A Grateful Reflection

By Theodore J. Wardlaw

It was indeed comprehensive. That large word “comprehensive” is one of the first things that struck me, so many years ago now, when so many of us began putting words around an ambitious set of goals that we imagined would change the course of Austin Seminary. It wasn’t simply a “capital campaign”—somehow a less ambitious description, to me at least—but a “comprehensive campaign.” It wasn’t just the dream of raising a potful of money to add to our endowment; it was a purposeful blueprint that would change the face of the campus, enhance the impact of the faculty, enrich continuing education programs, and raise the overall academic achievement of the student body. The dream inviting our attention, energy, and benevolence was, well, comprehensive .

It was also audacious—particularly so in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-09, the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression of 1928-29. I had been in the President’s Office since 2002. In that time, I had worked with so many others to complete the last third of the Centennial Campaign, and then to raise the $10,000,000 for the John and Nancy Anderson House. That four-story apartment building for students was completed in 2009. No one would have blamed us if we had decided to take a deep breath, rest on our laurels, and set aside audacious dreams for the future. But our Office of Institutional Advancement, our Campaign Planning Committee of the Board, and our board members generally considered were composed of bold and visionary people. I remember sitting in a meeting with the first iteration of the planning committee for our next campaign. We were in Room 204 of the McCord Center as someone with a magic marker scribbled on a big whiteboard the dreamy results of a campaign survey we had completed. The entire ecosystem of the Seminary had been invited to suggest initiatives for the next campaign, and now we were tallying up the total dollar-figure for those initiatives—a number just over $100 million. Just a few years after the Centennial Campaign had raised $25 million—then the largest campaign ever in the Seminary’s history—we were looking at a potential figure four times that amount! We had to pare down, of course, and we did. What emerged from that meeting was a consensus that our next campaign should have five specific initiatives: (1) three new distinguished faculty chairs, (2) nine new full-ride merit fellowships and two new international fellowships, (3) the endowment of the College of Pastoral Leaders—a cohort-based program of continuing education, (4) the construction of a second four-story apartment building as a “twin” to sit next to Anderson House, and (5) the renovation and expansion of the Stitt Library. Our goal would be a relatively prudent $44 million, but still the largest goal we had ever embraced. That meeting, by the way, was maybe a year after the impact of the Great Recession. Its conclusion launched first the planning and then the execution of what became a ten-year campaign.

The theme “Weaving Promise and Practice into Ministry” was designed to be a profound emblem of Austin Seminary’s enduring commitments. As a seminary defined since its very beginning by its ecclesial fidelity to the church—and in this regard not simply fashioned as a graduate school of religion—the words “practice” and “ministry” are deeply intentional. Moreover, the word “promise” signals a profound hope we have in God’s ongoing commitment to the life of the church.

We embrace this hope stubbornly and ferociously— particularly in a time in which it is often fashionable, even in seminaries, for scholars and leaders to wonder how long it will be before the church as we know it goes out of business. Austin Seminary, though, is not preoccupied with that topic of conversation, and the most recent proof of this is this campaign itself.

Here in the wake of the campaign’s successful conclusion, in which we ended up raising just a little less than fifty million dollars, it is a pleasure to survey its results. Because of new merit fellowships, some thirty percent of Austin’s master’s-degree recipients (some of whom are international students) are meritorious fellowship recipients. This raises the overall academic achievement of the student body and minimizes their indebtedness in postseminary years. Moreover, with a total of fourteen out of nineteen faculty positions now endowed, we are better able to attract the finest young faculty members and retain them for years to come. Also, pastors and other religious leaders are now able—because of a fully endowed continuing education program which will live in perpetuity—to form themselves into self-designed cohorts through which they can enrich and further empower their ministries. And because of this campaign’s deeper investment in residential formation, students enrolling at Austin can live in beautiful new apartments on campus and thus enjoy the blessing of living in community even as they learn in community in order to serve in communities. Finally, it is a joy to witness the construction, going on now, of an enlarged and modernized learning and information center which, when completed, will offer collaborative learning spaces as well as individual spaces. It will be a place that reflects the impact of the latest learning technology.

Near five o’clock on Friday, December 20, 2019— the very last day of the Fall semester and on the cusp of Christmas break—we received a pledge commitment that enabled us finally to claim a one million-dollar challenge grant from the Mabee Foundation of Midland, Texas, and thus to secure the complete funding of the last of our five initiatives, the Learning and Information Center. Our deadline for claiming the Mabee Challenge was only days away. It was a complete godsend for a weary campaign team. Our “Weaving Promise and Practice into Ministry” comprehensive campaign was successfully completed.

Now, as I write these words, we are in the midst of another crisis—a medical one, a financial one, a spiritual one—that is perhaps the biggest crisis in most of our lifetimes. We now can observe that our comprehensive campaign, by sheer coincidence, plopped itself between two unspeakable crises in our national and global history. I dare not draw any conclusions from this coincidence, except to say that the church and its witness remains fundamentally important in our time, just as it has since the very first Easter. And because of how the seminaries—seminaries like this one—sustain the church, I give thanks to God for all of those who have joyfully and generously supported Austin Seminary in this most recent comprehensive campaign. Their names are listed in this issue of Windows, and their impact will be felt for generations to come.

The Reverend Dr. Theodore J. Wardlaw has been president and professor of homiletics at Austin Seminary since 2002.