By Dr. Scott Bader-Saye, Academic Dean
This fall Seminary of the Southwest rolls out a new Master of Divinity curriculum for the incoming junior class. The highlights include the addition of a case-based Seminar in Applied Theology that will meet weekly for all three years; a new sequencing of courses that allows for more content overlap and team teaching; a deeper integration of theory, practice, and pastoral identity; and a cross-curricular commitment to preparing students to build beloved community.
The preparation for this moment began in 2020, when the faculty decided it was time to rethink our curriculum from the ground up to be sure that we were preparing students for the church and the world they would enter as ministers upon graduation. How could we ensure that they would have the formation they needed for the particular challenges of this moment? How could we continue to form students in the rich resources of the Christian tradition with an eye to the particular ways the church’s identity needs to be embodied and enacted in this time and place?
“The new MDiv curriculum represents thoughtful collaborative research and design by Dean Bader-Saye and the faculty over a period of several years. The sustained imagination with which they worked on this project was an inspiration to me. By taking on this intensive formation, our graduates will become servant leaders who minister in a diverse culture with confidence and humility.”
We undertook a process of listening and data gathering—reaching out to students, alumni, board members, and church leaders. We specifically solicited feedback from students and alumni of color to better understand their experience at the seminary and to learn what we could do to create an environment more conducive to their formation and belonging. In this data gathering and reflection, the faculty discerned some key areas for improvement:
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- need for better integration of the academic disciplines
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- need for better integration of theory and practice
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- need for better integration of pastoral identity
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- need for preparation to address a changing church
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- need for preparation to address issues of racial injustice
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- need for preparation to address a conflicted and polarized cultural context
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- need to adjust student workload expectations to open space for personal formation in pastoral dispositions, spiritual practices, relational health, and personal wellness
The MDiv curriculum already attended to each of these things in various ways, but we went back to the drawing board to ask how we could do each of these things more intentionally and more fully.
The new curriculum responds to significant changes in the church and the world that have been going on for decades but have accelerated in recent years. Mainline churches, including the Episcopal Church, continue to navigate the challenges and opportunities of a post-Christendom context. Churches no longer carry the cultural and political influence they once did, and the assumption that people will show up to church out of cultural habit no longer holds. One gift of the post-Christendom world is that there are fewer reasons to come to church unless you are interested in following Jesus. A leaner church that is less beholden to social status is a church that is freer to be creative in its ministry and witness. How do we prepare students to see and embrace these opportunities for faithfulness?
At the same time, the cultural and political landscape our students will enter is fraught with conflict, violence, and division. Two aspects of this landscape stood out to the faculty and to our conversation partners as crucial issues for future pastors to address. The first is the reality of racial injustice and violence. The second is the pervasive ideological polarization that keeps us from understanding and truly engaging those we disagree with. We drew on the image of beloved community as a way of describing what it would look like to attend both to racial repair and to the healing of divisions. Preparing students to build beloved community is an overarching goal of the new curriculum, and it will be given special attention in the new Seminar in Applied Theology.
The Seminar in Applied Theology is a two-hour seminar that meets weekly for all three years of the MDiv program. It is a case-based course that will provide opportunities for students to integrate learning, practice, and pastoral identity. Each class session will center around a case study of a particularly challenging moment in ministry that requires a creative and adaptive response. Multiple faculty members will be present for each session to bring their disciplinary knowledge to bear on the case at hand and to help students integrate the knowledge they are learning across the curriculum. Class sessions will include reflection on the case study, instruction from professors, theological reflection, group discussion, role playing, and communal strategizing of faithful pastoral responses.
In the new curriculum, the credit-hour requirement has been lowered in order to free space for students to attend to personal formation in pastoral dispositions, spiritual practices, relational health, and personal wellness. The MDiv advising program has been developing over several years into a more fulsome coaching relationship in which advisors resource students with strategies for attending to the personal growth they will need to sustain faithful ministry for the long haul. It seemed good to the faculty to allow more time in the week for students to attend to the small experiments in habit formation that arise out of their advising work. We believe that commitment, hard work, and faithfulness are compatible with personal wellness and relational health. We want students to begin to learn now how to create the right balance to sustain long-term ministry. Reducing some of the curricular workload allows the faculty to raise our expectations around student attention to character, habits, dispositions, and spiritual practices.
Anyone who has been involved in higher education knows that curriculum revision is a dangerous and fraught undertaking! It can easily devolve into petty conflicts and zero-sum thinking. It is a reflection of the health and wisdom of our faculty that we have been able to rally around a common vision of formation and are ready to roll out these changes with enthusiasm and collegial partnership. I am grateful for the ways everyone contributed to this work and graciously received the contributions of others. I am convinced that our students will benefit from this new curriculum and that the church will be better for it.
