Project Report

I. Issue and Context

The issue in teaching and learning which Virginia Theological Seminary brought to the Lexington Seminar meeting in Maine in June, 1999 was the situation of international students—degree and diploma candidates coming from countries outside of North America—at our seminary. The issue remains alive, almost three years later, and participation in the Lexington Seminar process and the program its grant has helped to fund has enhanced our work with it. The issue has many aspects, radiating out from our central mission of formation of persons for leadership in ministry. How do the international and domestic sides of our community equip each other for the work of ministry, and how is that mutuality frustrated? How are we called by God to change, as we seek to educate international students in ways that will serve the Church's mission? How may cross-cultural encounter and mission shape formation for ministry in this seminary?

Background: the Significance of International Students at VTS.

International students make up about six percent of the student body at VTS, and their problems might thus seem marginal. In fact they are important to VTS' mission, for several reasons. First, an important aspect of VTS' ethos is global: above the chapel altar is lettered, "Go Ye Into All the World and Preach the Gospel." That expresses the historic and present importance of global involvement in the interests of the Gospel to this community. The Board of Trustees' 1998 Strategic Plan charged the Seminary to expand its international initiatives. The Seminary is already a center for occasional international meetings among leaders of the international Anglican Communion. Its Bishop Payne Library is a growing repository for Anglican materials from dioceses around the world. International students who receive degrees or diplomas from VTS are often elected bishop or advanced to other positions of leadership when they return home, so that its alumni/ae have disproportionate influence in the Anglican Communion worldwide. The international students presently studying at VTS thus have a larger role—substantive, symbolic, and representative—in the Seminary's ethos than their numbers might suggest. Second, the issues facing international students have analogues among domestic students. VTS has an increasing focus on the varied cultural contexts of ministry, and on equipping students to cross cultural boundaries in order to convey the Gospel to all persons and, in the process, to learn more fully themselves what the Gospel is. Third, the experience of being uprooted from a family, country, church, and culture and being sent to study in a strange language in a strange place is common to almost all of our students, although it is more radical for international students. Their intense culture shock and communication difficulties they face in coming to America bring into focus the less radical shock and difficulty encountered by the majority of our students, who do not generally arrive at seminary speaking the language of pericopes, eschatology, or parish genomes. Fourth, the cost in money and staff / community time of maintaining our international students is very great, substantially greater than for domestic students. That can pose difficult questions of stewardship, particularly in a church which is currently identifying a shortage of clergy domestically. Fifth, hospitality is a basic Judaic, Islamic and Christian virtue; one of VTS's more prized media of evangelism is being hospitable to strangers. Success or failure in welcoming these obvious strangers has wide resonance in the community's life. When particular events brought these issues suddenly to the fore in 1998 and 1999, there was a certain level of conflict in the faculty and student body, and serious questions were addressed to the Seminary by individual alumni/ae.

The Present Status of the Issue in the VTS Faculty.

Part of the outcome of The Lexington Seminar experience was to assemble a variety of policies relating to international students in written form (to accompany our case study as appendices), parts of which had been oral tradition, some of which were not widely known, or poorly understood, or well understood but opposed by individual faculty members or students. That body of information, now laid out in writing, continues to raise as well as to answer questions. The intra-faculty discussions which the Lexington Seminar generated has led to significantly wider dialogue and some changes. For example, faculty reconsideration of our policy not to admit international students directly to degree programs has led to significant alteration in our admissions patterns. Particular events continue to generate concern about the situation of international students. Those questions and issues include: direct admission to degree programs, with or without a probationary period; assessment of language skill and of the quality and character of prior study; financial provision for students' families; the relevance and usefulness of our present diploma and degree programs for the ministries international students will undertake; unclarity about the personal situation of some students; differing standards of doctrine, ecclesial life, piety, and practice among Anglican Churches in the global Communion. This year the faculty has implemented a comprehensive revision of the M. Div. and M.T.S. curricula. While the three years of intense conversation leading to those changes precluded sustained consultation directly on international students, it raised again and again the questions of cross-cultural education, admissions standards, teaching methods, degree program objectives, and the nature of community life that emerged in our case study and subsequent Lexington Seminar discussions.

II. Project Design

The project we undertook with partial funding from the Lexington Seminar was for VTS faculty members to make visits to institutions for theological education and ecclesiastical judicatories in other parts of the world, with the purpose of exploring specific areas of cooperation in theological education. We intend that every member of the faculty who wishes to make such a trip be able to do so, over the next several years, and that all be encouraged to participate. Thus members of our faculty have begun to travel to such institutions in delegations, with diverse faculty representation. The visits are planned with care. Discerning which institutions to visit, devising specific questions and goals for each visit, choosing the participants, scheduling the travel, providing for reports, and organizing committee work and faculty discussion for the outcome of the visit, are all important.

Because of our intensive work on curriculum revision, the Lexington Seminar permitted the Seminary to delay implementation of this program for a year. That delay, combined with the ongoing nature of the program, means that it is still in its early stages and that our report is still unavoidably preliminary.

Because our goal of sending all faculty members could not be met by the funds offered by The Lexington Seminar alone, we applied for and were granted additional funds from the Seminary Consultation on Mission and the Evangelical Education Society, which support formation for mission in the Episcopal Church.

In general, the goals of the visits are:

To assess the kinds of programs and levels of work represented on international students' transcripts and records, in order better to evaluate their previous academic work. Often we have a very unclear grasp about what a specific diploma or degree program in an applicant's file actually represents: the perspectives shaping the design of the program, the nature of teaching and learning, what sort of assessments of work are made and on what basis, the texts used, what sort of examinations or papers are produced, etc. The diversity of theological institutions sending us international students, and the unclarity about what their programs actually accomplish, has kept us from admitting international students directly to our degree programs, and sometimes leaves us requiring them to repeat work they have already done—or failing to require them to do work they have actually not done or done in modes too widely different from ours. Visits that lead to regular institutional and personal links should make our assessments more reliable.
To learn about the particular shape of mission of the churches in which our graduates will serve. In designing our program requirements, and in teaching and relating to international students, we do not always have a clear understanding of the relation of their study at VTS to the specific mission needs of their churches. Direct contact and consultation should help clarify what we can teach that will help their churches, and what they can teach that will help our churches.
To assess the possibility of cooperative relationships. We receive many proposals for partnership from institutions of theological education around the world. Visits would permit us to assess what kinds of theological education and formation we can best provide, what they can best provide, and what sorts of exchanges or mutual support would do most to foster our missions. What do we stand to learn from them, and they from us? There are many concrete questions that can be answered. For example, should we ever provide first-degree theological education for international students? Are faculty or student exchanges really possible, and would they be helpful?
To learn more about the cultures and religious environments in which our international students live. Many of us are inadequately informed about the worlds from which our international students come and to which they return. Visits can begin to inform us better, and improve our teaching, cross-cultural programs, and community support.
Cross-cultural and global theological mission is critical to the future of the church, given the increased mobility and communication throughout the world, and the development of large linguistic, ethnic, and cultural communities throughout the United States. These visits are meant to foster a wider conceptual and strategic view of mission and ministry in this community.

Before the visits actually got underway formally in 2001, they had already begun in a limited way with individual faculty corresponding with and visiting to bishops and theological institutions abroad on a personal basis. We also had been visited by representatives of several institutions that were proposing a variety of relationships to us.

So far, two visits are complete:

Uganda in June 10-26, 2001: Margaret McNaughton-Ayers, Stephen Edmondson
(Sites: Bishop Barham Divinity College, Kigezi [Jovahn Turyamureeba]; Central Buganda University, Kasaka [George Sinabulya]; Uganda Christian University, Mukono [Stephen Noll])
Central America and Caribbean institutions in January 9 - January 18, 2002: Richard Jones, Katherine Grieb (Sites: Centro de Estudios Teologicos, Dominican Republic [Napoleon Brito]; Centro Anglicano de Estudios Teológicos Superiores, El Salvador [Boanerges Rosa])

We are presently planning to send another delegation to East Africa and possibly another to Asia in the near future.

The program is thus underway. Only four members of the faculty have yet participated. Full reports to the faculty have been made by those who took the initial trips. There are signs that we are making some progress toward our goals, but we are still too early in our implementation to make confident assessments.

III. Resources Used

A Lexington Seminar committee of faculty members, supported by the Office of Academic Affairs, planned the visits which have occurred thus far. The committee is diverse in its views, but includes several of the faculty members who are best-informed and most experienced in relation to international students. The members' personal contacts in the Anglican Communion have provided the chief outside sources of advice for whom to visit, when, and how. We have not used other outside resource people.

IV. Project Results

The project is too early in its implementation to assess results. The feedback from the faculty members who visited institutions in Uganda and Central America/Caribbean has initially clarified some issues for them.

They have a clearer grasp of the nature and status of degree program accreditation in some institutions, and the relation of different kinds of institutions to each other and the Anglican church. Clearly some university programs in East Africa are well organized and funded, reflecting stable institutions where the curriculum is reliable. Other programs seem to be the personal vision of a bishop without substantial institutional embodiment, or to reflect patterns of learning which vary so widely from Western ones that their certificates do not mean what they seem to mean to Western evaluators. For example, one East African university which the team visited meets for classes one or two days per week whenever a teacher happens to be present.
One member came back with a considerable amount of excitement about the value which Ugandan pastors saw in learning critical biblical studies. He also had a clearer sense of the modes of education often employed in East African theological colleges, their use of material resources such as books, copying machines, etc., and the differing forms of community life in which education occurs. Learning by rote in the absence of books, repeating the views of professors who speak with the authority of elders, leaves students unprepared for the demand for individualist critical thought and independent theological inquiry which much of our teaching and learning presumes. It has been proposed that our program of supporting the English writing skills of international students be supplemented by a wider program of introduction to critical thinking and writing.
Cultural differences in education included some relating to gender, both in Africa and in Central America. Few seminarians in one Latin American institution had ever encountered a learned woman professor/priest, and were being taught approaches to gender differentiation in a theology class which would have excluded that possibility. If those seminarians came as international students for further study at VTS, they would encounter a faculty and student body at VTS in which women are fully represented.
The lack of theological materials from the Anglican tradition translated into Spanish (or Swahili) was marked, and the consequences for the materials available for the theological curriculum were marked as well. Translation could become a major faculty project.

Fuller reports and discussions are underway. A deeper and better informed faculty discussion of the issues of the education of international students, and a better grasp of some issues in cross-cultural education in general, clearly will be a result of the project. So far our experience is consistent with achieving our goals, but it is still too early to offer fuller assessment.

V. Continuation of the Goals

Some concrete changes have occurred in our patterns of teaching and learning in part as a response to the Lexington Seminar experience and the project it has helped to fund.

We created a January Term in which cross-cultural immersion experiences, as well as other intensive learning experiences, could be scheduled. It was in that context that the faculty trip to Central America/ Caribbean occurred, but also an immersion trip to churches in Myanmar (Burma). Plans have begun to send a group to a Caribbean seminary in the next January Term. Learning to see and think theologically in a new cultural framework is becoming a crucial part of formation for ministry.
A faculty member who was on the Lexington team has designed a course on the epistle of James, focusing on wealth and poverty. After an initial study of James on campus, using all available scholarly resources, the group will travel to Haiti and then study James again in that cultural context. This is a new way for us to teach and learn.
We have built up links with graduates of the Seminary who are serving in theological institutions in the third world. Among many examples, there were extensive interviews and correspondence with an alumni American couple who have been teachers in East African theological colleges over the last three years, and again with a graduate recently consecrated bishop after a long term as a leader and professor in an East African theological college, trying to get a more realistic sense of what that education is like, how we can best support it, and what we can expect to learn from it.
As a result of the Dominican Republic and Central American visits, invitations to apply for admission to the VTS D.Min. program have been sent to 7 theological educators working in those two countries. Invitations have been received for VTS faculty to offer short courses and for VTS seminarians to audit classes or take part in a supervised parish internship in those two countries.
We are conferring on how to involve VTS alumni/ae and others who visit or minister internationally in the admissions process for students wishing to come to VTS.
We are examining means of supporting internationals students who find that our courses require a different sort of reading and writing than the pedagogies they are familiar with. For example, it has been proposed that we expand our program of employing experienced writing tutors, so that skills beyond linguistic ones can be taught.

Ongoing stimulus for change should be produced by wider faculty involvement in international programs brought about by the project and consequent enrichment of faculty culture, by the institutional and personal links the project forges, and by further curricular changes inspired by the project.

VI. Budget

Administrative and faculty time and resources is being taken out of present staff resources and budget. Fees for consultants for planning and evaluation have not been judged necessary as yet, but will be funded from our own resources and from funding sought from other sources if needed.

We expect initially to fund visits by at least 12 faculty members to sites for theological education globally (e.g. Africa, Latin America, Asia, India—specific sites to be determined by the committee), in groups of two to four.

$4,000/person/trip for 12 persons = $48,000. The per-person figure is a general one, based on our experience with sending students and faculty members to Kenya, Tanzania, West Africa, and South Africa for immersion experiences. It includes air fare, local travel, meals, and accommodation. It is obviously vulnerable to varied local conditions, changing costs of air travel, etc., which is why greater precision in budgeting is not possible at this point.

The Lexington Seminar Implementation Grant of $15,000 has served as seed money for this project. We have succeeded in obtaining additional funds from the Seminary Consultation on Mission, the Center for Anglican Communion Studies, and the Evangelical Education Society. As necessary, we shall seek other grants.

Accounting for the funds is the responsibility of the regular financial administration of the Seminary; reporting is the responsibility of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in consultation with the Committee for International and Cross-Cultural Programs.

Virginia Theological Seminary : 1999 Seminar