You need to observe how they sit in the classroom, who they sit with, even where they sit. You need to learn their names of course, but you also need to learn where they are from, why they are studying at Gordon-Conwell, and what they hope to learn. To do this, you need to know who is in the room. Beyond learning objectives and the content of systematic theology-as a teacher in a theological classroom-you get the rare opportunity to echo the vocational call of the students in your care. Everyone in this course should meet the following learning objectives and should be able to reproduce what they have learned in some form at the end of the term.īut if you as the teacher are paying attention, you can do something else too. It is a short-term community with clear and limited goals. When you teach a semester-long, in-person course, you get 30-plus hours, week after week, to form individuals into a community. As a wise friend told me recently, you cannot hear someone’s call for them-but you can sometimes hear an echo.Īs an adjunct instructor at Gordon-Conwell for the last seven years, I often heard these echoes. To heed this call, you must listen for it. A “call to ministry” is a notoriously vague sense that may grow in intensity, but that may also get lost in the busyness of life. In evangelical spaces especially, it seeks to train those who are discerning a call to ministry.
Theological education is not like other forms of education. I’d like to tell you a little about what may soon be lost, with the hope that we might imagine another way forward for theological education. But talking about the sale of a residential campus in this way neglects the truth of what is lost. There is always a temptation to market this future as a “pivot”-a courageous choice toward a brighter future. The persistent attention to “the future of theological education” signals nothing more than the reality that whatever comes next will not be like what we once had. Trinity’s Divinity school (TEDS) recently downsized its faculty, and Fuller Theological Seminary consolidated its campus and programs a few years ago, shortly after Moody Bible Institute. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary closure of its campus in Hamilton, Massachusetts, is simply the latest in a string of downsizing among evangelical seminaries. There is no good news coming from freestanding seminaries, and there hasn’t been for some time.
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