Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary : 2000 Seminar

December 1, 2002

 

3003 Benham Avenue, Elkhart, Indiana 46517–1999

 

Background

Six faculty members from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary participated in the 1999–2000 cycle of the Lexington Seminar for Teaching and Learning. The Lexington Seminar event in Maine in June of 2000 was a welcome opportunity for the AMBS team to have collegial conversation with peers from four other seminaries. It was stimulating and helpful to immerse ourselves in discussion about how AMBS teaches “the tradition” (Anabaptist/Mennonite theological and ethical perspectives) in an increasingly diverse denomination and diverse student body.

 

The June 2002 Lexington Seminar event in Maine provided the three-member AMBS team with an opportunity to give an interim report on our project and to receive counsel from those present about how and where we might adjust our approach in the remaining year.

 

AMBS teaching/learning issues originally came into focus through an AMBS narrative developed for the 2000 seminar in Maine, a piece entitled “Where Angel(ic Doctor)s Fear to Tread: Interested Parties in Sacred Space (/Turf).” Behind the whimsical title lay a broad set of issues about what it meant to be a Mennonite seminary, as well as differing convictions about what kind of training best prepares our students for service to the church.

 

During an August 2000 workshop following the event in Maine, the entire AMBS faculty interacted vigorously with the AMBS narrative. We grappled with critical issues and began a systematic, two-year process of reflection and self-assessment on how we teach “the tradition.” AMBS is grateful to have received the follow-up implementation grant of $15,000 needed to pursue further work on teaching and learning agenda.

 

 

The TEACHING/LEARNING ISSUE

 

Early in the process, the AMBS Lexington Seminar team identified several teaching and learning issues inherent in the narrative we drafted for the June 2000 seminar. Prominent among these was the question of how a seminary with increasing diversity in its student body could be engaged in both catechism and critical reflection:

 

How does a seminary teach “the tradition” and form students in it when students are at such diverse places with respect to “the tradition”? How do we teach, in the same classroom, students who first have to learn “the tradition” and those who want and need to learn how to handle “the tradition” critically or how to practice “the tradition”? And how do we deal with other kinds of diversity in our classrooms, especially that created by the presence of many international students and students from a variety of denominational and theological backgrounds? (from “Where Angel[ic Doctor]s Fear to Tread”)

“The tradition” in our case is Anabaptist theology and praxis as developed in the Mennonite denomination, particularly in North America. Mennonite theology and practice have issued in distinctive approaches to ethics, hermeneutics, social action, worship, ecclesiology, Christology, and missiology—to name just a few areas pertinent to seminary education.

 

Three factors made it urgent for AMBS to examine how “the tradition” is taught:

 

1)      After ten years of processing, the two main groups of Mennonites in North America (Mennonite Church, and General Conference Mennonite Church) formally merged into one denomination in 2001. As a Mennonite people we are discovering that the two groups, with their distinct historical trajectories, have differences in ecclesiology, leadership style, and worship. AMBS is in a key position to help shape an integrated theology for the new church (or, at minimum, to foster understanding and appreciation of our respective traditions).

2)      Mennonites increasingly are in conversation with Christians of other denominations. In addition, more Mennonites are attending seminaries of other denominations and AMBS has more students from other traditions. This exchange has been rich and good, but it could minimize some of the distinctive strengths and contributions of Mennonite theology in North American (and elsewhere in the world). It is imperative that faculty at AMBS continue to reflect critically on the vibrant center of Anabaptist theology and that we own and teach that in ways that are life-giving to Mennonite students, to students of other denominations, and to the wider church.

3)      AMBS recently undertook a comprehensive review of its program in mission and evangelism and its place in the larger curriculum. An important issue in the evaluation of our mission and evangelism program was how we teach and advocate the tradition in an environment that is boldly confessional while ecumenically respectful and self-critical.

The Issue of Faculty Peer Relationships

In the early 1990s, AMBS completed a major curriculum revision. That process generated considerable conflict and pain within the faculty (hence the reference to “where angels fear to tread” and the allusion to “turf” in the title of our Lexington Seminar narrative). In the last curriculum revision there were hard-fought struggles over which courses should be required for the MDiv degree (and, some faculty felt, which departments or courses were most valued).

There has been much healing and recovery among faculty members in the last five years, but scars and memories remain. The series of “Lexington Seminar Conversations” in which we have engaged over the last two years has brought additional healing to our faculty on this score. Our students and we as faculty are benefiting from a greater sense of professional collegiality among faculty—one of the central goals of the project (see below). We discovered in the process that our faculty meetings have focused so much on pressing administrative agenda that we were not discussing the larger, crucial issues that faculties must be addressing, such as how theological education happens at AMBS.

When we applied for the project grant, we saw the Lexington Seminar project as a two-year effort that would:

1.       Build on the momentum of positive faculty relationships that has developed over the past years by providing regular settings in which faculty members are thinking together about teaching and learning issues.

2.       Increase respect and appreciation across departmental lines as faculty members came to understand more about how their colleagues teach “the tradition.”

3.       Help faculty associate curriculum review with the positive working relationships, experiences, fun, and mutual respect encouraged by the Lexington Seminar Project.

4.       Help faculty continue to bond by creating settings in which faculty relax, have fun, and enjoy each other.

 

WHAT WE HOPED TO ACCOMPLISH

The first goal of the proposed AMBS Lexington Seminar project was to systematically engage the faculty over a two-year period in critical reflection on how we define, nurture, and teach core concepts of Anabaptist/Mennonite theology. We said that will have succeeded in this objective if, at the end of the two-year process:

·          Every faculty member can articulate, in some detail, what difference it makes to understand and teach his or her discipline at a Mennonite seminary.

·          Every faculty member is able to give at least a brief summary statement of how each major discipline is taught from an Anabaptist/Mennonite perspective at AMBS.

·          Every AMBS administrator and board member is able to articulate elements of what AMBS shares with other seminary programs in its approach to theological education as well as how and why theological training is different at AMBS.

·          Every faculty member can articulate his or her contribution to the teaching of mission and evangelism in such a way that the tradition is articulated clearly and confessionally in the context of ecumenical respect and dialogue.

·          Every course includes some component that reflects the professor’s commitment to reflect critically on why or how this course is taught differently because it is offered at a Mennonite seminary.

·          Every MDiv student can articulate in his or her senior Integration Paper and senior interview either how Anabaptist/Mennonite theology impinges upon the topic the student has chosen to address or how their own denominational heritage impinges upon the topic they have chosen to address in their Integration Paper.

·          AMBS faculty members write a set of articles, used by the wider church, on “teaching the tradition” for the new publication Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology (a periodical co-sponsored with Canadian Mennonite Bible College, and published semi-annually for pastors and others in church leadership), subject to approval by the editors.

·          Graduating students, in their exit interview or survey, indicate a measurable increase in understanding of the relevance of Anabaptist/Mennonite theology (or their own theological heritage) for ministry and scholarship.

The second goal of the proposed AMBS Lexington Seminar project is to strengthen morale and commitment to shared mission among faculty members whose schedules and distinct academic disciplines make corporate theological reflection difficult, and who still carry pain from the last curriculum revision.

From a variety of angles, we largely met these two over-arching goals as a result of this project, as detailed below, even though we did not succeed in meeting some of the specific outcomes we had originally identified as signs of that accomplishment. More specifically, although most of the faculty report real gains in faculty camaraderie and good will, we have not come to the place where we feel good about any particular sixty-word summary of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition that is serviceable for the entire seminary or for each individual professor in it. We also have some differences of opinion about whether it would be good to develop such a summary.

 

 

IMPLEMENTATION PLAN AND SCHEDULE

We proposed a two-year cycle of faculty discussion, reflection, and decision-making that will make us more effective in teaching “the tradition.” Major components of this process were as follows:

August 27–30, 2001

We launched the AMBS Lexington Seminar during a three-day faculty retreat in Chicago. Our outside resource person did a masterful job as consultant for the first two days. Each faculty member presented a brief statement on “how being Anabaptist/Mennonite does or does not influence teaching/learning in my discipline.” Dr. Keifert helped us focus questions and projects for the next two years. He also observed faculty dynamics and identified some “elephants” in the room for us.

 

Getting to Chicago in the first place was itself an adventure. We traveled by car to South Bend, where we picked up the South Shore Railroad. Shortly after embarking, the train was delayed for 30 minutes while a derailed freight train some miles ahead was cleared off the track. Then in Gary we were stopped for a couple more hours while a downed power line ahead of us (the one that powered the train) was repaired. We had plenty of time to talk and visit. We arrived in Chicago several hours late, so we simply dropped our bags off at the hotel and proceeded to the subway to get to the restaurant where we had reservations. We had problems with the subway tokens, but eventually all got on the right train. When we emerged from the subway, we were surprised to see that it was raining! So the faculty, administration, and spouses from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary ran the last two blocks to the restaurant in the rain, arriving late, tired, hungry, and sopping wet around 9:30 p.m. for our evening dinner. But it was a great dinner! The food and conversations were good and we quickly regained our perspective and good humor!

 

This four-day event was very significant one for us as a faculty—an event we simply would not have had the opportunity to have without the grant from Lexington Seminar. In preparation for this faculty workshop/retreat, each faculty member wrote a two-page paper on how he or she teaches the tradition at AMBS. We spent each morning and one afternoon discussing our papers and how we teach at AMBS and exploring difficulties we have experienced in communication (group dynamics).

 

We invited and funded spouses to accompany faculty for the three days in Chicago for two reasons. First, a key purpose of the project was to build a greater sense of community, which we considered more likely to happen if spouses are supportive and involved at appropriate times. Second, we included recreational activities in Chicago—activities our fac­ulty entered into with greater energy in the company of their spouses. Spouses did not take part in the main discussion times related to teaching/learning, but participated in worship and recreation.

 

In the afternoons we had fun as a faculty, along with our spouses. We spent one afternoon and evening in small, informal groups, some going to dinner and theater, some to a concert, and others doing different things. One evening we went to a Cubs game as a faculty, via the El. Most meals we ate together as a faculty with spouses. Every morning we began with worship, singing together and sharing devotions. All of these times together—both the “fun” times and the times of worship and prayer—were positive, community-building events for us.

 

When our resource person left us a day before we needed to return to Elkhart, we spent a bit of time assessing what we accomplished during the week and thinking about what we did not accomplish, but plan to attend to in the coming years. Out of this exercise came a list of issues that we hoped would not get lost simply because the workshop itself was over:

·         Build community and a shared identity as a faculty, both internally and externally.

·         Consider restructuring to reduce departmental competition.

·         Develop a shared scholarship and sustain a shared conversation as a faculty.

·         Attend to the missional church agenda.

·         Attend to pedagogy: review our curriculum and individual syllabi, identify “minimum know­ledge,” “pass-on-able habits.”

·         Gain nonproductive time for the leisure essential to schola.

·         Identify a shared post-critical Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition and vision.

 

September 11, 2001

The tragic terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001, gave us reason to pause and reflect on the big questions of life, including the purposes of theological education in this world. Indeed, they impelled such reflection. Although we initially were shocked and nearly incapacitated by the events, we hastily planned a special chapel service for that morning at 11:45. As we engaged in several informal conversations over the next days about how we as pacifists might respond appropriately and helpfully to the horrible events that led to thousands of deaths, several ideas emerged.

 

On September 25, 2001, the AMBS community pounded 6,800 plain wooden stakes in the field next to the chapel, grieving the lives lost in the September 11 attacks. (That was the number of deaths that was being projected at that time.) We pounded these stakes in the form of an open cross, with space to walk among the stakes on both the vertical and horizontal axes—for mourning, contemplation, and prayer. Then on November 6, we gathered again to replace the stakes with crocus bulbs. In the Spring of 2002, we gathered in the same area to again ponder, pray, and express our confession of faith, symbolized by the crocuses growing in the field next to our chapel. Each year as these flowers bloom, they will remind us of God’s gift of hope for new life and our call to be peacemakers.

 

As our minister of community life commented, “The power of Christ’s resurrection is greater than the forces of violence and death. These crocuses symbolize our hope for peace and new life to emerge from the tragedies of terrorism and war.”

Evaluation of Progress on Issues We Hoped Would Not Get Lost

As we examine the list of issues that we hoped would not get lost nearly a year and a half later, we can say that we have clearly made progress on the first issue. The Lexington Seminar Conversations have helped us to feel like we are a faculty with a shared identity internally, though it is not as clear how much our identity as a faculty has grown externally. We discussed briefly the possibility of restructuring, but have not yet taken this step. This is something to which we may return in the coming year. We made progress on a number of fronts with regard to a shared conversation as a faculty (see further below). We attended significantly to the missional church agenda at several points in the last year and a half. We addressed pedagogical issues in new ways in this conversation and still have more to do on this front. We did not gain much nonproductive time for the leisure essential to schola, yet the fact that the Lexington Seminar Conversations were scheduled over lunch when most of us needed to eat anyway, and the fact that we intentionally avoided making seminary business decisions in this venue gave some relief to our sense of busyness. One faculty member commented that while he still feels busy, he feels less harried because of these important conversations. Finally, we made some progress toward a shared post-critical Anabaptist/Menno­nite tradition and vision (see further below.)

 

 

LEXINGTON SEMINAR CONVERSATIONS, SEPTEMBER 2001 - NOVEMBER 2002

 

In just over a year since our significant Chicago faculty workshop/retreat, we have conducted more than twenty “Lexington Seminar Conversations” to address the issues we raised in our initial problem statement as well as some of the issues that we had hoped would not get lost in this process at the conclusion of our workshop/retreat.

 

In this fifteen-month period, we have engaged in:

• five follow-up conversations on papers written for the August 2001 retreat. (The sense of the faculty was that we had invested quite a bit of time and thought in those papers that were not adequately recognized or explored in the Chicago event alone.)
• four conversations on key courses central to our curriculum: how and why we teach them the way we do and what adjustments we should consider
• four conversations on current issues and challenges in theological education
• two conversations on the significance of the denomination’s “missional church” agenda for our work, including a half-day workshop for which faculty wrote two-page papers on how they teach from a “missional perspective”
• one conversation on whether we should relax or adjust our requirement that students take our signature course on the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition
• one conversation on changes we would wish for in the way in which Mennonite theology is conceived and formulated in the future
• one conversation was intentionally left open in order to provide opportunity for faculty members to raise items of concern related to teaching and learning at AMBS
• one conversation about how our students are doing: is there a connection between how they are doing in our individual courses and how they are progressing toward the goals of our programs?
• one assessment conversation on what we have learned and gained in our LS conversations

 

In addition to these conversations, we recently began a series of Lexington Seminar Conversations on the booklet, “Ministerial Formation and Theological Education in Mennonite Perspective.” This booklet was written about ten years ago in the midst of our last curriculum revision. It is required reading of most of our students as we work at formation in ministry for our ministry students and as we orient our students to their professional disciplines.

 

To prepare for these conversations, Ben Ollenburger prepared a short paper for the administrators and faculty who were not here ten years ago to provide some historical context to the production of this booklet (see the attached Appendix). This paper and the subsequent conversations have brought us back to the first rationale for focusing on how we teach the tradition at AMBS; namely, the implications of the denominational merger that we just experienced. The booklet was at least in part written to bring together into one new statement the somewhat different approaches toward and emphases in theological education between the two traditions. It was helpful to reflect as a faculty on what has changed in the subsequent ten years.

Evaluation of Project Design

As we assess in retrospect the project’s design, we now recognize that much of what we have done so far in this project has been both well-received by the faculty and effective in meeting our two main goals. As we had hoped, both the initial faculty workshop/retreat and the subsequent Lexington Seminar Conversations have contributed significantly to the strengthening of morale on our faculty and to our commitment to a shared mission, as well as to the nitty-gritty details of how we define, nurture, and teach core concepts of Anabaptist/Mennonite theology.

 

At the end of the last school year we dedicated one of our Lexington Seminar Conversations to an assessment of what we have learned and where we are as a result of our investment in these conversations on teaching the tradition at AMBS. Among the comments of the faculty at that session were the following:

• “I teach with a better degree of awareness about what our tradition is.”
• “I have no clearer sense about what our tradition is.”
• “The conversations have provided a better window on our curriculum.”
•  “The Lexington Seminar Conversations have shown that we need a more cohesive idea of what we’re about.”
• “We need to articulate a usable Anabaptist tradition for the twenty-first century.”
• “We have not focused sufficiently on the common ground, the convergences that really were there in our papers last summer.”
• “These conversations have been good for our collegiality.”
• “For a change we have had a sustained conversation and it has served as a good reminder of our essential complementarity.”

 

President Nelson Kraybill said, “Of my five years here, I experienced this past academic year as the one when the faculty most seemed to enjoy each other, came to faculty meetings with the best spirit, and seemed most energized for their work. I attribute much of that to the Lexington leaven in our faculty. For the first time that I have seen, faculty had a structured opportunity to learn what and how others teach.”

 

Many of our conversations focused around either particular faculty members (via the papers they wrote on how they teach the tradition at AMBS or how they teach missionally at AMBS) or on particular courses (via the syllabi). These conversations resulted in a sense of shared mission as well as a sense of shared ownership with regard to some of the core courses in our curriculum. Perhaps as significantly, we heard comments like, “Finally! We are having conversations about the issues that matter most around here,” or “It’s great to be able to have these conversations without the pressure we normally feel in faculty meeting to make decisions on this or that policy.”

 

In our May 2002 assessment of our progress in the Lexington Seminar Conversations, we discovered a difference of opinion about how often to schedule the conversations for the 2002–2003 school year. Some thought that the momentum of weekly conversations was a significant contributor to their success, while others thought that the schedule was too intense, too frequent, and that a more relaxed schedule would strengthen the conversations. In the end, we compromised, scheduling the conversations approximately three times a month—every Wednesday except those on which the faculty meet in departments.

 

Although the initial faculty workshop/retreat was financially costly, it helped us embark on the project in several ways. First, it provided the catalyst needed to force us to think individually about how we understand the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition and how we are teaching it at AMBS. This catalyst was the assignment to write the kind of paper that would force us to do some preliminary thinking about the issue. Second, it was long enough and sustained enough to be memorable. More than just a one or one-and-a-half-day workshop, this four-day investment in each other and in the seminary gave us the opportunity for a sustained conversation in the context of work, worship, and play. Third, the decision to bring in an outside resource person appears to have been a wise one, since he was able to reflect back to us some of the gifts we have and are for one another and expose some of the latent pathologies in our interaction. Fourth, we experienced the intangible, yet real, sense of community and shared good will that emerged from the combination of overcoming adversity together, worshiping together, working together, playing together, and eating together.

Project Results

In addition to the difficult-to-quantify benefits that we have received in terms of faculty camaraderie and sense of shared mission, our project has resulted in several tangible results. For instance, as we have worked to define and summarize the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition, we considered several summaries that could potentially communicate to others what we mean by this terminology. Along the way, we considered the following suggestion, offered by the president:

Anabaptism is a community-grounded way of following Jesus Christ that emphasizes worship of the triune God, mission, peacemaking, and citizenship in the Kingdom of God above all other allegiances. Taking particular inspiration from the Early Church and the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, Anabaptists gather under Holy Spirit guidance to interpret Scripture as authoritative for their lives in light of God’s revelation in Christ.

While we have not yet arrived at a definition that satisfies every faculty member, we have benefited from the discussion. One of the conversations we plan to have yet this school year will focus on the rela­tionship between defining the center and guarding the boundaries, between academic freedom and accountability to the constituency, between preservation of the seminary as institution and the free exploration of ideas. This conversation has loomed somewhat in importance since the trustees of a sister institution recently clarified their intent to use the 1995 Confessional of Faith in Mennonite Perspective as a tool in determining what kinds of latitude employees would be allowed in the public expressions of their beliefs. It is a conversation our faculty is eager to have.

Learnings

One of the primary learnings from this project has been that the more important factors in the successful education of seminary students are also among the more difficult to quantify or measure. Specifically, these factors include general faculty camaraderie, a shared sense of the tradition to which we are accountable as well as a shared sense of vision for the seminary, and the ability to agree and disagree in love, as well as the wisdom to know what disagreements are significant to pursue. We learned that although busyness seems endemic to our society and to our seminary, the stress produced by that busyness can be mitigated by appropriate attention to the large, important questions, the big picture on our work as teachers.

 

Despite progress, we are still not clear about how best to articulate our tradition, the task of which is complicated by the fact that when it comes to identity issues, we are not sure whether to emphasize our theological distinctives or our commonalities with Protestant orthodoxy. We learned what is going on in others’ courses and how they contribute to our teaching of the tradition. As one faculty member commented, “The conversations have provided a better window on our curriculum.”

 

Although the most specific adjustments to teaching were made by the four professors whose courses were the focus of a specific conversation examining those courses, other professors have been more intentional and thoughtful about representing the tradition as they prepare their course syllabi.

 

Several challenges remain. First, we continue to have some trouble communicating as a faculty. Some of this may stem from the difficult experience we had ten years ago with curricular revision, re­sulting in a sense on the part of each of our three departments that they have somehow been mar­gin­alized in the curriculum. And some faculty members just tend to prefer to communicate in oblique ways. Second, we are just beginning to recognize that some of us seem to thrive on being marginalized and actually embrace the role of victim within faculty. We may need some professional help on that score. Third, we have not yet sufficiently explored the reasons for or the implications of the fact that some members of the faculty think it suspect to wish to summarize the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition in easy-to-understand ways. There is apparently a fear that any easy-to-understand summary of the tradition will by definition be misleading in light of the complexity of the historical and sociological realities of our tradition.

 

One anecdote may serve to illustrate the sense of marginalization that remains within our faculty. At the August 2001 workshop/retreat, a faculty member from one department commented privately to a faculty member from another department that he did not think that all of the departments at AMBS were equally valued. Although the speaker apparently was thinking about how his own department was being marginalized, the hearer reported publicly to the rest of the faculty that someone had suggested to him that there was no room for his department in the seminary. This comment was both shocking and painful. Coming on the last day of the workshop/retreat, it was difficult to attend to this “elephant in the room” in constructive ways. Because the hearer had over-interpreted the comment due to his own sense of victimization, the speaker did not even recognize the reported comment as his own. Unfortunately, this matter was not cleared up publicly until the end of the school year.

 

All of this would suggest that although we have made significant progress as a faculty—progress made possible by the grant from the Lexington Seminar—we still have much work to do.

Appendix

 

MinForTEMP

“Ministerial Formation and Theological Education in Mennonite Perspective”

Some History and Some Context

Being A Narrative Account Pertaining Mostly to the First Part

From One—and Hence Partial—Perspective

Ben C. Ollenburger

 

From my perspective and unaided memory, the MinForTEMP booklet (henceforth, “the blue book”), which has canonical status in AMBS by virtue of the seminary board’s approval of it, emerged in several interrelated contexts:

(1)    curriculum-revision discussions going on in faculty meetings and especially in the curriculum-revision committee, between 1989 and 1993;

(2)    faculty and broader discussion about pastoral ministry, which began in earnest at the seminary in 1987-88;

(3)    faculty discussion, during the same period, around various proposals for the reform of theological education, all of them originating in the Lilly-funded and ATS-sponsored “Aims and Purposes of Theological Education” project;

(4)    various denominational initiatives, such as polity statements, a new confession of faith, and the prospective or possible merger of two denominations;

(5)    perhaps more immediately pressing, discussion about the merger of GBS and MBS into one seminary, a prospect that served to bring further to light certain differences and tensions between the two seminaries, their constituencies, and their traditions—not to mention different kinds and styles of governance;

(6)    in close relation to the previous, the elevation of Marlin Miller to the presidency of MBS while he remained president of GBS.

The blue book does not clearly reflect all of these contexts or contextual factors, at least not in ways that I could specify. But it does, as I believe, reflect and obliquely address one factor that I have not yet mentioned: greater theological diversity among faculty then than exists today.

In some respects, the curriculum-revision process, which began in 1989, continued the work done earlier in writing a new mission statement. That work produced, in 1987-88, the seven-paragraph statement printed on the inside front cover of the blue book and elsewhere. At the time, the teaching faculty included twenty-seven people. Three of those (Erland Waltner, Millard Lind, and Howard Charles) were formally retired but continued to offer courses; they also participated in department and faculty meetings, as did Jacob Enz. It may stand to reason that one would find greater theological diversity among twenty-seven people than among sixteen—our current number.[1] However, the larger number does not alone account for the greater diversity. In 1987, at least ten of the teaching faculty had taught at AMBS for five years or fewer. Five had church backgrounds other than GC or MC, and four also had no experience with or of AMBS before joining the faculty; two had come to AMBS with significant experience teaching in decidedly non-Mennonite seminaries. By contrast, six faculty had been at AMBS since the Dean’s Seminar, which concluded in 1968, and another five had been faculty members here for at least ten years. Nine were either formally retired or within three years of retirement. Differences in length and kind and location of experience, in age, church background, education, and temperament all contributed to theological diversity, and diversity of other kinds, among faculty.

The diversity among us rarely came explicitly to expression; neither, then, did it generate much concern.[2] Several factors account for this, in my judgment. First, AMBS was at that time two seminaries, each with its own president and board(s), and each with its own residual culture. I say “residual culture,” in part because each of the seminaries had appointed faculty who lacked any native tact for or knowledge of its culture (e.g., GBS appointed Dennis Hollinger and Ben C. Ollenburger). However, the sense remained, even if only residually, that theological diversity was a concomitant of two seminaries and two denominations (or conferences, if you will), each represented by a president—according to by-laws then in effect, the two presidents in meeting more or less constituted AMBS—so that addressing the matter would be impolite or impolitic. Some combination of condescension and defensiveness, each with a history, played a role here.[3] Second, AMBS had defined itself as, in some sense, disinterested regarding theology, except as this would be biblical theology in concert with history and ethics, and then also practical theology.[4] Third, in the decade or two prior to 1987, AMBS had not struggled severely with either enrollment or finances; no sense of institutional crisis had gripped it.

Things changed, rapidly. I have already pointed to some dramatic changes in the composition of the teaching faculty. Even preceding these were initiatives by Erick Sawatzky (one of the “new” faculty), in concert with others, for the reconsideration and revalorizing of pastoral ministry—of “the pastor.” This was in direct contrast to, and in express criticism of, the “Theological Education in the Free Church Tradition” statement that issued from the Dean’s Seminar and had been printed in subsequent seminary catalogs. That statement stressed “community,” and the church as community—a more-or-less egalitarian community of mutual discernment and common ministry—in which specific ministries perform certain functions as contingently needed. In material he distributed for faculty discussion, Erick stressed the identity and authority of the pastor and went so far as to sponsor a “professional” pastoral ministry—the pastor as professional—a notion anathema to the TheoEduFreChTrad. His view had the advantage of significant support in congregations and among conference ministers. It also brought some contemporary GC/MC differences to light, not to mention differences among faculty. Addressing these, or managing them, became necessary when Henry Poettcker retired as president of MBS and Marlin Miller succeeded him.

In 1990, when Marlin Miller became president of both seminaries, he embraced the novel (to him) MBS and GC dimensions of his responsibility with considerable vigor. In some part, he changed his mind. While recognizing the weaknesses of the TheoEduFreChuTrad (its “Bultmann-esque” and “sixty-ish,” vaguely existential “encounter” talk—terms he used in conversation), he had been nonetheless and more or less in tune with it. However, partly in response to church leaders—including, now, GC church leaders—and seminary graduates, but also as a consequence of discussion within the faculty, Marlin moved in a different direction. In discussions held as part of the 1988(?) self-study, for example, Marlin sponsored the use of the term office, especially in reference to pastoral ministry, and that term enjoys a particular prominence in the blue book. Further, Marlin became less shy about his own identity as a systematic theologian, and about doctrinal matters, which partially aligned with his continuing work on the new confession of faith. Since he had been researching and writing the ME V article on the priesthood of all believers, he found it useful to criticize the a-historical use of this notion or cliché as contradicting a pastoral office with appropriate authority. This, too, found its way into the blue book, which specifically but briefly advocates for theology’s crucial importance in theological education—and ministry (p. 6).

Among the matters faculty discussed during the self-study was that of the seminary’s name, and specifically the “biblical” part of it. Why had their founders given both schools the name “biblical seminary,” and what should we take it to mean? Reference was made to the prec­e­dent of Bethany Biblical Seminary and also to the influence of the Biblical Seminary of New York, the alma mater of several veteran (retired and retiring) faculty members.[5] The influence of that school, on one hand, and the aforementioned Mennonite hostility to or suspicion of theology on the other, had worked together to maintain a kind of, sometimes uneasy, curricular set­tlement.[6] In this regard, too, things changed. One outcome of the self-study was the initiation of a curriculum review that, among other things, would take seriously a (re)new(ed) focus on pre­paration for pastoral ministry. The commencement of the review process coincided with the full (not just formal) retirement of many veteran faculty, the departure of others (Dennis Martin, Gary Martin, Leroy Friesen, David Augsburger, Dennis Hollinger), and the appointment of two others (H. Wayne Pipkin, Walter Sawatsky). These goings and comings also changed the nature of the conversation at AMBS. Whatever rationale the curriculum formerly enjoyed no longer ob­tained, and whatever shared theological convictions (or culture) had underwritten it could no longer be assumed; the meaning of GBS and MBS as biblical seminaries had to be rethought or ignored.

The blue book does not address in detail the nature of a revised curriculum or what it should mean to be a biblical seminary (p. 9). On the other hand, the blue book did emerge in the context of discussion, especially in committee, about the curriculum. The committee (as I recall) had “educational philosophy” as part of its name, and the blue book was written to articulate crucial or potentially contested features of that philosophy. The first part of the book reflects two quite different but, as it turned out, closely related and contested areas of discussion: (a) the movement away from TheoEduFreChTrad and toward ministerial formation for the pastoral office, and (b) the proper paradigm for theological education. While I have already mentioned the former, it should also be noted that this movement had as part of its larger context, and motivation, the kind of institutional crisis that AMBS had managed to avoid earlier. Declining enrollment, especially after 1990, and financial troubles were obvious, but these were taken to derive from the seminary’s (or the seminaries’) reputation for not preparing pastors, being critical of the church and hostile to actual churches or congregations, having no interest in evangelism, being too academic and insufficiently spiritual, and perhaps for being too liberal.[7] Especially pages 1–5 of the blue book evince an effort to embrace, a bit gingerly, both “the tradition” of Anabaptism’s recovered vision and “the tradition” of a pastoral office with authority—and ministers of character. These pages locate the seminary between strict egalitarianism and clericalism.

The second area of discussion (b) concerned literature on theological education, all of it critical and reformist. A large part of this literature sought to bring theological education into more fruitful—often mutually fruitful—relation to the church. Most of it also sought to avoid what Edward Farley had described as a corrupting “clerical paradigm,” in which, for example, the disciplines of theological study and even individual courses derive their rationale and character from their putative relation and contribution to specific acts of ministry. So the issue arose how to define theological education so that it would be authentically related to the church without adopting a clerical paradigm. The chart on pp. 22–23, which Daniel Schipani devised, is one way of representing the choices. On the other hand, some of the literature on theological education advocated or reflected theological views, particularly regarding scripture, that were inimical to Anabaptist and Mennonite convictions. Marlin Miller addressed this issue directly, referring especially to books by Joseph Hough and John Cobb and by Charles Wood (all three Methodists, by the way), locating the seminary’s position between these mainline proposals and a kind of evangelical orthodoxy (pp. 6–8). The latter is something of a caricature, but it served to distinguish an insistence on the Bible’s importance as “norm,” and its centrality to theological education, from specific doctrines of its inspiration.

These two areas of discussion, (a) and (b), come together in remarks about the Bible’s central place in the curriculum.[8] Theological education construed in particular as formation for pastoral ministry—the exercise of a “ministerial office”—in and for the church, which is in and for the world as sign of and witness to God’s Reign, etc., did not diminish but rather defined the central place of scripture. As Marlin Miller expressed it, this central place had to do, not entirely with the number of Bible courses in the curriculum, but with the responsibility of “faculty members in all disciplines to refer their teaching to the world of scripture” (p. 9). “The world of scripture” in this quotation derives from George Lindbeck (cited in fn. 6, p. 19), whose work formed part of the intellectual context of Marlin Miller’s contribution to the blue book.

In this narrative account from one perspective, I have omitted thus far to mention one significant matter. In connection with his sponsorship of the “ministerial office,” Marlin Miller also advocated the view (or expressed the hope) that seminary faculty exercise a teaching office in the church. In that regard, the blue book describes seminary faculty as “teachers of the church” and (thus) as being, along with pastors, “servants of the Word” (p. 6). More specifically, “the seminary faculty has been called to be a center of scholarly inquiry and to provide theological leadership in the church’s teaching ministry” (p. 5). In this way, the blue book recognizes both that the seminary forms but one part of the church’s teaching ministry, and that seminary faculty have a unique calling within it, namely to engage in scholarly inquiry. Our teaching and scholarship themselves have at least three “responsibilities”:

(1)    “passing on traditions that have proven to be carriers of faithful witness to God’s reign;”

(2)    helping Christian communities to “make good judgments about normative Christian beliefs;” and

(3)    “articulating the church’s beliefs in ways that nurture Christian life and faith….”

Each of these responsibilities includes a critical and a constructive component. Faculty are to assess critically the church’s practices and beliefs, with respect to their faithfulness and (or) need for renewal, and to make constructive proposals for “shaping the church’s practices and beliefs.” The principal criterion for such critical assessments and constructive proposals shall be “consonance with Scripture” (p. 6)—or they shall be “measured and formed by scripture” (pp. 6, 9)—and scripture is to be “understood as a canonical whole centered on Jesus Christ,” although we do not yet know “what all this means for theology and theological education” (p. 10). Indeed!

 

 

7 Nov 2002