PROFS PRACTICE THE COMMUNITY THEY PREACH

At the heart of ABSW's mission is a commitment to community — to train leaders who understand and value the gathering of diverse people in the common love of Christ. Community, however, is not merely a theory or a principle espoused in course lectures. It is lived out in the seminary itself.

"We are not independent entrepreneurs seeking skills," ABSW President Keith Russell often says. "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."

	Dr. Marian Ronan (top photo) talks to recent grad Natalya Johnson at a senior project presentation. Senior Michael Jordan (above) reflects with Dr. Judy Yates Siker and the Rev. Michelle Holmes.

"What surprises me about this faculty is their individual and collective willingness to go beyond the boundaries of their job descriptions," says Dr. Judy Yates Siker, dean of the faculty and associate professor of New Testament. "Each one here gives more in time and energy than a seminary can afford to repay, but I think it is because each of us here sees his or her work — and not just the teaching — with the students as a ministry."

The seminary's new curriculum really requires the practice of community. In the first two years of the M.Div. program, teams teach the core classes. The interdisciplinary approach connects Bible, theology, church history, and the ministerial arts. Professors accompany students when they move between the classroom and various ministry contexts. And as students conclude their final year with an integrative senior project, faculty collaboration continues through review and assessment.

"Our faculty understands that in order for us to achieve this new way of doing theological education, we have to develop habits of community that are not always present in scholarly institutions," Russell says.

The faculty cultivates collegiality in formal and informal ways. "We work to maintain contact with one another throughout the week, and at our monthly faculty meetings we set aside time to check in with one another so that we can celebrate the joys and share the sorrows of our fellow colleagues," Siker says. "We often share meals with one another, in small groups or large. In a faculty this size it is easy to find a friend for lunch."

The faculty had a deep immersion in community while designing the new curriculum before its launch in 2001. "We spent many, many hours working together to create it," says Dr. LeAnn Flesher, professor of Old Testament.

Meeting just about every month in the academic year, faculty members discerned the program's themes and debated the particulars. They created mock classroom sessions. For more than two years, they formulated and reformulated their plans for the new curriculum. "So it's owned by the whole faculty," Flesher says.

Faculty members who arrived after the launch of the new curriculum put their fingerprints on the process through a "serendipitous" event, Flesher says. In 2004 the Association of Theological Schools, ABSW's accrediting body, asked the seminary to build more assessment into its curriculum, so that the seminary could measure whether its learning objectives are actually achieved at the end of the three-year program. The ATS request required the faculty to go back through the curriculum with an eye for inserting assessment procedures.

"We went through the whole curriculum again, and the new people were part of the conversation, so that by the end I could see there was comprehension," Flesher says. "When people see the whole thing, they better understand their piece. And then there was buy-in again."

How does a multiracial, multiethnic faculty, diverse in gender and denomination, with different passions and personalities, pull this off? Not without tension, Flesher notes. But every faculty member has some type of leadership experience in the church, she says, so they understand the challenge of community. They also understand the reward.

"It's not easy being community," Russell adds, "but it's worth the effort. It's what we're all about."