FASHIONING A COMMUNITY OF LEARNING

It is always changing. Always growing. Attentive to experience. Ever watchful for wisdom. And from it no one truly graduates.

That’s the community of learning—a company of believers who answer the call to study, engage, reflect, and preach the good news. It’s a community central to the mission of the American Baptist Seminary of the West.

“We seek to create a community of learning composed of faculty, students and Christian churches that will provide a theological education that is: multi-racial and multicultural, evangelical and ecumenical, academic and spiritual, theoretical and practical.”

These points of tension in ABSW’s mission statement are hallmarks of authentic community. They are the growing edges for a people trying to be faithful together.

“We are not independent entrepreneurs seeking skills,” says ABSW President Keith Russell. “Rather we are men and women who have common cause in Jesus and therefore seek to be trained in light of a larger commitment to a historical community of faith—the church.”

Community characterizes the seminary experience at ABSW. Community is a valued practice—something to be modeled. And it is an aspiration—something to stride toward. Community is manifested in a variety of ways at ABSW. In the classroom all members are valued. “I always encourage students that they have something to share and something to learn,” says Dr. James Chuck, professor of theology and church ministry. “We consider the experiences of the people that come to the class as a resource for the class.”

Students, faculty, and staff share in times of worship, and they participate in a variety of community gatherings—special lectures, study groups, retreats, and barbecues. Alumni/ae, too, are members of this community. They contribute their experiences to the pool of knowledgeand return to campus to be refreshed and to sharpen their skills.

“To leave seminary is not to leave the community of learning but to move directly into a community where one must lead, inspire, and challenge faith and learning to continue,” Russell says. “We invite people back into this community as they move and work in the life of the church.”

A Community-Focused Curriculum

Community provides the framework for ABSW’s master of divinity curriculum. The new curriculum begun this fall emphasizes “contextual” education in which diverse ministry settings are the focal point for theological reflection.

Professors integrate their disciplines through team teaching. Student context groups move from the classroom to church settings and back again – processing theory and experiencing the work of ministry at the same time.

Five Bay Area churches are participating this year. The pastors serve as mentors, but the entire church is a partner as well.

“The local church has a role not only as a facilitator of learners but also as a participant in learning,” says the Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews, an ABSW alum and pastor of Grace Baptist Church in San Jose, one of the five churches.

Grace’s lay leaders engage with the context groups and get to hear the students’ first impressions about the church—a “snapshot that the leadership wouldn’t have any other way,” Mathews says.

The Challenge of Community

The new curriculum affirms the truth that learning is lifelong—as critical for professors as for students, says Chuck, who joined the faculty in 1991 after 40 years as pastor of First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.

“I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago,” Chuck says. He attributes that growth to engagement with students and his wide reading interests—spurred on by a theological reading group made up mostly of retired ministers.

Chuck says that faculty in a community of learning must break from traditional notions of isolated disciplines. “If we don’t interact with each other, we’re like eight restaurants on the same street,” he says. “There’s no point in saying we have a multicultural, multiracial community if we don’t interact with each other.”

Recently the faculty has begun to take time in its meetings for professors to get to know each other better, to share their life stories and “the growing edges of our interests,” Chuck says.

The new curriculum represents a major change in traditional ministerial preparation. Yet it reflects a philosophy of community that’s central to Christian experience.

“At the heart of the Christian faith is the formation of a new human community,” Russell says. “All of our training and learning must be in reference to and in relationship to the past, present, and future of this Christological community.”