Seabury-Western Theological Seminary : 2000 Seminar

The Feast of the Presentation:
Snapshot of a Seminary in Transition

Seabury-Western is an institution in the process of rebirth, to use a term from the life-cycle of congregations. Our present dean and president has been here only a year and a half. The teaching member of the faculty with the longest tenure (24 years) left to take another position this past summer. The next most senior teaching member of the faculty has been here for 14 years. This academic year, 4 out of 13 faculty are new. In October 1999, under the leadership of the dean and president, the following new mission statement was adopted by the Board of Trustees: "Seabury-Western Theological Seminary is called to develop empowered and empowering leaders for Christ's Church and God's mission in the world through: practices of learning, worship, and community life which transform; distinctive integration of theory and practice with a particular focus on congregational vitality; and learning and renewal that sustain leaders throughout their lives and ministries." In September 1999, the faculty decided to embark upon a major revision of the curriculum. Not only has it been 10 years since this work has been done, but also each of the members of the Association of Chicago Theological Schools has been asked to consider moving to a 4-1-4 academic calendar, which for Seabury-Western would necessitate revising its curriculum.

The new mission statement talks of "practices of learning, worship, and community life which transform." This reflects our sense that curriculum is more than a set of courses; teaching and learning occur in the context of worship and community. All of these are essential elements of the M.Div. curriculum. As faculty go about the work of revising the curriculum, we are attending to the changing American context of our mission, and to the changing racial and ethnic demographics in North America.

It is in this context of a seminary in change that, on February 4, 1999, an African- American student gave a sermon in his preaching class in which he expressed his pain at what had happened at a chapel service. The class was taken aback. Two days earlier the Feast of the Presentation had been dutifully celebrated with incense and with a fully sung service, but a person of color was not represented among the six liturgical ministers. The seminary community was caught up in a series of reactions to this oversight. The student representative to the faculty made this part of his report at the next regular faculty meeting. The Worship Committee discussed this incident at several of its meetings during the balance of the winter term. Students of color wrote a letter to the community in which they expressed their pain.

The seminary community was not prepared for this incident. Faculty and students believed they had made considerable progress in the past two years in addressing issues raised by an increasingly diverse student body. Thanks to the recruiting efforts of the Director of Academic Affairs in September 1997, 9 out of 57 students were persons of color. For decades the seminary had only an occasional student of color in any given year, but by the mid-‘90s there was a growing awareness that the seminary needed to be more intentional in recruiting students of color and in hiring at least one faculty person of color. In 1995, under the leadership of two students, the Committee to End Racism was formed. This committee, whose members included six students, the Academic Dean and the Dean, began its work by sponsoring a community-wide prejudice reduction workshop in the fall and by showing the videotape, "The Color of Fear," to small groups of students, faculty, and staff. Between May 1998 and January 1999, a faculty member and a student completed the ten-day basic training in anti-racism led by Crossroads Ministry. In its first annual report, the Committee to End Racism made recommendations to the administration and to the faculty, one of which was that faculty were asked to make a commitment to include the experience of minorities and people of color in their courses.

At the September 1997 Faculty Conference, the faculty, realizing that there would be nine students of color, spent over an hour discussing ways it would address cross-cultural issues. The Director of Academic Affairs and an adjunct instructor, who himself was an Anglican priest from Kenya and who had done considerable work on the bi-cultural personality, discussed cultural differences that inhibit minority students from the freedom of full participation in discussions and introduced the faculty to mutual invitation, a method of conducting discussions. During the 1997/1998 academic year, an African-American alumnus served as a mentor for the students of color and frequently met with them at their weekly evening meetings. Faculty made progress in incorporating the experience of minorities and people of color in their courses. A community-wide workshop on racism was held during this academic year and the succeeding one.

Despite all these efforts, on February 2, 1999, a person of color was not represented among the ministers at the Feast of the Presentation, a major liturgical event in the church year. Had the seminary community become too comfortable by the progress we had made? It is true that, as one faculty member said, because the seminary has limited financial and human resources we are always scrambling just to keep up with our daily responsibilities. The celebrant was up until two o'clock the morning before the service in order to rehearse the elaborate sections she was to sing from the Supplemental Liturgical Texts. Service planning was done at the last minute with only a brief rehearsal. The Professor of Liturgics was on sabbatical leave that quarter. Ironically, the preacher and a final-year student had completed the last five days of the ten-day anti-racism Crossroad Ministry training only two days before the service. The work of processing the "fall-out" from this incident was hindered by the lack of time for any extended faculty discussion. Faculty is stretched as they work in such a small institution, e.g. faculty do not have sufficient administrative support and, as a result, do almost all of their own correspondence.

This incident throws a bright light on a seminary community in transition as its seeks to shape its curriculum and worship in light of a new mission statement. Seabury-Western had been making progress in addressing cultural diversity and racism in its courses, community, and worship before the incident. Two persons of color joined the faculty this past fall, one intentionally recruited to enhance the ethnic diversity of the faculty. Yet the conflict reminded us of how difficult it is to enact consistently our values of diversity and inclusiveness, even in a context as central as our worship. We view the work of dismantling racism as an important dimension of the church's mission in our contemporary North American context, and we expect that we will continue to learn how to do this in our own institutional life. The Anti-Racism Committee now has 25 members, including 5 faculty. Students of color are continuing to meet, and the Recruitment Committee, because of the small number of persons of color being raised up for ordination by their communities and supported by their dioceses, has been in communication with bishops in order to share our concerns.

The challenge posed by our desire for a diverse institution is a significant aspect of our work of designing a new curriculum. This academic year the faculty discussed David Bosch's book, Transforming Mission, and in light of our conversation, held a brainstorming session on characteristics of a new curriculum. These characteristics include a mission-oriented focus with clarity about what constitutes the mission of the church; attention to the categories of contextualization; a theology informed by mission; engagement of diversity in the classroom; and the development of skills in a variety of congregational contexts. The faculty, divided by clusters or fields, are making presentations on the implications of these characteristics for their own clusters. The faculty do not know now what the final design of a new curriculum will look like, but because we are committed to our mission as expressed in the new mission statement, we bring energy to this work.