11 minute read
Residential Education
by CHUCK TEDRICK
Residential Education
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Are we crazy, nuts, or insane? While most of the academic, educational, and commercial world is rapidly converting to a virtual mode of education and commerce, why is Westminster Seminary California (WSC) doubling down on residential education? Why are we so committed to face-to-face (even mask-to-mask) education? We believe that residential education offers the most robust and well-rounded seminary education and formation. While recognizing and utilizing the technologies available to us for distance learning, we believe that face-to-face interaction is ideal when training men and women for Christian ministry and service.
WSC remains committed to fostering a vibrant community in which we learn, live, and love together. The “we” in that sentence is not merely the students, but the faculty, the administration, our families, our churches, and our community.
Certainly, like us, you have appreciated the benefits of being able to work, learn, and participate in your church life while at home during the pandemic. We are grateful to live in an age when these technologies are available to us. However, we would be surprised if you did not recognize that while they were a helpful substitute, it was just that – a substitute. You longed for the opportunity to sit across the table from one another at work, in school, or at the coffee shop. Undoubtedly, you prayed to be gathered next to one another in the same sanctuary. Being seen and heard is good; being there is better. This has been and continues to be a core conviction and commitment of WSC.
LEARNING IN COMMUNITY
Our foundational commitment to providing a thoroughly Reformed theological education and training includes the highest academic standards. Integral to these standards is the recognition that theological training is communal. Our classes encourage participation as an essential ingredient to our academic and spiritual formation. We want to watch, learn, and listen, but we also want to repeat, reflect, and respond to the professors, as well as to one another. Learning to preach, teach, evangelize, counsel, discuss, defend, and dialogue thoughtfully takes time, feedback, and presence. These are all interpersonal and communal activities. We believe learning and honing them in community will only enhance their practice and participation in community. For example, learning to receive and give encouragement, correction, and criticism are best done in person. Though some of these things are difficult, they are imperative to developing the gifts and character of men and women called to serve.
Learning does not start and stop during the scheduled class hour but is ongoing. WSC students, alumni, and faculty all count their interactions with one another in the student lounge, library, local coffee shops, outdoors (beaches - we must say something about beaches when talking about San Diego), and homes among their fondest memories of seminary. It is in these settings where the classroom instruction is nurtured, matured, and nuanced. This familiarity and access is one of the reasons we keep our student-teacher ratio low, 11:1. In our conversations with one another we clarify, encourage, correct, and engage one another as we seek to comprehend and communicate the rich truths taught in the classroom.
There is a saying that suggests 90 percent of communication is non-verbal. This estimate may be high, but the point is germane. Our bodies and minds/mouths are not disconnected entities, but part and parcel of an integrated whole. We increase our potential of understanding one another and communicating clearly with one another by being present. As those who are
preparing to teach, preach, shepherd, and serve those who are created in the image of God and have been fashioned with a body and soul, we believe that our time learning in community helps shape us for service.
LIVING IN COMMUNITY
WSC has been and remains intentional in its commitment to residential education and formation. We are building upon a firm foundation and visionary planning of our past decades of board members, donors, faculty, administration, graduates, and friends. In particular, they planned and sacrificed for the building of Westminster Village. The Village affords students myriad opportunities to learn and live in community. Furthermore, the Village has significantly reduced one of the most pressing challenges of previous generations of students seeking to attend WSC: the cost of housing in Southern California. As planned, the Village has drastically decreased the cost of housing to below market value, while increasing community and convenience. We are thankful to the Lord for his providence and to our friends for their generosity.
Perhaps it would be prudent to acknowledge that WSC is sometimes said to be a “bubble,” particularly now that we have the Village. Our intention is not to isolate ourselves or our students from the world, but to take a few concentrated years to help prepare them for their service throughout the world. Our commitment to residential education includes participation in the local communities as we work, shop, play, serve, love, and worship with our neighbors. Furthermore, WSC is not exempt from the suffering, trials, tribulations, and difficulties of the world. We face many of the same challenges and opportunities as do our neighbors. Neither the seminary nor the village are meant to be permanent homes for students. They are meant to serve for a specific time and purpose in the life of the students as they prepare to serve and be sent by their churches to various places throughout the world.
There are currently more than 15 countries represented in our student body. What an incredible opportunity our community has to engage in and out of the classroom with one another. We are granted the opportunity to learn and experience different cultures, sharpen and soften one another as we hear about Christ’s church throughout the world, become aware and sensitive to the joys and sorrows of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, pray for and with one another, and fellowship together. The relationships that are forged in seminary endure throughout ministry.
In addition to academics, we provide opportunities to pray together. Every Wednesday each faculty member meets with a group of students to pray for one another, our churches, and our world. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings the WSC community is invited to participate in chapel. We welcome our faculty, ministers from our churches, guests, and graduating seniors to lead a devotional from God’s Word. Chapels often include singing and praying together as well.
Several times throughout the academic year we host convocations in which guest speakers come to address a topic of interest to our community. These convocations have included every department of the seminary curriculum and beyond: historical theology, systematic theology, biblical theology, practical theology, linguistics, and philosophy. Augmenting the convocations
are opportunities to share a meal with the guest speaker and Q&A discussions.
Seeking to care for the body as well as the mind, football (as in soccer), basketball, softball, golf, running, hiking, walking, and surfing are a few of the activities in which the community participates. Sometimes these are organized activities and tournaments for the whole community, while most of the time they are ordinary and organic happenings between neighbors.
We care about our students while they are with us for a few years, but we are not a destination. We are a training ground where we endeavor to see them launched into faithful service in their various callings and vocations. To that end we host recruitment, training, and placement opportunities. Sometimes these are discussion or training sessions from various church denominations or federations. At other times educational and service-oriented ministries and organizations will come to share their opportunities and invite participation. It is a blessing of our residential model to be present to explore these options.
Integral to residential education and formation are internships, or field education. We recognize the value of hands-on training and face-to-face mentoring. Master of Divinity students are required to participate in 700 hours of field education with their local church. They will teach, serve, learn, and counsel in their local churches and communities. Furthermore, all students are afforded the opportunity to participate in mission trips, service projects, and student associations. All of these are designed to help inform, shape, and form them, as well as helping those whom they serve.
LOVING IN COMMUNITY
Why are you writing about being a loving community? After all, aren’t you an academic institution? The answer should be obvious in the context of preparing men and women to serve Christ, his Gospel, and his Church. We love because we have been loved by the one who is love, in order to love. True faith manifests itself in our love of God and love of neighbor. The Scriptures teach that Christians are to be known by their love, which is a fruit of faith. 2 Corinthians 5:14 notes that it is the love of Christ which controls us. How lovely. How humbling. How glorious.
The Apostle Paul wrote that without love we are nothing (I Corinthians 13:2). What a staggering and humbling statement. Sometimes we may be tempted to think that if we have all the right data, dogma, or facts that we are good to go. However, that is not how Scripture portrays the reality. Paul noted that the church in Corinth was not suffering from a lack of giftedness, but a lack of love. He posits a series of conditional statements highlighting some lofty gifts: if I could speak with the tongue of angels, if I had faith that could move mountains, if I knew all things, that would be amazing. But, without love these hypotheticals would not merely be diminished, they would be worthless, useless, harmful, damaging.
Paul does not say that the truth without love is admirable, good, praiseworthy, or noteworthy. Rather, it is nothing; worse, we are nothing. The truth without love is noisy, it is deadly, it is coercive, it is sinful. Without love we produce nothing of value, we gain nothing of value, and we are nothing of value, according to Paul, in the context of the church and Christian fellowship. Granted, WSC is not the Holy Spirit nor the church, and WSC cannot make anyone love. However, as those who are made in the image of the one who is love and recreated in Christ to love one another, we want to encourage, model, and shape a loving community in which learning and living with one another happens. Of course, we do not do these things perfectly, but we look to the one who is perfect and is perfecting his people.
In summary, we are committed to residential education because we believe it is the best way to engage, inform, and form the next generations of servants of Christ, his Gospel, and his Church. Of course, we are empathic and understanding of those who in God’s providence cannot attend a seminary in person and must pursue their studies online. There are many situations in which this might be the case, and we rejoice at the opportunities afforded to our brothers and sisters in these situations. We also want to be clear that we do not look down upon any students, the institutions who serve them, or the education they receive. We are grateful for our partnership in training and serving the next generation of pastors, missionaries, scholars, teachers, and servants. Rather, our hope and encouragement here is for those who are able to attend in person but recognize that it may impose some challenges, inconveniences, and difficulties. We are not naive to these challenges and objections. We want to help mitigate them if we are able. We also want to encourage you to consider the benefits to you now and the community you will serve in the future by being fully immersed in a residential education program. A good seminary education is not just taught, but caught, by learning, living, and loving in person and in community. We would welcome you to come learn with us, live with us, and love with us.
By way of analogy, Paul wrote letters to churches that were instructive and helpful. They were loving and thoughtful. They were informational and formational. More so, in our understanding of Scripture they are divine and all of the aforementioned by being so. However, the point of the analogy is Paul and the churches longed to be together, in person. They wanted to be with one another in the same place at the same time. Being seen and heard is good, being present is better. We believe that is true of our churches, our families, and our seminary.
Pray for WSC
CURRENT STUDENTS
Please pray for the spiritual formation of WSC students as they prepare to serve Christ's church.
Chuck Tedrick is Dean of Students at WSC and lives in Rancho Bernardo with his wife, Michele.
