A question that I get a lot: why did you go to a Christian seminary? What has that choice meant for your ministry?
(00:05):
This is a great question. Part of the story that I told yesterday about choosing to go to seminary when I was sick was a conversation that I had with Reverend David Olson. He was the senior minister of the first Unitarian Church of Baltimore, where I was a member as I was choosing to go into seminary. And what he told me was this, if you are a recent Unitarian Universalist convert, if you've come to this faith as an adult, he said, you should absolutely go to one of our identity seminaries. You should go to Meadville Lombard, you should go to Star King. You should get grounded in this tradition that you are going to serve, hopefully for the rest of your career. On the other hand, he said, if you're grounded in Unitarian universalism, if you've grown up in the tradition, go elsewhere, particularly a Christian seminary, because you're going to need to be able to move in those interfaith spaces in your career and going to a Christian seminary will allow you to do that.
(01:11)
Now, I started going to a Unitarian church when I was 14, the congregation in Binghamton, New York. And at that point in my life, I had been a part of three Unitarian congregations well over a decade, and so I followed that second path. Now, David Olson, not entirely coincidentally, was also the minister who pushed me to see community organizing as a key part of ministry. The thing that I took away from a lot of my interactions with him was the necessity of grounding Unitarian Universalist ministry in a relationship with the communities around us. And that looks like being in relationship with Christian clergy. So you have to learn how to do that well.
(02:01)
The other more prosaic reason for going to Wesley Theological Seminary is that I didn't want to move. I was living in Baltimore. I hadn't gotten married yet, but I was about to, and I didn't want to move to Chicago or Berkeley, but I really fell in love with Wesley while I was there. Wesley Theological Seminary is a progressive Methodist seminary with big contingents from the United Methodists, African Methodist, Episcopal churches, and Korean Methodist churches, and going to school there, I had a different experience and understanding of diversity than exists sometimes in UU spaces. Wesley is a tremendously diverse place, and one of the ways that hangs together is that it depends on a shared sense of call among all of its
(02:58):
all of its students. So I had to get very clear very quickly on being able to articulate my sense of call as a Unitarian Universalist in a predominantly Methodist context. That served me really well in Wesley in ministry since. The other thing that I really loved at Wesley and why I went back there for a doctorate actually, was the relentless focus that that school has on congregational life. So every single class, the driving question is, how will this work in a congregation? How do we actually do this thing? Not as an academic question, but as a question of lived experience in a church. That's really been the grounding for a lot of my ministry sense.