At Karam Forum 2022, Michaela O’Donnell talked real talk about the challenges theological educators are facing today in their vocational formation, as well as the opportunities to serve the world that flow from refreshing our vocation. In this short talk, she summarizes what she and her colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary’s De Pree Center have heard from theological educators across the country. And she shares a vision of a new business model for theological education that gives a central place to providing for others the very vocational formation we ourselves are so in need of right now.
One tangible model of this new vision is the Go the Distance cohort workshop. Elsewhere in this newsletter, we’re announcing that members of Karam Fellowship can join this community of vocational renewal at a steep discount. Check out that opportunity and consider how it might benefit you in your walk!
More and more of our jobs as theological educators consist of doing things that we didn’t sign up for back when we entered this sector of service. How can we become the leaders that the church and the world need us to be?
Below are a few selections from O’Donnell’s remarks. We think this short talk opens a window into a fresh view of the possibilities of theological education. Check it out.
And if you want to know more about the research they did and what they found, check out Go the Distance, since cohort members will learn about that in the workshop process!
Babysitting, and Other Pain Points in Theological Education
Earlier this spring, we were mapping the pain points of theological educators, and the things that came to the top were full. The burnout. Right? The sense of isolation. The sense of – sometimes, in some spaces – the babysitting: Wait a minute, I don’t have the grown adults I used to have in my classroom! I’m doing a whole different thing.
And mostly the thing I’m being asked to do today is not the thing I signed up for. Ooh, that’s tough. Right?
Who’s Gonna Lead Us?
It’s in the midst of that, theological education in all these disrupted industries, that Meryl and I started thinking to ourselves, wondering aloud, brainstorming. Meryl’s been very patient with my wandering imagination.
What kind of leaders are we gonna need in the coming age? Who’s gonna guide us when everything is upside down, and when the rapids are coming at us, and when we don’t know what day it is? And so we started asking: What does healthy faithful and fruitful leadership look like across industries?
This winter we did 18 focus groups. We had about a hundred people responding to those questions. Super interesting. Meryl’s gonna tell you more about that research. And then we did 40 exemplar interviews this summer.
A New Way Seminaries Can Serve
Fuller Seminary – yeah, it’s the Fuller Show – has been in the business of theological education for 75 years. We’re celebrating our 75th anniversary this year. Largely, historically, training pastors, missionaries….About 25 years ago, Fuller started to wonder, especially when you think about it retrospectively: What about all the folks that are never gonna come to seminary? How might a seminary serve them?
And you started to get all these organic expressions in these places called centers. We [the De Pree Center] are one of six centers at Fuller whose primary charge is to leverage the resources of a seminary for the sake of whatever audience we’re pointing straight toward. Talk about a disruption in theological education! And by the way, that that work is increasingly not on the periphery, not the adjacent thing that some people do on the side that is fun and interesting, but a really important part of our business model at Fuller….
We primarily serve marketplace leaders by converting that research that we do, and others do, into resources for real life. At the heart of the actual resources that we do is a through-line of spiritual formation. Our team will call this “inner work.”
Because we think people who are doing their inner work and who are spiritually formed can actually change the world. And we’ve seen it time and time again. And so we’ve sort of doubled down on that.
