Crossings Spring 2019

SPRING 2019

An Historic Morning CDSP joins Trinity Wall Street’s family

Community Organizing + Course draws students steeped in activism

Support and Stimulation Global Anglican alliances strengthen CDSP

Letter from the Dean — T he V ery R ev . D r . W. M ark R ichardson , P h D President and Dean

I have been thinking of you—CDSP alumni, students, friends, and supporters—during this momentous time when CDSP is entering into a lasting partnership with Trinity Church Wall Street. In our many conversations over the years, you have encouraged the turn of our curriculum toward mission, discipleship and evangelism as the keys for interpreting theological education and forming new leadership. And it is just that emphasis that has made Trinity want to partner with us.

So, with renewed vigor, we now ask: What does a seminary curriculum look like that prepares leaders for our world today and tomorrow?

It looks like learning about economies of justice at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It looks like staring into the face of our most basic sin of racism at the founding of the United States. It looks like building strategies to change ways of life and dependencies that are taking our living planet to the brink. And it looks like initiating the necessary discourse to discover these as symptoms of a single spiritual alienation. This bucket list of cultural problems usually lands in op-ed columns, but if theological education touches our lives, our relationships, and our grounding in a material universe, then these things must be named.

These realities of our world push us to treat our creedal faith holistically, to approach the classic theological disciplines by turning them toward practice and experience whenever possible. This approach forms faith that promises love at the heart of the universe, love as the motivating force in facing the broken places and finding healing.

We are at the very beginning of a new venture as CDSP is being built into the ministry of Trinity Church Wall Street. So, why have I opened this letter with ‘mission’ when ‘merger’ is the news? I do this because the TrinityCDSP partnership began in mission and only succeeds if we keep our eyes fixed on this big picture: service to church and world in rapidly changing times. We need innovation in heart and mind to meet today’s challenges.

We face best the disruption of change in partnership. Trinity’s priorities—developing and repurposing our church’s assets, partnering with others to repair our neighborhoods, reimagining then building a new generation of lay and C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

ordained leadership for our church—catalyze and bring focus to life-changing ministries. Our curriculum at CDSP reflects similar values. We emphasize core leadership skills such as contextual awareness, critical reflection, and public conversation, and we prepare students to develop church-neighborhood relationships to advance God’s mission. And all of this in the context of teaching the classical theological disciplines.

As John Dwyer points out in his column on the back page of this magazine, part of the identity of CDSP is its willingness to change when the context of mission requires it. From the San Francisco Peninsula to Berkeley, from stand-alone Episcopal Church education to GTU ecumenism and interfaith relationships, and now from West Coast mission to global scope as we partner with Trinity—these have each been large transitions that reflect the resilience and adaptability of our school. Preparing to preach the good news and lead communities of faith will take on both local and global dimension, extending our student body and expanding our consciousness of neighbor through an international network of students preparing for lay and ordained ministries.

From the beginning of our conversations with Trinity over a year ago, to the day in March 2019 when we announced this partnership, the excitement for me has been a profound appreciation of our common mission, the joy of building friendship between faculty at CDSP and leadership at Trinity, and the hard and exhilarating work of imagining possibilities together for the future that were not imagined the day before.

We are beginning yet another new chapter at CDSP. And what is in my heart is that you are CDSP. You, the students, alums, friends and donors, are the reason we have remained vital and ready to enter this new era of partnership, and you are the stakeholders in CDSP’s future. We hope you see this. We hope you understand that Trinity took notice of the legacy you helped to build, and the talent and promise represented in the CDSP community near and far. My dream is that this will continue, and that you will find ways to strengthen us with your gifts, your ideas, and your various ministries throughout our church.

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

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Turning Point

Welcome Back

On a March Monday, CDSP and Trinity Church Wall Street announced a partnership that will reshape the seminary.

The Rev. Spencer Hatcher ’16, returns to reshape the role of recruiter.

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Making Appointments

Street Level Young leaders find CDSP’s community organizing course grounds activism in Christian theology.

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Communion Across Cultures Alums (like Archbishop Paul Kwong ’82) and current students say CDSP’s international relationships prepare leaders to minister in many contexts.

Crossings SPRING 2019

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A Prestigious Award Jed Dearing is the latest CDSP student to receive a significant scholarship from the Society for the Increase of the Ministry.

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Ceiling Smasher A new scholarship for black and Native American students honors Bishop Jennifer BaskervilleBurrows ’97.

CDSP students, faculty and staff will serve on panels that shape Episcopal Church policy, thanks to appointments by the Presiding Bishop and President of the House of Deputies.

25 The Very Rev. W. Mark Richardson, President and Dean Editorial: Canticle Communications Design: Barbara Nishi Graphic Design Crossings is published by Church Divinity School of the Pacific 2451 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA 94709-1211

Ready to Grow Alums can help their financially stable seminary to grow, writes CDSP’s vice president, the Rev. John Dwyer.

© Church Divinity School of the Pacific, all rights reserved.

For additional print copies, e-mail communications@cdsp.edu.

Crossings also is published as a pdf online, at www.cdsp.edu/news/crossings, with archive copies available.

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Monday A new era begins at CDSP 2

By Jim Naughton

It was not your typical Monday service of Morning Prayer.

All Saints Chapel was almost full. The worshippers included almost a dozen people from New York City who had arrived the night before. Two dozen lowresidence students from around the country had tuned in to participate via live stream. And when the final strains of CDSP’s school hymn, “O Wisdom from on High,” died, no one left the chapel.

A flurry of activity ended with two lecterns at the front of the assembly. The Very Rev. Dr. W. Mark Richardson, CDSP’s president and dean, stood behind one, and the Rev. Dr. Bill Lupfer, rector of Trinity Church Wall Street, stood behind the other. Smart phones were in abundance as students and visitors took photos and recorded videos. Lupfer, at one point, produced his own phone from a jacket pocket, snapped a photo of Richardson, then took photos of the people who were taking photos of him.

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019

“You are on the front lines of a momentous change in the life of the school.”

— T h e V e r y R e v . D r . W. M a r k R i c h a r d s o n

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

“We treasure the scrappy nature that you bring to theology. We see you journeying with us with like-minded values.”

— T he R ev . D r . M ark B ozzuti -J ones

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It was unusual, Richardson acknowledged, for him to insist that the student body, staff and faculty attend the service that March 4 morning, but he had big news to share.

“You are on the front lines of a momentous change in the life of the school,” he said.

“You have chosen a vocation of ministry in a time of trouble and flux in our church and world, and you are not naïve to this challenge. You have an eye open for transformational moments. Well, you’ve just found one.

You’re part of it. Right in the middle of it.”

CDSP, he said, was becoming part of Trinity Wall Street’s global family. Under an agreement between the two institutions,

“I think we are on an adventure that is a true adventure.

A true adventure doesn’t have a map.

There is no one we can go ask what to do, so we have to figure it out ourselves.”

—The Rev. Dr. Bill Lupfer

Trinity will invest heavily in CDSP’s faculty, program and physical plant and the members of Trinity’s vestry will constitute CDSP’s board of trustees. CDSP’s previous board of trustees had approved the pact unanimously in December, dissolving itself in the process.

The partnership had been contingent on C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

approval by the Association of Theological Schools, whose assurance of continued accreditation had arrived just a few weeks before.

The outlines of what the new arrangement will mean for the seminary and its students began to emerge over the remainder of the next 36 hours as Richardson, Lupfer and Trinity staff members talked with CDSP’s faculty, staff and students at meetings around campus.

In the near term, Trinity will invest at least $1 million in CDSP in the next budget year to help enhance its staff and ensure its financial stability. In the years ahead, Lupfer said, Trinity plans to increase the size of CDSP’s faculty, expand its curriculum, and integrate it into a global network dedicated to developing leaders and increasing the church’s capacity for ministry.

“This is a partnership that is missiondriven,” Richardson said. “The school you know is the school we want to build upon for the future.”

The conversations that led to the new relationship between CDSP and Trinity began by accident and progressed through happy coincidence. Richardson ran into the Rev. Winnie Varghese, Trinity’s director of justice and reconciliation, and the Rev. Phillip A. Jackson ’94, Trinity’s vicar, in an airport in 2017 and they introduced him to Lupfer, who became Trinity’s rector in 2015.

Richardson had been contemplating how CDSP could use a campus parking lot, one of the last pieces of undeveloped land north of

the University of California, Berkeley campus, to help ensure CDSP’s financial future. He thought Trinity, with its extensive experience in property development, might offer some guidance. Lupfer and his senior staff, meanwhile, were in the midst of a lengthy series of consultations with leaders from across the Anglican Communion regarding their greatest challenges.

Those talks, he told the crowd in All Saints Chapel, kept returning to the same two priorities. “Leadership formation and building capacity for ministry. And we were hearing this from Korea and Japan to Central America to Southern Africa,” he said.

Each institution had expertise in which the other was interested, but the conversations quickly went deeper than either had anticipated.

“Our surprise [came] at some common ground in our mission at our two respective institutions, as different as they are,” Richardson said in the chapel on Monday morning.

“We looked at your curriculum and it aligned right with what we were thinking [about leadership development],” Lupfer said.

“You built it a couple of years before. So it looked to us … like, ‘Hey, good alignment.’”

There were a variety of devils amongst copious details, but they were exorcised by extensive conversation among CDSP’s trustees, Richardson, the Rev. John Dwyer, CDSP’s vice president and chief operating officer, and Lupfer and Trinity’s senior management team.

“I think we are on an adventure that is a true adventure,” Lupfer told those gathered in the chapel. “A true adventure doesn’t have a map. There is no one we can go ask what to do, so we have to figure it out ourselves.”

The theme of wisdom ran through the morning’s readings (The Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 7) and music, he noted. “So I think that is what Mark and I are asking today. Are you ready to go for it, and take an adventure and seek the new wisdom?”

If Monday morning was for exposition, Monday afternoon was for deeper exploration. The CDSP community gathered for lunch and a question-and-answer session in Denniston Refectory with Richardson, Lupfer and two members of what Lupfer refers to as his “wisdom team,” the Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, director of core values and Latin America and Caribbean relations, and Varghese, who spent two weeks at CDSP last summer as the St. Margaret’s Visiting

Professor of Women in Ministry.

Questions were many, but among them were: How much does Trinity’s leadership want CDSP to change? What is the theological basis for Lupfer’s emphasis on the importance of students learning basic economic and managerial principles? And how will the new relationship affect students financially?

The Rev. Phil Hooper, a senior from the Diocese of Nevada, asked whether ­Trinity would respect the ways in which CDSP was shaped by the experience of the church in the West, where Christianity has a much smaller institutional footprint than it does in the eastern United States.

Lupfer, who spent 11 years as dean of Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, reassured Hooper that he had an affinity for the Photo by Thomas Minczeski

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“We looked at your curriculum and it aligned right with what we were thinking [about leadership development].”

—The Rev. Dr. Bill Lupfer

Church Divinity School of the Pacific • Spring 2019 C R O S S I N G S

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

“We are here because we think this place has a lot to teach the church and is an important site of formation.”

—The Rev. Winnie Varghese

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decision making style of the western church, which he described as “collaborative and reflective,” and said he’d been trying with uneven success to infuse some of this ethos in the eastern church.

Varghese said the church in the West was “ahead of the curve” in developing leaders for a post-Christendom church in the U.S. “We are not here by chance,” she said. “We are here because we think this place has a lot to teach the church and is an important site of formation.”

“We treasure the scrappy nature that you bring to theology,” said Bozzuti-Jones, a graduate of the Jesuit School of Theology, just up Le Conte Avenue from CDSP. “We see you journeying with us with likeminded values.”

When the panel had finished, Jackson, who as a CDSP alumnus and Trinity senior staff member could speak knowledgably about both institutions, rose from his lunch table and asked for the microphone. “Well, first of all you are going to have to wear a suit every day,” he said. “That’s just a requirement.”

When the laughter died, he continued. “You will actually bring more challenge to us than we to you. Because this is going to stay Berkeley. The school is going to stay the same, the way it is, continue to

have that feel. People are going to be attracted to come here because of that feel. And it is going to be a benefit to us. You are going to help us loosen up a little bit.”

For much of the morning, informal conversation on the CDSP campus had focused on Lupfer’s suggestion that the church needs a better understanding of market economics and a deeper appreciation for the contributions that creative business leaders could make to it.

“New leaders will need to be conversant in scripture and history, theology, pastoral care, liturgy and homiletics, as well as community

wisdom of the market, whether he was referring broadly to the marketplace of ideas, or public square, or whether he meant financial markets and economic systems.

Lupfer’s answer suggested that he meant both. “Your liturgy this morning was bathed in this image of the feminine image of God moving through the marketplace,” Lupfer said. “God is not afraid of the exchange of values,” whether intellectual or material. “God is at the center of that, and we want God to be at the center of that. So we talk about mission through marketplace, but also bending God’s economy into

“I am convinced that we are doing something very exciting not just for ourselves, but for the church and the world.”

— T h e V e r y R e v . D r . W. M a r k R i c h a r d s o n

organizing ... and at least the basic principles of the economy so that God’s economy can be brought into that,” he had said in chapel.

During the question and answer session, Scott MacDougall, assistant professor of theology, asked him to expand on what he meant by the

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

the material economy and how that can work.”

Senior Daniel Pinell of the Diocese of Central Florida returned to this issue in his question, asking whether the language of the marketplace might alienate Latinos and other marginalized groups who were

struggling in the U.S. economy.

“We don’t mean everything that happens in the marketplace is of God,” Varghese said.

“We don’t mean that subsidizing huge corporations that come in and destroy neighborhoods is of God.”

“We need, in other words, to be bold for the sake of the gospel …”

— T h e V e r y R e v . D r . W. M a r k R i c h a r d s o n

However, she added, “The way we structure church is to rely on the patronage of people. … someone is paying for it. What we are thinking about internationally, and what has been brought to us by international partners is, ‘If we can make our own money, we can administer our own agendas, not yours, however good you think yours might be.’

And that’s a profound learning.”

That understanding has implications for the church in the United States as well, she said. Clergy are taught to raise money, but “it is a different model to imagine what would be an income-generating source with integrity.”

First-year student Will Bryant from the Diocese of Western North Carolina asked Lupfer if Trinity had “certain stance toward student loans” that are “predatory toward youth and students.”

“We don’t like student loans,” Lupfer said.

“We’d like to work toward them not being necessary.”

On Tuesday morning, Lupfer, Varghese, Bozzuti-Jones and the Rev. Canon Benjamin Musoke-Lubega, Trinity’s director of Anglican

(From top) Professor Scott MacDougall, seniors LaClaire Atkins and the Rev. Phil Hooper posed questions at a well-attended community lunch where the Rev. Dr. Bill Lupfer, the Rev. Philip A. Jackson ’94, and the Very Rev. Dr. W. Mark Richardson were among the speakers.

Photos by Thomas Minczeski

relations, joined Richardson for a Q-and-A style homily at the Tuesday morning Eucharist before heading back to lower Manhattan for Ash Wednesday services the next day.

The visit had been brief, and densely packed, and the CDSP community in Berkeley and beyond was still discussing the new partnership well into the following week.

But, as Richardson said at Monday’s prayer service, CDSP’s students understood the importance of institutional change before this opportunity presented itself.

“Many of you speak openly about how we need more creativity today than we have ever needed in our church in order to be faithful to our ministries,” he had said.

“We need, in other words, to be bold for the sake of the gospel, to basically take informed risk knowing that we can’t know the details of the future … I am convinced that we are doing something very exciting not just for ourselves, but for the church and the world.”

Church meets community, 8

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

CDSP’s community organizing requirement energizes new leaders

and vice versa

By Rebecca Wilson

and

Jim Naughton

When CDSP made a class in community organizing mandatory for all MDiv students in 2016, it wasn’t seeking a recruiting advantage, just trying to meet one of the needs of the contemporary church.

But the advantage materialized just the same.

Today, several students with extensive backgrounds in community organizing say that they chose CDSP in part because they were eager for the opportunity to put a firm theological foundation beneath their organizing efforts.

“The longer I did community organizing and church, the more I thought those things needed to be in conversation with each other,” says Laura Eberly, a master of theological studies student from the Diocese of Chicago. “Who’s here? Who’s not here? How are we complicit in making this an exclusive space?”

“I came from a big organizing and advocacy background,” says Jed Dearing, a second-year student from the Diocese of Southern Ohio. “So for me, it was encouraging to know that I wasn’t going to have to check that part of my calling as a Christian while I was at seminary.”

“Before seminary, I was doing community organizing work because it felt like the right thing to do,” says Daniel Pinell, a senior from the Diocese of Central Florida. “I wanted to help my community, the immigrant community. But I felt a little conflicted because I felt a disconnect from my previous evangelism ministry. Seminary has helped me integrate the two so that in the future, God willing, I can have a ministry that’s a combination of the two.”

The community organizing class, taught as a weeklong intensive course, consists of two distinct pieces. One is the classic community organizing training offered by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s largest and longeststanding network of local faith and community-based organizations. It teaches students skills and techniques that help communities to agree on specific goals and to create the political leverage necessary to bring about change. The other, led by a CDSP faculty member, includes an extensive reading list and numerous writing assignments designed to set the training in a theological and ethical framework.

As Dr. Jennifer Snow, associate professor of practical theology and director of extended learning, told Episcopal News Service, the class

Illustration by proksima/iStock

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requires “thinking differently about power: building relationships with people, inviting people in to share the power with you as a leader. It’s a very specific strategy about trying to reach a more just society in our particular context.”

The importance of immersing one’s self in a particular context before attempting to exercise leadership is a lesson illustrated by the stories of the three CDSP students who came to campus as experienced organizers.

undocumented too,” says Pinell, who became a permanent resident of the United States last April. “When I was 17 years old, I overstayed my visa. I immediately felt this shame, almost sinful. It was something that I really had to struggle with in my first few years in the U.S. I felt that my students had that same kind of shame, I could see it in their eyes. I wanted to do something about that.”

Pinell says that through grassroots organizing he learned the importance of “giving people a voice,” and

Photo courtesy of Daniel Pinell

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“I became a follower of Jesus because of evangelical preaching in my home country, Nicaragua, but I loved the Roman Catholic

Daniel “It all started in San Francisco,” Daniel Pinell says. “I was doing ministry with a missionary order called InnerCHANGE. I got involved with a group of clergy who were doing organizing on immigration issues: the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity. My wife and I showed up at one of the meetings and that’s how we got started. We moved to Oakland, and they were looking for a person who could be an organizer on immigrants’ rights issues. I applied and got the job and started working at East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.

“A lot of the people were undocumented. Back then, I was

tradition, and also many Protestant theologians. In the Anglican Communion, you have those two things together—reform and Catholic. I have more room to breathe theologically.”

— Daniel Pinell

helping them claim a personal and communal sense of power. “If we mobilize, we can tap into that power, and in that way, channel our energy into something productive instead of feeling shameful,” he says.

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

At a rally in 2006, he heard the Rt. Rev. Allen H. Vigneron, then the Roman Catholic bishop of Oakland, speak. “He said ‘Welcome to United States of America.’ That was the first time that a person of authority welcomed me into this country. For me, it was hugely important having the support of the religious community to get over that shame. I would lie if I said it went away entirely, but I felt much better when the religious community showed welcome.”

In San Francisco, Pinell spent two years in an Augustinian order at the pre-novitiate stage of formation and said he “felt the call to ordination but not the call to celibacy.” He and his wife, Nettie, married in 2015, but he says he “still struggled with this call to the priesthood. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

As he explored his call to ministry, Pinell was in charge of organizing monthly vigils sponsored by the Oakland-based Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity at the West County Detention Center in Richmond where roughly 200 undocumented immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers were once held. Contra Costa Country ended its contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in July.

His work included helping congregations organize the liturgies for each vigil and working with local families who were hosting relatives and friends who had come to visit the detainees.

“We planned the vigils around family visitation times so we could talk with people who were visiting detainees, and offer them coffee and snacks. Sometimes they were so moved by their visits that they wanted to share their testimony.”

The vigils have ended, but Pinell’s faith journey continues.

“Ever since I started this whole adventure of following Jesus, it was through a very ecumenical lens,” he says. “I became a follower of Jesus because of evangelical preaching in my home country, Nicaragua, but I loved the Roman Catholic tradition,

and also many Protestant theologians. In the Anglican Communion, you have those two things together—reform and Catholic. I have more room to breathe theologically. I can appreciate my Roman Catholic tradition and the reform tradition. I don’t have to feel guilt and choose sides, wonder if a Roman Catholic should be studying Bonhoeffer. The Anglican Communion is a microcosm of the ecumenical movement.”

Pinell was received into the Episcopal Church at Grace Cathedral on Easter Sunday in 2018. “I’ve been really appreciative of how CDSP has been welcoming to me” he says.

“When I started, I was not even Episcopalian.

They took a chance on me.

“At the same time,” he adds, “I would love to see more involvement with the Latino community, and hopefully see more students from Latino communities.”

Mentored at Mercy Housing, an antipoverty organization that focuses on affordable housing, Eberly helped organize tenants in Chicago neighborhoods with what she describes as “super-local issues” such as speed bumps, stop signs and the accessibility of public transportation.

“The thread that connects all of it for me is that where we are supposed to be is with the people who

Laura

are most

Say the words “community organizer,” and most people think of former President Barack Obama, who learned the craft on the streets of Chicago, where Saul Alinsky, co-founder of the IAF, made his mark. Laura Eberly got her first taste of community organizing in Chicago, too.

“I have been doing community organizing since 2010,” she says. “I came to it from back-and-forth interests in public policy and social work.”

Eberly was getting a master’s degree in social work at the University of Chicago, and “trying to figure out where I was supposed to be between clinical positions and public policy that was ill-informed by the experiences of people” when one of her professors asked her if she’d ever heard of community organizing. The field appealed to her immediately because it promoted systematic change on issues of justice, but did so by involving the people who would benefit from the change.

“The thread that connects all of it for me is that where we are supposed to be is with the people who are most marginalized by our society” she says. “That’s who we’re supposed to be hanging out with as Christians.”

She received her training at the Midwest Academy, a training institute for progressive community organizers founded by Heather Booth in 1973 as a place to teach strategy, tactics and movement building, and “never looked back.”

marginalized by our society.”

— L a u r a E b e r ly 11 Photo courtesy of Laura Eberly

In 2014, she was a fellow in the Aging Justice project, a yearlong intensive policy and advocacy training program that equipped older women and their allies to advance public policies that allowed older women to age in place with economic security and access to affordable health care.

“I wasn’t raised in the church at all,” she says. “My teenage rebellion was to get God. I volunteered at a school in South Africa and was evangelized from there. I came to God kicking and screaming.”

Her turn toward seminary began at Brent House, the Diocese of Chicago’s campus ministry at the University of Chicago. The Rev. Stacy Alan, Brent House’s chaplain, “started nudging me about the vocational diaconate,” Eberly says. “She said, ‘There’s this ministry in the Episcopal Church that’s all about social justice work.’”

The week she was made a postulant in Chicago, her wife received “her dream job offer” in Oakland, Eberly says, so the couple moved to the Bay Area. But shortly after arriving, Eberly was hit by a car and spent Church Divinity School of the Pacific • Spring 2019 C R O S S I N G S

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the next 18 months recovering. She found her way back to organizing work through a position at the YWCA San Francisco & Marin, and began attending CDSP half time last spring.

“CDSP has been above and beyond anything I anticipated it would be,” she says. “To be perfectly frank, I was not excited about going back and doing more school. I spent five years in an extremely academic institution, and I was enjoying putting things into practice.”

However, she found “depth, commitment and a diverse community” at CDSP, and treasures “being able to study with folks who come from all sorts of faith backgrounds and from all over the country.”

Eberly arrived at seminary “with a very strong sense that the message of the gospel is about solidarity with marginalized people” she says.

“But having people point me toward thinkers like [Jürgen] Moltmann and [James] Cone who have gotten us to where we are now, who have put their life’s work into interrogating the scriptures, the transitions of the church, it has opened up a whole new world.”

Jed In 2009, Jed Dearing and a group of friends had just begun living in an intentional community in Columbus, Ohio. “There were 10 of us who had all either post-evangelical or postholiness traditions,” he says. “While we had all grown out of these traditions, we were all still really compelled by Jesus and we didn’t know what to do with it, because our previous church homes weren’t providing space for it.” There, he was introduced to the Episcopal Church through the street church ministry of St. John’s Church in the Franklinton neighborhood of Columbus.

“Through the combination of living in this community and getting connected through street church, we started building a network through the neighborhood,” he says.

Then, on Christmas Eve 2011, three people died in a house fire at a condemned property owned by a Columbus slum lord. Dearing and his friends organized a protest. “We got together at the church, and the next thing you knew, there were 100 people there with news cameras and the police.

“Very quickly, on the fly, we realized there’s power here and a lot of energy, and we’ve got to organize it,” he says. “On the fly, we made the decision to split the group up to look at different aspects of the issue, developed proposals, formed teams, started working from there. It was neat to see both the power of the church and its relationships, and the power of living in a neighborhood that was ready to come together to do something.”

Dearing had no formal training as an organizer, but he had been a youth pastor for seven years, and so he knew “how to wrangle big groups of people.” Over the next 16 months, the group met with people who had lived in the property, took their stories to their state representatives, researched property law, and met with the county prosecutor to ask how the property owner had been “consistently let off the hook,” for his long record of code violations.

“We were present at hearings with family of victims,” he says.

“Whenever there was a court date, people would march with signs. We had children riding bikes in neighborhoods, sit-ins in the courtroom and

“One of the great gifts of community organizing is to learn not to come in to a situation with a lot of expectations,” he says.

“You are being invited to experience things, rather than thinking that you can come in with a big idea that is just what people need.”

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

— Jed Dearing

Photo by Thomas Minczeski

marched around the landlord’s mansion out in the suburbs.

“We went to his home and knocked,” Dearing says. “We were asking to have a conversation and work on resolution, but the door was never answered.”

In April 2012, the landlord pleaded no contest to 21 misdemeanor code violations and served thirty days in jail.

By the time Dearing left the community, his network had moved on from sponsoring a food pantry to training neighbors in AssetBased Community Development (ABCD), a method that strengthens communities by mobilizing individuals and institutions to recognize and build on the community’s existing strengths.

“When I was asking myself, should I go into social work, community development, or leading the church, I came to realize that the church is a place where community work can be done. You can offer a message of hope and get yourself invited into people’s lives in ways that you cannot in other places.

You can ask what it means to rally people together for the sake of others for the sake of change. I want to do this work out of the church and out of wholistic reconciliation.”

Dearing says he has found a supportive community at CDSP and had the chance to work with “other people drawn to the community organizing piece” of their shared studies.

Touch the Wounds Not every student takes immediately to community organizing. One stumbling block, Dearing says, is that the IAF model of organizing focuses on helping a community to identify its needs and then to develop its power through mobilizing its members to work for change.

“Many people are skeptical of this,” he says. “They wonder if this has a place in the church. This approach is about power, and in some ways the church is trying to deconstruct earthly powers.”

However, Dearing says minds are often changed when students attend an “action,” a mandatory part of the IAF training.

An “action,” in the IAF’s lexicon, is the culmination of a campaign that begins with one-on-one conversations and house meetings, and produces a request requiring a yes or no answer that is placed before public

officials. The “action” is usually a high-energy experience at which members of grassroots communities express their needs through vivid testimony. Few public officials agree to attend these actions if they are not already resolved to pay serious attention to the community’s demands.

Dearing says attending the action provoked “a sea change” in his class’s understanding of the importance of community organizing. “It was almost a ‘touch my wounds’ moment,” he says. “People began to see how this has a place in the church.”

Another stumbling block in community organizing is that it requires humility, Dearing says.

“One of the great gifts of community organizing is to learn not to come in to a situation with a lot of expectations,” he says.

“You are being invited to experience things, rather than thinking that you can come in with a big idea that is just what people need.

“I worked on my ego a lot in that class,” he says. “Which was great. Or, at least useful.”

Daniel Pinell, Laura Eberly and Jed Dearing meet up on Community Night in Denniston Refectory.

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Global Relationships in Asia and England enrich the CDSP experience Like any good CDSP alum, Archbishop Paul Kwong is ready to make the case for why the years that he spent on the seminary’s campus in Berkeley were absolutely the best years to be there.

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“But I shouldn’t,” he says. He is, after all, the primate of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (the Anglican Church in Hong Kong) and chair of the Anglican Consultative Council, two roles that require significant diplomatic skills, and to spend political capital arguing the superiority of the experience enjoyed by the Class of 1982 would be imprudent. So, having casually spoken the phrase “golden era,” he returns to the question at hand, which is how he sees his alma mater’s place in the Anglican Communion.

“CDSP has always been a very important theological college located on the Pacific Rim,” he says. “It doesn’t simply serve the people in the United States, but also serves people in other parts of the world, in particular, Asia.

“And I welcome and support

Photo byCRichard R O SWheeler SINGS

Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Reach

By Jim Naughton

the seminary’s new relationship with Trinity Wall Street wholeheartedly. It will strengthen CDSP’s mission for training future leaders and equipping them for the diverse ministries to which they are called, throughout the wider Anglican Communion.”

Kwong says he was shaped, in particular, by the strong community life at CDSP. “The community life at CDSP is something I really treasure even though it was a long, long time ago. It is a community in which different backgrounds, different nationalities, people from different traditions can come together to study, to share and to stay together in the same place, and this is something that is very significant for the formation.”

As the only Episcopal seminary on the West Coast, CDSP occupies a unique place both in the Episcopal Church and the wider communion.

Its increasingly vital exchange programs with seminaries in Hong Kong, the Philippines and England offer students an opportunity to immerse themselves in other churches and cultures. Its membership in the Graduate Theological Union, whose schools have an international reach, and its location in the racially and

ethnically diverse East Bay mean that students and faculty work daily in a global microcosm. And its course offerings, which include postcolonial approaches to scripture and church history, introduce students to the work of scholars who are reshaping Anglican thinking in the 21st century.

“We are positioned to play a global role in the Anglican Communion, in ways that go well beyond our location” says the Rev. Dr. W. Mark Richardson, CDSP’s president and dean. “The communion, like the Episcopal Church, is in the midst of an era of great change. Our curriculum not only grounds students in core Christian practice and teaching, it instills the skills necessary lead communities through periods of difficult, but in the end, life-giving change.”

Change of Context Students who spend time studying at other seminaries gain an appreciation for the differences, both stark and subtle, that shape the contexts in which clergy and lay leaders in other cultures minister. But they also see more clearly the elements that unite Anglicans across the world.

The Rev. Reed Loy ’15, rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, spent six weeks at Ming Hua Theological College in Hong Kong.

“Landing in Hong Kong and driving through the city to Ming Hua seminary, the scenes and sounds washed over me with their profound otherness,” he says. “But at Ming Hua I stepped straight into their midday Eucharist. And so just forty-five minutes after landing, I was singing the Sanctus

and sharing the bread and wine with these new neighbors in Christ.

“In the next six weeks, I visited dozens of Sheng Kung Hui churches, schools and social service agencies, preached to adults and youth, attended clergy gatherings and met with churchwide leaders in mainland China. I got a small taste of being Christian in China, but most of all I gained the knowledge of my oneness with these distant neighbors through the living connection of the church.”

The Rev. Phil Hooper, a senior, was the first CDSP student to participate in a new program at College of the Resurrection, popularly known as Mirfield, an Anglo-Catholic seminary in West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom.

“The Church of England operates from a vastly different cultural and political vantage point than the Episcopal Church, and its structure, its management and its ordination processes naturally reflect that,” he says. “This was all very interesting, but what was even more compelling to me was the subtle effect these differences had on my UK classmates’ sense of their vocational calling. A priest in the Church of England is a public figure in a different way; they are aligned with public order in the communities they serve, and their understanding of a ‘cure of souls’ for everyone in the geographic region of their parish challenged me to rethink how parishes in the Episcopal Church might engage more broadly in their surrounding neighborhoods.”

Hooper was at Mirfield in May 2018 during Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s star turn as the preacher at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. “He was unknown to most of my classmates, and watching

“I got a small taste of being Christian in China, but most of all I gained the knowledge of my oneness with these distant neighbors through the living connection of the church.”

— T HE RE V. REE D LOY ’ 1 5

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The Rev. Marjorie Buslig of the Philippines presides at Eucharist with Deacon Bonnie Stewart and Ren Aguila, also of the Philippines.

it with them on TV, I could see their reactions of amazement and delight,” he says. “‘Do all Episcopalians preach like your bishop?’ they asked. ‘Not all of them,’ I said. ‘But his message on the power of love—that’s what we’re trying to embody.’”

Portia Hopkins, a third-year, low residency MDiv student from the Diocese of Northern California, studied last year at Ripon

training center in the Church of England. She and her classmate, Solveig Sonet, spent two weeks in December at CDSP. “We sat in on both preaching and doctrine lectures and were so inspired to see that understanding privilege and context were at the heart of both,” she says. “It was also a breath of fresh air to see students so engaged. The Church of England is the state church and is only Photo by Thomas Minczeski

“The biggest surprise for me has been the diversity of the Church of England, both theologically and as a matter of liturgical practice.”

— Portia Hopkins MDiv Student

College Cuddesdon, the seminary with which CDSP has the longest relationship. “The biggest surprise for me has been the diversity of the Church of England, both theologically and as a matter of liturgical practice,” she wrote in an email several weeks after arriving in England. “I have had the opportunity to visit and participate in a variety of worship settings, from quite Anglo-Catholic ‘smellsand-bells,’ to ‘low church’ Anglican evangelical.

“For example, one evening prayer service each week at Cuddesdon is a ‘Service of the Word,’ which is an informal service with contemporary music, creative prayer and a very open structure. It’s not quite ‘anything goes,’ but I can’t imagine an equivalent in the Episcopal Church.”

The enrichment of student exchange relationships flows both ways.

Laura McAdam is in her third and final year at Cuddesdon, the largest ministry

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gradually considering issues of inclusivity and non-Anglocentric expressions of faith, so it was helpful to see students actively considering various worldviews.

“Having experienced the Anglican Church in Kenya and the Episcopal Church in the United States in the same year, it was humbling and enlightening to see how the faith is lived out across contexts and cultures, and experience discussions and practical outworking of those issues which both divide and unite us.”

CDSP students took the English duo to heart and were especially complimentary of their resounding one-two finish in the seminary’s annual ugly Christmas sweater contest.

“One of the reasons we have to wear vestments so much is because as a rule we lack style,” McAdam says, playing along with the joke. “Dressing tacky is pretty much on the admission criteria for vicar school.”

The Rev. Marjorie Buslig, a priest in the

Episcopal Church of the Philippines and a second-year master of theological studies student, says her experience at CDSP and in the Graduate Theological Union has “opened a lot of doors and windows of new learning and different ways of looking at the church and how faith and spirituality affects peoples’ lives.

“I experienced different kinds of Christianity I never thought existed,” she says. “This gave a new outlook of the word Christian.”

Through her Theology of Interfaith Dialogue class at the Graduate Theological Union’s Jesuit School of Theology, she attended worship in a mosque for the first time. Other new experiences came simply by living among CDSP students and faculty.

“Living within the CDSP community is an opportunity to experience other voices, or you could say other cultures of Anglicanism, which is an eye opener because it is so similar yet totally different with my version of Anglicanism,” Buslig said.

It isn’t just students who benefit from CDSP’s longstanding relationships with other seminaries. Several CDSP faculty members have spent time at Cuddesdon during sabbaticals, most recently the Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, CDSP’s academic dean.

“For me, on sabbatical, Cuddesdon provided a community of worship and theological reflection, both of which were anchors in my writing project,” she says. “I had access to a community of scholars with different perspectives on the Anglican Communion and on worship, and they helped me refine my thinking over the course of the term that I was there.” Meyers says the question and answer session during a presentation she made at Cuddesdon, “helped me to articulate the concept of ‘worshipful mission’ in a way I hadn’t up until then.”

Canon Professor Mark Chapman, academic dean at Cuddesdon, says the longstanding exchange between CDSP and Cuddesdon, which dates to the 1970s, has made students “far more sensitive to the sometimes subtle and often complex differences between the two churches.” That, in turn, “has been of immense value in helping students engage with the wider set of issues of inter-provincial relationships in the Anglican Communion.”

“All our students come back from their exchanges enriched by the experience and aware that many of the labels that are used to

label others can be very misleading,” he says.

“Our experience in Cuddesdon of the visiting students from CDSP is that they are often surprised by the huge diversity of the worshipping life of the Church of England as well as the wide range of theological viewpoints among both students and staff. At the same time, they always appreciate the regular patterns of corporate prayer and the quietness and beauty of the rural setting.

“They always help us to reflect on ourselves, especially on our sense that all Anglicans are much like the Church of England!”

“All our students come back from their exchanges enriched by the experience and aware that many of the labels that

Postcolonial Viewpoint

are used to label Students don’t have to cross an ocean to get a sense of the breadth and complexity of the Anglican Communion and the forces that have shaped it. They can simply take classes with Dr. Jennifer Snow, associate professor of practical theology, whose spring 2018 course in Global Anglicanism focused, in the words of the course catalog, on “postcoloniality and power, the establishment of ‘national churches’ as a colonial exercise … the effect of decolonization struggles on individual national churches … and the tensions and relationships between ‘global south’ and ‘global north’ Anglicanism around issues of cultural integrity and imperialism, sexuality, gender roles, and Biblical hermeneutics.”

Snow says the course was intended in part as a survey of the history of the Anglican

others can be very misleading.”

— Canon Professor M a r k C h a pm a n , C u dd e s d o n

“Having experienced the Anglican Church in Kenya and the Episcopal Church in the United States in the same year, it was humbling and enlightening to see how the faith is lived out across contexts and cultures …”

— Laura McAdam

Communion and its member churches. “But it is also an opportunity to reflect deeply on how our communion has been constituted by mission, empire and colonialism,” she says.

Part of her goal in reshaping the course was to place the story of the Episcopal Church into the broader context of churches that sprang from the Church of England Church Divinity School of the Pacific • Spring 2019 C R O S S I N G S

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during and after British imperial rule.

Episcopalians have absorbed a “siloed” sense of their relationship to the global communion, she says, as “something completely separate from us, that can be an enemy, that is trying to control us or act as a judge upon us, something that doesn’t understand who we are. Understanding that our history has a lot in common with the history of other provinces transfers the whole dynamic into a different realm.”

Snow says the class was the most diverse she’s ever taught at CDSP. It included students from the United States, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Rwanda. “We had students from charismatic and evangelical backgrounds, and queer-identified students. If you look at the history of what brought the Anglican Communion into being and what has caused tensions, you can pull on all of those threads: sexuality, race, evangelicalism, the charismatic revival.”

Class members “did some tough reading and had some tough conversations,” Snow says, but that was all to the good. One class was devoted

“Diving into the difficult aspects of our history also shows us how the church has resisted empire and exploitation. It shows how we have resources in our history to build relationships as well as break them down.”

— Dr. Jennifer Snow

specifically to sexuality, another to slavery and another to race. “From the beginning we constructed the class as a place of relationship building,” she says. “We were, in a sense,

trying to determine what it means to be a communion. The students were able to bridge across some pretty deep divides about some very difficult things. Diving into the difficult aspects of our history also shows us how the church has resisted empire and exploitation. It shows how we have resources in our history to build relationships as well as break them down.

“The students and I were just blown away by the dynamism and exciting relationships we had in that class. It was amazing. We all grew through it.”

Buslig, who was a student in the class, agrees. “It just widened my radar on the Anglican Communion and the issues and problems that confronts the communion,” she says.

Pivotal Partnerships Knitting the far flung and often fractious Anglican Communion together is more challenging than leading an excellent class on global Anglicanism. Yet, Kwong believes that Snow and other educators have a pivotal role to play in helping to enhance the communion’s self-understanding as well as to spread knowledge about it more broadly.

“The most important role that CDSP can do is to promote and to teach more about Anglicanism in the communion,” he says. “I have experience in different parts of the communion, even here in Hong Kong, because in recent decades we have had new members coming into the church from different traditions who haven’t the faintest idea of what Anglicanism is about, and I think education about Anglicanism and the communion is important to the Anglican church, and in that regard I think CDSP can play a very important role to help people understand what Anglicanism is all about.”

As it continues to cultivate communion-wide contacts, CDSP will have few better-placed advocates than Kwong, who hosted a weeklong meeting of the Anglican Consultative

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Council (ACC) in Hong Kong in April. The ACC includes one to three members from every province in the communion.

“I really want to let people know the time I was at CDSP, for me personally, was the most enjoyable and fruitful time,” he says. “I have been telling people I enjoyed every second of being there. I had a wonderful time. I had wonderful classmates, wonderful faculty members who looked after me well, taught me well and really helped my ministry.”

For as much as he values his alma mater, Kwong says the best way for individual seminaries to be of service to the communion is to build up the sort of partnerships that CDSP enjoys with Ming Hua, St. Andrew’s, Cuddesdon and Mirfield. “I don’t think any single theological institution is big enough or sufficient to accomplish that work alone,” he says.

“I am very supportive of the idea of building up partnerships among the theological colleges across the communion.”

Hopkins’ time at Cuddesdon illustrates Kwong’s hopes for a communion connected through theological education. While there, she met a Kenyan seminary professor on sabbatical. “From her, I have gotten to actually witness a small amount of the way Christian faith is understood and practiced in that culture,” she says. “While I would of course learn more by going to Africa, it isn’t feasible for all of us to go everywhere.

But any exchange program allows us all to see that the way we think things just are isn’t necessarily so; everything is enculturated, even our understanding of the Christian faith.

“Thus, an exchange allows many people—the ones doing the exchange, the ones in the community where the exchange takes place, and the ones in the sending community— all to learn new things about ideas and practices, and, maybe even more importantly, to turn a newly discerning eye back on their own assumptions and biases.”

At a gala reception during the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Austin last summer, CDSP announced the creation of a scholarship honoring its history-making alumnae, Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows ’97 of the Diocese of Indianapolis.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry

History Maker

New scholarship honors Baskerville-Burrows Baskerville-Burrows, who served as CDSP’s director of alumni/ae and church relations from 2002-2004, broke a particular portion of the stained-glass ceiling when she became the first black woman to be ordained a diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church.

At her request, The Bishop Jennifer BaskervilleBurrows Scholarship Fund will benefit black and Native American students at CDSP. Donate online at cdsp.edu/ bishopjennifer.

“Jennifer is an illustrious alumnae whose gracious manner, probing intelligence, deep spirituality and easy, good humor have inspired Episcopalians throughout the church,” said the Very Rev. Dr. W. Mark Richardson, CDSP’s president and dean. “She is both patient and bold, an excellent listener and a decisive leader. It is our honor to honor her. We could not be happier about having her name on a scholarship for future leaders in formation from our black and Native American communities.”

Baskerville-Burrows will deliver CDSP’s commencement address in May and will receive an honorary doctorate of divinity.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, president of the House of Deputies, contributed lead gifts to the scholarship fund, and both spoke about Baskerville-Burrows during a reception at St. David’s Episcopal Church, near the Austin Convention Center where the Episcopal Church’s triennial convention took place in July.

“Bishop Jennifer knows no chasm that cannot be bridged,” Curry said. “She is a sign that God isn’t finished with the church yet.”

Before her election as bishop, Baskerville-Burrows served in the dioceses of Chicago, Central New York and Newark.

Photos by Bill McCullough

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Making It New

By Jim Naughton Photo by Richard Wheeler

The Rev. Spencer Hatcher’s new job is a new job.

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CDSP had never had a director of diocesan relations and recruitment, until Hatcher ’16, began work last fall.

“One of the things that was really interesting to me was the shift in focus in what it means to think about seminary recruitment,” says Hatcher, who was previously priest-in-charge at Grace Church in Brunswick, Maryland, and director of summer programs at the Claggett Center in the Diocese of Maryland.

The position is similar to an admis­sions director’s job, but it has been reconfigured to reflect the importance of diocesan relationships both in recruiting students to CDSP’s residential and low-residential programs and in getting additional dioceses interested in CDSP’s local formation partnership program. Through such partnerships, CDSP tailors curricula and courses to support local formation for ordained ministry in dioceses across the Episcopal Church.

Gone are the days when admissions directors could simply post up at a booth during churchwide conferences and diocesan conventions

and wait for people to come to them with questions, Hatcher says. The landscape of theological education is changing quickly, she says, and seminaries need to take the initiative in explaining these changes to constituencies across the church.

Hatcher expects to spend significant time on the road, meeting with bishops, deployment officers and, of course, candidates for ordination, talking with them, one on one, about CDSP’s programs and its signature strengths.

“I am looking forward to sitting down with people to talk about what I love and care about,” she says.

“What does life in your church look like? What kind of leadership does life in your church require? What is the groundwork you can do now for the church you might be in 20 years?

“I’ll tell them what CDSP is doing, and I will ask ‘What might we do together?’”

The Rev. Andrew Hybl ’12, CDSP’s dean of students, who previously served as the seminary’s director of admissions, says he knew right away that Hatcher had a talent for accompanying people in discernment and a knack for building relationships. “Back when Spencer was a student, I told her ‘Don’t be surprised when you come back in a few years and take my job.’

“She is someone who is passionate about the church and about her experience in seminary at CDSP. These characteristics are palpable once you meet her. I am really excited she is on board, and I am confident that good things are in store for the future.”

Hatcher believes that theological education is in a liminal moment, and that seminaries must train future leaders both for the church as it exists in this moment and for the church that is coming into being.

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“As we wonder what it means to be church now and into the future, creatively engaging and cultivating partnerships is crucial,” she says. “I’m excited about our partnership with Trinity Church Wall Street because it will increase access to theological edu­cation and, over time, create a learning environment that is increasingly intercultural and focused on what it means to be part of a global church and how that global reality impacts and transforms our local contexts.

“At the same time, the church is changing faster than anybody can keep track of. We are needing to be an institution that trains people for a church we don’t yet imagine and can’t yet imagine. Both what we have and what we might have in the future—both of those matter for the conversation.”

One of CDSP’s great advantages is its location within the Graduate Theological Union, Hatcher says.

“CDSP is one of the few seminaries that is rooted in an interdenominational and interfaith learning environment. Our world is increasingly globalized, and we are increasingly not living in a Christian vacuum. It is so important we learn how to live with one another and learn from one another.”

When she talks about CDSP with prospective students, one of the questions she hears most often is what community living is like at CDSP. “I tell them that when I was here I learned as much in conversations with my fellow classmates on our roof deck as in a classroom,” Hatcher says. “So, community life matters and it continues to matter when you begin your boots on the ground ministry.”

As she speaks with people about life in Berkeley, she’s in the process of reestablishing her own life in the city where she spent three pivotal years. Finding a role in a worshiping community is at the top of her to-do list, she says, but she’s also adjusting to being in a familiar setting, but at a different time in her life. “I now live a block and a half down the hill from the place where I lived as a student,” Hatcher says. “It’s a bit surreal.”

Community News

STUDENT NEWS LaClaire Atkins ’19 has been appointed to the House of Deputies State of the Church Committee by House of Deputies President Gay Clark Jennings.

The Rev. Phil Hooper ’19 attended the annual gathering of the Society of Catholic Priests in New York City.

Mia Kano ’19 has written three Bible studies for the Sermons that Work website of The Episcopal Church.

Aaron Klinefelter ’19 attended “Jesus and the World’s Faiths,” the 2018 Summer Institute at Newbigin House of Studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Angela Lerena ’19 has been awarded a United Thank Offering seminarian grant to develop a Messy Church congregation at Grace Episcopal Church in Nampa, Idaho.

Kathleen Moore ’19 has been appointed by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and House of Deputies President Gay Clark Jennings as a member of the Task Force on Liturgical and Prayer Book Revision.

Photo by Richard Wheeler

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ALUM NEWS The Rev. Isaiah “Shaneequa” Brokenleg ’18 accepted a call as vicar at Trinity Episcopal Church in Watertown, South Dakota. She has also been appointed by the presiding officers of the Episcopal Church to the Task Force on Communion Across Difference.

A sermon by the Rev. David Carlisle ’18 was selected for publication in the Episcopal Preaching Foundation’s Preaching Excellence Program 2018 Book of Sermons.

The Rev. Susan Creighton ’79 has published “DeepLight: A Memoir of the Soul,” a memoir of her experiences as a woman, a monastic, and an Episcopal priest.

The Rev. Kevin Gore ’18 accepted a call as priest-in-charge at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Mountain Home, Arkansas.

The Rev. Jane Gober ’03 is interim rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Pemberton, New Jersey.

22 The Rev. Gary Commins ’80, ’01, presented an honorary degree to the Rev. Dr. Tim Vivian ’88, at alumni convocation in October.

The Rev. Spencer Hatcher ’16 has been appointed by House of Deputies President Gay Jennings to the Task Force to Study Sexism in The Episcopal Church and Develop Anti-Sexism Training.

The Rev. Frank Hebert ’87 has retired as rector of Christ Church, Mexico City. He continues to live in Mexico in retirement.

The Rev. Andrew Hybl ’12 has been appointed by House of Deputies President Gay Clark Jennings to the Task Force on New Funding for Clergy Formation.

The Rev. Reed Loy ’15 is rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Hopkinton, New Hampshire. He and his wife, Linden, are parents to Laurel, born in 2016, and Julian, born in January 2018.

The Rev. Kathryn Macek ’10 retired from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in La Grande, Oregon. She and her husband are relocating to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to be near family.

The Rev. Eric Metoyer ’10 was appointed by the presiding officers of the Episcopal Church to the Task Force on Church Planting and Congregational Redevelopment.

The Rev. John Reardon CAS ’17 accepted a call as vicar of St. James Episcopal Church in North Providence, Rhode Island.

The Rev. Elizabeth Riley ’13 accepted a call as rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Mercer Island, Washington.

The Rev. Michael Sells ’18 is the recipient of an Episcopal Church Foundation Lilly National Initiative Ministerial Excellence Fund grant.

The Rev. Carren Sheldon ’12 responded to the devastation caused by the Carr Fire burning near Redding, California, where she is interim rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church.

CDSP awarded an honorary degree to the Rev. Dr. Tim Vivian ’88 at its annual alumni convocation on October 11.

Photo by Richard Wheeler

The Rev. Charlotte Wilson ’16 is interim rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Burlingame, California.

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FACULTY NEWS George Emblom, assistant professor of church music and director of chapel music, concluded his ministry at CDSP on June 30.

“George is an accomplished musician and teacher, and during his 21 years at CDSP, he has excelled at helping students find their singing voices and understand the role of liturgical music in spiritual formation,” President and Dean Mark Richardson and Academic Dean Ruth Meyers said in a letter to the community.

Assistant Professor Scott MacDougall attended “Jesus and the World’s Faiths,” the 2018 Summer Institute at Newbigin House of Studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. MacDougall has also been appointed to the Graduate Theological Union’s core doctoral faculty by the GTU Board of Trustees.

Assistant Professor Caroline McCall was appointed by the presiding officers of the Episcopal Church to the Task Force on Church Planting and Congregational Redevelopment.

Professor Ruth Meyers participated in the 2019 conference of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, the official network

for liturgy of the Anglican Communion. The conference, which took place in Hong Kong, was hosted by the Most Rev. Dr. Paul Kwong ’82 ’16, archbishop and primate of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui and bishop of the Diocese of Hong Kong Island. Professor Meyers has also been appointed by the presiding officers of the Episcopal Church as a member of the Task Force on Liturgical and Prayer Book Revision.

President and Dean Mark Richardson has been appointed by the presiding officers of the Episcopal Church to the Task Force on the Care of Creation and Environmental Racism.

Associate Professor Susanna Singer is serving as interim academic dean during the spring semester 2019 while Academic Dean Ruth Meyers is on sabbatical. She was appointed by House of Deputies President Gay Jennings to the Task Force on Formation and Ministry of the Baptized.

In May 2018, the Board of Trustees approved the promotion of now-Associate Professor Jennifer Snow.

IN MEMORIAM Robert F. Gaines, a friend and former trustee of CDSP, died in February. A memorial service was held on February 24 at Trinity Cathedral Church in Sacramento, California.

Christopher Putnam MTS ’11 died on September 15. A memorial service was held on November 3 at All Souls Episcopal Parish in Berkeley, California.

Allan Hohlt ’66 died on June 14 at the Belknap County Nursing Home in Laconia, New Hampshire. A memorial service was held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Ashland, New Hampshire, on June 27.

Anne Vance, who received an honorary degree from CDSP in 1997, died on September 24. A Celebration of Life was held at St. Alban’s Church in Tucson, Arizona, on November 3.

Nancy Kaehr, a long-time friend of CDSP, died on October 4. A memorial service was held on November 3 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, California. President and Dean Mark Richardson preached.

The Rev. Peter Van Hook ’72 died on December 16. A memorial service was held on December 22 at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark’s in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Rev. Kimberly Morgan ’09 died on November 19. A memorial service was held on November 25 at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Reno, Nevada.

Ruth Wilson, an alumna of St. Margaret’s House, died on November 23. Her memorial service was held at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Laramie, Wyoming, on November 27.

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Jed Dearing Photo by Thomas Minczeski

Jed Dearing, a second-year student from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, was recently named a Becoming Beloved Community scholar for the 2018-2019 academic year by the Society for the Increase of the Ministry (SIM). He is one of three CDSP students

Students Snare Top Scholarships

C R O S S I N G S Spring 2019 • Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Photo by Richard Wheeler

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who have recently received scholarships from SIM, which was established in 1857 to offer merit and need-based scholarships to Episcopal seminarians.

Debbi Geller-Rhodes, a second-year low residency student from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, and the Rev. Phil Hooper, a senior from the Diocese of Nevada, had each previously received Carpenter Merit Scholarships from SIM. Aaron Klinefelter, a senior, and the Revs.

Anil Shah and Tamra Tucker, who graduated last May, were also recipients of scholarships from the society.

Dearing was chosen in part for “leadership displayed through work as director of an Episcopal Service Corps community in Columbus, Ohio, and his efforts on behalf of residents of the neighborhood,” said a spokesman for SIM. He is one of eight recipients of the scholarship, which is dedicated to emerging leaders who sense a call to further their ministries of justice and reconciliation.

SIM previously announced the scholarships to Geller-Rhodes and Hooper in the spring issue of its magazine, “The Call.”

The magazine said Geller-Rhodes’ “deep and thorough habitation of the faith is a living witness that is converting others,” noting that for three years she led a grief recovery group at the Lebanon Correctional Institution,

Debbi Geller-Rhodes

Phil Hooper

a maximum-security prison in southern Ohio between Cincinnati and Dayton.

The magazine hailed Hooper as “a postChristian ministry innovator who embodies a model of faith leadership SIM actively seeks to foster through scholarships for the education of Millennial faith leaders.” It praised him as a “master builder of radically welcoming Beloved Community,” as exemplified by Holy Doubt, the faith community he founded in his sponsoring diocese.

Finances and the Future First came stability, next comes growth with the help of CDSP’s faithful alums By

the

R e v . J o h n F. D w y e r

Vice President and Chief Operating Officer

There are many chapters in our lives as we move from childhood to revered elder, with multiple developmental stages within each chapter.

We are the same person, but different, shaped by growth, changing circumstances, and contextual as well as cultural influences. Institutions are the same: they grow and change and have multiple chapters during their existence.

CDSP has grown and changed within 125 years of chapters: starting in San Mateo, moving to San Francisco, coming across the Bay to Berkeley, expanding the campus eastward and then purchasing the last building on the block, our Easton Hall. In the midst of movement and expansion, other changes occurred in the curriculum and the makeup of the student body that reflected the evolving needs of our church and society.

The announcement that CDSP has become part of the Trinity Church Wall Street family is another chapter in the life of this sacred institution. It is the same institution, yet one that is becoming more visible and transformative thanks to increased capacity to respond to the needs of a changing church and world.

Amidst these changes, chronic financial struggle has been a constant of CDSP’s past two decades.

Like all small, independent schools with small endowments, CDSP has had to be innovative and scrappy

in finding ways to continue excellent programming and formation for students being trained for ministry.

Scrappiness and determination can only take an institution like CDSP so far before financial pressures become insurmountable, as both our accrediting agency and our auditors have reminded us.

In recent years, we have taken huge steps toward stabilizing our operational budget, creating a budget surplus for the first time in many years, but we still faced capital maintenance and endowment development needs and had no clear path toward meeting them. Now that we have entered a new relationship with Trinity, we can foresee financial stability, even as we continue the fiscal discipline which got us to this point.

I believe the Holy Spirit was deeply involved in the beginning, development, and successful completion of the missional and value-centered relationship between CDSP and Trinity Church Wall Street. Being a part of the Trinity family will provide CDSP with the resources and capacity to live more fully into its mission and goals, and it assures CDSP’s future as a financially secure and preeminent seminary.

Although our relationship with Trinity brings stability to our financial situation, and growth to the life and reach of CDSP, the seminary will continue to rely on the support of its

donors, friends, and alums to fulfill its God-given potential. Trinity was attracted to CDSP in part because of the loyalty of its alums and its donors. Trinity knew that we were creative with the resources we had, and that our friends were faithful and appreciative of our program despite the thin financial line we trod for years. Trinity respects and honors our long-term financial supporters, for they recognize that in loyal giving lies relationship, something Trinity wants CDSP to continue to foster and develop.

These facts provide some helpful perspective: • Any financial gifts given to CDSP remain for the benefit of CDSP • Any directed/restricted gifts given to CDSP for specific purposes will continue to be utilized for those intended purposes at CDSP • Gifts once devoted to operational overhead can now fund scholarships and expansion of CDSP’s faculty, staff and programming.

Our church is changing at a rapid pace. This new chapter in CDSP’s life allows us to be agile, responsive, and thoughtful to the disruption occurring all around us. Continuing relationships with individual donors and alums are critical to this next chapter’s success.

Church Divinity School of the Pacific • Spring 2019 C R O S S I N G S

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