New Look, Same Courageous Spirit
Aware Magazine celebrates its centennial issue
Aware Magazine is older than sliced bread. Originally named The Garrett Tower, The Garrett Biblical Institute published the first issue in 1924, a letter from the school into a radically different world. The U.S. Constitution forbid the sale of alcohol; Louis Armstrong delighted crowds on Chicago’s South Side as a member of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band; most homes still weren’t electrified. And yes, pre-sliced bread wouldn’t hit pantry shelves until 1928. Despite all the ways our world has changed, aspects of that culture feel eerily familiar. A wave of xenophobia was sweeping the nation, as politicians blamed Irish and Italian immigrants for everything from joblessness to crime. Economic desperation drove millions to work in unsanitary and dangerous factories, often in 12-hour shifts. Christian Nationalism was ascendant with the Ku Klux Klan at its peak membership, shaping national policy while its members terrorized non-white neighbors. Aware was born into this swirling and pivotal moment, as Garrett proclaimed what it meant to shape ministers for social transformation.
One century later, that work is still our mission. Even as we expand programs for counseling, non-profit leadership, public ministry, and other forms of vocational training, most students still come to Garrett following a call to parish leadership. We remain convinced, all these many years later, that God vibrantly works through local communities, and that wise, courageous ministers will play a crucial
role in mending political polarization, bigotry, and violence. We believe that Jesus embodies what it means to live an engaged and faithful life, and that training people to follow him can help to build God’s Kingdom.
While these core convictions remain unchanged, we are also blessed by our professors’ groundbreaking academic work, students’ fresh theological voices, our alums’ faithful service, and the fruitful partnerships between our institutes and local congregations. Together, we form a laboratory to
explore how to nurture God’s people toward gospel-centered lives. As that work finds new expressions, it only makes sense that Aware should change, too—offering a better window into the Garrett community.
You’ll notice this issue feels different in your hands. We’ve expanded from 20 to 32 pages, giving room to tell more in-depth stories. Every issue, we will collaborate with artists whose work aligns with our cover story. (For this issue’s focus on resonance between Advent and migration narratives, we partnered with Puerto Rican illustrator
Karina Cruz Ortiz.) In this new model, we’ll publish two issues every year, each with a different focus. The Winter Aware will be our theological edition. In these pages, you’ll see an emphasis on faculty voices, our centers and institutes’ powerful work, and how Garrett classrooms guide students’ dreams.
The Summer Aware will be community focused, featuring more alumni stories, seminary events, and Garrett’s wide influence throughout the United States and around the globe. We hope these changes will offer a more robust picture of how Garrett exemplifies transformative theological education.
As we enter Advent in a perilous world, I’m drawn to how community surrounds Jesus’ birth. In Luke’s gospel, when Mary learns she is pregnant she runs to Elizabeth’s home and the two women share words and song that proclaim an abundant future. Mary could have been terrified by the great uncertainty that no doubt filled her mind, but she instead chose love and connection. From Joseph to the shepherds who flocked to the manger, these stories are shaped by people who put fear aside to follow where God’s love leads. It’s an embodied hope, one that Garrett’s community mirrors. More than anything, that’s what I hope you find in these pages: A reminder of how God moves in our midst, working for healing and wholeness.
Blessings from our family to yours,
The Reverend Dr. Javier Viera President
Want to read President Viera’s thoughts about how investing in deacons is essential for revitalizing The United Methodist Church? Read his thoughts for UMNews at garrett.edu/deacons
Garrett’s Global Reach
Mapping our connections throughout the world
Atlanta, Georgia: Garrett partners with The Phillips School of Theology to nurture Christian Methodist Episcopal students, and strengthen our centers’ work in Black Methodist churches.
Orlando, Florida: Garrett has launched significant partnerships with the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), including new grant funding to create a national initiative, and to strengthen Hispanic pastoral leaders and congregations.
Too often, the history of global theological education has been extractive and transactional, instead of being grounded in the ways God calls us to act as a global church. As Garrett Seminary becomes a destination for international students and scholars, we’re investing in partnerships that nurture reciprocal benefits for their home countries. This is part of Garrett’s commitment to decolonization, but it’s also a recognition that mutual flourishing helps institutions on both sides of the exchange.
Today, when students attend Garrett, they receive an education shaped by an unparalleled commitment to contextual theology. The myriad perspectives present in the classroom immeasurably enrich group discussion, and our broad network of alums create opportunities for graduates to put this training into practice.
Colombia
(Burma)
Costa Rica South Korea
Democratic Republic of the Congo
India
United States of America
Chile: Garrett is collaborating with the Methodist Church of Chile to develop Spanish-language coursework, and to resource a school of ministry for Latiné ministers.
United States of America
COLOMBIA
Chennai, India: Garrett is exploring a collaboration with Indian Theological Seminary to create faculty exchanges, student cohorts, and online contextual education.
Mutare, Zimbabwe: Garrett’s partnership with Africa University includes a newly formed Mageto Fellows program and an upcoming contextual cohort of online learners on the continent.
Alum Countries
Angola Canada
Argentina Central African Republic
Great Britain (UK) Japan
Hong Kong Kenya
Australia China India Malawi
Austria Colombia
The Bahamas Cuba
Brazil Germany
Ireland Malaysia
Italy
Jamaica
Mexico
Myanmar (Burma)
Nigeria
Palestine
The Philippines
Poland
Puerto Rico
Sierra Leone
Seoul, South Korea: Garrett enjoys a vibrant enrollment partnership with Methodist Theological University.
Jabalpur, India: Garrett is discerning a new partnership with Leonard Theological College that is both curricular, enrollment-focused, and built around faculty professional development.
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Switzerland
Tanzania
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Uganda
Dr. Mark Teasdale launches a new center to resource local parishes
By Benjamin Perry
SEEDING CHURCH REVIVAL
Across denominations, there is broad consensus: The Church is at an inflection point, and the coming decades will determine whether current forms of Christianity will play a vital role in shaping cultural values or further recede from relevance. This fall, Rev. Dr. Mark Teasdale will launch The Center for the Missional Church at Garrett as a core part of the seminary’s mission to help churches thrive as they work to heal a fractured world. As the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism, a position supported at Garrett by a generous grant from the Foundation for Evangelism, Dr. Teasdale is convinced that the key to thriving lies in returning churches and denominations to the principles of discipleship. “The Western church has become much too interested in success as defined by the secular marketplace,” he says. “In doing so, we’ve given up many of our core beliefs.”
The Center for the Missional Church was founded by Paul Dietrich in the 1960’s. Already concerned by waves of institutionalization, Dietrich sought to marry missional church theology with organizational theory to help churches extend beyond themselves. “The ossification of American mainstream Protestantism traces all the way back to the turn of the 20th century,” Dr. Teasdale notes. “The church became institutionally conservative, focusing more on how to hold onto the people it already had than trying to reach new people.” Dietrich was alarmed by how this posture suppressed change within church bodies and inhibited engagement with those outside the church. “The Center launched from this desire to move institutionally oriented churches toward becoming missional churches,” Dr. Teasdale says. “It created written resources and teaching guides, and offered coaching to help congregations implement them.”
In some ways, this move for The Center to become one of Garrett’s institutes is a homecoming. Both Garrett Theological Seminary and Evangelical Theological Seminary were among the
schools to support the organization in its nascent form. Over the years, however, this close partnership was lost. The current moment presents a perfect opportunity for reunion.
“The forces that led to The Center’s founding have only intensified,” Dr. Teasdale explains. “More and more, you're seeing churches align themselves with explicitly political and social agendas to the point where—if you look at Pew research data—the makeup of individual churches align with particular political beliefs. Churches have become chaplains for political and social agendas, instead of embracing a holistic understanding of the work and life to which the gospel calls.” Moreover, this polarization has only exacerbated institutionalization. “It doesn’t matter where on the theological spectrum folks are. Liberal or conservative, institutions have developed a fear of being creative in our ministry,” he argues. “It’s not that individual people are unwilling to be entrepreneurial, but the structures they’re in are not flexible.”
Church decline has also contributed to the difficulty. When congregations look around and see pews far emptier than they used to be, they often become deeply anxious about losing members and even more hesitant to experiment with any new programs that might cause division. It leads to the kinds of politicization Dr. Teasdale outlines, a retreat to what feels uniting and safe. “When churches operate from a place of fear, aligning politics and doctrine, they wind up ignoring the rest of the gospel,” he says. “So, for example, evangelical churches will focus only on preparing people for death and forgiving sins while ignoring the parts of the gospel where Jesus says abundant life doesn’t just start when the mortal body dies—that we must end poverty and longstanding injustices towards racial groups. Meanwhile, on the left there’s rightful focus on welcoming the stranger and caring for the poor, but what about sins that must be repented or the
“Churches have become chaplains for political and social agendas, instead of embracing a holistic understanding of the work and life to which the gospel calls.”
– Rev. Dr. Mark Teasdale
fact that Jesus died on the cross? The crucifixion is not for nothing.”
Dr. Teasdale hopes that, by returning churches to foundational tenets of the gospel, it will help them break out of the boxes in which we’ve become confined. “God has a bigger dream than this institutionally narrowed way of operating,” he says. “That's the leverage point we can use to move churches to the place where they start engaging more fully with the people outside of their walls and conduct more effective discipleship with folks sitting in their pews.” For the many churches that long for this rebirth, The Center for the Missional Church’s resources help put that idea into practice, getting into the weeds of budgets and church administration to align organizations’ structures with their values.
One significant benefit of moving The Center for the Missional Church to Garrett is that it enables crosspollination with the rest of the seminary’s vibrant work. “I would love to see The Center link this approach with our already strong other centers— the Hispanic/Latinx Center, the Center for Asian/Asian American ministry, the Center for the Church and the Black Experience,” Dr. Teasdale says. “Let’s explore how it becomes embodied in particular forms of church.” The Center for the Missional Church’s preexisting resources can be adapted and expanded by other centers’ incredible scholars, tailored to fit congregations. “Let’s provide churches with resources created by people who are already part of those communities,” he dreams.
In his classroom, Dr. Teasdale sees a longing for this revivalist approach.
“Students do not want a church defined by marketplace success,” he laughs. “They are so excited to break beyond a corporate model to new forms of community.” He believes a generational divide is helping fuel this transition. “As Gen Z begins to make its presence felt in the seminary, they’re rejecting the narrow way of understanding church that both the
“Let’s provide churches with resources created by people who are already part of those communities.”
left and the right have been holding,” he concludes. “They’re seeing the rancor, hurt, and pain this has caused and want something more holistic that will improve people's physical, mental, emotional, and relational well-being.”
By investing in the new iteration of The Center for the Missional Church, Garrett hopes similarly to guide churches throughout our country and world. This mission takes a dream, but it also takes resources and structural change. Together, we hope to construct scaffolding upon which new Christian movements will be built. †
Heart Ablaze for God: Students in Dr. Teasdale’s classes celebrate the energy and enthusiasm he brings to evangelism, but also his sensitivity to how churches can ground that work in different communities’ values.
NURTURING TRANSFORMATION
The Creation Collective at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church enters its second year
By Benjamin Perry
“ W e believe that Christian communities are called to engage in deeper reflection and venture bolder action to support the just healing of creation for the flourishing of all. In partnership with Garrett Seminary and the Center for Ecological Regeneration, we're committed to drawing on theological, ethical, scientific, and practical ecological resources as we seek to live into a
hopeful vision of congregational and personal action in a climate changed world.”
These words open the Creation Collective’s mission statement.
Last year, congregants at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis began meeting with Rev. Dr. Timothy Eberhart, Garrett Seminary’s Robert and Marilyn Degler McClean Associate Professor of Ecological Theology and Practice
and Director of the Center for Ecological Regeneration. In a class called “Hope for Creation in a Climate Changed World,” they worked to discern how the church could root more deeply in theological reflection and ecological repair. “We focused on better understanding the range of environmental crises that we're facing, along with some of the causes and unfolding implications,” Dr. Eberhart explains. “That includes understanding how Christian beliefs and spiritual practices have contributed to ecological harm, but also how we might recover and re-orient Christian spirituality, worship, discipleship formation, and missional action for the sake of planetary healing.”
Over the spring months, the class engaged a set of regenerative design principles to help members embrace Hennepin’s place in the local geography, its historical commitments to education and justice, and its unique assets as part of discerning a congregational vision for regenerative ministry. As a result of that process, the class claimed the following:
“Hennepin Avenue embraces its vocation as a ‘Cathedral for All Creation,’ bringing together and supporting various denominational, ecumenical/ interfaith, and public efforts for the just healing of the world. As a meeting place of confluent social, cultural, and educational systems, in a region ripe with diverse environmental assets, wisdoms, and efforts, Hennepin is a model and catalyst for regenerative convergences that flow inward for deep congregational change and outward for widespread systemic transformation.”
In support of this vision for the congregation, the class proposed the formation of the Creation Collective, which is organized into six different “bee hives,” each dedicated to different aspects of regenerative ministry—buildings and energy, land use, food and agriculture, worship and spirituality, Christian education and formation, and political advocacy, organizing, and outreach. While this scope of this organization and incipient action is impressive, members are clear that this energy would not be possible without the theological reflection that preceded it. “We had been searching for a way to do creation care before the pandemic, and actually formed a green team that met a couple times, but it never gained traction,” says Dan Dahm, a member of Hennepin since 1990 and one of the Collective’s initial organizers. “The approach our partnership with Garrett brought us was what we needed to lay the foundation.” Ginger Sisco, another decades-long Hennepin member, concurs with Dahm’s assessment. “Churches can go for the shiny object for a year's time and say, ‘Well, we've done that,’” she observes. “What our partnership with a seminary brings is the theological formation and grounding that keeps it alive and attracts others.”
Sandy Christie was surprised by how much this process enriched her understanding. A retired architect whose firm specialized in sustainable design, she was familiar with much of the science presented but found that the connections to her faith facilitated new understanding. “Talking through the theology and learning the history of nature-engaged Christianity was really enlightening for me,” she says. “It makes it feel more possible to nurture a different relationship to creation because that has happened in the past.” For Hennepin’s lead pastor, Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay, it was Dr. Eberhart’s process that helped the collective grow its own agency. “What
I've really loved about the way that Tim has handled this is that he doesn’t push it, he lets it evolve ecologically,” she says. “He's done good farming—trusting that what will take root will be what is indigenous to this time, this place, this church, this people.”
One blessing the Creation Collective has already bestowed on the Hennepin community is greater connectedness between its members. “My circle of people at church has easily doubled in size,” Dahm says with joy. “We had 30-40 participants every week and, initially, I didn’t know a lot of these people beyond their faces and their names,” Christie agrees. “Learning people’s backgrounds and what they bring to this work is such a great bonding process.” As connections within the class deepened, that
spirit began to spread throughout the church community. “Yesterday, a woman was walking through the communal area where coffee is served in compostable cups and noticed that the church is not part of a system where compost gets picked up,” Sisco says. “So, she picked up the cups, saying, ‘Between church and home is a drop off place for compost.’ She's not actively in any of our hives, but she's been paying attention.” Last year was Rev. Macaulay’s first at Hennepin, and she is quick to name how the collective’s flourishing has aided her own transition. “Honest to Pete, any pastor who could walk into a new appointment with this group being nurtured—it feels like I must have done something good in life,” she laughs. “I actually came out of retirement to serve and had become a little jaded about church—not sure that I had the heart and passion to do this work anymore—for this to be born in the middle of my own sense of possibility has been such a gift.”
“If our work stops being connected to the life of real communities of faith, it becomes an academic exercise and we lose the spirit and lifeblood of why we exist.”
This use of theological scholarship to strengthen local churches is one of Garrett Seminary’s broader commitments. “If our work stops being connected to the life of real communities of faith, it becomes an academic exercise and we lose the spirit and lifeblood of why we exist,” says Garrett President Javier Viera. “We all know Tim to be a serious thinker and ethicist, but he’s also a serious leader who seeks to kindle justice, compassion, and hope in the world.” For Dr. Eberhart, this interplay between church and academy is what makes the Center for Ecological Regeneration’s work distinct. “There’s sometimes a faulty assumption within our seminaries, and in our churches, that rigorous theological and moral conversations aren’t of interest in congregational spaces,” he says. “What I have always found is that laity are eager, in many ways desperately longing, to engage the depth of theological, spiritual, and moral reflection that happens in a seminary context.”
In fact, Dahm was so moved that he shared resources from the class with colleagues at the Science Museum of Minnesota. “I pulled together a group from our green team here at the museum to read Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass,” he says. “The reaction was so positive! The resources Tim brought to us let me bring a part of myself to work that I had never been able to bring before.” For President Viera, this interplay between churches and their community is an integral part of revitalizing both congregations and our broader culture. “Too often, we still think about the church in a very specific way, as what happens within the walls on a particular hour, on a particular day of the week,” he says. “But when we also consider influencing leaders, civic organizations, and government to think more critically and ethically about the work they do—when we inspire greater moral seriousness—that’s the full work of the church.”
The Collective’s leaders treat planting hope beyond Hennepin’s walls as a core part of how the church can foster ecological repair. “If all we do is worry about the future and feel like we’re doomed, it’s almost impossible to move forward with any action,” Christie reflects. “You have to believe you can make a difference.” As part of embodying this promise, the Collective planted a Three Sisters Garden outside the church. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge about environmental symbiosis, the corn, beans and squash represent the possibility of communities shaped by reciprocity and interdependence. “It’s a proclamation,” Rev. Macaulay says about the garden. “There are people who are church resistant, or church agnostic at best— unsure that the church can be trusted— who have become deeply engaged in this process because the Collective’s method fits its meaning.”
Indeed, one of the Center for Ecological Regeneration’s core convictions is that congregations
can play a pivotal role in nurturing climate resiliency and ecological repair. “Our congregations contain spiritual resources that are uniquely fitted to dealing with hard realities —like injustice, pain, death, despair —while at the same time cultivating compassionate and restorative responses,” Dr. Eberhart says. “It's not an accident that some within the scientific community are turning to the world's religious and wisdom traditions at this moment, recognizing that we’re going to need the kind of moral clarity, spiritual commitment, and collective action that religious communities have often provided at moments of historical crisis.”
For members of the Collective, their experience reflects the fruit of this approach. “The excitement that I hear from people who want to dig in and start doing things is making me feel so optimistic,” Christie confesses. For Sisco, it’s changed her relationship to the land. “Connecting this work to my spiritual life is really significant,” she
says. “It’s a deeper appreciation of the way you’re raised and where you live.” Dahm emphasizes the wonder he feels about life’s interconnectedness. “I’ve been spending time in my backyard watching the bumblebees, but it’s never just the bumblebees doing their thing. It’s the bees and the flowers growing over a season, the fungi that live in the soil and distribute fluids, the minerals moving from one plant to another,” he says. “The more time you spend with it, the more awesome it is.” The vitality of a congregation is intimately tied to the vitality of these pollinators, the vitality of a community inextricable from the vitality of the land. As the Center for Ecological Regeneration expands its work with congregations in the coming years, drawing on Garrett’s partnership with Hennepin, one can’t help but notice the reciprocal benefits. “We can always do more together than we can do alone,” Dr. Eberhart says. “We discover and generate hope in and through each other.” †
Collective Discernment: The commitment to creating a year-long cohort for theological study helped members of Hennepin Avenue build consensus about how their congregation can respond to the climate crisis.
ROOTED IN THE CHURCH
Garrett Seminary’s Centers and Institutes work with pastors and congregations to strengthen their ministry
By Benjamin Perry
At Garrett Seminary, we take seriously our responsibility to serve local parishes. Our centers and institutes act as bridge-builders, connecting congregations with the latest insights in theological education, and ensuring that our academic work responds to churches’ pressing needs. Every year, leaders engage hundreds of clergy and congregations, using their gifts to help ministry thrive. Below, we’ve gathered some of the ways this work is happening, but you can learn more at garrett.edu/ centers-and-institutes.
Center for the Church and the Black Experience
The Center for the Church and the Black Experience (CBE) is Garrett's longestserving Center. For 54 years, it has empowered and trained generations of Black leaders for the church and society at large. We continue to be a citadel of teaching, research, action, and reflection on Black life and Black Church life. We are committed to training seminarians and pastors to be pastoral, priestly, and prophetic “leaders of leaders” in new-age ministerial opportunities and challenges.
CBE and the Garrett Collective are excited to partner with the Oikos Institute for Social Impact (oikosinstitute.org). Together, we will work with 15 congregations led by Garrett Black alums and DMin students in our Strategic Leadership for Black Congregations cohort to assist them in harnessing the power of their assets to make a greater social impact in the communities they serve. The Oikos Institute's grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative makes the partnership possible.
Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry
The Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry and Stead Center , which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, invited the renowned Dr. James He Qi
“Every year, leaders engage hundres of clergy and congregations, using their gifts to help ministry thrive.”
to Garrett on April 4, 2024 to lecture about his inspiring art and theology. The title of the event was “Images of Just Faith: Dr. James He Qi’s Journey of the Arts of Liberation.” This event was attended by both the Garrett community and local congregations, including Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches. The amazing work of Dr. He Qi guided us as we meditate upon our spiritualities and expressions of social holiness. Dr. He Qi ended the event by offering a live demonstration of his calligraphy. Garrett has decided to display Dr. He Qi’s artwork in one of the most visible places in Garrett (first floor, beside admissions office) to continuously shared Dr. He Qi’s liberating art with our communities. This year’s Homecoming celebration also featured an incredible array of Asian women pastors discussing what it means to be of Asian descent and serve in ministry, as we continue to strengthen connections between the center and Asian/Asian American churches.
Hispanic-Latinx Center
The Hispanic-Latinx Center is deeply committed to serving the pueblo latiné.
Holy Visions: Dr. James He Qi describes his artistic process and the theology that undergirds his work, inspiring students and pastors to reinterpret the gospel for their own contexts.
“It is essential to train leaders who can develop ministries that reflect both Methodist traditions and their communities’ diverse realities.”
As part of this important work, we are excited to launch the Escuela de Ministerio (School of Ministry) in spring 2025. In partnership with the Methodist Church of Chile and the North Central Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church (UMC), this program will provide essential training for Latiné leaders, including local pastors and laypeople. Garrett Seminary will offer courses in theology, church leadership, and social justice, while the Methodist Church of Chile will provide specialized instruction in Methodist studies, blending expertise from both institutions. This program responds to the urgent need to equip Latiné leaders to build and lead Methodist churches rooted in justice and inclusivity. With many United Methodist Conferences navigating transitions following disaffiliation from the UMC—and the subsequent impact on Latiné congregations and leadership—it is essential to train leaders who can develop ministries that reflect both Methodist traditions and
their communities’ diverse realities. By focusing on social justice and holistic ministry, the Escuela de Ministerio will prepare leaders to spiritually guide their congregations while fostering inclusive spaces that empower their communities. This is more than a training program—it's a pathway to transformative leadership for a more inclusive church.
Styberg Preaching Institute
The Styberg Preaching Institute was endowed by benefactors Ernest and Bernice Styberg to improve the state of preaching in the church. Impressed by a much earlier preacher and concerned about recent preachers they experienced; they charged the institute to help preachers further study the art of preaching. Since its inauguration in 2005, the institute has held annual workshops led by wellknown scholars and teachers in the field, even offering virtual workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teaching Preaching: The Styberg Preaching Institute hosts a training with Dr. Reggie Blount to inspire pastors, offering new ways to bring God’s Word into their pulpits.
Today, we’re thrilled to offer this education to attendees both in-person and virtually, to better facilitate congregational participation. Bringing training into the district to engage pastors on their turf, so to speak, has been equally rewarding. The pastors who attend deeply appreciate the opportunity to learn with colleagues and urge the institute to continue offering such opportunities. As the institute prepares to honor its 20th anniversary in October 2025, our celebrations will include a preaching workshop for pastors in the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Rueben P. Job Insititute for Spiritual Formation
The Rueben P. Job Institute for Spiritual Formation's commitment to supporting
the thriving of congregations is concretely expressed in its webinar offerings and conferences. Just this semester, the Job Institute is conducting a 6-week webinar for BIPOC Women in Leadership, attended mostly by clergywomen. This community of 13 women, led by Rev. Dr. Vanessa Monroe, explores the power of spiritual practice to balance, fuel, and sustain BIPOC women leaders as they lean into their life's call.
Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was safe to gather, the Job Institute co-hosted a conference with the Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry. "Heart Strangely Warmed and Awakened: Spirituality, Solidarity, and Belongingness," was led by Bishop Hee-Soo Jung, and attended by 70+ clergy both from the Northern Illinois Conference and the Wisconsin
“Pastors who attend deeply appreciate the opportunity to learn with colleagues.”
A Balm in Evanston: Attendees of “Hearts Strangely Warmed and Awakened: Spirituality, Solidarity, and Belongingness,” offered interpersonal support while also brainstorming ways to help clergy heal.
Conference. This day-long conference helped clergy explore the impact of COVID-19 and racism on their personal and ministerial lives, discerning ways they can support and find healing together.
Center for Ecological Regeneration
For the past year and half, the Center for Ecological Regeneration (CER) has partnered with Hennepin Ave UMC in downtown Minneapolis as part of Garrett’s commitment to work with congregations in offering new models of accessible theological education to non-traditional students. At the core of this partnership is an ongoing class at Hennepin taught by CER director Dr. Timothy Eberhart that draws on theological, ethical, scientific, and practical ecological resources to equip the church for regenerative ministry in a climate changing world. As a result of the class, Hennepin has claimed its vocation to be a “Cathedral for All Creation” and launched a new Creation Collective. To learn more about this partnership and fruits of the class, see page 9. With financial support from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative, the CER is planning to partner with congregations in a new Midwest Bioregional Hub. In the coming years, it will support participating churches through an online curriculum that helps them connect eco-theological understandings with regenerative, reparative practices. Amidst the many responses needed in an age of climate crisis, we’re confident that congregations will play a key role as organizing centers of community resilience and hopeful action, and are excited to join them in this vital work.
Junius B. Dotson Institute For Music and Worship In the Black Church & Beyond
The Junius B. Dotson Institute (JBDI) honors the late Reverend Junius B. Dotson, a nationally recognized pastor, speaker, and author who served as The United Methodist Church’s General
“Congregations will play a key role as organizing centers of community resilience and action..”
Secretary of Discipleship Ministries. At JBDI, we cultivate the recovery, recreation and revitalization of Black communities’ and the Black Church’s distinctive musical and liturgical heritages. More specifically, the faculty seeks to serve, strengthen and sustain part-time music and worship leaders. Clergy and laity continue to strive for excellence in worship, and JBDI faculty offer prophetic biblical and theological teachings for leaders serving in cross-cultural and cross-racial appointments across the denomination. We intentionally engage the obvious complexities present in this season of transition. Throughout, the JBDI Institute is a resource to sharpen worship leaders, musicians, instrumentalists, volunteer singers, laity, and clergy’s gifts and talents. Recently, the General Board of Discipleship 2024 School of Congregational Development (SCD) in in Schaumberg, IL invited JBDI to foster innovative ministry strategies
Catch the Spirit: The Junius B. Dotson Institute’s inaugural celebration in Atlanta trained more than 100 Black pastors, musicians, and church leaders—all culminating in a worship service featuring Richard Smallwood, attended by more than 800 community members.
for congregational growth with key institutional leaders. We established connections with twenty new churches where we can provide trainings and event partnerships across a variety of ministry areas. Together, we will offer tailored programming to strengthen these congregations.
Stead Center for Ethics and Values
Conversations on ethics and values usually start with adults. The Stead Center wants to change that. Not because we have some simplistic vision about “the children as our future” or “child-like understandings.” Not at all—we believe the opposite is true. Children and youth are not naïve to the daily survival and thriving of their families, communities, and the planet. Children participate in constructing their worlds, first with family, then friends, broadening out as they meet
“Play and artistic expression is one way that children ‘do ethics.’”
new people. Play and artistic expression is one way that children “do ethics.”
The Art of Ethics project seeks to cultivate this moral imagination. We invite adult leaders, teachers, and caregivers to join children and youth and envision a better world through visual and language arts. Started in the summer of 2023, the Art of Ethics project grows each semester with the assistance of wonderfully creative Garrett field education and doctoral students. We now have curriculum for Christian, interfaith, and secular communities—ages pre-K through high school. Participants can submit their projects to the online art gallery which features children’s and youth’s visual art. We have also developed a worship service template Christian congregations can use to center children and invite the whole congregation into the Art of Ethics. †
Speak Your Mind: Fourteen year-old Isaac created this portrait to depict how young people use their platforms to share ideas and change the world.
Our Migrant God
Exile, migration, and return is the biblical theme—from beginning to end
By President Javier Viera
ary wraps the child in cloth and lays him in a manger.
When churches tell this story, we focus on the tenderness embodied in this routine act. Swaddling helps babies feel safe and secure while sleeping—mimicking the uterine embrace.
Illustrations by Karina N. Cruz Ortiz
So here we find Mary, building an external womb to shelter the one she cherishes. In this strange land, God is not only born in the personhood of Jesus, but also through his parents’ love. Exclusive focus on a mother’s compassion and humanity, however, obscures the inhumanity of an empire that pushed her to this choice. Placing your infant where the animals feed is both an act of care and an act of desperation. Escaping in the dead of night for a foreign land with an infant in tow is both an act of selflessness and an act of despair. At the end of a year when the country’s loudest voices repeatedly demonized migrants, Advent demands empathy—and a reckoning with how we act as Christians in the days to come.
The Christmas story is told as much by verses we gloss over as it is by the ones we dwell upon. How many pageants every year begin with “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” but never sit with the implicit violence that a ruler’s words can force a pregnant teenager to uproot her life, leaving everything she has known in order to find safety and security at her most vulnerable moment? The compounding suffering—when Joseph and Mary must flee to Egypt to save their newborn’s life—is saved for another Sunday, safely removed from the carols and tinsel. And yet, the inclusion of such details is part of why Latiné people have deep devotion to the Holy Family: Because this story of migration, of economic precarity, of security and vulnerability is a story we know so well. Too many are familiar with what it means when edicts from the powerful radically change the trajectories of their futures. Mary’s act of love is echoed by the millions of women who clutch children tight against their breast while walking hundreds of miles, in the tenderness of a mother who wraps her kids in foil blankets on a concrete floor. That love is a proclamation of humanity in the middle of systems designed to dehumanize.
The Bible is filled with migration narratives because it is a reality that
humans have lived throughout our history, and one that humanity will continue to experience. And while stories like Christmas depict the courage and compassion found in dire circumstances, other narratives reveal devastating choices people make when struggling to survive. Consider the heart-wrenching story of Naomi and Ruth. When this story is taught or preached, too often we moralize it as an example of Ruth’s commitment, perseverance, and love for her motherin-law Naomi. At weddings we hear Ruth’s famous words to her motherin-law: “Do not urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.”
These words are beautiful and poetic, but they’re spoken in a moment of fear, weakness, and uncertainty not often associated with romantic love. Continue reading, and the two nowmigrant women have returned to Naomi’s homeland. They’re vulnerable in every way. They’re poor and hungry. They’re widowed, without anyone to provide for and
protect them. One of them is a foreign migrant looking for work with nowhere to turn, and their desperation has reached a critical point. And this is where the story turns tragic: Feeling trapped and hopeless, Naomi exploits Ruth. She exerts what little power she has and concocts a plan for Ruth to seduce a drunken relative into lying with her so that she might become pregnant and thus have his protection, and by association so would Naomi. This story of faithful friendship, deep commitment, and authentic love quickly turns, and we see that desperate people are often forced to make desperate decisions. As such, Naomi, “commodifies [Ruth’s] body,” Dr. Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar writes, “and puts her physical safety and reputation on the line to sexually entrap an inebriated man.” Beset by her own fears and feelings of powerlessness, Ruth complies.
“The Christmas story is told as much by verses we gloss over as it is by the ones we dwell upon.”
As if this story isn’t scandalous enough, we also learn another critical theological detail by the close of the book: Ruth births a son who will become the grandfather of King David, the most revered and beloved of Israel’s kings, which also makes her a direct ancestor of Jesus. At the heart of the Christian story is the claim that both the mother and the great, great, great…grandmother of Jesus are migrant women on the run, both looking for safety, for security, and a community to take them in so they can simply live. Why has the Christian God chosen to be made known through these exploited, vulnerable, powerless figures on the run? And, lest we cast these women in a certain light, what is implied that they persevere, overcome, survive, and eventually come to define what virtue and faithfulness look like in our tradition?
I believe there is insight to be gleaned for our national conversations on matters like immigration, on women’s autonomy over their own bodies, on national economic policies, on our care for the most vulnerable
among us, our relations with our neighbors and even strangers, and on the role religion and politics play in the public square. And while we want our political processes to address these matters, I think the more pressing questions are, “What is my personal role and responsibility in responding to these crises? What role should my church take in response to the migrants among us?” The Advent story does not allow us to remain detached, objective observers. It demands response. In the despair expressed from all sides of the political spectrum in the lead up and aftermath of our national elections, we seem to have forgotten that electoral politics is but one way to express our aspirations. There are many other ways to determine who we are as a people, the communities we will form and shape into being, and the kind of world we will leave for future generations. Communities of faith and conscience are essential to determining the values and the contributions we will make to that collective effort. That is, in part, why we need to revitalize these sorts of communities, because we’re seeing what happens when they are no longer vibrant. In its place, the electoral sphere becomes the only meaningful way to determine who and what we will become, and in that sphere there are winners and losers. In communities like Garrett’s, however, and in your own communities of faith, our future isn’t determined by winning and losing; rather, it is determined by values like love, justice, compassion, mercy, and hope. Thus, the real questions we must answer post-elections are: Will we be a community of hope? Will our children, will those in need, will those in power, will those most vulnerable find in us— in our way of life, in our way of thinking, in our methods of constructing a future—a compelling and life-giving vision of what might be?
Mary, Ruth, and Naomi and their experiences are precisely the sort of people who should be centered
“If we want to find God, we must follow God to the margins."
in our theological vision and moral universe. Their suffering, their prolonged vulnerability, their subjection to dehumanizing choices are what Gustavo Gutierrez, the recently deceased Latin American theologian, called structural sin: the reality in which majorities of people confront these dilemmas daily while the powerful elite can live their lives mostly inoculated—rarely if ever having to see it, let alone live it. Christian faith, he argued, called Christians into a different relationship with God, one in which their neighbors’ material well-being is as important as the spiritual. To profess Christ without centering that reality in our own faith fundamentally misunderstands Christ and the God he revealed to us. This is why Gutierrez’s central theological claim was that God has a preferential option for the poor. As a result, he claimed that we should too; that if we want to find God, we must follow God to the margins, where the poor and exploited, the rejected of our society, and the forgotten are forced to dwell. In God’s economy our margins are the true center. We cannot idolize the
manger and not contend with the filth into which Jesus was laid. The lives of people, God’s people, all over the world depend on our willingness to follow the Jesus whose preferential option could not be clearer.
This Christmas, Christians must ask ourselves: What kind of world do we long to see birthed? What values and actions are essential in that world and for its people? How can churches become sanctuaries of justice, compassion, and hope—building a future where displacements and forced migrations no longer define millions of people’s reality? These are questions that our political processes alone cannot and will not answer for us. We must answer them, with our own commitments and actions that advance God’s love and compassion. If there is any hope in our current national malaise, it is that we have agency, we have a critical role and voice in making that love and compassion known and real. That’s the real decision, the true election we face—not only every four years, but every day.
In Luke’s gospel, the first people who hear about Jesus’ birth are migrants, too. The angel appears to nomadic herders, inviting them to bring their sheep and find the holiness born into their midst. Like Mary, these shepherds are people on society’s periphery who are brought into the center of God’s story. The angel’s first words to them are “Do not be afraid,” not because there is nothing to fear but because God is the God who is present with God’s people as they move. From Abraham and Sarah to Jacob, Joseph and their family, the prophets, and Christ himself, exile, migration, and return is the biblical theme from beginning to end. And “Do not be afraid,” is God’s reassuring word to us, as well. Hope is not an ethereal yearning; it is a repeated choice. Like Mary, when we face threat and danger, we can build external wombs for one another—sanctuaries of welcome, where God again is born. †
Following that Still, Small Voice
The 2024-2025 incoming class is the largest at Garrett in more than ten years, spurred in part by a dramatic rise in international students. As a new generation answers the call to ministry, hear the stories that led them to Evanston.
By Benjamin Perry
A Joyful Noise for God
Medomfo Owusu, MDiv ‘27
“Your body’s got to be active in this. Even if you feel out of key and out of tune, you’re called to praise.” Medomfo Owusu’s laughter is lyrical when she describes the joy that comes from wedding her passion for music with her call to ministry. A native of Ipswich in the East of England, Medomfo wasted no time in pursuing this dream. After graduating university in the summer, she immediately enrolled in Garrett’s Master of Divinity program. “I know I eventually want to do a PhD to study Christian music in the African diaspora, but I also want to serve God in ministry—and I’m so glad I don’t have to choose between the two,” she says.”
This precocious spirit is nothing new. When she was just eleven years old, Medomfo revived a dormant Christian Fellowship with the chaplain at her school, assigning classmates
Bible passages to read—a group which she says actually attracted as many atheist and agnostic students as it did Christians. Throughout her university studies, she sang and played the violin at a nondenominational church while also singing in her college chapel’s high Anglican choral tradition. Needless to say, the diversity of religious expressions at Garrett helps her feel at home. “At Garrett, you get to learn from people from East and West Africa, South and East Asia, people who were born in the states and people who migrated here. There are Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Catholics all within the teaching faculty—that’s not even talking about the students,” she grins.
Another source of gratitude is the way that faculty model her own bivocational dreams. “Especially for us Gen
Z creatives, so many of us want to be multi-hyphenates. We want flexibility to express all the things God gives us to minister to others,” she says. “And it’s such a blessing to see how many professors are multivocational as well—a lot of them are ordained and still practicing ministers. They weren’t expected to give that up.” For Medomfo, that visible reminder testifies to an ancient truth—that this has long been the model for ministry. “It’s helpful to know that this is not God’s first rodeo dealing with bivocational leaders,” she quips. “This has been God’s story for centuries, even going back to Catholic monastic communities.”
“When we hear beauty from another child of God it can ignite life in you and remind you that you also bear God’s image.”
Part of what beckons Medomfo to both music and parish ministry is a womanist conviction that faith should care for the entire person, not just the mind. “Womanism invites me to bring my full spirituality, musicality, creativity—my love for nature, for dance, for family,” she says. “I don’t have to question whether that’s part of my faith, it is already there.” As Medomfo talks, she deftly weaves biblical exegesis into her own sense of call. “I think of the moment when Mary is pregnant with Jesus and visits Elizabeth, even just the sound of Mary’s voice makes John kick inside of Elizabeth’s womb, filling her with the Holy Spirit,” she explains. “When we hear beauty from another child of God it can ignite life in you and remind you that you also bear God’s image.”
Medomfo says that ministry lets her use this physical connectedness to help
people feel known and loved. “There’s something really special about the chance to listen to people,” she says. “I’m passionate about giving people space to tell their stories.” One of the gifts she thinks church offers, though, is a process of discipleship that also helps people know they belong to something larger than themselves. “It’s not just about having a personal faith,” she concludes, “Being in community with other people is what helps us grow into the fullest versions of ourselves.”
Called to Be Church in the World
Allison Martin MDiv/MAPCC ‘28
A call to ministry is rarely convenient. Indeed, Allison Martin’s life is a testament that the divine voice has power to draw us toward uncertain futures when conviction in that holy love outweighs our hesitation. Now starting as a dual-degree student in the MDiv/MAPCC programs, they are pursuing ordination as a deacon in the United Methodist Church in combination with a career as a licensed counselor. Just four years ago, however, Allison wasn’t sure if there was a place for them within the denomination.
“I’m a nonbinary lesbian, so the 2019 General Conference was a really painful experience,” they say. “But I felt this pull to come back.”
After the United Methodist Church
voted five years ago to prohibit LGBTQIA+ people from serving in ministry, Allison joined an affirming PC(USA) student ministry, but their heart never left the Wesleyan tradition. “I grew up in the Methodist Church, it’s where I claimed my faith as my own,” they say. “My church was there for me when I came out in high school, and my youth group was the only place where I felt safe as a queer person.” So, Allison accepted enrollment at Garrett last year before the ban was overturned in April. “I applied to pursue ordination as a deacon before I knew that it would even be possible for me,” they confide. Now, the way is blessedly clear, and they have their sights set squarely on ministry of care and compassion. “One thing I love about deacons is that they can proclaim good news through what they do and not just through what they say,” Allison shares. “I don't feel called to preach or necessarily lead a congregation, but I do feel called to be the church in the world.”
As this calling crystallized, it became clear that Garrett was where they needed to study. “One thing I wanted from a counseling program was more than just Western conceptions of healing, and Garrett’s MAPCC program does such a good job of integrating different modalities into spiritual care and counseling,” they say. “It’s not pathologizing and cares for the whole person.” Perspectives bring distinctive focus to the MAPCC program, as does an emphasis on trauma-informed care. “I would be doing a disservice to my future clients if I didn’t go to a program that included those perspectives in their curriculum,” Allison says. “People heal the best when they know they’re loved in community.”
Allison’s own story attests to this truth. After pain and conflict, they are claiming their place within the faith tradition that helped them feel whole. “Things like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral are the reason I’m still able to call myself a Christian,” they confess. “It felt reckless to come back, but also
like it was my only option because I’ve dreamed of being a deacon and a counselor my whole life.” In their words, you can hear potent belief in the connection between individual and communal healing. “I’m called to be a presence for people in crisis and a witness. If you’re a Christian, you’re supposed to make it on Earth as it is in heaven.”
A Brush with Life
Zaillah Rufus Gurugulla, MAFCEL & MAPCC ‘26
“All I could do was just hang by my arms from the platform, and the train was coming.” While call stories come in many forms, few are as dramatic as Gurugulla’s. When she was only a child, she committed herself to Christ after she nearly died on the railroad tracks. As she and her father traveled to retrieve her older sister from a station in Southern India, they became separated and eleven-year-old Zaillah accidentally wandered into the path of a returning train. At the last moment, she managed to leap and grab the edge of the platform but—unable to pull herself up—she dangled for minutes, clinging to life. “Pressed against the platform,” she says, “I was screaming in terror.” Fortunately, her father and a heroic bystander heard her cries, ran to her side, and pulled her out of danger. In the weeks following this narrow escape, Zaillah’s faith grew swiftly
deeper. “I could have died that day. It was nothing but a miracle that I missed death by just a few inches,” she notes with reverence. “In that moment I understood how much I need salvation, how much I need God and cannot do it on my own.” Once a more casual Christian, she now longed to become a missionary and devoted significant effort in strengthening the Indian church. While studying in college for a degree in Fine Arts, she and her father started the School of Praise, Worship and Music—a boot camp to train students in Christian music. “It is very rigorous,” she says. “People come having never touched an instrument and within a month we train them to a state where they can look at chords, read time signatures, and play music.” The group draws heavily from rural suburbs where churches often lack a music program, attracting both children and adults, pastors and laity. Seeking further theological education, she planned to study at an Indian seminary but couldn’t find a program that blended faith, art history, culture, and leadership. On the verge of pursuing a more general degree, she happened to attend an information session that leaders from Garrett hosted in her city. “In the Masters of Arts in Faith, Culture, and Educational Leadership, I found the exact combination I was looking for,” she reports joyfully. “I was so surprised because I had not found it anywhere else.” Education in the United States presented its own set of challenges, however, most notably the steeper tuition. “The currency and finances are so different here compared to where I live, I could not have made the decision to attend if I had not received a scholarship,” she says. “I am so grateful for the heart that God has given donors who use their resources so people like me can be equipped with the education to pursue our dreams.”
After she completes her degree, Zaillah plans to return to India and expand the camps she runs for Indian churches “I want to be part of God’s mission through my creative gifts,” she
“I am so grateful for...donors who use their resources so people like me can be equipped with the education to pursue our dreams.”
says. “I could even imagine expanding beyond India one day.” For now, though, she is delighted by this chance to study, nurturing her talents and faith. “For the first couple weeks, I couldn’t believe I was here—it took me a long time to process that I was even present,” she laughs. “It was too good to be true.”
Following a Dream
Simbarashe Ndowa, MAPM ‘26
Simbarashe (Simba) Ndowa’s childhood village on the border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique didn’t have a church. His mother was a certified traditional healer, a profession into which Simba
might well have followed. When Simba was only four or five years old, however, he began to experience vivid dreams. “In one particular dream, a large book would open, and I would receive some instructions,” he recalls. Animated in his speech, Simba’s conviction is so contagious that regardless of your feelings about prophetic dreams, you find yourself believing. Leaning forward in his chair, he exclaims, “I remember, when I was six or seven and able to read, I came across those same instructions in biblical verses and thought, ‘This is what I dreamt about!’” From those early moments, Simba and his family discerned that his calling would lead him to serve God beyond his home, but it was not an easy path between those youthful visions and admission into Garrett’s Masters of Arts in Public Ministry program.
Even pursuing the higher education that could lead to graduate study was far from guaranteed. “I would pray, ‘God, if it is you who I see in my dreams, I want to go to school,’” he remembers. “I would plead, ‘I don’t want to follow the rituals to become a traditional leader. I have heard you and read my Bible, I know you are there. Help me serve you.” These pleas did not go unanswered—he was able to attend school locally, where he began participating in a student Bible study and officially became a Christian. After graduation, Simba moved with his brother to Harare—Zimbabwe’s capital city—where he worked as a bus conductor and a gardener as he applied to universities.
The journey to his undergraduate degree from Africa University was likewise filled with moments of divine assistance. He began coursework in Environmental Studies, without enough money to pay the next semester’s tuition. By chance or providence, however, an international student from the United States took a personal interest in his story and connected Simba with his father—a Methodist pastor in Chico, California. The pastor’s family and congregation in Chico was
so moved, they helped Simba finish his degree. “One exceptional lady whose son had died in a car accident sold everything that belonged to him and put that money toward my scholarship,” he says with gratitude. That connection with the United Methodist Church endured, and when Simba finally decided to pursue his theological training, a colleague from the Democratic Republic of the Congo recommended Garrett.
Now, Simba is studying to pursue his call as a youth minister. “In my home community and all over the world, children are vulnerable. I know God is calling me to help,” he says. “When I was a youth, I saw potential dying in my colleagues. Talent is being destroyed because they have no exposure to a better kind of life.” While the particularities of Zimbabwe are central to his call, he finds Garrett’s diversity essential in helping him follow it. “It is critical to meet different people and understand, ‘Who is God to that culture, to that person?’” he says with potent fervor. “All of us are coming from different perspectives, different life experiences. But we believe in one God, and that God wants us to save one another.”
Scholar for the Common Good
respond to shifting culture—but dynamic growth in the number of international students who study at Garrett yields especially robust changes. When a classroom is likely to have students from several countries, including students who belong to persecuted communities or may even be studying in Evanston as political refugees, it changes the nature of group discussion. A conversation that might otherwise be hypothetical can become palpably real. It is precisely this context that attracted Mashungam Shatshang to the Master of Theological Studies program. “Garrett’s mission is to form courageous leaders for the thriving of the church and the healing of the world. Those words really caught my attention,” he says. “When you do theology in the middle of existential crisis, you must have courage.”
Mashungam grew up in a small district in the Indian state of Manipur, part of a Christian community that has been increasingly imperiled by Hindu nationalism and the attendant rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After he received his Bachelor of Divinity from Union Biblical Seminary, a Methodist institution in Pune, concerns about how theology can strengthen his country’s imperiled democracy sent him to Chicago seeking answers. “Right now, India is going through tremendous change. What the BJP envisions is not a proper Republic because it does not include, among others, the Christians and Muslims who have been an integral part of this nation since independence,” he says. “The question of how I can counter Hindutva for political civility based on the Constitution and rule of law is what sent me looking for resources in Christian theology that can bridge this gap.”
This pursuit, however, brought him to a perhaps-unexpected place: the field of patristics. “I have this sense that to go forward in the future, sometimes we must take a step back into the past,” he says. “I’ve been so moved by
Saint Augustine’s conception of the common good, that a nation is defined by its pursuit of all people’s wellbeing, and want to wield that definition against the idea of Hindu nationhood proclaimed by the BJP.” It’s not just the ideas of Augustine that attract him, however, it’s also the style with which he approaches theology. “What I love best about Augustine is how he brings heart and mind together in what he writes,” Mashungam says. “That’s the way theology should be: We have to think critically about things, but we can’t lose touch with our emotions about what we study.”
Indeed, as much as he is excited by his first semester’s classes, Mashungam also praises the way Garrett makes him feel. “The staff, faculty and senior students have been so hospitable, it’s made me know I’m welcome and brings me comfort,” he says. “Even visiting the lake, listening to the sound of waves and staring at the huge horizon, it helps me find calm in the knowledge that I’m part of a much larger history of humanity and salvation, which is still ongoing.”
After he graduates, Mashungam wants to return to Manipur, to nurture Christian community in his home state. “Right now, we have lots of concerns. Leadership crisis in the church, and a lack of sufficient theological institutions force people to move out of the state to study, which causes a drain on human resources. There’s also a potent political divide and a lack of theological engagement with the so-called secular,” he says. “So, I want to return and work on the social issues my community is facing, and how theology can respond.” Resolute in the conviction of that call, his voice steadies. “Too often, when you are in danger, it feels as though you are unable to speak your mind and then ignore those things that threaten your very existence,” he says with confidence. “We cannot wait for others. We must have the courage to be honest, to nurture change person by person, community by community, because that’s what leads to bigger changes.” †
Mashungam Shatshang MTS
Communal Care for a Fractured World
Garrett students prepare for careers in counseling and chaplaincy
By Benjamin Perry
Across the United States, 169 million people live in regions experiencing a shortage of mental healthcare providers. Sadly, difficulty in accessing care coincides with a dramatic increase in the prevalence of anxiety, depression, addiction, suicidality, and other mental health disorders. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this crisis, but the underlying trends predate 2020: The US has long refused to invest in mental healthcare while simultaneously creating circumstances that inflict widespread trauma. Witnessing the staggering gap between need and care, Garrett Seminary has created the Masters of Arts in Pastoral Care and Counseling (MAPCC) degree program, training graduates for a wide range of caring professions—including chaplains, spiritual directors, ordained ministers, lay leaders, and licensed clinical counselors.
Students have many options to pursue a vocation in counseling, from social work to traditional psychology programs, but Rev. Dr. AHyun Lee (GETS ‘15), feels there is a crucial distinctiveness in Garrett’s decolonial pedagogy and blend of academic disciplines. As Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology, Care, and Psychotherapy, and director of the MAPCC, she weaves psychological and psychodynamic theory with theology, somatic practice, and trauma-informed care to pursue
A Ministry of Presence: Students in the Masters of Arts in Pastoral Care and Counseling program learn across disciplines to bring the fullness of God’s love into the contexts where they offer care.
a holistic approach to healing. “The discipline of psychology is centered in the Western context,” she explains. “Our program intentionally grounds itself in both counseling and spiritual care, but also in asking, ‘How can we bring marginalized stories and experiences to the forefront of mental health and spiritual care?’”
For Dr. Rolf Nolasco, Director of the Rueben P. Job Institute for Spiritual Formation, this shift from Western paradigms demands a fundamental reevaluation of theories, theologies, and practices of spiritual care and counseling. “Western epistemology is individually-focused, disconnected from social realities that shape or even contort people’s lived experiences, and privileges what I’d call ‘mental
gymnastics,’ over and against the body,” he says, “A decolonial framework also interrogates theologies and spiritualities that negate or even obstruct healing and human flourishing.” It’s a lesson that student Amelia Abernathy will take into the world with her when she graduates this spring. “I would be a terrible counselor if my job was only to listen to people and then send them back into the world that has caused them so much harm,” she says. “Part of my work is also being an advocate and activist in these communities, trying to nurture social healing.”
This wider focus is what it means to work for the healing of the world, investing in leaders who are attuned to suffering’s root causes and not just its manifold symptoms. “There’s this
idea that trauma is only caused by a life-threatening event,” Dr. Lee says. “Trauma is also created by the ongoing imperialism, racism, sexism and other social harms that communities experience.” Psychological research has recently focused on how generational trauma, chronic stress, micro- and macroaggressions, and other forces affect health, but their findings merely affirm truths that suffering communities have long known. “The effects are not just mental, but bodily and relational,” Dr. Nolasco says. “They are totalizing, destructive, and incredibly isolating.”
“Attending to the body is very important,” Dr. Nolasco explains, “it holds everything that makes us human. It is also the site of wisdom and healing.” Similarly, harm that’s rooted in individualism requires care rooted in our interdependency. “You’re not actually able to care for yourself without other people. It’s reciprocal,” Dr. Lee notes. “So it cannot be, ‘You got hurt, you have trauma, you need to protect yourself.’ We must emphasize, ‘You’re vulnerable and are not able to survive alone. You need collaborative care that’s grounded in community.”
Garrett knows that students still need to navigate licensing boards and other bodies who understand care through a more limited frame. The program has licensed clinicians like Dr. Lee among the faculty, to guide students over the hurdles they need for professional accreditation. “There are classes where we discuss at length how the course material applies to licensing examinations,” Abernathy says. At the same time, however, those functional necessities are held in balance with an intention to live into the kinds of care Garrett hopes will shape the world. “You get to know your cohort. You have people who are running this long race beside you, supporting you and who you encourage in kind,” she says. “It’s a real sense of family—so lovely and grace-filled that it helps me breathe.”
That communal feeling is no accident. “We are very careful in our pedagogy
to orient class as a place of mutual care,” Dr. Lee shares. “These courses are experimental; the classroom is where we practice the care we will provide.”
Integrating spirituality into counseling is a core part of that emphasis. “It is what animates our calling as counselors, chaplains, or spiritual guides,” Dr. Nolasco says. “It is our way of mediating, embodying, making real and present the healing presence of God in a broken and breaking world.” This is particularly important for students who enter the program to answer their call to ministry. Dr. Lee served churches before and after she finished her PhD in clinical training, but she says that a focus on counseling hasn’t just made her a better clinician— it’s made her a better pastor. “Whether I’m creating liturgy or helping someone who struggles with addiction, the sensitivity I bring is totally different,” she says. “More pastors are also becoming bivocational, and counseling provides career possibilities.”
Reciprocally, theology also improves the care counselors provide, helping them to see those seeking care as human beings, bearers of the image of God and not simply case numbers with assigned diagnostic codes. “The suffering isn’t the person, even if the person is suffering,” Dr. Nolasco
observes. “What secular Western counseling bypasses is the uniqueness of the person. When we see clearly how the person who is suffering is valued by God, it helps us connect with the imago dei in that person.” Even for counselors who serve in secular settings, many clients still bring theological questions into the room. “I began counseling at seventeen for anxiety and depression, but it wasn’t until I worked with someone who was spiritually aware and went to divinity school that I found healing,” Abernathy confesses. “I was struggling with how I could believe in God but not feel great in the world. Those conversations helped me explore not only the spiritual parts of my life but life itself.”
“When we see clearly how the person who is suffering is valued by God, it helps us connect.”
The widespread need for care providers combined with pedagogical distinctiveness has made the MAPCC Garrett’s fastest-growing degree program. Considering its future, Dr. Nolasco asks, “How can we build a program rooted in the understanding that our healing is tied to the healing of other people, that our suffering is tied to other people’s suffering?” This question is bigger than the United States, and Dr. Lee hopes that the MAPCC can soon educate students in other parts of the world. “There are many places like Korea and India where there are significant mental health needs but insufficient training, and Garrett is very attuned to how we can develop transnational partnerships,” she says. “We’re also exploring how we can provide more digital opportunities in the future, to make the program more accessible.” But the MAPCC is already preparing students like Abernathy—who has accepted a position at a Chicagobased counseling agency—ready to pursue healing and wholeness. “When we begin to help each other, we can remember who we are,” Dr. Nolasco concludes. “I mean that in two senses: Remembering as in bringing-to-mind, but also as a way of bringing together. If we can remember who we are, we can invest in each other’s flourishing.” †
Helping the Helpers
An Interview with the Rev. Dr. Clare Biedenharn ’06, ‘15
By Benjamin Perry
Healthcare workers are experiencing a burnout crisis. Since the pandemic began, rising workplace stress and staffing shortages have pushed medical professionals to the brink. This disturbing trend is particularly acute among nurses: In 2023, a study by the American Medical Association found that 56% of nurses were overburdened, and 41% planned to leave their job within two years. While caring for patients is sometimes depicted as chaplains’ sole charge, they are called to minister to everyone in a hospital. Rev. Clare Biedenharn (GETS – ’06, ’15) takes that responsibility seriously: She and her research team are planning a study to investigate how to reduce nurse burnout. In a potent sign that this is something the world desperately needs, The National Institute of Health selected their proposal to move into the second round for a $275,000 grant. Their study is based on research Rev. Biedenharn completed for her Garrett DMin dissertation, listening to ICU nurses at East Jefferson General Hospital, New Orleans. “Listen, healthcare is in a hot mess,” she admits. “Nurses feel like widgets, and have been moved so far away from that initial loving impulse of wanting to help people.” Part of her approach is to reconnect nurses with their original sense of call. “My favorite question is, ‘Why did you want to become a nurse?’” she shares. “Suddenly, they’ll stop, look kind of wistful and talk about how they helped care for their grandfather. Or, at the hospital I worked at in New Orleans, some of those nurses started as candy stripers—high school volunteers—and have been there for
“As chaplains, we get to be a symbol of God’s grace and presence”
20-25 years.” By grounding people in that call, she hopes to build resilience toward inevitable workplace stressors.
“I love that I can help people remember and reconnect, to know how they’re part of a bigger picture,” she says.
Part of what motivates Rev. Biedenharn is gratitude to nurses who helped revive her own sense of purpose. In her last local church ministry appointment, she was told she couldn’t preach or teach because she was a woman. She left that job for a chaplaincy position but was so harmed by the experience, she wasn’t sure she could offer meaningful care. “When I came to that hospital, I was so beat down by that church, I really felt worthless. In fact, when they were making assignments, I thought, ‘I’ll just sit back and take whatever is left,’” she confesses. “The only thing left was the ICU and those nurses did for me what they do for their patients. I came to that third floor broken and sick, and they picked me up and got me going again.”
Nearly thirty years later, Rev. Biedenharn has helped lead wider changes in how chaplains operate as part of hospital care teams. “We were kind of a bunch of cowboys at first,” she laughs. “If you were a religious person, you could just show up and offer care. Now, there’s a big push for research, for professional credentials, so we can have a real seat at the table.” Throughout all the changes, it’s the same love for ministry that sustains her. “As chaplains, we get to be a symbol of God’s grace and presence,” she says with joy. “It’s such an honor to keep asking open questions—not to give people solutions, but to help them tap into their own resources.” †
A Joyful Healer: Part of the gift Dr. Biedenharn offers is an infectious enthusiasm that reminds doctors and nurses why they followed this vocation.
What Is Our Relationship to the World?
Decolonial theology demands a new understanding of the climate crisis
By Benjamin Perry
Amid her ill-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley tweeted, “If we want to be serious about saving the environment, we need to confront India and China. They are some of the biggest polluters.” While her tone was blunt, her argument was not particularly new—she joined a growing chorus of voices who blame industrialization
in Africa and Asia for the rise in carbon emissions, and a reason that the United States should refrain from passing new environmental policy. As I talk with Dr. Wonhee Anne Joh, Garrett’s Professor of Christian Theology and Postcolonial Studies, she describes the intellectual dishonesty of this myopic perspective, and the way it endangers our collective future. “We can’t talk climate change
or catastrophe without talking about colonialism at the same time,” she says.
“When you discuss it devoid of these racialized colonial histories, you presume a false equivalence. Climate change may be a shared global responsibility, but we are not all equally responsible for this crisis—nor will its harm be evenly felt.”
Moreover, it’s particularly violent to cry out against formerly colonized
countries’ economic development given the history of how countries like the United States fueled our own. “Western industrialization was only possible because of that colonialism,” Dr. Joh says. “The West was only able to accumulate its wealth because of its conquest, constituting itself at the expense of desecrating the rest of the world.” The effects of these extraction economies are ongoing. “They didn’t just conquer people at that time,” Dr. Joh explains. “They decimated culture and also took the raw resources,” creating manufactured scarcity where there was once abundance. Now, she says, people talk about “natural” disasters, without ever confronting their distinctly unnatural foundations. “These crises happen because resources are unevenly distributed,” Dr. Joh observes. “The long history of underdevelopment and theft through racialized colonial history is why countries can’t withstand ‘natural’ disasters.”
Even nominal attempts to redress that harm have played out along colonial fault lines. Consider the World Bank—who declares it their mission to “end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.” While the institution was formed in 1944 as anticolonial movements were gaining power, in function it has served to further enrich wealthy nations by exploiting poorer ones. “Formerly colonized nations were lent tons of money so they could develop, but neoliberal imperial powers actually put the money back into themselves through transnational companies,” Dr. Joh says. “Now, you have formerly colonized places, stripped of resources, lent all this money with interest and they can barely make interest payments.” And still folks like Nikki Haley have the gall to blame India for driving climate change. “It’s a deft move that dominant folks make,” she wryly observes. “They keep changing the rules, right at the moment when they are applied to them, and then they take the posture of a pseudo-ethical stance.”
This hypocritical attitude is offensive and hinders ecological progress; it’s also a stark threat to the wellbeing of people living in countries like the United States. “Our fates are intertwined and that's something the US and other dominant parts of the world don’t realize,” Dr. Joh explains. “We live together or we die together.” The persistent fantasy that lies beneath climate denialism is that somehow we can adapt our way out of this crisis, even as entire nations and ecosystems collapse. “We cannot accumulate so much that we become invulnerable,” she says bluntly. “That’s not how life works. But somehow, we don't yet realize that there will be no life for us, either.”
In order to change at the pace and magnitude this crisis demands, countries like the United States must stop viewing international environmental legislation as a zero sum game and accept our moral obligation to do substantially more than formerly colonized nations—and also to follow their wisdom and leadership. “It’s simple,” Dr. Joh says. “But people don't want to accept how simple it is. Stop producing. Stop accumulating. Take the back seat. Learn from others. Change the way we
think about who we are, what we are in relation to everything around us.” Again, the history of colonization presents an impediment here: The US is so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the people who can teach and lead the world. “Now we must learn from others who we’ve been told are inferior to us,” she observes, “I constantly have to be mindful that there is a different mindset to which I must return—that there are other truths just as valid and perhaps even more ancient, even more wise, and that those will offer us lifesaving ways. Unless we do that, we won’t turn away from this lifestyle.”
Ultimately, understanding our fundamental interconnectedness is what fosters transformation. And that work begins by uprooting the lie of self-determination. “You cannot love others unless you love yourself,” Dr. Joh says. “Unless we see our own vulnerable humanity, there's no way that we're ever going to think about the rest of the world differently.” There’s a tenderness required there, but not one that tumbles toward self-pity. We in the United States will continue to live within the violence of empire but cannot use that reality to justify despair. “Even Jesus had a consciousness that was born into a colonial context,” she says, voice rising with passion. “So the question becomes: What does it mean for followers of Jesus to embody the compassion, love and activism with which Jesus bore witness as a form of counter-governance?”
“Unless we see our own vulnerable humanity, there's no way that we're ever going to think about the rest of the world differently.”
Fortunately, we don’t have to find those answers on our own—we can turn to folks who are already doing that work. The scale of change required is far closer to overthrowing an occupying empire than it is to begin a recycling program, so we must learn from people whose histories and genealogies lived through that change. “It starts with base communities, everyday practices in which we live our lives in relation to one another,” Dr. Joh concludes, “We must retrain our imaginations, rearrange our desires until we desire a different kind of world—to live an embodied hope.” †
Queering is a Process, Not a Destination
A Conversation with Dr. Kate Ott and members of the Queer Theoethics Class
In her article, “Taking Children’s Moral Lives Seriously,” Dr. Kate Ott— Garrett’s Jerre and Mary Joy Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics— argues that ethics must “shift from a practice of thinking and doing through logical, independent rationality to an interdependent encounter that requires imagination and creative practices like play or improvisation.” For last semester’s Queer Theoethics class, Dr. Ott implemented a curriculum and pedagogy designed to put these ideals into practice. “The class examined how the theoretical discipline of queer theory intersects into theology and ethics,” Dr. Ott explains. “Our work together was not just to identify the kind of normativity in everyday systems, but also to ask how those same normativities affect us in the classroom.” Since queer theory, as a discipline, is intently focused on destabilizing norms, it’s fitting that the
class disrupted hierarchical separation between professor and students to favor a more collaborative approach.
“It was a very exciting course,” says PhD student Grant Showalter-Swanson, “We spent a lot of time reflecting on how often queerness is ascribed to identity, moving toward thinking about queer and queering as a verb, a process that enables us to imagine something more expansive than those essentializing claims.” For Dr. Ott, this understanding was a key part of how she wanted students to change how they thought about the discipline. “Queer theologies and ethics are different than LGBTQ studies,” she says. “Part of queer theory is to help us think about the ways that spaces are normatively defined through gendered and sexual constructions. But queer theory now goes far beyond that: considering how indigenous knowledge systems come
into play in conversation with queer theory, how womanist ethics and theology push back against the normative whiteness that also shapes a gender and sexual system.”
This work is deeply personal, and so it was both inevitable and intentional for students to bring their lived experiences into the weekly readings. Part of the course’s structure asked class members to prepare a report on works of queer theory, so colleagues could interact with more books than they could personally read. When MDiv student Luke Miltz read Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, he found himself confronting many of the systems in which he was raised in Kansas. “Homonationalism really hit home, because what acceptance I found there as a gay man was always conditional,” he says. “Like, I paid dues to the Log Cabin Republicans as a junior in high school. Or, I’ve been to the Middle East a few times, and when I come home folks will says things like, ‘They don’t like you over there,’ and talk about how Islam is radically homophobic.” As someone who is studying how to strengthen interreligious engagement, Miltz says queer theoethics provides
an invaluable addition to that work. “Part of what I feel called to is gently informing other Christians that we are not ‘right’ in what we believe,” he says, “We’re no more ‘correct’ in what we believe to be existential reality than anyone else.” The space queerness carves for fluidity and ambiguity is a powerful intervention against the kind of religious certainty that too often breeds religious supremacy.
While queer theory and LGBTQIA+ identity are not synonymous, part of what MAPM student Millie Piper found were ways to approach her own lesbian identity with expansive curiosity. “I came into seminary with questions about whether it was okay to be queer,” she remembers. “But I came into this class more concerned with, ‘What are the beauties and intricacies of being queer?’” In readings like Indecent Theology by Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid and Queer Soul and Queer Theology by Laurel Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young, she found new perspectives on embodiment. “This idea of a bodily, even explicit theology put into words something I understood but had never heard before,” she says. “In some ways, a despiritualizing of the incarnation.” It’s a paradox that sits at the heart of so much queer thought: By leaning into mystery, we find surer ground; in moving beyond a stultified spirituality we uncover holiness. That dismantling of formal structures can present its own challenges, however, Piper notes. “If queer theoethics is committed to being antinormative,” she asks, “how can it flourish without tearing itself apart?”
This tension between deconstruction and constructive meaning-making is part of why Dr. Ott uses queer ethics in her own scholarly work. Though she herself is a cisheterosexual woman, she observes that the gifts borne by queer perspectives are by no means limited to LGBTQIA+ people. “My primary work is sexuality and technology with teens and young adults,” she says. “If I can't think out of queer frameworks personally, I
shouldn’t be doing this work because I'm not listening to folks’ experience or the shifts that must be made for us to do more liberative work.” Teaching this class is, in some ways, a tacit proclamation of this central truth: A world shaped by the claims of queerness will be freer for all people. “A liberation theologian at my core, I have rarely, other than being female-identified, been in the most marginalized of communities that we say we want to give preferential option,” she reflects. “It is part of my theological and ethical commitment to both listen to folks who have minoritized experiences and also contest the kinds of theology and ethics I do using the theory that comes from those lived experiences that move us past white supremacist or cisgender approaches.”
really exciting—even hopeful—work,” he confesses. “Centering people’s lived experiences, particularly marginalized and oppressed folks, leads us toward a more innovative and expansive future.” Speaking with Dr. Ott and students from the class, this expansive ethos is what came through most clearly. “Doing Christian ethics in relationship to the institutional inertia of the Church, this class really gave us the chance to think through what theology could look like if people had the space to be creative,” Luke Miltz observes. “How would we be describing God, if we were truly evaluating our human experiences of God?—something that’s very Methodist to do.”
“By leaning into mystery, we find surer ground.”
Intersection with other liberatory frames is part of what Grant Showalter-Swanson is taking away from the course. “A constant question in my work is where there can be coalitional conversations between queer theoethics and the work of decolonization,” he says. “The ways in which we think about gender and sexual expression in the West—and how we even approach these conversations in the Western Academy— is deeply steeped in traditions that are limiting and colonizing for all people.” The ethical locus of this class, nestled between self-examination and group interaction, provided a liminal space where they could explore new ideas while also being held accountable to others’ experience. “Finding constructive ways of imagining gender and sexuality beyond Western paradigms, it’s
Ultimately, that encouragement toward self-determination is something he felt Dr. Ott’s guidance nurtured. “She always says, ‘An experience can be a learning experience without you having to report on it or prove it in some way. I don’t have to validate it for it to have been important,’” he recalls. “It’s one of the most impactful things I’ve ever heard in higher education, valuable for theology but also just for forming us as scholars.” Dr. Ott expresses her own gratitude for how joyfully the class adopted this approach. “Within the class, burgeoning queer theory ethicists get to find the points that meant the most to their lived experiences,” she says. “It’s a privilege to help them contest some of those legacies.” For Showalter-Swanson, the collective approach to pedagogy was as important as the subject content. “Part of the queering process is having boundaries for safety but also being open to the messiness, the creativity, the innovation,” he adds. With a grin, Piper affirms his assessment. “Apart from being able to engage with the course materials in a way that’s more interesting than a lecture, we also became closer as a class than most—because we were answering each other’s questions, and adding questions on top of questions,” she laughs. “It was one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken.” †
Oración por la paz y la serenidad en el bullicio navideño
Santo Dios, hay tanto que hacer en la espera del nacimiento de Cristo.
Tanta exigencia de que todo sea perfecto. Es fácil distraerse con tanto ruido, con la lista interminable de cosas por hacer.
Ayúdame a respirar.
Ayúdame a escuchar tu amor sereno.
Ayúdame a confiar en que volverás a este mundo ruidoso trayendo contigo tu paz.
Ayúdame a creer en tu gracia mientras dejo que la imperfección sea suficiente.
Ayúdame a hacer de lado esta apurada lista de pendientes.
Ayúdame simplemente a ser, a estar presente.
Déjame estar listo, abiertas las manos, abierto el corazón.
Amén.
A Prayer for Stillness and Peace in the Noise of Christmas
Holy God, there is so much to do as we wait for the birth of Christ.
There are so many demands for us to make everything perfect.
It is easy to get distracted by the noise and the long to-do list.
Help me listen for your quiet love.
Help me breathe.
Help me trust that you will come again into this loud world with your peace.
Help me believe in your grace as I let imperfection be enough.
Help me set the to-do list down and simply be. Let me be ready, with open hands and an open heart.
Amen.
English by rev. dr. abby mohaupt. Traducción por José Delpino.
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