A postdenominational seminary

Christian Century, Sept 22, 1999

THE FIRST institute to train Baptist pastors in North Carolina was opened 160 years ago. But as classes begin in earnest this fall at Wake Forest University's new divinity school, the seminary's Baptist roots and heritage will be overshadowed by a postdenominational, ecumenical approach to training clergy. As one sign of the new approach, its faculty will include a Benedictine monk, a feminist biblical scholar and a theologian who calls God "our motherly father."

Opening as the 21st century nears, the school is premised on the conviction that denominations no longer matter. It has shaped a curriculum grounded in no single tradition but able to relate to all. Underlying the new approach is a belief that the various strands of Christian life are perpetually in flux. Evangelicals are seeking out Roman Catholic spirituality. Episcopalians are turning to charismatic practices. Churches are changing names to hide their denominational affiliation.

This cross-denominational pollination means that the postmodern minister should be as comfortable with the woman who speaks in tongues as with the man who sings Gregorian chants. The idea is not to be trendy or politically correct, said church historian Bill Leonard, the dean of the new school. It's to keep up with changing times. "This is a school that mirrors the future of the church," said Leonard. "All the major traditions are in an identity crisis. My sense of the American religious scene is that there are no models. If we're really talking about a changing religious environment, we can't mimic any seminary tradition."

For at least 20 years, historians have argued that the denominational vessels, which once held broad cross-sections of Christian believers, have cracked. Most of the major mainline denominations have seen a two-decade-long membership decline, and many Christians say their faith is no longer determined by their particular tradition. Americans' mobility, their willingness to intermarry across faiths and their rising education levels all contribute to the weakening of the denominational system.

Other divinity schools, and especially those affiliated with mainline denominations, have generally had an ecumenical outlook that explores the various Christian traditions while staying grounded in their own denominational framework. And some of these school leaders insist that the demise of denominations has been greatly exaggerated. "In my judgment it's a mistake to say we're moving beyond them or away from them entirely," said L. Gregory Jones, dean of the divinity school at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "There's a hunger for roots that is causing people to return to the particularities of denominational traditions."

Leonard, a refugee from the upheaval within the Southern Baptist Convention, has a different vision. His school is tailored, he says, to a younger generation of students, born between 1965 and 1978, who distrust both political and religious institutions. This independent and pragmatic generation has no interest in denominational wrangling, preferring instead small-scale action and hands-on involvement.

To help guide them, the divinity school has set up a yearlong colloquium where all incoming students and faculty gather once a week to discuss books and think about theology. Students will be required to spend two semesters working as interns in a church, a hospital or a social service agency. And with an enrollment cap of about 135 students; the school's small atmosphere will encourage students to find their own Christian identity either in an existing denomination or outside the fold.

The creation of a divinity school at Wake Forest is both a recovery of religion's founding role on campus and a testament to how much that role has changed. It was Samuel Wait, a New England Baptist, who, bemoaning the death of ministerial training in North Carolina, founded an agricultural institute for ministers in 1834. Students worked half the day on a plantation near the tiny town of Wake Forest and spent the other half poring over the Bible. Four years later the school became Wake Forest College, and its emphasis shifted to the liberal arts. Later came the professional schools; first law, then medicine, and finally business. In this, Wake Forest was no different from the nation's great universities. At Harvard and Chicago, divinity schools were the first to be established on campus, and they were supposed to be the glue that held the university together.

But after the turn of the century, divinity schools lost their cachet. In 1956, shortly after Wake Forest's medical school moved to Winston-Salem, the rest of the college followed. The old ministerial training grounds became a Southern Baptist seminary. Thirty years later the university severed all ties to the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

Among the students who will make up the inaugural class are 15 Baptists, four Presbyterians, two United Methodists, one Lutheran, one Moravian and one member of the United Church of Christ. The students--just five are men--will wade into streams of Christian traditions in which Southern Baptists have just begun to dip their toes. Samuel Weber, a Benedictine monk, will introduce students to the contemplative tradition in Roman Catholicism. Classes on prayer may include instruction in how monks have used psalms to mark the hours, days and seasons and may expose students to thinkers such as Trappist monk Thomas Merton.