Session 5 Seminary Landscape

No Main Presenter, Panel members: Mark Valeri; Union Seminary in Virginia, Darryl Guder; Columbia Seminary, Marty Soards; Louisville Seminary, Mark Crocco; Princeton Seminary, Gloria Pulido; San Francisco Seminary, Jim Singleton; pastor of Covenant Pres in Austin

First thoughts, we can be a positive in a negative context-

We do this with confidence, we affirm the central tenets, the battle is not lost, the creeds are true. We need to remember that life and death are the important issues.

We do this with humility. We (as students and professors) should be humble in the seminary context. We need personal humility, theological humility and academic humility. Try to learn something. If a professor tells you to write a paper using the hermeneutic of suspicion, don’t argue about the hermeneutic, write the paper. Then later approach the professor about the underlying hermeneutic, and talk to them, rather than posting something anonymously.

Commentary by Dave: There were many questions that followed, mostly on a very practical level. What should I do if I was marked down on a paper for saying something Reformed? How should I protest? As A student of Fuller Seminary, I was unable to fully relate to the experience of most of the other seminarians present. All of them are a minority on campus. The evangelicals at PCUSA seminaries are a conservative minority; students at Gordon-Conwell and Westminster are the more liberal minority. At Fuller, evangelicals are the majority of the campus, not just among PCUSA students.

The panel members felt the future is full of hope for the PCUSA. Evangelical students are doing well in churches. More liberal students are going to churches that are dying. The grassroots person in the pew seems to know that for the most part conservative/evangelical churches grow and thrive, while the more liberal churches tend to slowly die.

The Seminary faculty is becoming, slowly, more evangelical. That is not true for all seminaries, but for most. And the evangelical students at more liberal seminaries seem to really know theology, and are able to debate effectively. But the evangelical students were admonished not to debate to the detriment of their theological position, but rather to pray for their seminary and professors.