Join us at Karam Forum 2022 this November 17-18! Amos Yong will give our keynote address, on how theological schools can rely on the Holy Spirit to build new modes and models in our digitalizing, globalizing, pluralizing cultural environments. Denise Daniels, Michaela O’Donnell, Helen Young Hayes, Fernando Tamara and more will also lead our collaboration, with a focus on Thriving in a Changing World.
We’re looking forward to gathering with you to reaffirm, reimagine and refresh our vocations as theological educators – collaborating to seek new life for ourselves, our students, our schools and our communities.
Gather with us LIVE in Denver, OR join by Zoom from wherever you are! You don’t need to decide ahead of time which way you’ll participate. Reserve your ticket today, and decide later whether you’ll join us in person at Park Church or via Zoom.
Check out our event website for details, including the schedule and FAQs.
We’ll start at 7:00pm on Thursday, Nov. 17, and finish up with lunch on Friday, Nov. 18. So if you’re attending either ETS or AAR/SBL, Karam Forum is a super-easy addition to your trip.
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Our changing world is a huge challenge for our schools. The faith once delivered to the saints doesn’t change, and the theological knowledge tradition is always stewarded in organic continuity. But context makes a big difference, and theological schools are called by God to carry the mission forward in new ways. From the digital revolution to the challenge of cultural pluralism, almost everything that our schools were built to do needs to be rethought.
Yet no one can be sure what comes next. The changes needed aren’t simply a matter of tinkering with institutional structures and finance flows. Potential students are increasingly skeptical that they even need a formal theological education – that what we do in theological schools is actually valuable to their ministry. How do we make it plausible to them that our schools deliver value that’s worth what we’re asking them to pay for it, in years of time as well as in money?
The Lord leading his people out of their familiar home and into a wilderness, toward a land they do not know? If only there were some precedent for that!
Amos Yong of Fuller Theological Seminary will give Karam Forum 2022’s keynote address, on how our schools can rely on the Holy Spirit to find new opportunities amid the challenges of digitalization, globalization and pluralization. As he wrote in his recent book on the future of theological schools, Renewing the Church by the Spirit:
Theological education cannot avoid the impact of these broader developments. Its institutions used to rely on hierarchical ecclesial connections that are now fraying in a flattened, connected and networked world. Further, if institutions of theological education formerly served Christian churches, the nature of ecclesiality is itself being called into question in a diversifying post-Christian and postcolonial world, to the point that theological educators are now less sure about the identity of their primary constituents. How might theological education reconstruct itself in a postmodern, post-Western, post-Enlightenment and even post-Christendom age?…
How can theological education serve these developments at the vanguard of world Christian growth but also be more subdued about the inevitable comings and goings of social forms? The key, I think, is to be both ecclesiological and more fully pneumatological. Because the church exists as the body of Christ and as the fellowship of the Spirit (II Corinthians 13:13), there is no nonpentecostal church – no people of God upon whom the Spirit has not been poured out (Acts 2:33). I would go further and argue that part of the crisis of the church today has to do with its Pentecost-related pneumatic aspects not being recognized, or at best being marginalized. To ask about the role of the Spirit in theological education, then, ought to be of interest to all who seek to root such efforts more deeply in the redemptive work of God in our time. How might theological education be reconceptualized from this perspective after both Easter and Pentecost?
The renewal of theological education in a flat, connected and networked world can be found by reconsidering the primordial Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit….I wish to nurture a kind of theological sensibility – a pneumatological imagination, more precisely – that, when confronted with specific curricular, pedagogical and policy questions in dynamically shifting environments, can explore effective contextual responses by asking, in effect: What has the Spirit done? What might the Spirit be doing? What would the Spirit do? What would the Spirit wish for or empower us to do? In short, mine is a theological re-visioning of theological education that cultivates a hermeneutical and methodological imagination for renewing the church in its participation in the mission of God in the twenty-first century. It is a vision retrieved from the past but intended for the future.
See a longer excerpt, printed in a previous edition of the ON newsletter, here.
Discussion will follow Yong’s keynote address, including longtime ON friends Fernando Tamara and Philip Thompson. In a future newsletter update, we’ll share more about their experience and what we have planned in Denver!
We also have plenty more in store, including:
Michaela O’Donnell and Meryl Herr of Fuller Theological Seminary will lead a collaboration focused on our own formation as educators facing these challenges. It’s not just our schools that face unprecedented challenges – it’s us! How can we find life-giving renewal in our tumultuous vocational circumstances?
Denise Daniels of Wheaton College will help us explore what’s emerging in the world of Christian entrepreneurship, as God’s people find new ways of bringing life to the world. This will include an exciting conversation with Denver entrepreneur Helen Young Hayes, former powerhouse executive at global investment fund Janus and now founder of ActivateWork, which helps marginalized workers succeed. (See Faith & Co.’s gripping profile of Hayes and ActivateWork, “Second Chances.”)
Kara Martin of Alphacrucis College continues to lead our annual Global Session, in which colleagues from around the world join us via Zoom. We always discover rich insights by hearing about what the Holy Spirit is doing among our global peers in theological education. This year we’ll feature colleagues from Africa and South America.
And Jeff Hoffmeyer of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work will introduce us to local ministries embodying the mission of God in Denver. Wherever Karam Forum goes, we’re always honored to yield the stage to the people who are building the future of Christian community and mission on the ground in those places.
Register today to join us LIVE in Denver, OR by Zoom from wherever you are!
