Ready or Not, Here We Go

My 20th year of the seminary juggernaut

“Are you ready?” She kept asking and I couldn’t figure out why. It was the summer of 2004. My husband and I were having dinner at the home of a friend and her husband. She was an African American woman who’d gone to seminary at Duke after having earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In a few more weeks I’d be following her steps. I’d just left my tenure-track psychology professor position at UNC-Chapel Hill in order to pursue my M.Div. at Duke. “Are you ready?” she asked again, this time adding, “Are you resting?”

Finally, I looked at her and said, “You do know I’ve done this before, right?” I had earned my master’s and doctorate degrees from a top-25 clinical psychology program and had served as a faculty member at two others. I was pretty sure I could handle another master’s program. “It’s different,” she said quietly, “seminary is different.” She was right.

Seminary is unlike any other educational experience. I knew how to do challenging work. I’d done the work of researching designing, gathering and analyzing data, and writing up a master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation. I had multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the top journal in my field. I had completed three thousand hours of supervised clinical practice and passed both national and state licensing examinations. I had written syllabi, taught courses, and served on student thesis and dissertation committees.

Seminary, though, is not just about academic achievement. It is a journey of head and heart. We come to seminary not as objective learners, but as believers. We are studying the faith that we confess and often that our parents, grandparents, and other loved ones have confessed for generations before us. We are responding to God’s call to prepare for and enter into ministry.

Unlike other academic settings, people often enter seminary thinking they already know the content. Most Christians don’t read theological texts. Even the most devout churchgoers have never learned how the Bible was constructed or how Christian doctrine was developed. Much of our faith comes from imbibing what our pastors, Sunday school teachers, youth ministers, and relatives tell us. Then we get to seminary, where we learn that many of our long-held beliefs are debatable, perhaps even flat-out wrong. It is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually taxing.

People jokingly refer to seminaries as cemeteries, the places where faith goes to die. But as I tell new students, that’s only the case if their faith wasn’t strong to begin with. Seminary reveals when we have shallow faith that cannot withstand being questioned or challenged.

A good seminary is one that connects our faith to our personal journeys. It doesn’t just tell us what to think. Rather it invites us to study the historical and contemporary beliefs of the church (in all their messiness and complexity) and to put it in conversation with our own experience. A good seminary experience helps us to get in touch with our authentic selves. In the process, we have to submit to a lot of pruning.

Faculty get the privilege of accompanying and guiding people in this process. We get to be the holding spaces for their turmoil, anxiety, frustration, and confusion. We get to be the provocateurs who encourage them to take risks and to confront deeply held beliefs about faith, justice, and what it means to be human. We are the first responders when their seminary journey activates their stress responses and when life’s struggles intrude upon their learning experiences. We get to be the spiritual companions as they discern how they are being called to use their gifts in a world riddled with instability and chaos. We get to be the activators who help them to see their gifts. We get to watch them grow. And my, how they grow!

This fall marks my twentieth year in theological education (my seventeenth as a faculty member). As a womanist theologian, I often have the burden of being the first Black woman in a position of spiritual and intellectual authority that many students have ever encountered. I get to destabilize their assumptions about how a professor looks and acts. I get to deal with the ways that some of them will try to challenge my authority. I get to see how they respond when they learn what womanist sass looks like.

It is arduous work, and it is holy work. It will tax my abilities, at times undermining my self-care rhythms and interfering with the other work that I feel called to do in the world. It will wear me out. So every August, I grudgingly let summer go, knowing that no matter how great a teaching experience I have, by December, I will feel like I am limping toward the semester’s finish line. By May, I will be crawling toward summer.

I am not ready. I can never be ready. But ready or not, here we go.