Into the new millennium: the impact of the academy on the church.

Issues of race, gender, and economic and political ideologies exploded in 1968. That historic and tumultuous year included the unforgettable experiences of King, Kennedy, Resurrection City, Howard University, the National Women's Caucus, the Democratic National Convention, and many more. As a twelve-year-old, I witnessed these politics of difference and diversity rocking the country. That very year, the Spirit called me into a life of witness, specifically as an ordained minister. The politics of difference and diversity that defined the United States in 1968 also define the core of my ministry. The Spirit has impeccable timing.

I am grateful to the generations of African-American ministers, scholars, and elders whose hard-won accomplishments made my vocation possible. I lift up Dr. Albert ("Pete") Pero as one of the minister scholars. He kept diversity and difference on the agenda in the classroom and at the heart of his ministry. Over the course of his career, he developed a remarkable style that integrated his front-line experience in the 1960s movements with his passion for theology and his essence as a pastor. I recently became his colleague in the theology department at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Dr. Pero taught theology to a predominantly affluent white student body for about thirty years. Not of small consequence, he taught black and womanist theologies to decades of seminarians. I admire his devotion to keeping diversity at the center of his call. His career and faith inspire my call and strengthen my commitment to do the same.

Like Pete, my life's experience has become central to my particular call. As a senior in college in 1978, I began the formal process of theological training. In my search for a seminary I invited several people to help me find an outstanding place to study. One advisor, Bishop Woodie White, at that time General Secretary of the General Commission on Religion and Race, enthusiastically directed me to the thirteen United Methodist seminaries. Others directed me to prepare a list of factors that I considered essential for my theological education.

I carefully examined each seminary according to my criteria. I looked intentionally for a seminary whose faculty had an extensive publishing record and an environment that cultivated creative and critical reason as well as a passion for prophetic interaction. I wanted to work with people who demonstrated a commitment to prepare women and men to be unabashedly and critically Christian. I needed a seminary that gave high priority to multicultural diversity. Key factors included diversity of race, gender, tradition, life experience, and country of origin among faculty and students.

Diversity ranked especially high on my list because my undergraduate studies failed to provide any courses with or about persons of color. I spent four long years in courses that ignored categories and perspectives critical to communities of color. I did not have access to mentors or role models who looked liked me. The experience convinced me that my choice for seminary needed to reflect integrated diversity. The criteria that I established could not be found in any United Methodist seminary in 1978.

I chose to study instead at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The faculty at Union included five well-published African American men, four highly respected white women scholars, and one Asian male. Although no women of color served on the faculty, Union still offered tremendous diversity and a commitment to excellence that met the criteria that I needed to prepare for ministry. Indeed, I received an excellent education. Throughout my formal and informal theological education, I felt celebrated, affirmed, and transformed significantly for ministry.

My development continued as I left the academy and entered the ministry. My first call invited me to serve as sole pastor with an inner-city mission congregation in Brooklyn, New York. I learned to manage the challenges that accompany being a young woman pastor who taught black theology and used gender-neutral language for God. What had played well in the seminary classroom met an ambivalent audience in this congregation. I loved the people and respected their resistance. I celebrated and affirmed people even with their negativity. I worked with their children and youth and stood by folks during their life struggles. Change happened over time by the power of the Spirit made present in Jesus Christ. The call transformed both the congregation and me.

My second appointment secured my call to minister with attention to diversity and difference. From Brooklyn, I moved into a predominantly white and very affluent congregation in White Plains, New York. I was the first African American minister and the first woman on staff. I encountered little resistance because members felt they needed a diverse staff in order to thrive. They were right. The benefits came quickly as more African American families came to the church. In addition, two women in the congregation accepted their calls to ministry. (They currently serve as pastors in the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.) My experience demonstrated to me that diversity fosters Christian transformation in a way that brings forth God's commonwealth.

Over the years, my ministry shifted from the church proper into the academy. My belief in the power that comes through difference continued to grow. No longer did I believe that diversity "fosters" Christian transformation. My language shifted, and I began to proclaim that Christian transformation requires diversity. I began to preach that diversity is not a luxury; it is the essence of the commonwealth.

The first few years of the new millennium indicate that our exposure to different ideas and people will continue to increase. In college I had no professors of color. I serve now on a seminary faculty that comprises almost 50 percent women and 30 percent persons of color or persons whose first language is other than English. The presence and proliferation of diversity within the academy has shaped not only my generation but also an entire generation of young scholars--and pastors. How will these students and leaders of the new millennium impact the church? What lessons have we learned about theological education and the Christian ministry in the second millennium that may assist us as we move into the third? I will show that the ideas, beliefs, and sociocultural issues associated with theological education and the Christian ministry in our time will develop an increasingly inclusive vision for theological education in the decades to come.

Theological education and diversity

The first major lesson that we can learn is the challenge and necessity to normalize diversity within theological education. The church in all ages has proclaimed, "Behold, I make all things new." This verse offers hope and pushes us into the future. Likewise, the church across the centuries has pondered a question raised by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, "How should one live?" (1) Socrates's query corresponds to a question that anthropologists ask and that the church has asked during the modern period, How do (and should) we live together? Anthropologists also ask, Who are we? The church has explored this through the ages and continues to contemplate it today. A final set of questions emerges for both anthropologists and church leaders: How do we live with each other? What do we do? Anthropologists ask these questions out of a social-scientific interest in diversity and comparative studies. Christians ask them because living together is the central tenet of the gospel and because it is theologically correct for diverse people to be able to be together in the church.

The third millennium challenges theological education not only to be together in the church catholic in ways that acknowledge our relatedness to each other but also to live with full awareness of our responsibility for each other. This last principle becomes more difficult as we consider the tremendous variety that exists among people locally and globally. We live in a world where very different societies change constantly. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict suggested that we have devised a "great arc" of assorted procedures through which we labor, express, direct households, rule and command others, and encourage our fascination with unknown things. (2)

For anthropologists this "great arc" symbolizes the challenge that diversity brings to human social life. Theological education of the last century rarely succeeded in cultivating the gifts inherent in diversity. The new millennium continues the rapid proliferation of diversity. Seminaries, schools of theology, divinity schools, and churches must face the pressing and rising presence of diversity.

As Christians, we sing, "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end...." We have reason to wonder about this claim. The HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to destroy entire generations. We understand that if the world continues on present course, the earth will not sustain life as we know it. Wars rage on local and global turf, and the United States owns more than enough weapons of mass destruction to inflict irrevocable damage on the world. Theological education faces stark questions of survival. God's people bring to theological education a tangled mixture of hope in the ancient doxology and valid anxiety about our future. Theological education must revisit the historical traditions and assumptions of Christianity. In light of the so-called progress of our world, some traditions will offer refreshment and others will require reformation.

Learning from the past

The church and theological education operate within and contribute to a world organized primarily by dominance and subordination. The binary parallels that emerged during the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the scientific method. They also supported rigorous and destructive imperialism. Written texts superceded oral traditions. The search for universals overrode the importance of the particular. Local concerns gave way to general considerations, and temporal categories shifted from regard for timeliness to respect for timelessness. (3)

During this influential time period, the church made use of ideologies and technological advances in order to proselytize in new locations. The church sent missionaries into the world with unbridled evangelical zeal. Even now, Christian history texts fail to record adequately, if at all, the damage done by missionaries. Too many missionaries considered indigenous peoples to be less than human, dismissed the value of indigenous cultures, condemned indigenous spirituality, and committed countless acts of violence against the bodies and souls they sought to "save." (4) How will theological education in the new millennium handle this scarred history? How can education be infused with Christian histories told from indigenous perspectives? How will educators manage the varieties of multicultural scholarship, honor differences as vital for the body of Christ, and give "equal air time" to emerging educational processes and epistemologies?

The third millennium calls theological education and Christian ministry to create avenues for justice to recast power imbalances. Trends among emerging generations in the United States reveal increased skepticism of power--political, corporate, and religious. They know first hand about multicultural concerns, religious pluralism, and the historical church practice of covering up scandalous behavior. Theological education can expect tough questions from students who demand open answers. How will theological education welcome such questions in ways that respect well-rooted hermeneutics of suspicion?

Education must adapt rather than restrict. We must question the ways we view histories and traditions of theological education and the academy in light of diversity. Louise Lamphere in Structuring Diversity poses the question, How do we structure diversity for positive results? (5) Finally, we must ask, how do we associate with each other in the midst of compelling diversity?

These paramount concerns require educators to apply principles of diversity in order to develop adequate strategies. Diverse perspectives add value and authenticity to the task of developing theological education. Whether from a global perspective or from a North American perspective, we must engage the vast assortment of human cultures and the enormous depth inherent in individual and community systems related to communication, local issues, and to the monetary, political, and spiritual aspects of life. (6) With all of this complexity, theological educators must ask, What different perspectives are available to help develop a recipe for significant ministry that emphasizes diversity? What do I need to understand about my own culture and the cultural assumptions I bring to theological education as a carrier of a particular culture?

I offer from my own social location the following response: We will be equipped best if we understand theological education as a dynamic unfolding of events that, according to Michael Carrithers, involves

change, creation and re-creation, interpretation and re-interpretation
... these are not processes which occur occasionally and exceptionally,
but are rather the very stuff of human social life. Even when we do
something that seems traditional, we do so in new conditions, and so are
in fact re-creating tradition rather than simply copying it. (7)

A significant theological education in the third millennium will embrace diversity in order to realize the fullness of the commonwealth that God with us calls into existence. A significant ministry in the third millennium will demonstrate in its practice that we are not bound solely by our own traditions or our own unreflective views of human "nature." We can and must learn to accept the constructs of our own tradition and also appreciate the validity of other ways of viewing Christianity and faith in general. Only then can a tolerant church emerge. (8) We must have a change of focus that de-centers the academy and seminaries so that we recognize the vitality at the peripheries. We must move from a static meaning of ministry to dynamic flexible processes that thrive through diverse participation.

Signs that change is necessary

The second lesson from the second millennium involves the relationship between modernity and the European Enlightenment epistemology. The close of the previous century offered signs that indicate cracks in the prevalent belief in scientific positivism and that traditional theological understandings are no longer the only consideration for growing segments of the academy and the church. Whether we call this the "end of modernity" or the demise of the European Enlightenment's grip, this movement pushes us into postmodernity. Our communities will expect new interpretations of reality, call for new epistemological approaches, and demand more fluid sharing of power.

The Enlightenment and its influence upon many academic disciplines and the church continues to recede. Moreover, various communities, particularly peoples of color, have pressed against the essential claims of modernity because it was built on the backs of the peoples that Europe conquered and colonized. In my view, historically oppressed communities of color have always lived out of a reversal of Enlightenment epistemology. During the postmodern period, particular segments of the European and Amer-European (9) community find affinity with these convictions. Many European descendants of the Enlightenment, as Stephen Toulmin suggests, now accept as plausible that which is oral, particular, local, and timely (10)--categories that marginalized communities have found central for generations.

Langdon Gilkey outlines four reasons for the movement toward postmodernism. (11) First, knowledge obtained in a future-shock world has yielded much technology that has shown itself to be ambiguous and potentially destructive to humankind and the earth. Technology offers both generative possibility and destructive potential. Second, the political guarantees of the Enlightenment have not brought shalom; in its place came repression fueled by dangerous convictions and executed by vain leaders. Third, Gilkey claims, we have caused God's saving activities in history to cease because Western culture failed in its attempt to triumph against evil. The Enlightenment developed from this perspective and over and against the salvation history portrayed in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. (12) In other words, the assumptions about progress are questionable. Fourth, Gilkey suggests, the formative presence of world religions has loosened the controlling claims of Western religion.

Thomas Kuhn also questions claims asserted by Western religions as he calls into question the category of "objectivity" in the scientific community. (13) Kuhn argues that objectivity in the scientific community means that prominent scientists in a particular field support a specific idea/project. Once endorsed by the scientific community, the idea/project results are conveyed to the general public as objective fact. Michael Polanyi asserts in Personal Knowledge (14) that scientific knowledge builds on a previous knowledge base that generations hold in trust. The "truth" handed to new generations has been constructed by previous generations and may not contain any real sense of objective truth.

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Kuhn and Polanyi both maintain that this liminal stage in which knowledge faces deconstruction offers a creative potential. We have the opportunity to offer new interpretations and develop new geometric paradigms that assume mutuality and the value difference among people. The church and the academy of the third millennium have a new task. Walter Brueggemann puts it this way:

It is clear on many fronts, not only in theology but in very many
disciplines, that the old modes of knowing that are Euro-American, male,
and white, no longer command respect and credibility as objective and
universally true. Indeed, older modes of assertion about reality have an
increasingly empty ring, even if we do not understand all the reasons
for change. (15)

Theological education in the third millennium

Theological education in the third millennium must recognize and take seriously the contextual, local, and multicultural conditions of our intellectual environment. While Descartes sought to objectify knowing and considered social context irrelevant, we understand that our knowing relates directly to our social location, an understanding that historically oppressed communities have always known.

Liberation theologians and ethicists, both female and male, articulate consistently the critical relationship between social location and understanding. These theologies argue that our particular histories, geographies, religions, races, genders, and so on impact the way we construct knowledge and subsequent understandings. All knowing is partial and particular. A contextual approach claims that the knower helps to construct what is known and that the material reality of the knower influences what and how something is known.

Contextualism calls off the search for universal, all-encompassing truth. Instead, scholarship focuses on local truth that might be applicable to other places. Localization of truth defies long-held assumptions about an omnipresent, infinite, and boundless knowledge base. Access to limited and local knowledge calls for a reorientation, reconstructed methods of theological education. (16)

I am confident that theological education in the third millennium will recognize knowledge as contextual, local, and diverse. Globalization brings ever-increasing exposure among widely diverse perspectives and dismantles those paradigms that stick with the myth of objectivity and ignore the impact of diversity. The broad entrance of voices once excluded or dismissed in the academy and the church will de-center the way we approach theological education.

Theological education and hegemony

The relationship of theological education and hegemony provides a third lesson for the new millennium. Theological education in the third millennium must have bishops, presidents, and deans who understand the nuances of their own particular culture and remember that we construct truths from our local contexts. Our truths collide or cooperate with other diverse knowledge bases so that no single system carries ultimate privilege. Old ways of knowing are in transition. Brueggemann makes this point persuasively:

We are now able to see that what has passed for objective, universal
knowledge has in fact been the interested claim of the dominant voices
who were able to pose their view and to gain either assent or docile
acceptance from those whose interests the claim did not serve.
Objectivity is in fact one more practice of ideology that presents
interest in a covert form as an established fact. (17)

Each person who finds her- or himself in theological education lives out meaning from a particular perspective that coexists in a world with perspectives that differ. In the new millennium, it will be prudent for us to learn from such differences and to appreciate perspectives that vary from our own. The knowledge created from our particular experiences will be as diverse as the world's peoples. Even as we orient our lives around our particular beliefs, we must refrain from the temptation to claim access to universal or objective truth. Rather, we must open ourselves and expect to be transformed by knowledge systems that come to us from others.

In the third millennium we must move from a unilateral assertion of hegemony to one that takes local context seriously. For instance, people from marginalized communities in the U.S. know that many Amer-Europeans fear the demise of the "white, male Western world of colonialism." (18)

Occasionally I am invited to give workshops on diversity in the corporate sector. More often than not top management decides that employees need to understand diversity in order to work with an increasingly multicultural workforce and customer base. Those at the top of the organization, white males, decide that employees need this training. My experience reveals that white males most strongly resist the diversity workshops. I find it interesting that some white males call for diversity training and others resist it.

I conclude four things from this important experience: (1) great diversity exists among white males; (2) white males hold tremendous power over others, despite the rhetoric claiming that reverse discrimination affects white males unfairly; (3) corporate leaders are beginning to acknowledge the significant benefits of a diverse work force as well as to recognize that commitment to diversity and multiculturalism creates a strong customer base; (4) white males do have a voice or power in every aspect of American society. Theological education in the third millennium will continue to articulate the voice of white males, but it will no longer be privileged or go unchallenged.

The new millennium questions boldly the credibility claims of white-male perspectives. This reality means that many dominant folks will feel threatened, which correspondingly means that marginalized communities, particularly communities of color, will be even more at risk. Racism, sexism, and heterosexism will be more blatant. This shifting paradigm will affect the economy and impact jobs, business, law enforcement, and health care. Patterns in homes, relations between people of different genders and sexual orientations, and the family will be affected. Brutality will be justified in local and global arenas. The collapse of the old system will be profoundly potent, and backlash will consist of rhetorical and physical tools mobilized by the old system in reaction to the threat of its imminent demise.

The passing of the old order not only has pragmatic effects, it also has theological implications for the academy and the church. Cornel West's comment on prophetic vision expresses well the emerging politics of valuing diversity in theological education:

... we promote a prospective and prophetic vision with a sense of
possibility and potential, especially for those who bear the social
costs of the present. We look to the past for strength, not solace; we
look at the present and see people perishing, not profits mounting; we
look toward the future and vow to make it different and better. (19)

Imagining theological education in the third millennium

The final lesson I share here poses a direct challenge to the leaders of our institutions. Moving from hegemony to valuing differences provides a great opportunity for theological education to shift from rationalist paradigms to more imaginative theological models. The collaborative work of Angie Current and Kathy Sage offers an example of imagination applied well. More than ten years ago, they noticed the problematic absence of women-of-color scholars among the thirteen BHEM (Board for Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church) seminaries. They imagined a different future and responded by developing a proposal for a women-of-color scholarship program that made its way through the ranks and received approval from the BHEM board.

The scholarship program supports women of color who imagine a change for their lives, in the academy and across the church. I suggest that environments that encourage imagination help people conceive, envision, picture, and fantasize about reality. When Current, Sage, and later Karen Collier, Lynn Scott, and my mentors Katie Cannon, Jackie Grant, Rita Nakashima Brock, and Renita Weems imagined a productive and successful program that would graduate women of color (the daughters of foremothers, many of whom did not have the opportunity, support, or encouragement to pursue higher education), they dreamed a world into reality. They imagined a world that celebrates, affirms, and is transforming theological education. These women developed the opportunity to live into the fullness of their call to the ministry of the church. Their presence in our seminaries and other institutions gives new life to the academy and our church. I believe that we must move with bold imagination into the future to which God's history is moving.

Justo Gonzalez imagines the church of the third millennium this way:

... our church and our witness must be multicultural, not simply
because our society is multicultural, not simply because the future from
which God is calling us is multicultural. We must be multicultural, not
just so that those from other cultures may feel at home among us, but
also so that we may feel at home in God's future. We must be
multicultural because, like John at Patmos, our eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord; because we know and we believe that on that
waking-up morning when the stars begin to fall, when we gather at the
river where angel feet have trod, we shall all, from all nations, and
tribes, and peoples, and languages, sing without ceasing: "Holy, holy,
holy! All the saints adore thee, casting down our golden crowns before
the glassy sea; cherubim and seraphim; Japanese and Swahili; American
and European, Cherokee and Ukrainian; falling down before thee, which
wert, and art, and evermore shall be!" Amen! (20)

Gonzalez offers a compelling image of the church and theological education in the third millennium. The image takes seriously God's call to us today for a future that will push us to new dimensions. We must free ourselves from any notion that the present systems of the world are fixed. Other worlds can be imagined.

The "I Dream a World" photo exhibit that toured museums in the U.S. in the latter half of the 1980s reminded me of the ways that vision and imagination create reality. The exhibit presented one hundred black women who changed America. Because of the way that history continues to exclude women of color, it may be hard for some people in our society to even consider that there were/are one hundred black women who transformed this country. Where U.S. history fails to attend to black history, the "I Dream a World" exhibit brought front and center the women whose lives helped imagine this world in which I and other women and men can strive forward to transform the world.

People who have been historically oppressed constantly imagine, vision, and dream a new reality. King's "I Have A Dream" speech brought this message to the world in 1963. The dreaming that he articulated inspired the founders of this program, the women-of-color scholars, and more extensively the academy and the church. We continue birthing this dream. The "I Dream A World" exhibit, King's dream, and BHEM's Women of Color Scholarship and Mentoring Program imagine and bring into existence a new world for the new millennium.

Garrett Green suggests that the imagining process flourishes when a distinction is made between Paul's appeal to the Corinthians to live "as if" and the contrasting view to live "as." (21) To live "as if" suggests that we put energy into opposing the current reality by trying to live differently within it. Alternatively, to live "as" means that we live the reality we imagine, thus making our vision of reality the only one to consider. If I live as a free person, then I am a free person. Nelson Mandela used this strategy to survive his 27 years as political prisoner on Robbin Island. Women-of-color scholars do the same. Translating imagination as reality moves Green's argument one step further. Instead of "living as" we can "take action as" and claim the things we want to exist. (22) Theological education in the third millennium requires that we either "live as" or "take action as"--approaches that differ from Paul's injunction to live "as if." We inherit this lesson from the imaginative voices that brought new life into the academy during the second millennium.

Theological education in the third millennium offers significant possibilities. Will we dare to imagine into reality diverse seminary faculties that include several women-of-color scholars? Will we create opportunities for women of color because we consider their/our gifts to be critical to the process of training future leaders of the church and academy?

May we be bold enough to imagine new ways of doing theological education. May we also be committed enough to dream into reality a new millennium marked by rich diversity and mutual transformation.

1. This question and the others that follow in this paragraph are drawn from Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1.

2. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Cultures (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1935).

3. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 186-92.

4. See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

5. Louise Lamphere, "Introduction," Structuring Diversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1-34.

6. Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures, 2.

7. Carrithers, 9.

8. For a comment on what is required in order to have tolerant civilizations see Carrithers, 190-20.

9. This term was coined by Dr. Tink Tinker, Professor of Native American Religion and Culture at Iliff School of Theology.

10. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 186-92.

11. Langdon Gilkey, Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 3-14.

12. Gilkey, 8.

13. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962).

14. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

15. Walter Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 8.

16. Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation, 9.

17. Brueggemann, 9.

18. Brueggemann, 11.

19. Cornel West, "The New Politics of Cultural Difference," in October 53 (Summer 1990), 109.

20. Justo Gonzalez, Convocation lecture given at Iliff School of Theology (September 13, 1995), 22-23.

21. Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).

22. See David J. Bryant, Faith and the Play of Imagination (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1989).

Linda E. Thomas

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago