Sure. So I’m Christine Hong. I teach here at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, which is adjacent to Atlanta. I am a second-generation Korean person in diaspora. Was born in Los Angeles, grew up really LA and Seattle, then went to school on the West Coast, but then also on the East Coast and back on the West Coast, and found myself in the last, I guess, nine years now here in the Deep South in Georgia, and then I guess like five years in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s contentious whether or not people think that’s the South of the Midwest country, U.S. In some ways, I think that that it’s actually more southern sometimes than Atlanta is. But yeah, that’s. I feel like I’ve lived sort of all over all over this country.

I am Presbyterian as well, ordained Presbyterian minister. I’ve been ordained now since 2005, so quite a long time. But also am someone who is a double belonger, so I practice Christianity, but have reindigenized a lot of my practices into Korean indigenous practices of Mujo, which is Korean shamanism. So try to practice those things together as much as possible. But in some ways they conflict, and so sometimes I practice those things separately as part of my discipline.

And do you want to just say the title of your new book because it really is related. I don’t have it to hold up.

yes, I have two new books coming out. One is coming out. The publishing date is November 17, and that book is a book that is not an academic episode. It’s a book for trade by Broadleaf called “Waking Up Ghosts: Making Peace with Ancestors, and it is a book about my ancestors, and it is a braided memoir about the story of my maternal grandparents coming out of the Korean War and ceasefire, and also the story of my life and about how I came into embracing Korean shamanism as someone who is a Korean Christian in diaspora. So, what does that look like to embrace ancestral veneration and Korean shamanism as a person who also is a pastor and a Christian, and what does that look like to decolonize your Korean and Christian practices?

Yeah, if you’re curious about that and what that looks like, the second book I wrote with Dr. Ann Walker over at Phillips Seminary, who is from the Cherokee Nation, and that book is called Candidly Speaking: Dialogs for the End of empire, which, if you’ve been paying attention to the world, it is clear we are at the end of a few empires here, and it is a book of letters that we’ve been writing to each other over the last couple of years, and again, a very accessible book from two religious educators and practical theologians about what it looks like to be teaching in these times, so that will be coming out also probably early fall this year.

I personally can see each of them in their own way being a next step from the Decolonial Futures book and elements of what you talk about there. So why don’t you tell us how that book came about, the Decolonial Futures book, and sort of what’s happened since it came out.

Yeah, so Decolonial Futures really came about as I I tested in graduate work, so quite a long time ago, I started writing little chapters here and there, and I studied interreligious education during a time where there was no such thing other than in Europe. So in you know in Europe, interreligious education is really part of public education.

So people really live into it just in public education. But here in the United States, I think after 9/11, that’s kind of when people started talking about it because it was truly to keep people alive, especially people who were Muslim in America. And so, in the academy, there wasn’t really even in the in university systems when you asked people what is interreligious education, they would say, “Do you mean comparative religions? or comparative theologies? And that is not what people meant. So I actually went to Claremont School Theology to study interreligious education, and it was a field that was coming out of religious education of theology that was just being born. And a lot of Muslim educators, religious educators, were starting that field, as well as a lot of Christian educators, and working together to figure out: we don’t mean comparative theology, we don’t mean comparative religion. We mean what does it mean to have different beliefs and not try to convert each other, but simply on the ground with religious traditions that are different, different political systems, different ways of being in the world, just to honor and respect each other, different cultures, not to evangelize each other, and just to honor one another and make sure we keep people alive, people’s children stay alive, etc. How do we do that? How do we do that? And it truly was the question because this was when people also didn’t want to say the word white or the words white supremacy in classrooms.

And I remember when I when I was starting to teach about white supremacy in in seminaries, as I was still writing the earlier chapters of this book, I had a I had a lot of like white seminarians tell me I couldn’t teach about white supremacy because I wasn’t white. I mean, I had white students walking out, and I think I write a little bit about it in this book. I have white seminarians like walking out of my classroom saying, “How dare you teach about it as a non-white person, so it was it was such a from the beginning of writing this book to the end of writing this book, things had vastly changed. So it was wild, and I think that’s why I really felt like I need to write this down. Like I need to write this book in order to make sure I could first of all document how things were changing so quickly, and then Trump was elected in the midst of all of this.

So how how would you document how things were changing so rapidly? How things democracy was deteriorating number number two, and how first of all it had always been deteriorating for so many of us, and how certain people had just started to notice it through all of these, and how religious education and theological education either was the remedy or refused to be the remedy.

So it was all of these things I was noticing as a religious educator that I was just wanting to document, and how I was trying to make sure that students were prepared in my classroom for the world, and how either they were resisting it or living into it in these very very organic ways, and the book-that’s just really how it was how it came about. And then I became a mother in the midst of it too, and I think that was part of the urgency of like I really just I want my children and other people’s children. I want people to to see them as human. And that’s all. That’s really what I want.

it’s not about competency. It really is about like this different form of being able to see other people’s human dignity, and that really is what intelligence is. So yeah, to come back to that point, I want to come back to that point. But how has it been received? What what has the book catalyzed, if you will, in terms of your work, and then in terms of the the wider, you know, field of theological education that you were speaking to as an audience.

So that’s such an interesting question because I think it took a long time for I will be honest, teachers of color, students of color. It was embraced really quickly. Like I didn’t pull any punches when I wrote it, because I was reading really deeply in the work of Afro pessimism. I was reading deeply only really in the work of Black folks, people of color, queer theology. I mean, I was that was really where I was pulling from, and and those were the wells in which I was working from, and I felt this deep urgency that this is where theological education needed to ground itself, and so I felt like I was just speaking an urgent truth that we all. On the ground into a space that was already, in some ways, like floundering to stay alive, and then white folks really-they were some people that said, and these are real quotes. We can’t publicize this because our donors will hate it.

Oh, jeez.

Like “This hurts my feelings.” Like I had people, like well-known people, come up and say, “Isn’t this a little too much?” Like “isn’t this a little overboard? Isn’t this, like, a gross exaggeration of what’s actually happening in society?” I had a colleague say, “This-it’s not this bad. So it was like this incredible, fractured response that I was ready for because that’s the reason I wrote the book.

Yeah, that’s the reason I wrote the book because that’s what was happening in my classrooms was that even the way I was teaching into the fractured world was receiving fractured response, and I really wanted to bear witness to that. And yes, after it was published, it was like it was gaining traction among the people that I was writing for, really, which was teachers and students.

And then yeah, the people who wanted to be hurt by it absolutely were hurt by it. Like even even the other day, someone reported to me that someone said, like this. This particular chapter hurt my feelings. But you know what? That’s what it’s supposed to do. If it hurt your feelings, it did its job. It’s not supposed to coddle you. This is not a comforting book. It’s not going to comfort you, right? And it’s it is supposed to hurt you. It’s supposed to open something in you, so that you can feel that yeah, there is a woundedness in you. Like that woundedness in you caused you to wound somebody else. You need to look at that wound.

And so, if it punctured something in you, it did what it was supposed to do. And even for me, as a non-black person of color, like I also need to have those punctures felt in me, so I know how I’m moving other people. That is part of the process of undoing harm and mitigating harm in this world. So, yeah, that was the reception, and it continues to be that way, which is how how I know it’s still relevant. Unfortunately.

Did you intend to like do consulting or do speaking at theological schools about the book, and has that happened?

So I’ve been invited to speak about like the book, you know, many times since it came out. But I think people realize in that once they open it up and they read it, that there are people that really feel embraced by the book because it speaks to the truth that they can’t speak in the space that they live in or that they work in, right? Like, oh my gosh, I’ve had students say or colleagues say, “You said everything out loud that we’ve never been able to say in this room. All happening here, but we’ve never been able to say it out loud.” But then I think the people who feel like, “Oh my gosh, we feel unmasked as the perpetrators of some of this.” They feel like too exposed, right? It’s been interesting.

People that are very ready to do the work have really been ready. Like when I arrive, and we’re like, let’s let’s unpack all of this. And when I come and do the work, I might give like a lecture, but we’ll do the workshop. We’ll do the work. But often people will be curious about how we’ll do the work, so they’ll invite me to come and do like, could we just do an info session on how we might do this work together, and then we’ll do it. We’ll talk about it on Zoom, and then they’ll when they realize like they actually have to do the work, and I’m not just going to talk about it, then I’ll never get the call back. Right? People just want me to come and talk about these colonial features. Like it’s over there. It’s so far away, but then when they realize that we actually have to do stuff together, we’re like, oh, okay. Then you know, I guess I guess we’ll just read it by ourselves then.

At the end, there was one of the places for me where I felt a little hole get poked in me. This wasn’t the only place, but one place is I still wish there was like you know 10 things I can do to like fix theological education and decolonize theological education, and it it isn’t that way. Like the hope of that is a colonial hope, and so the idea of it being like decolonial futures brings me into the whole sort of set of literatures about futurity, queer futurity, Afrofuturism, Afropessimisin, like all of that came into my mind, and I’m like, this is this is really like the work I’m going to work on the rest of my career, not something I’m going to implement as a program.

When that’s the case, having you come in and give a lecture or even do a workshop has to like function differently. So it it made me think, oh, the answer isn’t inviting you know the Reverend Doctor Christine Hong to come give a talk at my seminary about decolonizing theological education, but actually, like dwelling in the book and saying, “Where does this make me think I can change what I’m doing now? And as I go through the semester, and as I go through next semester, that maybe is a more like real way of the book and doing something with it, and it feels like the kind of book that asks you to do something. Like you get to the end and you say, “I would like you to commit to decolonize futuring of theological education through tangible anti-colonial work. I accept that.

Yes, and that it’s going to look different for everyone. Like I deliberately didn’t call it a decolonial future. Yeah, like I, I believe there are multiple futures, and there, there are, you know, different futures we imagine. It’s interesting. I think there are still futurisms, right? So I think that there are some people’s futures where they deserve the right to have futures that are just about them, without the surveillance of other people, without the intrusion of other people fixing themselves into those futures or centering themselves into those futures. Likewise, I believe that, for instance, for white folks, that they have always centered themselves and excluded others, or like made futures about like just themselves, like supremacisms, right? Like it’s just white people in the future and nobody else, and you can see that whenever you see like any dystopian future created by white writers, like you can see that right, where it’s just white people who survive any apocalypse or any movie about like the last anyone is like always Tom Cruise, but like it’s just him who survives.

I think the test is like you actually have to dream of inclusive features that actually decenter you. Like that’s the hard thing. Whereas black folks should get to dream about just black features, without being forced to be inclusive of anybody else, like that’s the dream, actually, right? I don’t think it’s. I think there are multiple futures, but we have to dream of futures that like are about the things that we have been missing, that we have been aching for, or that the things that we need, like medicine, right? The things that we need that we have deprived ourselves of, that we need to be more human, and those are different things for different people.

It’s one of the real strengths in my reading of the book to see how, to see with what care you take the differences, even within oneself, like parsing as you spend time, you know, in various parts of the book, telling your own story, letting yourself be multiplicity and not singularity, and and that in and of itself being a pushback against the sort of colonial gaze and the way that it tries to simplify. It made me think like one of the key concepts that I I just found myself really drawn to because partly it’s what I think I do try to do, and partly because it’s a posture and not a competency and intellectual thing is your concept of humble modesty, and yet at one point you like describe how the typical classroom because of my embodied identity just totally affirms me, like the structure of white theological education, white institutional culture totally affirms me when I walk in the room because it’s structured too, and in all kinds of ways it doesn’t when you walk into the room. I mean, your example of students saying, “Oh, well, you can’t teach me that because of your identity.” So I wanted to just invite you to talk about, like, how does humble modesty work differently depending on differences of embodied identity and the ways that we have to inhabit, you know, in a sense, similarly constructed spaces, but from our differing postures or or identities. Does that make sense?

Yes. I teach a class called Intercultural Intelligence, which is based on my experience of teaching elements of this book in different spaces everywhere that I taught. And this class prepares students at Columbia to go on a required trip, which they have to go somewhere in the world, usually a different country. And one of the things that prepares them to do is think about American exceptionalism, which often they don’t think about because they think about the dynamics of race often because we are in the deep south and we are in a blue dot in a red state. So they’re often thinking about dynamics of like racialization of black and white, of immigrant, documented, undocumented, and it is especially in these particular times like we talk about this all the time. Christian, not Christian, but we talk about it within an American bubble.

We don’t often see the way that American propaganda works at all globally. The narrative of what Americanisms look like, American militarism. We don’t. We don’t see beyond the bubble of how that looks globally. The footprints of American militarism in other countries that we actually go to, like our students go to South Africa, they go to Cuba, they go to South Korea and Taiwan. I mean, talk about American imperialism. So when they get there, if we don’t talk about American pluralism and American exceptionalism in the classroom. They will live into American exceptionalism without even thinking about it. So humble modesty really comes into play, right? Not only thinking about how you present yourself on the outside.

So like, for instance, in East Asia, when you’re on public transit, nobody talks, and it’s not because people are culturally submissive or culturally docile. It’s just, it’s just like when you’re on the public subway, it’s always crowded. It is so crowded. So if there’s an emergency and people are talking at the top of their lungs, no one will be able to hear what is happening. So people are quiet, and like cities in East Asia are overcrowded. So if there’s an emergency, if things need to happen, it literally matters. Otherwise, people will die, people will get trampled. So, people are for safety reasons quiet because we are not an individualistic society. We are collective. So, if something happens, we’re going to make sure everybody survives. These are places that have been through war recently.

So people have like living people have memories of massacres that happened in the 80s and the 70s and even the early 90s from Americans. So like things like this happen, and so when when students go to these immersion trips, often there are incidents where students will get fed up and say things like, “I don’t understand the world. Like I like I feel so oppressed. I feel so oppressed having to be so quiet, you know, on the public transit. Like oh, I hate this feeling. Like why can’t I be expressive? Why can’t I? But then we have to talk about it, right? Is it really a question? Is it really like? Is it just a tangential feeling? Is this the feeling? What is it similar to the feeling of oppression that we might feel in our home country? Because it is like it feels the same, but is. Is this really Korea oppressing, or Taiwan oppressing you as an American?

What is this new feeling like because you are here as a tourist and you’re not having to live here full time? You get to leave whatever, but you feel like you have the right to do whatever you want without consequence. And is that because you have a blue transport? Is this like an exceptionalist thing? And if you were to do whatever, that there wouldn’t be a consequence. What if you had a different expert? Would you feel the same way? Right. So it’s not only like modesty on the outside of like that that behavior, but it’s the humility. It’s connected to the feeling of humility on the inside. It’s not only the feeling on the inside. It’s political. It’s not only a posture of like this is who I am, but that posture is actually a political posture depending on where your feet are in the world. If you’re in Cuba and you do that, what does that mean? What does it mean to the person watching you if they have a Cuban identity and you have a U.S. identity? There’s meaning, so it’s not even individual. It’s global. It’s political. It’s militaristic. There are ripples, you know. So we talk about things like that. That is not even just about humble modesty, but it’s the things that are wrapped around it now. So that’s one example of how I teach that.

Yeah, it’s a really helpful nuance to make explicit the political aspect of humble modesty because I think the terms themselves, for some people, could be put in a context in which they’re not political at all, in which they’re personal and and subjective even, but the objective realities produce the political nature of it. I also was struck, and I think this is related — you were talking about like two different feelings are not the same feeling because, for example, if I go out for a walk with my dog in the evening, I feel quite comfortable because I, I’m actually, like by lived experience, not worried about anything happening to me. My wife, who’s Latina and small, and in her lived experience, at risk, goes out for a walk with the dog at night and goes very particular places because of that. And so the feeling of “I have to go out for a walk with my dog” aren’t the same for us because of the potential impact. And I, I don’t know that you are always speaking to the dominant cultures. You’re clearly not always in the book at certain points like that, I think you very much are trying to say, don’t get lost in the feeling of humble modesty being like equivalent to everyone else’s humble modesty, because in certain contexts, humble modesty might be a protective mechanism for someone. It might be that they’re threatened. I don’t know. I just I found that kind of parsing of the political consequences of feelings you might think are the same feeling a really important way to acknowledge the different ways that we experience our humanity.

I think it’s really always important to be aware it’s almost like antennas all the time, and that’s part of like being a being decolonially minded is always knowing contextually where you are, like not only how you were formed and how you come by your opinions and how you come by your culture, but always recognizing where you are grounded, like where you are, like why am I being self-reflective? Like why am I feeling the way I’m feeling in this particular moment around these particular people in this particular place? And often I think like the people that are the most educated, the people that have had the most schooling, read the most books, have the most degrees, sometimes are the most, or or think they’re the most liberal, that think they’re the most decolonial, they are sometimes actually the most colonial.

Right? Like we walk around assuming that, sometimes in spaces that people that don’t have as much education, that aren’t as liberal as us that aren’t as you know all of these as us, like you’re so colonized. Let me tell you how to be less colonized. Let me show you how you’re so much this and that. But it’s like even that assumption that you have the answers and that you can teach down to this person and liberate them from such a neo-colonial approach and relationship. You have become the colonizer by default. You have placed yourself as like the savior to this person.

You point out that the people who founded the Native American boarding schools called themselves friends of the Indian. They thought this as benevolent and created horrors.

Right, and it’s it’s you know it’s not even like people outside of someone’s racialization that does that. Sometimes we do it to our own people, and we don’t notice that because it’s our own people, right? Like I find myself sometimes as even among other Korean Christians, for instance, being like, “Oh my gosh! Like I wish they could just undo their internalized whatever, whatever. But even that approach is, I have to I have to think like where is that coming from? Where is that urgency? Where is that that where is that wanting to demean another person or wanting to correct them or change them in order to make myself more comfortable or myself you know or where is that coming from? Is there another way? Right? Is there another way? Is there without like that urge to dominate? It’s still at the end of the day the urge to dominate.

So I think that that is the hardest piece. That’s the hardest piece because it is at the end of the day, even those of us who want to decolonize sometimes approach that those approach decolonization through the through what we think is the fossilization, the urge to to dominate the other person in order to make it happen. On the flip side, I do agree that in times of violence, in times of like deep corruption and violence, where people are just being like cut down and cannot breathe, cannot survive, that it is that the people who are oppressed, the people who are being cut down, when the colonizer is saying, “Be at peace, everybody. That’s all the way to stop this. But that is not the answer either. Cathartic violence is a real thing.

Let me go back to something we talked about earlier. I think it’s a core shift that you try and make early on, and that it influences the whole rest of the book, and that’s your critique of competency, your introduction of the idea of intelligence and multiple intelligences. And when I first read that, I took a picture of it and I sent it to my friend who works at our denominational headquarters, because we’ve just shifted our whole process for ministry leadership to competency based. So then it made me think. I feel challenged in a good way to to try and rethink what we’re doing out. So tell me how you came to that conviction and how you think it matters in doing this work. That that we think in a different way about what makes someone wise, I guess. What how you judge someone’s capacity, or I don’t I don’t know what the quite the right language. I think in teaching and learning it’s a shift in the way that we think of evaluation of someone.

I think just as a teacher, like a long time educator like you, I often ask my students like who are the people that you think of when you think of like the great teachers in your life? I ask myself that question a lot, either at the beginning of the year or as a production at some point, and I’ve often never heard them like name a professor, like an actual like philosopher, or you know, actual teacher. It’s usually like someone took the like who actually said a family member, and a grandparent, a parent, a lady. Mrs. Johnson down the street who used to make me a snack after school, like the bus driver that drove me home every day. It’s somebody who took the time, somebody who knew them, like knew something about them more than they made. Who didn’t just pour knowledge into them, but like also gave to like didn’t just do the banking, but also received, who reflected with them, who expanded the world, but also like let their world be expanded, no matter how young they were, it it’s and it was to me. I think like that sparked something in me, and I was like, “Wow, it is. It’s not about competency. It’s not about the you know the acronyms in front or behind the name. So no matter how many inventories we take about competency, which we all take so many of those, we seem to love those. But actually, at the end of the day, no matter what kind of human we are, that’s not memorable. That doesn’t seem to be actually very competent. Who the people that we remember as wise, as important, as being our great teachers, there’s something different about them than just competent. We seem to think of those people as wise and intelligent. So there’s something else.

So I started asking deeper questions about, “what are the markers? What are the markers of all of these Mrs. Johnson’s, you know, Mr. Kim, what are the markers of all these people?” And it was all of those things.

Like, they helped me reflect. They helped me notice things about myself that I didn’t notice on my own. They helped me learn even after they were gone. And that was the thing. Like, there was something like very ancestral about them too. But even after this person died, what they said stuck with me. Where I repeated the things that they said to other people. That was another thing. Like their what they said or what they taught lived beyond that person’s body, and also like it didn’t have it didn’t have to do with that person’s age either. So it could have been someone who was a child. A lot of people named like my grandchild teaches me something every day.

I spend a lot of time with our child, and they teach me something every day about myself, about the world. The perspective of that person has shown a different light, and that was a new intelligence that person had never had. So intelligence, to me, I started to redefine it based on what I was learning from my students and how they were redefining it. And so I was like, “It’s something completely different from competency, from how sociologists have defined it, psychologists, and we can still value competency, but I think as educators and in theological education, in the spiritual and the theological, there’s something to be said about the intelligence and the wisdom that our students are naming in their classrooms, and that they’re vocally, adamantly saying that this is what we are putting in our hearts. This is what we’re writing about. This is what we’re preaching about. This is what connects us to spirit. Yeah.

So that’s what I wanted to highlight.

Yeah, it’s beautiful, and in a way, it connects very much to the concept of humble modesty in the sense that I I don’t have all the information that I can just put into your head. I actually am in relationship with you and learning from you, and you’re learning from me. And so I love I love the interconnectedness of the sort of conceptual threads through the book and how grounded they are in your own listening and learning.

Like when I die, I don’t want someone to be like she’s so competent.

Sometimes I talk about, you know, Eileen Campbell Reed and I have been doing this study of learning ministry and following seminary graduates over almost 20 years now, and when we ask them what prepared you for the ministry that you’re doing now, they almost never talk about seminary. Very similar to what you’re just saying about you know a variety of peoples and circumstances that have just leaned into them and helped them to become who they are and do what they’re doing. So I really resonate with that, and it feels to me like those are the people and the and the sayings that people carry in their front pocket because they they know they need to pull them out. They know that they they really help them go. And matter to them, so I I found that one of the most I guess because the competency that seems like the way that we’re using competency often feels like a technical solution to something, which isn’t really what I think we want to be about is figuring out solutions to more quickly or more effectively producing pastoral leaders for spiritual communities.

Tell me, as we close the conversation, if you had the opportunity to start a seminary. I asked one person I was having a conversation with this question, and she said, “I wouldn’t start one,” but if you were to start a seminary, what were what would you say are a couple of like key elements that you would put at the center of that project concepts perspectives?

I would ask people to come to seminary with an ancestor. First of all, I think like everyone-it doesn’t matter who they are-needs to be connected to somebody, like in the ancestral realm. And you know, I don’t think it needs to be by blood. I think that there are ancestors everywhere that inspire us, like whoever they are, like people that we call on with wisdom that are in spirit, that just keep us going, that inspire us to be better every day. And so I want to come to you. Got to come here with at least one that guides you, yeah, that inspires you, that you are reflecting with, that you are talking to, that you’re dialog with, that you’re wrestling with, and also that that you’re not necessarily putting on a pedestal all the time.

I don’t think ancestor relationships are about deifying them, right? You are learning from them, and that they’re learning from you. You’re, it’s reciprocal, because I think that helps us be less isolated. I think it would also help us, many of us, to learn to reindigenize our practices, which historically seminaries have severed us from. Many of us, as Christianity has done for almost all of us. So I think that would be one step in decolonizing our spiritualities. So I would say, yeah, draw on ancestors.

I think we should be outside in other buildings and be with trees and creatures and plants. And so when I say ancestors, I don’t think they all have to be people either. I think that ancestors can be other living beings, and I think we miss out when they’re only people. It’s so funny that we think of we think of only people like being able to teach us things. We have redwoods on this planet that are 1000 years old, and why don’t we think of them as knowing things? I don’t know. I think that’s so dumb. It’s like you know that we center ourselves so much in this cosmos.

So for me, I would say, yeah, if seminaries were actually needed, and I’m going to start one, it would be very much more cosmological, very much more earth centered, very much more ancestral, very much more like bring your indigeneity in its fullness. We would sit at a very a much larger table that is much more grounded.

That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you.

One powerful bit I’ll share to draw you in—I asked her first to describe how the book came about, and then how it has been received. It turns out, in an unsurprising way, in a kind of colonial binary: people with power and privilege saying, ‘gosh, isn’t this all a bit much?’ and minoritzed people saying, ‘gosh, you said everything we think and feel and experience out loud, that’s awesome.’ Here’s the quote towards the end of that part of the conversation as an encouragement to jump in and listen to the conversation:

Like even even the other day, someone reported to me that someone said, like this particular chapter hurt my feelings. But you know what? That’s what it’s supposed to do. If it hurt your feelings, it did its job. It’s not supposed to coddle you. This is not a comforting book. It’s not going to comfort you, right? And it’s it is supposed to hurt you. It’s supposed to open something in you, so that you can feel that yeah, there is a woundedness in you. Like that woundedness in you caused you to wound somebody else. You need to look at that wound. And so, if it punctured something in you, it did what it was supposed to do. And even for me, as a non-black person of color, like I also need to have those punctures felt in me, so I know how I’m moving other people. That is part of the process of undoing harm and mitigating harm in this world. So, yeah, that was the reception, and it continues to be that way, which is how how I know it’s still relevant. Unfortunately.

I mean, yes, unfortunately, and all the more reason to promote her important work, read it, and get down to the business of anticolonial work in our seminary spaces.

Dr. Hong has two new books coming out, both of which in some sense grew out of Decolonial Futures. One is called Waking Up Ghosts: Making Peace with Ancestors (Broadleaf, November 2026). The other is Candidly Speaking: Refusing a White Supremacist World Through Dialogue and Story—Co-written with Dr. Anne Walker (Cherokee).

Coulter describes three shifts that account for his theory of the decline of seminaries, and especially of the mainline sort. The first is what I’ll call ‘nostalgia for the great theologians of yesteryear.’ He runs through a laundry list of the big names in the theological world when he was in seminary and graduate school.

Most of the movers and shakers of Protestant theology in the late twentieth century are gone. . . The departure or retirement of these scholars left a vacuum at most Protestant seminaries that has not been filled.

What I noted is that his list is, with the exception of James Cone, entirely composed of a white men.

The problem, he seems to say, is we have no great theologians today. Goggle this and you’ll find articles (written by younger white men) lamenting this supposed fact. Instead of the larger than life figures of the past, we are supposedly left with, Coulter writes, “a potpourri of liberationist approaches” that “usually coincide with a postcolonial approach.” He clearly thinks very little of this shift, more or less blaming them for the decline of the church and of theological education.

I’m tempted to offer a rebuttal, listing all the fantastic theologians working today. But that would be to give into Coulter’s logic. And that’s where I want to push back. It is actually liberating, the work of the Holy Spirit, even, to move beyond a “great man” theory of theological education.

I’ve done enough study of pedagogy to know the lecture is the least effective teaching method. Yet one of my senior (white male) colleagues when I was on the faculty at Luther Seminary was famous for his pedagogical aphorism: “If I’m not talking, you’re not learning.” Clearly he’d never read Paulo Freire.

In Hong’s excellent book, the first chapter is titled “Undoing Competency.” It could be titled “Undoing the Great Man theory of theological education.” “The colonial mindset,” she writes, “harnesses science and education to assume dominance and control over people, cultures, and experiences.” The heart of colonialism is, she writes, “the desire to master everything and everyone.” She quotes Indigenous educator Margaret Kovach to give the example of how colonialism and Christianity drew upon social Darwinism in a genocidal educational policy with Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The horrors of the boarding school legacy in Canada and the United States are only now finally being acknowledged, and efforts at repair begun.

Against the colonial tradition of mastery and dominance, Hong invites the posture of “humble modesty.” This does not mean self-deprecation. Rather, modesty is “the basic understanding that you move through this world without having figured it all out yet.” She then powerfully unpacks how living such humble modesty looks very different depending on your identity. The “inequality of failure” means, she says, that it is a privilege only some are granted to learn from mistakes. I’ve had that exact conversation with minoritized colleagues at my seminary. We do not have equal power to experiment within seminary spaces (and potentially be seen as screwing up) for the very reasons Hong points out. More on this in our upcoming conversation.

***

I started this Substack on renewing theological education because I don’t know the answers. I thought hosting interviews with thoughtful colleagues, along with my own grappling with the issues, might create a generative space for shared learning. I hope it is a space that models the posture of “humble modesty” which, if I’m being honest, feels a lot more like the Jesus I know than the “great men of theology” model Coulter laments. Jesus mostly asked questions, rather than giving answers, something we might ponder as we consider our posture for theological education.

I look forward to talking with Dr. Hong Wednesday and for my money, the future of theological education is in good hands with the kind of decolonial futures she is imagining and enacting. Thanks for reading, and as always, feel free to subscribe, share, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

But as I thought about his article, I had the nagging feeling that there was something important his article pointed to but did not say. I realized this as I wrote the first piece, and for that reason, made it part one so I could have a couple days to sort out what that nagging feeling was all about. While there are a number of ways I could say it, I think it is this: the M.Div. hides a fundamental distortion of Christian faith that is driving decline overall, even in so-called “non-conformist” Christian traditions. The task isn’t, as Coulter argues, that traditions like the ELCA “need to look to non-conformist forms to survive.” Rather than simply adopt non-conformist forms, we need to diagnose the cause of the decline so that the substance of how we live as church can change.

The idea of the M.Div. hiding a fundamental distortion of Christian faith that then profoundly distorts theological education and is driving the decline in both comes from Dr. Willie James Jennings, and especially his book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. It is also informed by my reading Christine Hong’s Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education and Harvey Kwiyani’s Decolonizing Mission. None of them say this exactly but the M.Div. is an exclusionary degree by intention. All three authors point towards white European colonialism as lionizing white male mastery—over lands, peoples, and in the name of their superior Christian civilization. This means, in a powerful phrase I heard Dr. Jennings use at his Christian Century lecture last fall, “we live inside of theft.”

The M.Div. emerged as part of the consolidation of a particular form of professionalism, a gatekeeping degree that promised a certain social and economic status in exchange for the costs of achieving it. The church’s ability to make good on that promise is, as Ted Smith writes in his excellent book The End of Theological Education, “unraveling.” One might make the argument that Coulter is on the right track in the sense that the non-conformist traditions were to some extent born out of a critique of Christian mastery, including a long-standing reticence to given their leaders’ spiritual formation over to “schools.”

Yet my ancestry on my dad’s side, the side that made manifest destiny reality by their participation in the settler conquest of Indigenous lands in the U.S, were non-conformists (Baptists, to be specific). They are quite clearly not opposed to full participation in the conquest rooted in the project of white European colonialism. And if the Trump era has shown us anything, it shows the willingness of just such conservative Christians to trade any semblance of Christian morality in a fever dream of returning to an era of white Christian dominance in American life.

The M.Div. is failing on its own, so giving it up is hardly an innovative move for theological schools like mine. Yet doing work that would actually uncover and say aloud what the M.Div. hides could be exactly the kind of work needed for historically white Christian denominations like the ELCA. Ted Smith, in the book referenced above, writes this:

In our time, there is no work more urgent than the renunciation of the white settler colonial project . . . For those of us who identify as white, renunciation involves long processes of telling the truth, relinquishing power, and making reparations.

Real renunciation, he argues “sets us free for teaching and learning otherwise. This is where any serious reimagining of theological education must begin.”

These reflections are the very reason I said earlier this year that I wanted to interview a few colleagues who are thinking about—and working on—decolonizing theological education. I hope to turn to those conversations this fall, opening up space to talk more clearly about the kind of “serious reimagining” is needed for this moment. For starters, I wonder what a certificate or Masters of Arts in Christian Leadership would look like in a fully decolonial frame. I’d love to be part of a seminary doing that work!

Dr. Coulter is a professor at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee, and an ordained bishop in the Church of God. I don’t know that he’s written much about theological education before this but his vantage point is important. Why? He’s in the sector of theological education that is growing.

I’ve often joked with my friend Dr. Mark Gornik of City Seminary, New York, that what I see threatening storm clouds over theological education, he sees the coming of a refreshing rain. Twenty five years ago, he started CSNY to serve new immigrants from the global church who had relocated to New York City.

While one factor can never explain everything, here’s the fascinating thing: CSNY has never had an M.Div. Instead, they have an MA in ministry leadership in global city. Across the Association of Theological Schools, the degree is most commonly called the MA in Christian Leadership or the MACL.

Coulter’s article describes the fascinating paradox of liberal mainline traditions being quite conservative when it comes to clergy formation, hanging on way too long to the idea of a residential M.Div. degree as the gold standard credential for ministry leadership. There are two parts to the problem articulated in that way: the residential part, and and the M.Div. part. The changes in church and society have been driving a decline in M.Div. enrollment for decades, including in the ELCA. And with plummeting enrollment, many, if not most, mainline schools have had to merge, relocate, or sell property to survive—very much the pattern for the ELCA.

Most of the growth in the largest seminaries across the ATS is online and in certificate and M.A. programs. Take Coulter’s school, Pentecostal Theological Seminary. They offer a totally online MACL that requires 8 core courses in formation for ministry, bible, history, and theology, along with 6 leadership concentration courses for a total of 14 courses. The M.Div. at my school, LSTC, requires 27 courses and, until recently, was not available via a distance learning option. While there are alternative pathways to ministry leadership in the ELCA, they are still not viewed as equal to the traditional pathway that requires the M.Div. plus a one-year, full-time pastoral internship.

Part of the issue here is the conservatism of mainline denominations that still hold onto the M.Div. as their gold standard credential for ministry. Most of the traditions attending the sorts of schools Coulter lists as growing do not require the M.Div. (or, for many of them, a master’s degree of any sort) for ministry leadership. So when pastors want to deepen their skills, the MACL is fitted perfectly to their actual need—an accessible, practical degree that helps them grow as Christian leaders. The interesting thing is, when you look up where MACL degrees are being offered, a mainline person like me feels lost—I’ve not heard of any of the schools.

In part two of this post, I’ll say a bit more about what I think ELCA schools should do given the trends Dr. Coulter points out. I’ll leave you guessing, but I will say, quoting a business leadership guru, W. Edwards Deming: Every system is perfectly designed to give you the result you are getting today.

Thanks for reading, and do drop a comment with your thoughts.

I took a winter break from reflections on theological education. An interview got postponed, I had other writing deadlines, I spent time with family. Yet the travails of theological education were never far from my mind, especially given some unexpected upheaval at my own school. So I’m stepping back into this space with a sense of renewed energy and a plan for what I’d like to do going forward. This post is an attempt to simply name some types of solutions to the challenges of theological education in this moment. I’m using the term types in the Weberian sense of ideal types: they help see the landscape but the types are not specific cases, and thus don’t hold all the nuance of actual circumstances. My goal is to paint a broad picture of some existing efforts at change to which my upcoming interviews and reflections hope to offer a stiff challenge. I’ll highlight the types of solutions I’ve seen and conclude with what I hope to raise going forward that will challenge these solutions as not going far enough in two important senses.

Type one: Double down on residential formation for pastoral leadership.

This is mostly the bastion of the well-endowed schools who can afford to incentivise students to commit to moving to and living in a residential community. It often includes either explicit or implicit arguments about it being impossible to do theological education and leadership formation adequately online.

Type two: Expand through online synchronous and asynchronous degree programs.

While there were many schools headed down this road before the outbreak of pandemic in March of 2020, nearly everyone confronted the need to do this afterwards. Some (see above) didn’t stick with it, but may who lagged behind the curve are now offering non-residential students the chance to attain theological degrees largely or entirely online.

Type three: Shift energy from the M.Div. to new M.A. offerings

Over the past decade or more, there have been many reports of the “death of the M.Div.” as the gold standard degree in theological schools. Indeed, the total numbers have declined not only in ELCA schools but in the ATS overall. During this time, a proliferation of new M.A. programs in specific ministry areas have been launched. In 2022, for the first time, enrollment in M.A. programs exceeded enrollment in M.Div. programs across all ATS schools.

Type four: Shifting from degrees to non-degree offerings

One might call this the “full spectrum” type in which degrees are seen as inherently exclusive and excluding. Thus, if you peruse the Lilly Endowment Pathways for Tomorrow grantees, you’ll see interesting experiments in widening access to all kinds of learners, with a wide variety of interests and goals for their formation. While many of these are asynchronous online initiatives, some are intensive onground. Some of these platforms are quite slick, branded in such a way that without digging you might not realize they were part of a theological school!

Type five: Merging or closing schools

There is some diversity here, with some schools simply closing, others effectively closing by merging with a larger, stronger institution, and some remaining an educational entity but ceasing the granting of degrees. This particularly impacts Mainline traditions like the ELCA. Recent ATS data shows only one Mainline seminary in the top 25 by students enrolled: Duke Divinity School.

Efforts by ELCA seminaries can be found within each of these five types above. I’m interested in exploring two additional types that I think are crucial to the future of the church but I see little of in the ELCA schools or even the ATS as a whole, for that matter.

Type Six: Decolonial Futures

Willie James Jennings, in his recent book After Whiteness names the uncomfortable fact of the way a colonial mindset lives in the heart of our enterprise in theological education in North America. Without facing this honestly and fully, and then changing how we do what we do, down to the diseased roots, the deep troubles we face will endure. I’ll be interviewing friends working on this: Christine Hong, who wrote Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence For Theological Education, and Harvey Kwiyani, Decolonizing Mission, as well as (I hope) Dr. Jennings.

Type Seven: Experimental Spiritual Communities

I’ve been working with a group of radically experimental ELCA communities all trying to rethink how gathering in spiritual community works today, especially for those who thought there was no church that could work for them. These leaderful communities tend to be hyperlocal, responsive to context, and quite badly served by the current structures of the ELCA, including seminaries. If the future of how we gather as spiritual community is more like these ministries than the typical Lutheran parish of the 1950s or 1970s, what are the implications for what theological schools are and do? I’ll be interviewing leaders from these communities about their experiences and what that might suggest for renewing theological education.

+Anon,

Christian

I started, though, with a question about the significance of connecting seminaries with universities. I had a conversation a month or so ago with Jonathan Strom, an ELCA Lutheran and Dean of Emory’s Candler School of Theology. He talked about how significant it is in his view to have divinity schools lodged within a university context. Given Lutheran history, being literally birthed in a university, he said it has always been surprising that so many of the Lutheran seminaries in North America are free-standing schools. In recent years, however, three of the ELCA seminaries have merged with Lutheran universities, in PLTS’s case with California Lutheran. So I asked what advantages does she see to having theological education embedded within a university context, and the answer was both instructive and inspiring. While not easy, such partnerships can benefit both in profound ways.

PLTS has been a leader in ecology and theological education, having started the Center for Climate Justice and Faith which sponsors numerous pathways for leadership formation both in degree programs and various certificate programs. This is a concrete, inspiring, Spirit-led initiative in response to changing needs of the church and the world.

Colleen is a leader to watch. I wonder, too, what it will mean that now a majority of the ELCA seminaries are led by women. She spoke strongly about the need for collaboration, something the seminaries have been quite poor in doing in the past. Perhaps a fresh moment with new leaders will press shared mission over defending traditional territories, donors, and synods. If so, there may be reason for hope that we can figure out God’s call in this moment to form leaders for the sake of the world.

As usual, I asked my final question: if you could start a seminary now, fresh, no existing institution to deal with, what core ideas or values would guide you? Her answer was so simple, powerful, beautiful, I immediately asked if she was going to write a book about theological education rooted in her ideas. Of course, she has to live it out first, leading my old seminary into new seasons of vital work forming leaders for God’s church for the sake of God’s beloved world. Listen and enjoy! Share and comment if you are inspired.

Anon,

Christian

Across the ELCA, these mostly synodically-based schools exist in 34 of 65 synods, from New England to Southwest California Synods. It is, as Greg shares, intended to be intensive, cohort-based, and serious, with top teachers and core topics to the life of faith. My first interview for this series was with Raymond Pickett, former Rector of Pacific Lutheran Seminary in Berkeley. We were convinced that some mental modes that frame our thinking about theological education have to be broken open in order to find fresh pathways forward. One of these is “lay” versus “clergy” theological education. It turns out that leaders who are not rostered leaders do not want second-rate, watered down theology. Nope. They want to be challenged and equipped with the best our theological teachers have to offer.

So, as Greg lays out, the challenge is how this vibrant network of synodically-based theological education can more fully integrate with the seven seminaries of the ELCA. The goal is to throw open the doors of theological education, creating what Justo Gonzalez has called a “full spectrum” of theological education from young people to the elderly, from full-time professionals to the wide range of crucial leadership that make faith communities work.

Thanks, Greg, for a fascinating conversation that taught me so much, and for your commitment to that “full spectrum” of theological education in Northwest Wisconsin and across the nation.

Anon,

Christian

I’ve wanted to know more about the TEIL program, as it feels like an example of the kind of contextual theological education our seminaries—including LSTC—need to get a lot better at. She was kind enough to sit down with me and share her experience. I won’t give alway all the gems in this interview here, but one thing is worth lifting up.

Francisco Herrera, a intrepid organizer in the church and a recent Ph.D. graduate from LSTC, worked with me to do a series of focus groups with BIPOC ELCA leaders over the past year. We hear from a bunch of amazing leaders from congregations all across the ELCA. One of the top asks from them was to work with them to develop contextually relevant resources on Lutheranism and Christianity generally. The vast majority of these leaders—like Wanda—didn’t grow up Lutheran or even Christian. They don’t want some warmed over European-centric version of the faith. That contextualizing work is at the heart of TEIL, and is part of the reason I believe it holds lessons for theological education far beyond that specific experiment.

Listen, share, and offer your thoughts in the comments.

Anon,

Christian

I reached out to Bishop Curry for an interview, but my brilliant colleague at LSTC, Keisha Dyson, beat me to the ask. He’d already sat with her and Tim Frakes, an amazing videographer who partners with LSTC on the regular. The conversation is telling, and I encourage you to give it a listen.

I love his idea that you enter into a role planning on leaving (because, surprise, we all do!). With this frame, from day one you are “building leaders to replace yourself.” This is a crucial question for the ELCA: how are we not just holding on to OUR place—and here I mean especially the European-descent majority in the ELCA? What would it mean for the majority to really invest in building leaders to replace the European-descent majority with vibrant Latiné, African descent, Asian, and Native leaders and congregations?

This is not a zero-sum scenario. European-descent congregations will be the majority for a long while to come. But where are they investing? To replace themselves with themselves? Or to support emerging ministries like the one that helped raise up our new presiding bishop?

There’s more here than that, but I’ll leave that to your discovery.

Anon,

Christian

In the R&E report reference above, the lead author Timothy Snyder points towards that deeper problem:

The significant number of congregations in rural communities reflects Lutheranism’s prominent place as an immigrant church before the 21st century. Many congregations were formed as the nation’s European-descent immigrants expanded westward.

In my response to this report, published in a complementary document winsomely titled “Research Commentaries,” I note that my family, too, were part of that westward expansion that claiming lands whose Indigenous inhabitants had just been displaced by deception and violence, often genocidal in nature. I quote my Emory colleague Ted A. Smith from his landmark book The End of Theological Education (Eerdmans 2023) who writes:

In our time, there is no work more urgent than the renunciation of the white settler colonial project intertwined with the building of our churches, colleges and seminaries. For those of us who identify as white, renunciation involves long processes of telling the truth, relinquishing power, and making reparations.

In the ELCA, the whitest denomination in the United States, the number of those called to this long process of renunciation and truth-telling is literally in the millions. Where to start, then, especially in thinking about theological education, the work of forming future leaders the work of this long process of renunciation?

Here’s a thought.

On Indigenous People’s Day, October 9, 2023, a group of Indigenous leaders across the ELCA joined together to launch a first-of-its-kind initiative called Theological Education for Indigenous Leaders. The first cohort included ten leaders who are preparing for rostered leadership in the ELCA. For too long, mission and ministry with Indigenous communities has come through a western colonial frame, causing profound harm, both institutionally through such horrors as the residential boarding schools and theologically through instituting a white lens on the Gospel.

Leaders gathered in Portland, OR for the launch of TIEL in 2023

This program, according to co-founder and instructor Vance Blackfox, Director of Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations for the ELCA, offers something unprecedented:

The TEIL program is a historic and first-of-its-kind opportunity for Indigenous leaders and for our church. Ninety percent of our instructors, whom we call wisdom keepers, are Indigenous, and the students will experience Indigenous pedagogy, or ways of learning about ministry and biblical studies, that are not offered anywhere else in our church.

This exciting ministry is worthy of as much support (good will, understanding, and financial backing) by the majority European-descent ELCA membership as possible. This is especially so given that the ELCA’s 2021 “A Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to American Indian and Alaska Native People,” calls us to this task: “We commit to supporting forms of leadership, education, and certification that are Native-focused and Native-led, and we commit to developing future Native leaders, pastors, and theologians.”

TEIL also ought to be taken seriously by the majority of European-descent ELCA members and especially those of us tasked with a role in theological education. A posture of listening and learning from the wisdom keepers and cohort of students involved in this program is a key element of the “the renunciation of the white settler colonial project” we have committed ourselves to in “A Declaration.” The curriculum for TEIL entails decolonizing theological education, something as much on the table for non-Indigenous people in the ELCA as it is for the leadership of TEIL. And it is our own work as European -descent leaders to learn the history and critique those pseudo-theologies and pedagogies that have malformed us, body and soul.

Let me conclude by coming straightforwardly to my post’s title, answering the question: Why do I suggest that the future of Lutheran theological education is Indigenous? For this simple reason: until Lutheran theological is dismantled and rebuild through a reckoning of European-descent Lutherans with our settler colonial history, regarding Indigenous peoples and the land itself, we do not have a faithful path forward.

Coming soon, an interview with participants in TEIL, and with scholars working on decolonizing theological education.

Anon,

Christian

I wanted to talk with Jonathan for two main reasons. First, Candler has taken some very creative steps to widen access to theological education. They asked themselves the crucial question: who are we not in conversation with that we should be? This led them beyond recruiting for degree programs, including The Foundry, that takes theological education into congregations, and La Mesa, a two-year ministry certificate program designed for those whose traditions do not require a master’s degree.

My second reason for taking with Jonathan is to hear how he sees Lutheran theological education. As an active layperson whose father was a graduate and long-time supporter of Luther Seminary, he’s watched with interest and concern as the ELCA seminaries struggle. Of course, the same winds of change in the spiritual landscape impacting the ELCA schools also impact Candler. Yet there are very strong benefits of the way Methodists — at Emory, Duke, Boston University and elsewhere — embedded their seminaries in major research universities. Lutherans, he notes, have always had a strong commitment to higher education yet many of our seminaries are free-standing. Some have, in recent years, merged with Lutheran colleges (one thinks, for example, of PLTS becoming part of California Lutheran, for example) but with rather mixed results.

His searching questions about the future of Lutheran theological education. I love his lifting up the Lutheran notion of a “common priesthood” rooted in our baptism, a theological handhold that should guide us as we work to reimagine theological education (the next interview, already in the cue, focuses on lay schools of theology!). I also found his searching questions about where the next generation of Lutheran academic leadership will come from are worthy of much consideration. He notes the absence of Lutherans in faculty search applicant pools, a reality I’ve noticed, too, reviewing grant applications for the Louisville Institute.

I hope you’ll find the conversation challenges you, and that you’ll share the conversation with friends you’d like to draw into this conversation about renewing Lutheran theological education.

Anon,

Christian

Well, he starts right off by calling out the fact that the ELCA persists as the whitest denomination in the USA, despite thirty years of rhetoric around various diversity strategies. The majority “other” the historically marginalized folks—African Americans, Latiné, Asian, Indigenous and Alaska Native. And queer folks, too. We’ve opened the door a little, in a formal way, but continue to kick out queer pastors if their commitments and morality doesn’t match the mainstream’s puritanism sex ethic. I wrote about this in my post on the election of Bishop Curry as Presiding Bishop a couple weeks ago. It is a congenital disease within Lutheranism.

If that section isn’t enough to encourage a listen, Tim does some real talk about mission developers and the way the ELCA mainstream too often under-resources them all the while questioning their Lutheran bonafides. He’s got experience to draw from both as a church planter and as a scholar, studying experimental churches.

But what is surprising, to me at least, is the places he goes for possible models for what’s needed: the arts. A longtime and serious musician (yay for the low brass), and an arts lover generally, he lifts of the idea of a pastoral leader as a curator, know by the experience created for the participant and not because they are front and center. He lifts up the idea of the musician working between the practice cubical, solo performance, and the ensemble.

It is not enough to train individual performers; the fact is that people need to be able to play with others. This is why TEEM and SAM training makes so much sense—the individual learning “to play” is always already in the context of the ensemble. And by the way, he drops some early insights about at major SAM research project currently underway, and I thought it was just fascinating. I don’t know how to put the little “mind exploding” emoji in Substack, but just imagine that here.

I hope you’ll give this great conversation a listen, share it, and put your thoughts and questions in the comments. And for more from Tim, see his excellent recent book from Fortress Press, Lived Vocation: Stories of Faith at Work.

All of this led me to partner with him as lead researcher on a Lilly Endowment Pathways for Tomorrow planning grant LSTC received last January. I start off asking him about that shared work, and what we’re learning about the vital mission and ministry of historically marginalized communities in the ELCA. That launches a wide-ranging and generative conversation. We talk about #decolonize and his leadership of a gathering focused on through the fruitfulness of the base Christian community model for organizing mission and ministry in local neighborhoods.

Towards the end of the conversation, I asked him to talk about his dissertation on intersectionality and Christian mission. He highlighted the four themes of intersectional praxis, the second of which is “playful pragmatism” (you’ll have to listen to the interview to get the rest!). Here, he offers a frame for all the work of renewing Lutheran theological education. The basic idea is because of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and more, we do not have the world, church, or seminaries we really desire. So playful pragmatism agrees we’ve got to start with what we have and experiment, trying to nudge our structures and practices towards the world God desires for us. Not everything—perhaps most things—will not work but we must try to create (playful) something better than what we have and see what DOES work (pragmatic).

Enjoy the conversation, and share your thoughts in the comments. My hope is that through these conversations, this can become a space of shared reflection about the renewal not only of theological education but of how to faithfully “chime in” with God’s mission of love, mercy, healing and justice for our beautiful and broken world.

Anon,

Christian

While I’d be the last one to disparage in-depth study, many problems evolve from this, shall we say, “style” of theological education Lutheran’s have committed themselves to in the ELCA. The first is a kind of Lutheran “certainly,” as if we’ve finally got it (what, God? the Gospel? Christian life?) right. Such epistemological arrogance nearly always leads to lobbing insults and sometimes worse towards “others” who’ve clearly got it wrong. Martin Luther himself led the way in this, and it has been (and is!) a particular stumbling block for Lutherans. The second is related, amounting to a kind of ‘better than you’ academic arrogance, as if our years of classroom study and long nights in the library to master ancient languages and arcane concepts make us the only theologians that matter in our congregations and communities. Too often, pastors become petty tyrants carrying on the arguments of their favorite professors in whatever new congregational circumstances they find themselves. Neither of these results of theological education make for wise pastoral leaders; no, quite the opposite!

Bishop Curry with his spouse, Lashonda

This is why some (yes, I’ll name it) whisper that candidates for pastoral ministry through alternative routes like The Theological Education for Emerging Ministries (TEEM) and Synodically Authorized Ministers (SAMs) create a two-tiered system in which we have adequately trained pastors (those with a traditional seminary-based M.Div.) and those with subpar training (those with a TEEM or SAM certificate, but not a degree). It wouldn’t be surprising if underneath such whisperings is blatant racism, given that large numbers of TEEM candidates are BIPOC leaders in the whitest denomination in the United States.

It turns out that the ELCA’s fifth Presiding Bishop, Yehiel Curry, is not only its first Black Presiding Bishop, but is also its first to come up through the TEEM program (he subsequently received the M.Div. degree from LSTC, as well). While I won’t pretend this Substack will have much impact on the ELCA’s views, nor its specific bias against alternative pathways to ministry, I thought I might take a moment to suggest the reasons why the TEEM program is actually the strongest theological education offering in the ELCA, and ought to inform how we reimagine the more traditional classroom-based master’s degree pathways.

If you’ve been reading the press releases (and LSTC’s rightly enthusiastic example is case in point), you’ll know of his winding path into ministry. After stints as a social worker and teacher, he got involved in a ministry for young Black men on Chicago’s south side which developed into Shekinah Chapel where he became a lay mission developer. Part of the genius of TEEM is its intentional commitment to candidates staying in their home communities and congregations while they pursue their pastoral training. Curry did just this, becoming ordained alongside Shekinah Chapel incorporating as a new congregation in the ELCA.

During Curry’s years in TEEM, I was on the faculty Luther Seminary, then as now doing research on theological education and pastoral formation. At the time, Luther was part of the Western Mission Cluster with PLTS in Berkeley, with whom they shared responsibility for TEEM. Luther contracted with one of the leading experts on adult education, Stephen D. Brookfield, then University Professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN, to do an in-depth study of the TEEM program. During this period, he was also mentoring the pre-tenure faculty group of which I was a member. I remember having a conversation with Stephen as he prepared his study report, and he said something like, “I don’t get it…you Lutherans have the best model for theological education I’ve seen, and you act like it is a barely acceptable, second-rate exception.”

After two years of extensive research, Brookfield wrote a one hundred page report detailing all of his findings. (I don’t think it is online, but do email me and I’ll share a copy with you.) His final section, Recommendations, begins with an affirmation underscoring exactly why he thinks so highly of TEEM. He notes the overwhelmingly favorable views of the program from students, and begins his recommendations by trying to succinctly state what it is exactly that TEEM gets right:

The cohort model, the residential on campus study periods, the flexibility of the program, the accessibility of program staff, the mentoring arrangement, the quality of professors, the overall organization of the program and the relevant content of the curriculum – all these are crucial aspects of the program that were, on the whole, viewed favorably by the great majority of students. I applaud the TEEM program’s designers for this visionary approach to theological education. It stands squarely in the best traditions of adult education – learner centered, balancing group and individual learning, constantly seeking to build connections between knowledge and students’ lives, and highly respectful of learners’ experiences and abilities. It has been a revelation to me just how highly the students regard the program and its staff. For many of them it is no overstatement to say it has been a transformative experience. In a 40-year career in adult education I have never encountered a program that exhibited such high levels of students satisfaction. The program should be a shining jewel in the ELCA crown.

Nearly twenty years later, I hate to say, TEEM is a far cry from the shining jewel in the ELCA crown. But as traditional seminary programs, and the M.Div. degree specifically, continue to struggle, perhaps the moment has come to see if TEEM might have a key to a newly vibrant future not only for theological education but for our church. Bishop Curry was, after all, planting a church when he went through TEEM, a still vibrant congregation currently led by pastor Jason Williams (also an LSTC TEEM graduate).

In his remarks after his election earlier this week, he made sure we all know that he’s still a church planter. “I won’t end my career in a Bishop’s office,” he said, a sly smile on his face. “I’m a builder, a mission developer, and I have to build it again.” While the Spirit may have many reasons for leading the church to elect Bishop Curry as the next Presiding Bishop, his experience as a scrappy, faithful, creative mission developer from the south side of Chicago might just be the most important for a denomination whose national leadership, despite constantly clanging the cymbals of “vision” and “innovation”, has yet to land either.

Anon,

Christian

Drawing from a list of all congregations incorporated in the ELCA over the past decade, along with all the Synodically Authorized Worshipping Communities or SAWCs (n=300), we invited a cohort of 25 communities to join the project. In the end, we included a few historic congregations going through radical missional reimagination, too. One of our criteria was they couldn’t have “Lutheran” in their name, even though they all are affiliated with the ELCA. While that sounds like a gimicky sampling strategy, I know, we thought it would most often indicate that communities were founded with the intention of being places for people who have been hurt by churches and don’t think there is a believable, safe-enough space for them to find spiritual community. And you know what? That’s exactly what happened—each in their own ways are exactly that.

As we gathered in Portland and then in Chicago, we invited leaders from each community—mostly all meeting for the first time— to jump into a craft activity, seeking a creative way to share who they are with the others. They had tons of fun, and found so much inspiration hearing the common themes across their communties as each shared. Among the top take - aways from the gathering was how alone they feel, often finding their experimental style not only the odd duck in their region, but often looked at with skepticism: “are you really “Lutheran” (enough)?

In the days and weeks afterwards, I found myself thinking about what lessons these leaders and their creative faith communities have to teach theological education.

Right off the top, many said, we need something dramatically different for training church planters and for supporting new expressions of church. To a person, people said their experiences of “church planting training” was somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. That’s troubling in a declining mainline church with a church closure to church starter rate of something like 8:1. I’ve pastored a new church plant, but I have not been to any trainings for mission development or transformation, so I’d best not go into any specifics. But I take them at their word: they need training and support, but what they are getting isn’t doing it.

I don’t think it is actually rocket science to create something better—heck, just bringing them together and letting them learn from each other was super helpful and supportive. As we ended one gathering, a participant started up a song we’d learned from the opening worship, a song St. Lydia’s uses at its Dinner Church in Brooklyn: “What We Need Is Here.” What would it look like to curate more spaces in which the experts in the room are the creative, Spirit-filled leaders from these communities themselves?

Ah, you might be thinking. But surely they need theology and history and bible, those core things seminaries think they are unique in providing as part of leadership formation. Well, chew on this cogent request from a leader of an urban, primarily queer and bipoc new congregation:

We need workshops and trainings empowering us in the ministries we are doing (these would be far-ranging from liberation theology, restorative response, circle-keeping, conflict transformation, preaching and exegesis, active listening, facilitating meetings, theater and ritual studies, etc, etc) with needed skills and learnings, but taught by people of color or LGBTQ+ and queer people with lived experience, from trauma-informed perspectives, Afro-indigenous rooted wisdom, and pedagogy that is actively anti-oppression.

Just take a moment and think about what seminary is centering these sorts of offerings. Yet many, if not all, of the leaders in these cohorts would affirm some or all of these requests. They really do need leadership support but what comes to them via the traditional channels in the ELCA too often is whitewashed and European-centric. And before you raise your hand to object, let me assure you that I am just the messenger here. Folks experience things the way they experience them, and it just so happens that in a room of their trusted peers, they speak with a rare kind of honesty, a kind they might not usually use for fear of having their (already meager) funding cut off.

This project continues for another couple years, and will end with a creative conference in 2027 lead by the leaders of these faith communities and others like them. So stay tuned, follow along, and let’s ponder together how we reinvent theological education for the church the Spirit is birthing among us. It is, to use a beloved but perhaps now overused quote, like author Arundhati Roy says: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Oh, ELCA, if we could only be quiet enough, and listen well enough, what we would hear.

Anon,

Christian

In thinking about the broadening types of leadership in faith communities beyond the traditional “clergy-led” congregation is one of the pivots we discussed. The rise of various “leaderful” communities with shared leadership, she noted, finally embraces in practice one of the theological hallmarks of the Lutheran tradition: the priesthood of all believers.

I found the the discussion of how changes in the forms of theological education and church leadership leads to different needs for the physical space of the theological school. Less the residential school modeled on a monastery, with is refectory and daily chapel, and more like a conference center prepared for short-term conferences and convenings along with effective technology allowing virtual connections reaching around the world. Luther Seminary’s own decision to sell its historic campus and relocate is, in part, a reflection of this kind of transformation.

Enjoy the conversation, and share your thoughts in the comments. My hope is that through these conversations, this can become a space of shared reflection about the renewal not only of theological education but of how to faithfully “chime in” with God’s mission of love, mercy, healing and justice for our beautiful and broken world.

Anon,

Christian

These are anecdotal observations, so take them for that and no more. Still, it was a very rare opportunity to ask a wide range of people about what’s going on in their context.

To start with, my sibling seminary in Saskatoon, the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, has found a home in a shared life with a couple other seminaries all located on the University of Saskatchewan. They have a couple faculty and no residential students to speak of. It is not a surprising reality as their circumstances mirror those of the ELCA seminaries—including, most recently, the largest of the ELCA seminaries, Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Just a week ago, they announced their board of directors has voted to sell the historic campus where they have been for a century as they downsize, looking for a smaller and less expensive physical footprint for the now mostly online and intensive course delivery they offer.

Yet, despite the challenges the schools of theology at the University of Saskatchewan face, I was deeply impressed with their substantial engagement with the colonial history and the work of building relationships with the various Indigenous peoples who live on what in Canada is called Treaty 6 territory. The conference began and ended with stunning plenary sessions led by, first, Elder Maria Campbell, a Metis elder with an incredibly broad influence through her art, activism, and writing, and last, Joseph Naytowhow, a Nehiyaw (Cree) elder, storyteller, actor, and musician. A full afternoon was dedicated to fieldtrips to local Indigenous sites, educating us all about the land we were meeting on. Few, if any, seminaries in the USA (that I know of) have integrated the story of the land they reside on, and built relationships with the Indigenous communities whose land it is. I was inspired to build on what my seminary is doing each fall, hosting the Vine Deloria, Jr. Theological Symposium.

In a counter example to the move to mostly online and intensive educational offerings, a colleague from Princeton Seminary described a stubbornly residential program for M.Div., M.A., and Ph.D. students. They have an FTE enrollment of 276 FTE (ATS 2023-24 data tables), robust for the historic mainline protestant seminaries and especially for those whose student bodies still uproot their lives to come live and study together on a shared campus. By contrast, that same year, the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon was 15 FTE and Luther Seminary, 184. Although I don’t have numbers of online vs. residential, I’d guess from what I heard that the vast majority of the Lutheran students are online students, not residential. What was surprising, however, was the fact that Princeton students are only about 35% Presbyterian now, down from almost entirely Presbyterian a generation ago when this colleague attended as an M.Div. student. Also, it is worth mentioning, and he did, that Princeton funds its highly residential student body with its endowment of over $1,300,000,000 versus $123,000,000 for Luther Seminary and Saskatoon’s $7,500,000. While $$$ don’t tell the whole story, it is a major factor in the fate of schools in this moment of upheaval.

I spent time talking with a colleague on the Catholic faculty at Tübingen, Germany, who was pretty discouraged by how the sex abuse scandal has decimated churchgoing in Germany. The church is funded by elective tax people pay to the state for membership in the church, whether Catholic or Protestant. People are not only stopping attending their local parishes, but they are actively withdrawing their registered membership so they no longer are subject to the tax. They are dealing with that massive decline that is impacting enrollment in theological schools, too, as well as grappling with the massive influx of migrants many of whom are Muslim. Colleagues from their new Center for Islamic Theology were present at the conference, a remarkable testament to the progress they are making on that front. They response to the decline in churchgoing, however, does not have such a positive story. He said he’d love it if, instead of a turning inward to attend to its own institutional turmoil, the church would turn outwards, meeting people where they are, listening to their concerns, and reimagining mission in ways that are responsive to their critique. From my perspective in the ELCA, I can only say “Amen.”

Another colleague who teaches in the department of Christian Studies at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul complained about the ways in which their department is being squeezed out by the university in favor of funding STEM, tech, and especially AI. She’s brilliant and doing amazing work looking at Christianity and local resistence in the midst of neoliberal expansion in Korea. I’d bet this pressure is present for colleagues in R1 universities in the USA, not to mention (of course) the adverse political pressures the current U.S. administration is putting on those schools. She wonders who will value the humanities, those disciples (in which she includes her field of Practical Theology) that concern themselves with the well-bring of all, and especially those who are most vulnerable. Need for power to drive AI, the government is planning to build major damns and displace many local communities. Her paper focused on their plight, their protests, and their collective power in moral terms over against the sheer force of the economic development calculus of the state.

Rounding out the reports on conversations, I chatted with a colleague from Rwanda who did her doctoral work in South African and now is a visiting scholar in Finland. She’s a dynamo, and along with her South African supervisor, published a wonderful chapter in the recently released second edition of a book I edited with my friend Aana Vigen: Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics (T&T Clark 2024). I connected with a couple other South African colleagues, including the outgoing president of the society who is department chair of Stellenbosch University’s Practical theology Department in its Faculty of Theology. I’ve been so interested to watch the challenging dynamics of a changing South Africa, including major process of decolonizing curriculum, something I’m going to be doing a series of interviews about over the rest of the summer.

There are common themes, of course, shared pressures across cases. Financial pressures. Church decline. Enrollment challenges. Political strife. Changing demographics. And yet more than searching for shared themes, I was looking for lessons about how colleagues are dealing with their contexts and challenges, as much as inspiration for us in the ELCA as we deal with our own. Sure, there may be lessons in this or that case, but mostly I feel the contexts don’t translate and we’ll need to figure out our own way forward in the ELCA. I do take heart, however, from the deep commitment and remarkable imagination across these many conversations. Most of all, I’m grateful for the friendship and collegiality which keeps me going.

More interviews in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. And if you find this of value, feel free to share with others and leave your thoughts in the comments. The goal is to try to spark a place of conversation, not just with my reflections and interviews, but with your commentary, too.

Anon,

Christian

Before we started the interview, we both shared reflections about the life of an important mentor for this shared work, the Rev. Dr. Craig Dykstra. He was a practical theologian and, for many years, Vice President of Religion at Lilly Endowment, who died just a few days ago. Craig developed the idea of pastoral imagination out of a series of conversations with pastors hosted by David Wood at the Louisville Institute in the 1990s. That set of conversations convinced him that wise pastors learn and draw upon a kind of embodied capacity to both see the holy depth of a situation, and to exercise the skills, capacities, and judgments needed for the work of mercy and justice in congregational life and for the sake of the world.

Craig worked with us to begin a research project centered on trying to understand how pastors learn this kind of imagination over time, embedded in the day-in, day-out work of ministry. While it was never our intent to focus our primary attention on the implications for theological education, we knew from the start our research would have significant implications for how seminaries form ministers ready for complexity that is ministry today.

The conversation ranges across Eileen’s long-standing work on the state of women in ministry, her own practices of pedagogy in the classroom informed by her research on ministry, and how she is bringing this wisdom to her work consulting with theological school faculties. It is an exciting and, I think, profound reflection on the current state of ministry today, and the implications for the changes needed in theological education. You can find a range of her exciting work on her Three Minute Ministry Mentor (3MMM) site, and I encourage you to sign up for her newsletter.

Later this week, I’m headed to the International Academy of Practical Theology in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I hope to convince some of my international colleagues to sit for an interview and bring some global Lutheran (and other!) perspective to the conversation. And I have some really interesting ELCA interviews scheduled for later this month. Till then,

Anon,

Christian