of disgust and exasperation with one another. But traffic did not deter us from travel, and we were always relieved when we made it to the next destination in our journey. Ultimately, we accepted that the traffic we encountered was inevitable and paled in comparison to the joyous experiences we shared together. Reflecting on traffic evokes the faculty meeting at my seminary and probably other seminaries as well. Here is an obvious and perhaps irrefutable thesis statement: Theological educators do not like faculty meetings. In fact, many of us despise them. We think faculty meetings are ineffective misuses of time (cue the “This could have been an email” meme) and sometimes dangerous spaces abounding in microaggressions that stem from intercultural missteps and interpersonal conflicts. But we accept that the faculty meeting is part of the job. When I talk with colleagues from other institutions, we commiserate about the faculty meetings at our respective seminaries and observe how they lack the collaborative spirit and invigorating dialogue we have experienced during the Wabash Center’s workshops and gatherings. At my seminary, I have offered an expression that is part smile, part frown, and all dread with colleagues when bumping into them on the way to a faculty meeting. The expression is hard to describe in words, but I will venture to suggest that many theological educators can empathetically visualize my look with ease. Over the past two academic years, I have taught an interdisciplinary course with one of my colleagues that serves as a concluding capstone for Master of Divinity students in their final semester of study with us. Because the learning aims include synthesizing lessons from other courses and preparing students for vocations in pastoral leadership after they graduate, my co-instructor and I ask the class at the onset what topics they would like to engage together and what kinds of guest lecturers they would like to hear from in the final weeks of the course. One of the topics that arose was church administration, with a question about how to facilitate meetings with laypersons, such as deacons and elders. In the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one of the responsibilities of a pastor is to be the moderator of the session. The denomination’s Book of Order explains that the session is “composed of those persons elected by the congregation to active service as ruling elders, together with all installed pastors and associate pastors.” It is therefore not surprising that some of our graduating students have session meetings in mind and desire to learn more about exercising leadership in meetings. What is surprising to some of my students is the reality that our seminary does not provide an exemplary model for meetings. One student divulged how it confounded them that the faculty at our seminary, with many professors they admired so deeply, struggled to conduct creative and productive meetings that were different from the corporate world and other secular professional contexts. It seemed to them that their professors were not practicing what they were teaching. Another alumnus, a few years after graduation, told me that they had outgrown some of their naivety about the seminary as an idealized church-related institution. When this alumnus was a student, they would have given anything to be a “fly on the wall” at a faculty meeting. Now they would never want to attend one because they believed that there was no joy in witnessing their former professors at our collective worst. Can the seminary faculty meeting be saved? I do not know (probably). But here are two recommendations that I have learned from my experiences with the Wabash Center. The first is the importance of clear objectives. Because the Wabash Center convenes faculty and administrators from a wide array of colleges, universities, divinity schools, and seminaries, the leaders at every workshop I have participated in have communicated their goals, hopes, and expectations with precision, care, and consistency. If one goal of a seminary faculty meeting is to ensure that all voices are heard and included, then two expectations are that the participants receive the preparatory materials with sufficient lead time and the meeting itself is moderated in ways that foster mutuality, equity, and reciprocity. Seminaries also need to be honest about their adoption of hierarchical systems from the academy. If the culture of a seminary is such that untenured faculty members listen and do not speak, then it is unreasonable to hope that faculty meetings embody the principles of inclusion and cooperation. If the purpose of a meeting is to simply vote on quotidian matters that require faculty approval, then the expectation ought to be modest and sights should be set on no more than a perfunctory meeting that moves forward the ordinary business of the seminary. The second lesson I gleaned from my experiences with the Wabash Center is the generative energy that results from collaborative leadership practices. I observed a leadership team with several persons sharing authority with one another and inviting every participant to enact their distinctive gifts. Each of us were given opportunities, with ample advance notice, to provide leadership that displayed our experiential insight, intercultural intelligence, and distinguishing pedagogy. The spotlight was rarely on one leader for a prolonged amount of time and the leaders wore their authority lightly. When a participant talked too much, or was the first to speak on several occasions, they were encouraged to take a step back and make room for others who may not process as quickly and needed a few moments of silence before fully engaging the discussion at hand. We met in various spaces and with diverse formats that fit the stated objectives of the sessions and cultivated a spirit of imagining and envisioning together. Of course, our seminaries are not the same as the Wabash Center. The context of a seminary faculty meeting differs from a Wabash Center workshop, but perhaps there are principles from the latter that we can apply to the former. However, I am unsure whether seminaries like mine want to change. At some of our theological institutions, the faculty meeting is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

A tense moment in my classroom captured some of the changing dynamics at my seminary. We were learning about the rise of higher criticism within the history of biblical interpretation in the United States. As we were analyzing a lecture that Charles Augustus Briggs delivered at Union Theological Seminary in 1891, some students found Briggs’s honest grappling with factual errors in the Scriptures invigorating and resonated with his push for new interpretive methods distinct from the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. They were surprised and encouraged to encounter a scholar who declared that the “theory of inerrancy” was neither located in the Scriptures nor sanctioned in the ancient Christian creeds. Over one hundred years ago, Briggs excoriated the doctrine of inerrancy as “a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” As I moved our discussion from this primary source to the ecclesial divisions that transpired in Briggs’s denomination (the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) due in no small part to his scholarship, we reflected on how and where we see these ruptures today. In 1909, one presbytery in New York ordained a handful of ministerial candidates who did not affirm a belief in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. In the following years, Presbyterians vigorously debated whether it was possible to be a Christian without attesting to the virgin birth, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the actuality of Christ’s miracles as recorded in the Gospels. Some students shared that these divisions persist in their congregations and denominations today. One student wondered aloud if their presbytery would allow a candidate to express a nuanced and complex position on the virgin birth today. But my classroom was not only buzzing with excitement and collaborative energy; it was also buzzing with trepidation and anger. Some students remained quiet and a few hardly looked away from their notebook computer screens. Finally, one student shared that this was not what they expected to learn at our seminary and that they thought any notion of Christianity without the doctrines of inerrancy and the virgin birth was heretical and dangerous. Another student expressed frustration with the trajectory of our discussion. They thought it was appropriate to learn this history, but how their peers were talking about the Bible deeply troubled them. The student added that conversations like this one were precisely why mainline Protestant congregations were in decline and losing members. Student populations at my seminary and other PC(USA) schools have shifted in the twenty-first century. In 2000, most of the students at my seminary were white, domestic, and Presbyterian. Since then, there have been large increases in the enrollment of international students and students of color. Black students comprised approximately 4/5 of the incoming class in 2021. There are now fewer Presbyterian students than students from other Christian traditions. In addition to educating students across wider diversities of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, culture, and national origin, students have a broader range of theological viewpoints. When my classroom was predominantly Presbyterian, there were certainly differences on matters of biblical interpretation and belief. As the PC(USA) wrestled over the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons, so too did the students in my classroom. But after the denomination made changes in its polity to permit the ordination of LGBTQIA+ pastors and allow ministers and sessions “to use their own discernment to conduct same-gender marriage ceremonies,” the enrollment of PC(USA) students opposed to these changes declined and the number of LGBTQIA+ students grew. These students, along with others seeking creative ways to enact intersectional justice in familiar and new ministries, are enlivening my classroom as they prompt and provoke us to fresh analyses and more expansive understandings of humanity and the divine throughout creation. The anxieties around this discussion of the virgin birth illustrate another shift. There are more students from theologically conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist traditions at my seminary today than there were twenty years ago. Some have deliberately chosen to enroll here because they too are yearning to expand their knowledge of God in an open and inclusive learning environment. They relish opportunities to excavate the depths of many theologies and ask the probing questions that they were discouraged from expressing in their churches. Others remain firmly rooted in their traditions and perpetually frustrated. They question why a seminary that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion ignores their religious interpretations and cultural perspectives. As an Asian American with firsthand experience in conservative, evangelical, mainline, and progressive Protestant contexts, I am acutely aware of both the promise and peril of my changing classroom. The increasing diversity presents new possibilities for learning with a student population that more closely represents the breadth of Christianity locally and globally. Both the church and the world are bigger than the denomination to which my seminary belongs. Yet, there are chasms of difference between progressive and conservative Protestants on foundational issues of doctrine and human dignity. It can be difficult to find common ground when some of us stand so far apart from one another. However, the instruction in classrooms like mine must meet the demands of more complexity with more clarity about learning covenants and pedagogical commitments. My cultivation of a hospitable learning environment distinguishes between welcoming all students and facilitating the public expressions of their private beliefs to uphold my seminary’s intersectional commitment to the flourishing of women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons in the classroom. It also requires a differentiation between conversion and education. I must continually discern how my students are learning and acknowledge that, for a few, the gaps between their learning expectations and my teaching philosophy will remain significant.

The following axiom is often met with solemn nods, sad sighs, and knowing looks of empathy and understanding: “Church hurt is the worst hurt.” At every seminary, there are students with deep wounds from the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual abuse they experienced in congregational contexts. Seminary communities understand that a church can be the site of terrible harm and heartbreaking pain. There are also powerful testimonies of resolve and resilience. Our students are not satisfied with the status quo and are seeking the kinds of theological education that will equip them to lead ministries of healing, hope, redemption, and transformation. Some are called to work within existing congregational and denominational structures. Others are participating in new church developments and enacting their convictions to form religious communities in places and among persons that have been ignored and forgotten. But what happens to teaching when seminary hurt is the worst hurt? I find that the seminary classroom is more responsive to church hurt than seminary hurt. Faculty in theological schools are generally open to acknowledging the trauma and affliction that people encounter in congregations. Some of us share our own scars and wounds. Many of us are theological educators because we too have not given up on all the good that is possible in churches. We are quick to assign readings that address pastoral leadership. We encourage our students to make connections between the theologians in our respective syllabi and congregational praxis in the “real world.” However, the seminary classroom is sometimes slower to respond to the harm and pain inflicted upon students within our own learning communities. The remainder of this reflection focuses on three specific forms of seminary hurt that I have encountered in my classroom. The first results from a student harming another student with deleterious commentary that assails the dignity of persons within our learning community. My seminary is committed to the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons in Christian leadership and society, but we also welcome students from religious communities that do not share our conviction. A few of these students have been outspoken in their opposition to our position and have utilized classroom discussions to express their disagreement. Other students are unfamiliar with queer theology and grapple with the practical implications of our commitment to LGBTQIA+ justice. My approach to these instances of harm is to respond promptly and firmly with direct intervention. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to maintain a respectful learning environment. It is my role to hold my students accountable when public professions of their personal beliefs are hurtful. Even if the bulk of these interactions with students occur outside of the classroom in private conversations, there must also be a public acknowledgment of the harm done inside of the classroom. The second form of seminary hurt is more difficult when I encounter it in my classroom. How do I respond when my colleagues harm students? There are few secrets at a freestanding seminary like mine. With a smaller student population than the nearby high school and an entire faculty collegium that is the same size as a computer science department at some universities, my seminary inhabits an intimate and fraught ecosystem. When I teach about racism within the history of Christianity in the United States, there are occasions when my students discuss the racism they have experienced in other classrooms at the seminary. In doing so, they are rightly underscoring the pervasive realities of racism within Christian institutions today. Studying history is not just about the past, it is also about helping us better understand how the past reverberates in our present. But what is my responsibility to my students? When matters move beyond my classroom, I must navigate multiple layers of collegiality, mutuality, hierarchy, and power. The third form of seminary hurt revolves around institutional decisions that harm students. My teaching often pivots to engage current events because I seek to be responsive to what is happening in the actual lives of my students. Sometimes, the events at hand deal with controversial matters in our seminary community. There has been confusion and anger when beloved colleagues are dismissed or depart because of arduous conditions. There has also been dismay and frustration regarding policies, procedures, and the pace of institutional change. In my classroom, I have engaged the following challenge from my students: “What I have dealt with at this seminary is worse than what I have experienced in the church. Shouldn’t the seminary be better than the church, or at least as good as the church?” In these moments, I wrestle with ambivalence. On the one hand, I am further motivated to grow as a teacher and determined to do better in my classroom. On the other hand, I know that participating in pathways toward institutional change requires that I venture outside of my classroom. And some of those places are where seminary hurt awaits and abounds.

Before the pandemic, one of the most pressing subjects for discussion and debate in my context, teaching at a freestanding seminary, was the transition to online education. I recall lively conversations engaging the merits and challenges of “moving online” in formal faculty meetings, and the sometimes more important informal tête-à-têtes with small groups of colleagues in hallways and offices. One line of thinking warned that the pedagogy employed in certain courses and disciplines would not be as effective online. Another approach suggested that the future of theological education would be online, especially for freestanding seminaries, because of the shifting patterns in enrollment. There were less “traditional” students seeking residential or in-person education and more “non-traditional” students pursuing fully or mostly online degrees. Both perspectives presented harbingers of ruin, identity loss, and irrelevancy. Then came the pandemic. We all became online instructors. Chapel services and committee meetings also migrated to virtual spaces in which everyone appeared in little rectangle boxes. For a while it was fun to experiment with different virtual backgrounds, such as picturesque beaches, majestic mountains, and Dunder Mifflin. Although the pandemic is not over, I believe the questions about capacities for online education have largely been resolved at my seminary and elsewhere. All our courses can be taught online. Each of our schools can offer fully online degrees. I suppose the question moving forward is how many more of our institutions will do so. Pastors experienced a similar phenomenon as the congregations they served also migrated online. At one level, the past two years have revealed new possibilities for ministry utilizing virtual tools, such as enabling closer remote contact with previously isolated parishioners with less access to physical gatherings. Yet at another level, it is also clear that a robust online ministry is not a panacea. The fact that everyone can participate in a worship service from their own homes does not make preaching any easier. Moving online does not sufficiently address the existing interpersonal conflicts, harmful theologies, and spiritual wounds within a congregation. Therefore, my pedagogy continues to connect the history of Christianity in the United States with the praxis of congregational ministry today. One promising topic I continue to cultivate with my students is the gap between seminaries and congregations regarding biblical interpretation. For many of us, it is daunting to apply what we learn about the Bible, such as historical-critical approaches to the authorship of various books and womanist reconstructions of problematic narratives, in local congregations accustomed to the hermeneutics of inerrancy and literalism. In these classroom dialogues with students, we stress the virtues of an authentically incremental approach in which new pastors seek to build trust, develop relationships, and more fully understand the histories, complexities, and strengths of the congregations they serve while remaining true to their personal convictions. Pastoral leadership is an exercise of one’s gifts with humility, openness, courage, and determination. I do not want to speak for all freestanding seminaries, but I will venture to propose that online education is likewise not a panacea. I believe the time that I have invested in developing and refining my pedagogical skills for online instruction is a worthy investment, but I also recognize that seminaries like mine need more than good online courses. What about our oppressive structures, longstanding hierarchies, painful ambiguities, and underexamined practices? My point is not to be a naysaying critic of either my institution or theological education writ large, but it is to ask an important question that defies easy or universal answers: Can we practice what we teach? Or put another way: Can theological faculty be agents of institutional change? One painful ambiguity in some contexts involves whether a seminary is a school or a church. Of course, a seminary is an academic institution and not a church. But it gets confusing when we pray before classes and meetings, worship together in chapel services that feel no different than being in a church on Sunday morning, and educate students for congregational ministry. Therefore, the notion of the seminary as model church is not an unfounded or unreasonable expectation. But the organizational systems of seminaries are unlike congregations. Professors are not the pastors of a seminary. In my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a session comprising elected lay leaders (ruling elders) and installed pastors serve as the “council for the congregation,” which means a pastor works together with laypersons to exercise oversight and leadership of the church’s affairs. Seminaries are academic institutions in which the responsibilities of oversight and leadership belong to administrators and a board of trustees. A pastor is almost always “in the room where it happens.” A professor is in the classroom, not the boardroom. This does not imply a negative answer to my question concerning whether theological faculty can be agents of institutional change, but I am hoping to provoke further exploration of how faculty can practice what we teach.

Recently, I was sharing with my children that one of the first purchases I made when moving to a new city or state was a map. In the not-so-distant past (circa 1995), obtaining a map was of utmost importance for daily travel to visit restaurants, stores, and especially the homes of new friends and colleagues. This need for a map diminished when directions became accessible online, but I still relied upon step-by-step printouts from MapQuest in the days before smartphones. For the entire duration of my children’s lifetimes, which is roughly a decade, the notion of traveling with maps or printouts has been obsolete. Directions to and from anywhere are available at our fingertips. When we are driving to an unfamiliar location, my children are accustomed to instructions emanating from an automated voice on a mobile phone, not the crinkling sounds of a human peering at a paper map. When my children begin driving in a few years, I do not anticipate teaching them to read maps in the same way my parents taught me a generation ago. Rather, I will likely provide reminders about devices being sufficiently charged and issue warnings about the perils of multitasking on the road. Technological developments over the past twenty years have transformed our access to information in a myriad of areas, ranging from shopping for household items to researching academic subjects. This information explosion has altered nearly every facet of our lives, but I wonder if theological education is one arena, at least in some classrooms, where the teaching and learning operates as if we were still in the twentieth century. Although much of my journey as a masters-level seminary student coincided with the advent of the information explosion, my experience entailed a lot of rote memorization with a heavy emphasis on comprehension of content, such as the ability to regurgitate information, often in dreaded blue books, about significant persons, dates, ideas, and movements, without notes. I was also required to analyze this content, but only after I demonstrated an adequate grasp of the foundational data. For example, it was important that I knew from memory the chronological order and specific dates of Martin Luther’s theological writings before I offered commentary on the import, impact, and differences between Luther’s three treatises in 1520. My teaching as an historian of Christianity in the United States has eschewed any requirement of rote memorization. I believe it remains valuable to possess a clear trajectory of religious developments and some historical facts from memory, but I also recognize how the information explosion has made it possible to shift my pedagogical priorities toward method, praxis, and application. Access to historical facts is no longer confined to visiting physical libraries or purchasing books because this information is readily available online. But because history is a contested endeavor pursued from multiple perspectives and sometimes with malicious agendas, my aims are to meticulously cover historiography and trace with my students how history gets made. This includes comparisons of written histories utilizing different sources, such as the different presentations of world missions from the viewpoints of white missionaries from the United States and local Christian leaders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I don’t want my teaching to be “two-thousand and late,” which is a colloquialism derived from a song by the Black Eyes Peas criticizing modes of thinking or doing that are hopelessly outdated. I cannot teach with some of the same approaches as my predecessors and former professors. I am grateful for the ways they sparked my curiosity and stirred my mind, but my students and I are learning today amid an explosion of information, misinformation, and disinformation. A pedagogy centered on lecturing about historical content for three hours every week and then mandating that my students reproduce this content from memory feels as archaic as printing out directions from MapQuest. It is more exciting and effective to interpret, analyze, and apply the historical content together with my students. In studying the history and legacy of U.S. participation in world missions, we are grappling with the pernicious results of colonization and evangelization alongside the courageous and anti-imperial witness of some individual missionaries. After my students graduate, they may not remember when or where exactly these missionaries served overseas, but they can immediately recall this information on their phones and computers. What I want them to remember, as they plan short-term mission trips in their congregations, is our deep engagement with the moral questions and immoral failings of world missions, including Jomo Kenyatta’s observation: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” Because I don’t want my students to repeat the mistakes of the past in their ministries, I must continuously adapt and revise my teaching to create more opportunities to connect historical content with contextual praxis.

How does my teaching connect the learning in my seminary classroom with congregations? As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I am aware that theological education has primarily adopted a trickle-down approach to answering this question—a trickle that flows from professors to students to congregations such that the students are the conduits connecting faculty like me to the many persons and messy challenges in their churches. The traditional method entails professors equipping students to take what they learn and apply it as religious leaders in their churches or church-related agencies. This model relies almost entirely upon students. The professor has one task whereas the student has at least two. Professors are responsible for teaching their subject matter with lectures, discussions, assignments, and exams. Yet, students must first demonstrate comprehension of the subject matter in the given coursework and then discern how to utilize what they have learned in their present and future ministries. The way that professors help to produce congregational transformation and social change in this paradigm is through their students. Professors teach their students well and these students then lead their congregations with the analytical tools in biblical interpretation, pastoral care, and theological ethics they acquired in the classroom. In other words, the instruction of the professors reaches a multitude of congregations through their students. When the semester is complete, it feels like the professor says to the student, “I can’t go with you to your congregation, but you have my lecture notes, required textbooks, and commentary on your research paper. All this, along with the grace of God, will be sufficient for you. And I guess we can stay in touch by email.” When I was a seminary student, the process of synthesizing and applying my theological education to my congregational ministry was entrusted to me to figure out by myself. The faculty at my predominantly white seminary conveyed little interest in my personhood as an Asian American and my ministry in a multigenerational, bilingual, and immigrant congregation. In some courses, I felt as though I left my personhood at the door before walking into the classroom to learn about the supposed superiority of theological frameworks and doctrinal formulations shaped by an assembly of white men in seventeenth-century England. Even in the courses in which my personhood was welcome into the classroom, there were not opportunities to integrate what I was learning there with the congregations I had come from and was headed to after graduation. Like my faculty colleagues in theological education today, I am committed to avoiding the mistakes of my past teachers and forging a better pathway for my students. None of us declare that we are going to do things exactly like they have always been done. And yet, how does our teaching directly and effectively connect the learning in our classrooms with the congregational contexts of our students? In the first few years of my teaching, I devoted time in every class session to prompting students to share about both their congregations and how the subject matter at hand would be received in their congregations. These discussions were insightful, raw, vulnerable, and generative. In recent years, I have made this kind of congregational synthesis and application more explicit in my pedagogy. In addition to discussions, I require students to reflect deeply about their congregational contexts and offer precise analysis connecting our lessons and assigned readings to their contexts, along with the opportunity to express moments of either detachment or potential division. For example, one prompt calls upon students to present a thick description of their past, present, or future congregation. The subsequent prompts ask students to first construct specific ways they would apply what they have learned from the assigned readings and lessons within such a congregation and then identify the promise and peril of their applications to uncover what is at stake for both their leadership and their congregation. My teaching confronts the long histories and ongoing legacies of racial prejudice, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, and LGBTQIA+ exclusion in American Christianity because I believe it is necessary for seminary classrooms to grapple with, rather than gloss over, past sins and present consequences. I am also convinced that my teaching must employ collaborative pedagogical processes in which my students and I work together to develop strategies and refine skills to help foster incremental change in congregations. Some of our congregations are committed to intersectional justice and social change whereas others are fiercely resistant to Christian approaches that disrupt familiar systems and theologies of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, and American exceptionalism. Bringing our congregations into the seminary classroom is therefore a sobering enterprise that is sometimes more dispiriting than inspiring. But too much is at stake to leave our congregations at the door.

For the past twelve months, I have made several pivots in my teaching to meet what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified in his 1967 speech on the war in Vietnam at The Riverside Church in New York City as “the fierce urgency of now.” Dr. King began by affirming the activists from Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam for their moral vision in organizing people together with the following call: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King then connected the organization’s call with his own challenge to act for peace in Vietnam and join in the global struggle against poverty and racism: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” In addition to teaching through a global pandemic, we are tasked with the responsibility to educate toward racial, social, and intersectional justice. We teach in different disciplines and at diverse institutions, but we inhabit the same world. We live in a world where millions marched to protest the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, anti-Black racism, and police brutality in May, June, and July. We all witnessed the violent insurrection and mob violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. More recently, we grieve and rage at the horrific murders of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels across several spas in metro Atlanta on March 16. In meeting “the fierce urgency of now,” my teaching pivots, as an historian of Christianity in the United States, to reveal that the scourge of hate and violence against Black, Indigenous, and other Persons of Color and the sins of white supremacy and misogyny have roots in Christian traditions with long records and unjust legacies of nativism, settler colonialism, sexism, and slavery. I have pivoted to share honestly with students about how my education at a predominantly white and theologically conservative seminary left me unprepared to confront the challenges before us because of several pedagogical imbalances and gaps. The pedagogies of my professors overemphasized the courageous ministries of Christian heroines and heroes who strove to combat injustice and underemphasized the complicity of Christians in perpetuating discrimination and hate against women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons. These pedagogies also elevated white men by treating their perspectives as normative and either erased women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons or reduced the presence of “diverse” voices to recommended (versus required) readings or one isolated lesson under a mishmash of topics. With this pivot, I am implicitly prompting students to assess what they are learning in my classroom as well as in the classrooms of my colleagues at our seminary. Is my pedagogy as a teacher better than what I experienced as a student? Does the teaching and learning at my seminary connect in meaningful ways with the congregations and ministry contexts our students inhabit? In reflecting with my students over the past year, I can offer two insights. The first insight is that pivots to address anti-Black, anti-Asian, and other forms of racial injustice are most helpful when they reinforce and strengthen existing course content. When a course syllabus already contains multiple lessons about communities of color with assigned readings from many scholars of color, pivots to cover urgent events are organically integrated to the foundational structure of the teaching and learning. When a pivot requires the introduction of different lessons or a sudden detour to new assigned readings, it may reveal a larger imbalance or gap in the course syllabus specifically and teaching philosophy more broadly. The second insight is that pivots are generative and effective when they cultivate collaboration in the classroom. In other words, a pivot works best as an invitation to learn together with students rather than an opportunity to be the “sage on the stage” with all the prescriptions to the world’s most pressing problems. One of the most useful prompts in my pivots is to ask students to share what is happening in their families and communities of faith and to discuss together how certain religious beliefs in our diverse Christian traditions have shaped different responses to racial, social, and intersectional justice in the forms of righteous activity, passive inactivity, and hateful violence. Heeding Dr. King’s message, we seek to confront “the fierce urgency of now” through genuine, vulnerable, and collaborative dialogue engaging the challenges, prejudices, and opportunities in our communities of faith.

I am often asked some version of the following question: “How has it been teaching online now?” For those of us who teach at schools with in-person learning, I imagine this is a common query from friends, family members, and colleagues. Initially, I gave answers that highlighted the sensations of newness, uncertainty, and adventure. Over time, I either expanded my answer to share what I was specifically learning or shortened my answer to a succinct summation like “it is going okay,” or “it is what it is,” based on the context of the conversation. For example, I opted for the latter replies, despite their triteness, at the beginning or the end of virtual meetings. What else is there to say when awkwardly waiting for other participants to join a Zoom call? Now, after approximately ten months, my answer is that my transition has not been from in-person to online education. Rather, I am continuing to adapt to pandemic education, which is occurring in an online environment to ensure safe conditions for productive learning. Pandemic education and online education are not synonymous. As someone who is new to fully online instruction, I have certainly benefited from consultations with educational design experts at my seminary and engaging resources in the forms of best practice summaries, advice guides, podcasts, and more. Fortunately, wise counsel and practical guidance are a few clicks away on my web browser. At the same time, I cannot escape the multiple pandemics we are experiencing across public health, systemic racism, white Christian nationalism, and political polarization. When so many people are suffering and dying, and so much hate and falsehood infects our civic life, it feels small and strange to invest my energy in making a weekly online forum more accessible and interactive. Therefore, I find it more generative to center the notion of pandemic education in my planning. As a theological educator, my students and I are constantly engaged in a collaborative learning process that seeks both comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter and concrete inquiry of why the subject matters in everyday congregations and ministry contexts. Teaching amid multiple pandemics has sharpened my focus on cultivating a pedagogical environment that thoroughly and precisely interrogates how the content in the syllabus intersects with what is actually happening in our churches and neighborhoods. One example in my teaching as an historian of American Christianity is to trace with students the legacies of racism, sexism, nativism, and heterosexism within some of our denominations and traditions. If my students and I only study the best of the past, exclusively reading the theologies and testimonies of those striving for justice and equality, we would be ill prepared to face the hard realities and complex challenges of Christian witness and leadership today. It is not enough to express perpetual shock at what actions, whether political insurrections or public health dismissals, bear the name of Jesus Christ. We must be able to identify origins and construct counternarratives. Some counternarratives will be rooted in the past, others will be adapted from the past to meet present conditions, and yet others will emerge as new creations. I have found transitioning to pandemic education also requires a heightened awareness of the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health of my students. One of my teaching principles, which I share freely and often with my students, is to exhibit compassion without compromising academic integrity. I do not hesitate to grant extensions, seek creative solutions to problems with assignments, and offer as much pastoral care as I can. Yet, I also strive to fully honor the contributions of students who meet deadlines with meticulous attention to requirements and expectations. The context of theological education, with its wide diversity of adult learners, some carrying significant congregational, familial, or other personal responsibilities alongside their academic coursework, makes this principle necessary but sometimes complicated to practice. Pandemic education has certainly stretched this principle of practicing compassion without compromise. I have witnessed students produce remarkably brilliant work and experienced invigorating synchronous discussions abounding with insights over the past ten months. Yet, I have also encountered deep pain, loss, doubt, exhaustion, and hopelessness in my classroom. Not only in my interaction with students, but also in myself. In these dark moments, I am especially reminded that pandemic education is not the same as online education.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen finds several problems with how slavery is taught in high schools across the United States. Loewen observes that white Americans remain perpetually startled at slavery. Even many years after high school, white adults are aghast when confronted with the horror and pervasiveness of slavery in the American past. It seems they did not learn, or have quickly forgotten, that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were among the multitudes of white Americans who owned enslaved Black Americans as their human property. Loewen surmises the ignorance of white Americans on slavery can be traced back to high school classrooms. History textbooks incorrectly present slavery as an uncaused tragedy and minimize white complicity in the enslavement of Black Americans. Students are meant to feel sadness for the plight of four million enslaved Black persons in 1860, but not anger toward the approximately 390,000 white slaveowners because these slaveowners, and their unjust actions, do not appear in the pages of the textbooks. Since Loewen published his book in 1995, there have been strides to improve the teaching and learning on slavery. One notable example is the introduction of lesson plans based on the 1619 Project from the New York Times in middle and high school classrooms in Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Yet, the backlash against a more comprehensive curriculum on slavery, which is most visible in President Trump’s recent call for a “1776 Commission” to directly challenge the pedagogy of the 1619 Project, reveals the need for an assessment of how theological schools are engaging these educational debates around slavery. As I reflect on my experiences as a theological student and educator, I am concerned seminary classrooms are also failing to provide instruction that properly captures the totality of white Christian involvement in slavery and anti-Black racism. The perpetual shock in some white congregations over some basic historical facts about slavery is alarming. One pernicious myth I encounter is the notion that most white Christians in the antebellum period were abolitionists pushing for the immediate emancipation of enslaved Black persons. This is simply not true. Very few white Christians held this position and there was little support for immediate emancipation in the Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Presbyterian denominations. Many white Christians in the southern states defended slavery so vigorously that some Black and white abolitionists identified white churches as the most impenetrable strongholds against their cause. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a white Presbyterian pastor in New Orleans who previously taught at Columbia Theological Seminary, preached in 1860 that slavery was a providential trust that whites must preserve and perpetuate because the natural condition of Black Americans was servitude. Palmer mocked northern abolitionists for thinking that Black Americans could survive alongside whites as equals. Palmer was neither reviled nor rebuked for his white supremacist views. Rather, he was widely celebrated and elected to serve as the first moderator of the newly formed Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America in 1861. Black Christians like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth emphasized the eradication of anti-Black racism as an essential component in their abolitionism. But even white Christian abolitionists in the northern states fell woefully short in their advocacy against anti-Black racism. Archibald Alexander, a white theologian and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, endorsed the colonization movement to send free Black Americans to Liberia, because he felt the discriminatory contempt white Christians held against Black Americans was too insurmountable to overcome. In 1846, Alexander wrote that anti-Black racism was wrong and unreasonable, but he did not commit to working toward racial equality. Instead of teaching white Christians to repent of their racism and white supremacy, Alexander preferred Black Americans, once emancipated, leave the country and find another home where their skin color would not be despised. Seminary classrooms may not treat slavery as an uncaused tragedy, but I believe some of our teaching and learning in theological education also minimizes white Christian complicity and misdirects the anger students should feel about slavery. Rather than fully grappling with the histories and legacies of economic exploitation, sexual violence, and virulent anti-Black racism perpetrated by white American Christians, students are left with a neatly packaged lesson on slavery centered on the dangers of deficient biblical interpretation and proof-texting the Scriptures. Such instruction misses a crucial point the abolitionists themselves made, which was to identify and confront the anti-Black racism of white Christians. In 1845, Frederick Douglass differentiated between genuine Christianity and the “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” in his autobiographical narrative. In the ongoing pursuit of racial justice today, our seminary classrooms must also engage in teaching a more complete history of slavery and white American Christianity.

Jennifer A. Lindholm begins her work on the spiritual proclivities and religious perspectives of college faculty in the United States by noting that they teach in a “spiritually engaged nation” where nine in ten adults profess belief in God or a Universal Spirit (1). Religion is ubiquitous in American life – 80 percent of Americans consider religion as important to their lives – but it is also a complex and contested matter that fosters community and generates conflict across the country.  Although college students are no different than other Americans in their spiritual and religious seeking – three in four college students are “searching for meaning and purpose in life” – Lindholm argues that they are not receiving sufficient instruction and mentoring from their professors. Two-thirds of college students report that their professors “never” encourage discussion of religious topics and nearly half are dissatisfied with how their college experience has provided opportunities for spiritual reflection (212). Yet Lindholm astutely demonstrates that college professors are no less spiritual or religious than their students. Drawing upon a 2012 survey of 8,447 tenured and tenure-track faculty from 264 diverse colleges and universities, the author finds that 19 percent of faculty self-identify as “not spiritual and not religious,” a figure only four percentage points higher than the general American population (50). Students are still disappointed in the lack of religious dialogue on their campuses in part because their professors experience competing tensions in their own attempts to incorporate their spiritual and religious lives into their work.  In the second chapter, Lindholm uses faculty perspectives to provide helpful delineations of what is meant by self-identifying as “spiritual” or “religious.” She interprets her data in the following five chapters to illumine the substantial challenges faculty face when seeking to connect the spiritual and religious dimensions of their lives in the academy. Although faculty who are able to freely and openly express their spirituality are “more likely to view themselves as being authentic in their work and personal lives,” respondents often stated that they  encountered overt hostility in the form of religious discrimination from colleagues and stumbled over more subtle obstacles like institutional expectations to be available to work on weekends (ix). One of the many fascinating points in Lindholm’s study shows how faculty from all faiths and in every kind of educational institution – public, private, and religious – experience these tensions. Evangelical faculty at public schools reported the highest levels of occasional discrimination (39 percent), but faculty from other religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Islam, and progressive Christianity, explained how they felt no less like outsiders at work (126-146).  Lindholm accomplishes her primary purpose successfully and presents a rich, data-based account of the spiritual and religious lives of college faculty in the United States, and also articulates several cogent and compelling prescriptions to create “valued space for the spirit within the academy” so professors and their students can more fully connect higher education with human wholeness (216). Theological educators will also benefit from this book. Lindholm’s call for greater consideration of spiritual and religious diversity within the scope of collegiate intercultural development applies equally to seminaries with student bodies that are increasingly becoming more ethnically, racially, and theologically diverse.