Ties that Bind: School of Theology 50th Anniversary

By Steven A. Beverly

The Anderson University School of Theology is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. With little fanfare, the SOT and the Church of God are marching past this historical milestone as they have for the previous 50 years — as partners, side by side and looking up the road to a bright future. The partnership, as all relationships, has been rocky at times, but the seminary and the church continue their journey together into this millennium. The ties that bind them have grown stronger with the years.

In 1917, determined Church of God pioneers began the Anderson Bible Training School as a humble venture that would later become Anderson University. By 1950, top administrators had lobbied hard to provide an advanced degree program for graduating students who had to seek advanced degrees from seminaries such as Chicago Theological Seminary and Duke University Divinity School to further study for ministry.

At the heart of the decision was a concern that advanced degrees from other seminaries might not serve Church of God pastors best. Those early leaders seemed to believe that a theological seminary, developed and maintained by the Church of God was more appropriate for the church and would also help stop attrition when Church of God pastors studied at other seminaries.

The seminary opened its doors to students in the 1950-51 school year, and a demanding 15-year journey to gain accreditation ensued. The Association of Theological Schools, the accrediting agency, insisted that there be a “high degree of separation between college and seminary” (Guide of Soul and Mind by Barry L. Callen, 1992). And while the seminary was continually making significant progress, the ATS was also looking for improved facilities and additional faculty. In 1960 the Church of God launched a campaign to raise funds to construct a building specifically for the seminary. Accreditation was granted in December 1965, almost four years after the seminary moved to its new home on the north side of campus.

In 1965, the Anderson College and Theological Seminary became Anderson College and a master’s degree in divinity was offered through its graduate school, the School of Theology. In the late 1980s, the Church of God would pull at those same seams that bound the seminary to the college. The church was debating whether it wanted an independent seminary under the control of the church instead of the college. The debate was significant because the church was accepting partnership and responsibility for maintaining and providing a seminary-level education. The result was not only a renewed commitment by the Church of God to the seminary but also a strengthening of the bonds between the college and the seminary. In 1987, Anderson College became Anderson University.

The relationship between the seminary and the church continues to strengthen as the needs of the Church of God become more diverse and as the School of Theology makes adjustments to meet those demands. The two are inextricably bound by a common element — people. Individuals bring the need for ministry preparation to the seminary halls, and the seminary extends its influence into the world by equipping them for service. That is the tacit bond, the glue that seals the partnership between church and seminary.

This bond is also a challenge for the seminary. “We can only equip people the church sends,” says Dr. David L. Sebastian MA ’77, dean of the seminary. “Pastors know there is a trend to develop leaders from within congregations. And I salute that. I don’t have a problem with that at all. But at the same time, we’re trying to help churches understand that they have a role in helping people discover their call and also to encourage them to be prepared and then to serve the church.”

Sebastian says the SOT has not emphasized that enough in the past 20 years. “We are a church that is calling people to Christ,” says Sebastian, “but one that is also commissioning them to serve and letting them go and wishing them well and sending them off, rather than keeping them within the walls of the church.”

Lynn Ramey MDiv ’55 stood in the commencement line of the third graduating class from the seminary. Even in the early years of the seminary, Ramey could sense the bond between the church and the seminary, and he benefited directly from the unspoken covenant in that bond.

At age 73, Ramey will go to Africa this year for the third time to participate in a work camp. He has pastored five churches in his career and says his seminary education played a significant role in the accomplishments of his life and ministry.

“I got under Dr. (Gene) Newberry’s skin,” admits Ramey. “He was so tired of me. I was pretty talky. When I wrote my thesis I picked out a real tough subject. I wrote on the doctrine of the trinity. My readers were Dr. Harold Phillips, Dr. Newberry and Dr. Burt Coody. I got past Newberry and Phillips fine, but Dr. Coody wrote some pretty sarcastic remarks. So I wrote my responses to those — after I cooled down. But Dr. Newberry told me, ‘Now he’s a good man, and he knows what he’s talking about, and if you make an appointment with him, he’ll sit down with you and go over this with you.’ We were held to pretty high standards. Those men were determined that the School of Theology was not going to be a second-rate institution.”

According to Ramey, there’s no question that the rigors of seminary were responsible for raising his self-expectations. “You have to expect a lot out of yourself after going through seminary.” And Ramey does, not only in his ministry. Ramey continues to push himself physically. At age 48 he climbed Long’s Peak in the Rocky Mountain State Park. Then, to celebrate his 68th birthday, Ramey, after working for two weeks at a work camp in Kenya, left his camp companions to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

“I can’t climb any mountains now,” says Ramey, regret thick in his voice. “I just don’t have the strength. But I can put in a day’s work.” Gutting and rehabbing a Kenyan dormitory for two weeks at 73 years old seems to be mountain enough.

Students such as Ramey have been coming for 50 years to enter into a covenant relationship with the seminary. “Prepare me and I’ll touch the world,” they say. “Come to us and we will touch the world through you,” says the seminary. But sometimes the challenge is just getting students to come.

“We don’t call people to ministry,” says Dean Sebastian. “It is not my role to go out and persuade people that they should become ministers. That’s a God-thing. That’s a Spirit-of-the-Lord work. We’re here to work with and equip those people God has called and whom the church has nurtured over a number of years. Coming to seminary is a partnership between God’s work in the lives of people and the congregation that nurtures them.”

For Dr. Diana Cook Swoope MRE ’81, associate pastor of Arlington Church of God in Akron, Ohio, considered one of the most respected Church of God congregations, attending the SOT was quite by “accident.”

“I knew I had a call to ministry,” says Swoope. “I was considering vocational ministry at the time. I was looking at doing some more formalized studies.”

By chance, Swoope met two graduating students on the Gulf Coast Bible College campus who talked of nothing but attending the SOT. “It inspired me and sparked my interest. I knew that Dr. (James L.) Massey was there (as campus minister). I had known him as a young girl growing up in Detroit. I talked with him about the calling I felt was on my life and the direction I thought God was moving me. He helped me to understand what a seminary education was about and the validity of pursuing vocational ministry through a seminary education.”

Swoope still uses her notes from classes occasionally, in particular, notes from Dr. Gilbert Stafford’s classes. “Dr. Stafford is a consummate professional and an excellent teacher,” said Swoope. “I would, without hesitation, say that he had the greatest impact on me while I was there at seminary.”

In Swoope’s case, the connections she made during seminary proved to be as valuable as the education she received. She was introduced to the Rev. Ronald Fowler MDiv ’66, senior pastor of Arlington Church of God.

Swoope, who serves on the university’s board of trustees, gives credit to her seminary education for teaching her what ministry was really about. “Ministry,” says Swoope, “is all about helping people to move, helping people to grow in their thought processes — not just in their spiritual growth. A lot of us think that it is just about helping people to grow spiritually, but people will grow no further than their thought processes. Seminary helped me to be more understanding in regard to the way I interact with people who come from varying backgrounds and varying theological positions.”

According to Dean Sebastian, students often echo Swoope’s comments about making connections. “These connections with colleagues provide a lifetime of support,” says Sebastian. “Seminary is not only academics. You have coffee and talk in the lounge, and those friendships continue, whatever generation you are from. I hear that from many of our grads. I also hear them say seminary was a place that taught them how to think.”

Sebastian says the SOT cannot prepare students for every incident in life. That is not part of the covenant. “But it can teach you how to think about all the different things that present themselves to you,” says Sebastian. “Students say (seminary) has improved their whole thought process in how to deal with problems and how to deal with opportunities.”

Dr. Nehiel Rojas MDiv ’79 would agree. After graduating from the SOT, Rojas and his family became missionaries, moving first to Peru and then ending up in Uruguay. There, Rojas met Adolfo, a man with multiple addictions and no ties to the church.

“Through friendship and through patience with this man, we accepted him in our little circle in our church,” says Rojas, originally from Peru. “We prayed for him when he asked us to pray for him. He opened up. And for about three or four years he was attending church on a regular basis. Toward the end of my first four-year term, he called me and told me, ‘Look, pastor, it has been one year, and I haven’t had one drop of alcohol!’ Even his drinking buddies would talk to me and say there’s no way this guy could stop drinking.”

Rojas eventually left Uruguay and returned to the United States to pastor and teach in the Houston, Texas, area. This past New Year’s Day, more than eight years since leaving South America, Rojas received a phone call from Adolfo. “This man who lives on a small disability income in a third-world country, he called me on the phone for New Year’s and he said, ‘Pastor, I’m clean!’ It’s just amazing. So I would say that this man is one of the highlights of my ministry.”

Rojas attributes his ability to work with Adolfo to how the seminary taught him to think. “My previous training taught me that you were saved if you stopped drinking and stopped smoking,” says Rojas. “My seminary experience helped me to formulate a better understanding of what salvation was. So when this man began to call Jesus his Lord, I knew he was experiencing salvation even though he was still struggling with his addictions.”

When Rojas embarked on his seminary journey, he was already a minister. Dean Sebastian sees Rojas’ case as one of the trends for which the SOT has made adjustments. “We need to see ourselves not just as a place that will prepare people before they go into ministry,” says Sebastian. “We’re retooling. We’re thinking that this learning is a lifelong process — even our doctorate in ministry degree.”

Sebastian says he believes more seminary graduates will want to continue their education to meet the demands of their changing environments. “Once students get out there and reflect on their seminary education in the context of what they are doing in ministry, they are saying, ‘What are the new questions that I have, and is there a place that I can go back to with colleagues?’ That’s the way I see the shape of education going. We want to stay in contact. We want to continue to be learners together. And that’s the role in which I see the seminary in the future. We are a part of the church’s life and development. It’s not like a high school where you go then you leave. Seminary is a place you come back to all your life.”

Few can attest to the value of lifelong learning better than Carl Holm MDiv ’60 who pastored 37 years and continues serving as funeral home chaplain at a facility in Ravenna, Ohio.

“One of the reasons I went to seminary was I felt a person ought to be as prepared as he could be. We had some good professors, and I had many good experiences there. Not only that, but the depth of the experience of learning was significant.” Holm said that before he attended seminary his circles were narrow and didn’t allow much room for ideas other than those with which he was familiar. He credits seminary with broadening his appreciation for other beliefs.

Holm has a tendency toward nostalgia regarding the seminary. He recalls how the Women of the Church of God paid his seminary tuition. “I’m not sure now why they did that,” says Holm. “But I am still grateful.”

Keeping seminary affordable for students is one of Dean Sebastian’s top priorities. Today’s seminary students invest 90 credit hours in their degree (most master’s degrees are 30 credit hours). “That is a huge investment of time and finances,” says Sebastian. In fact, the time investment is similar to what a lawyer might invest. “Yet we know that when a person goes out and takes a church of a hundred or two hundred people, the anticipated income for a pastor with this accumulated debt is not comparable to an attorney or almost any another profession,” says Sebastian.

Keeping costs down is part of the relationship the seminary has with the church. “That is a huge challenge,” Sebastian says. “(Controlling costs) is something we want to work on continually.” Sebastian is counting on a strong partnership with the church. “Churches help when they invest in a student so the student doesn’t have a huge debt upon graduation.”

Enabling students to afford their education and helping them view their education as a continuing process are essential roles of seminary, according to Sebastian.

“Someone said you are never smarter than you are your first year of seminary. But the longer you are in school, the more you find out what you don’t know. Our students realize that learning is a lifelong commitment. There are new books being written. There are new insights. So as students go on through a seminary experience, we hope their appetites for learning are whet.”

Sebastian gets excited about two things. One is seeing people come to the Lord. “The second is when men and women say, ‘You know, to the best of my understanding, I think God is calling me. What do I do?’ That excites me most, seeing that God is still calling men and women to ministry.”

The partnership between the Church of God and the School of Theology is only as strong as the bond between them. That bond — the hopes and aspirations of students wanting to be equipped for ministry, matched by the seminary’s commitment to prepare them — is stronger today than ever before.

“There have been a lot of challenges coming in to this assignment,” Sebastian says, “particularly with enrollment on the decline and a tight budget to work with. I really enjoy what I do. I feel a sense of satisfaction. When I come to the end of the year and I see people leave this place and I know they’re going to really have an opportunity to make an impact, there’s a great deal of satisfaction that comes with that. God has allowed me at this point to be in that equipping role. I’ve benefited from this school as a graduate, and now in some way I am making a contribution to its future.”

Steven A. Beverly BA ’83 lives in Alexandria, Ind., and is pursuing a master’s degree in journalism from Ball State University. He is a literary journalist and editor of Shining Light magazine.