Suzanne Watson Epting: Making Room for the Spirit
A few weeks ago I was sitting at a table with a few colleagues when I mentioned being excited about my work with Seabury.
“But Seabury’s not open anymore,” one of them remarked.
“Oh, yes, they are.” remarked another. “But what can they do now? There aren’t any degree programs anymore.”
Yet another person asked, “How can they be there if they sold all their buildings?”
I did what I could to correct the perceptions. I shared my excitement about the possibilities I personally still envision for Seabury – Seabury NEXT we call it. And since that time, I’ve been giving thanks for the wisdom and courage of those in leadership who have made and continue to make room for the Spirit.
I hearkened back to 1973. I was working full time in a community-based agency that was greeting and equipping adults with developmental disabilities who had been institutionalized in Minnesota. Some were deaf, but had been diagnosed instead with mental retardation. Some had Down Syndrome and were simply victims of a society that made little room for different looks, different levels of intelligence, and different gifts. Some of them had autism, something about which we were just in the early stages of understanding. One of them had simply been left in a basket on the church steps.
I was hired because of the volunteer work I’d done as a young person, because of my camp counseling experience and because I had three years of college. People weren’t eager, in those days, to work in community-based programs for those who were recently de-institutionalized.
But I needed more education. I couldn’t fit multiple special education classes into my fulltime schedule at work. Night classes would only take me so far. An academic advisor at the University of Minnesota suggested I consider a new program they were implementing. It was called University Without Walls. And as I’ve thought about Seabury NEXT and my own part in it, I’ve gone back to some of the literature about University Without Walls (UWW).
I re-read an article from Time magazine from 1972 in which I was reminded how revolutionary it was for educators to be saying achieving a college education didn’t have to take place only in a classroom with a prescribed curriculum. It was my privilege in UWW to work with an advisor and a team who helped me create my own courses, recruit my own faculty, articulate my own learning plan, and incorporate ways to measure my learning and be accountable for it. In that way, I was able to use many professionals in the community – doctors, nurses, psychologists, groundbreakers in community-based programs.
In “Unpublished Results: The University Without Walls Experiment” by Rick Hendra and Ed Harris from the University of Massachusetts, they revisit some of the “organizing concepts” which defined the philosophy of the program: inclusion of a broad range of persons, some beyond the usual college age, with significant life experience; involvement of students, faculty and administrators in the design and development of each learning unit; development of special seminars to prepare students to learn on their own and to prepare faculty for new instructional procedures; flexible time units tailored to student needs; use of a broad array of resources for teaching and learning, recognizing that students also learn from their own experiences; use of adjunct faculty involving many persons outside the regular educational institution (artists, scientists, dancers, physicians, lawyers,etc.); opportunities for students to use the resources of other UWW units at other colleges; new approaches to evaluation that will appraise the student’s cognitive and affective learning. [i]
That “experiment” was integrated into countless college and university programs and is now known by many other names. Those of us who were privileged to experience it learned, perhaps most importantly, what it means to create a learning community.
That’s what we’re supposed to be good at in the church. Community. In Seabury NEXT we now have something like a seminary without walls – with lots of room for the Spirit to work. Freed from many of our former institutional maintenance concerns, we might just be more likely to follow the nudges and whispers of the Spirit. We might just discover the teachers and learners who long to interact with saints who are scholars, or those who are leading the way in our communities. We might be able to come to a class over three weekends and find people like us. Or we might discover other saints in our online classroom who are living in the Cameroon, or bringing ministry experiences to us while being deployed in Iraq. We might even have clergy and lay people in the same class! And if we’re lucky, we might just get past that kind of language and recognize the primary baptismal identity that binds us.
Bless the faculty scholars and administrators and trustees for taking this chance. And bless you who are reading. Give thanks for what these scholars are giving to the church. Give thanks that they are making room for the Spirit. And the next time you’re having coffee with someone who is eager to learn about God’s presence, God’s mission, God’s love – remember to tell them there’s a place where we’re making room for the Spirit to live the covenant and equip the saints in new and exciting ways.
--Suzanne Watson Epting is a deacon and director of the North American Association for the Diaconate
[i] The University Without Walls Experiment: www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~hendra/Unpubilshed%20Results.html