Keri L. Day: Why we must testify

Keri L. Day sees a unique space in theological education for Black students and professors, and it contributed to the title of her new book.

The associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary wrote “Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education” as part of the Theological Education Between the Times series. One of the things she explores is the presence of both harm and hope in the academy.

“[There are] both the deep experiences of structural racism and a number of Black students as well as faculty members knowing that they have contributed and they have shaped theological education in profoundly important ways,” Day said.

Faith & Leadership: You write about how the theological academy is “a site of both harm and hope,” a site of both repression and affirmation, for racially marginalized groups. That is such a powerful image. Can you talk about it a bit more?

Keri Day: I’m thinking, for example, of how African American students come to the theological academy, say to Princeton Theological Seminary. On the one hand, they feel at times not heard, not seen, because the theologians that they’re studying are white, with particular kinds of experiences that are not their own cultural experiences. Or particular points that they make on a theological level do not resonate with those in the primarily dominant white class.

They feel themselves as needing to not just be understood but to prove themselves, that they too can participate in the intellectual “world building,” as we would call it in the context of theological education. That’s harm, a site of harm. It’s a site or a context where African American students and faculty begin to question themselves, their abilities to move through the context — what can they actually contribute to the context — because they feel so inadequate.

On the other hand, it’s also been a site of hope. The same students that come from the Princeton Theological Seminary will find themselves deeply tooled by classes that they’ve taken. Maybe they’ve come out of a church that is deeply conservative and doesn’t support Black women in ministry, does not support Black queer people. When they come to the seminary, they’re able to find and discover intellectual and theological tools that will allow them to make a case, to speak and affirm their own perspectives, and maybe those perspectives are not embraced within the context of the Black church or within the context of Black community.

In that way, it’s a site of hope, because here they do feel confirmed in their perspective. They do feel affirmed that they’re wanting to think more progressively about the world around them and about different experiences along lines of gender and sexuality. Here you have, again, this double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about — that they experience theological education on the one hand as still repressive in these kinds of ways that I mentioned but on the other hand as a site of profound possibility.

F&L: You have described parts of your book as a testimony. For those who do not know what it is to testify or understand what a rich and powerful part that is of some people’s theological experience, can you explain it?

KD: In this tradition that I grew up in, what made testifying so powerful was that it certainly is an individual act, in the sense that the individual is standing and declaring one’s own truth. In the moment of testifying, you are speaking your truth, your experience of God and the divine, your experience of the world, who you are.

There might be some people in the room who may not like what you’re declaring about what God has done for you or what you’ve experienced by way of struggles and victories through the week as you stand up in church and you basically speak what your experience has been with God and with the world and with yourself. But here you are. It’s a profoundly individual act.

But here is the key to the power of testifying and testimony: it is not only an individual speaking one’s truth; testifying is also a collective act. Part of what grants testifying or testimony its power is that presumably there is an audience or community on the other end that is waiting to hear and move into the experience with you.

When one got up in my tradition and testified to what God had done, one also knew that what made it a powerful moment is the community affirming by way of oohs and aahs, by way of saying “Amen,” by way of saying, “You better tell it!”

This call-and-response format is a way of the community affirming for individuals that they are heard, that their experience is valid, that basically the individual is right in speaking the truth that he or she knows to be true.

For me, the power at a metaphorical level, in my book of testimony and talking about theological education, is that part of what the theological academy has to do is be that community who is willing to participate in this powerful ethical moment. Not just a theological moment. It’s an ethical moment of affirming that what the individual — in this case, the native daughter, the native son, the African American student or faculty — that what they speak is important, that it needs to be heard, that it needs to be affirmed.

When it is heard, when it is affirmed in a collective manner, then that testimony becomes a form of knowledge about who we are as a community literally — not just about who I am as an individual speaker but about who we are. It becomes the truth of the collective, something that needs to be lived into by the community.

F&L: You end this book where you could not possibly have known you would when you began — in the pandemic. How do you think that made it different?

KD: I started this book a year and something before the pandemic hit, and in some ways I did have to go back and I had to reframe the book based on the pandemic. Because to me, it was in the pandemic that I was able to see in some ways the unrelenting nature of structural oppression. The pandemic more deeply exposed the unrelenting burden of structural racism on Black community, on Black students within theological education, on Black faculty.

I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean that other faculty who are not Black didn’t have issues. But what I am saying, as an example, is that I had a number of my students that come from communities that were hard hit by the pandemic because their communities have few resources, so they were more vulnerable. They were more susceptible to COVID. Many of them, Black students, had family members who lived in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and had COVID and were in serious condition, and [I saw] the burden that placed on these students, in the middle of online education, to perform.

They would come to me about their white professors, some of the very problematic responses in pedagogies that were operating, and in some ways a lack of desire by some professors to really understand the community that these students come out of and how their academic performance is actually affected by being Black in America, basically. It actually did call upon me to go back and to reshape some of what I wrote.

The postscript that I wrote to the book, the last few pages, I went back around to put the question mark back in the air. You get the sense that in the fourth chapter it is a prayer that I have of community, of theological education listening to native daughters and sons, of a kind of great gathering, of a beloved community.

But as a postscript, when I started writing about the pandemic, the question mark reemerges. Is it possible? It’s this sort of tension that I do want the reader to live inside of, where I talk about having students that felt like they were the problem. They were treated as if they were a problem because of all they were going through, given the community that they are a part of and how disproportionately these communities were affected, and them needing to balance what they do academically with this reality of their community and their family.

All of that brings back, Is it possible for theological education to truly listen? The question mark, again, reemerges. It’s this tension of what I was hoping to accomplish in the text. This tension reemerging by the time the reader ends the book, the postscript, that the theological academy is a site of both harm and hope.

F&L: What else would you like people to know about this book, about the process, or about what you hope they will take away from it?

KD: To the president and the dean of a theological institution, you must no longer take on a managerial position when it comes to the institution, just managing the institution according to what has happened in the past, just trying to preserve what the institution has been. To the president and the dean, after reading this book, I hope you take away that you must have bold, risk-taking vision in helping to release theological education into a more liberative future as it relates to race and gender.

To the faculty, to the faculty of color, to the Black faculty, testify. That in and of itself is often very hard and can be a dangerous thing if you’re on tenure track. But find ways to testify. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to ourselves to be able to just testify in safe spaces.

To the white faculty member, truly become an ally, as I talk about in this book, by attending to the policies and the structures of the institutions. It’s not enough to speak that I’m an ally or I have a good Black girlfriend or he is a good colleague of mine at my institution. Really stand up in the policy decision making of the institution and promote equity for Black students and Black faculty.

To the prospective student that wants to enroll in theological education, the groundwork has been laid down. We’re standing on the shoulders of others who in some way — and I don’t know if you can see this in my text, but I really try to give honor to those who have come before. I’m not just talking about what it means to be Black in theological education or a Black woman, but I’m also telling a story about how Black women have actually shaped theological education. I want the prospective student — white, Black, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity or race — I want them to be able to see that, to acknowledge that and to celebrate that.

My encounter with Tim Keller, who died May 19 at 72, began nearly 40 years ago when he was my teacher at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. I think my first semester was also Tim’s first — he had just begun to teach practical theology part time.

I had decided to attend Westminster largely because a professor named Harvie Conn was building a program there around ministry in cities. And it turned out that Tim’s encounter with Conn would be pivotal in his decision as well to go to New York City.

Tim was my professor for pastoral ministry and preaching, and he befriended me, wanting to know more about my plans for ministry, which I planned to pursue in Baltimore. In one course, he assigned me the lowest grade I received during my time in seminary. I told him that at graduation — with a smile — but in true Tim fashion, he countered by telling me something encouraging about my studies that also gave me a smile.

After I spent a decade in ministry in my hometown of Baltimore, Tim encouraged me to move to New York City and was deeply formative in what became my current project, City Seminary of New York. As the seminary grew, Tim, with his unique way of seeing what matters most, continued to think with us about our particular calling to the future of faith in the city.

As I’ve reflected on my own memories of Tim and of his journey to God over the three years since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I’ve returned to a seminar on ministry I took with him in 1987. It was a program capstone class of sorts I took with fellow student Jeff White. After Tim founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, Jeff would join him as the first pastoral staff person. These were days that began lifelong friendships — and days when a short seminar in seminary required only 600 pages of reading and two papers!

Looking over my class notes today, I can see how what Tim was teaching would guide his ministry approach to Redeemer. This was two years before he moved to New York City to begin Redeemer with his wife, Kathy, and their sons. I can also see how God was in this part of Tim’s story, giving him time and space to prepare for ministry.

In this seminar, Tim talked about how to build up a church’s life, the role of small groups, the importance of identifying a philosophy of ministry, the need to focus on a church’s unique purpose in its context, the dynamics of the Holy Spirit in grace, renewal and change, and, of course, the place of preaching.

But it was a particular point I remembered him making about pastoral ministry, about the questions we need to ask and answer, that I wanted to search out in my notes.

I think a key factor in Tim and Redeemer’s story was his faithful commitment to pastoral ministry. He pursued the fullest potential of the gifts God had given him and seeking to build bridges of grace, conversation and friendship for people to encounter Christ.

Tim had a great zeal for proclaiming the gospel, a gift for inviting people to see Christ in fresh ways.

I can’t recall the details, but some years ago I heard Tim recount how many hours each week he put into preparing his sermons for Redeemer, of which he often delivered four per Sunday; it was days, not hours. And it was not just the effort he put in before and during preaching but a continuous process of wrestling with the biblical text, his theological convictions and context as he saw it, and the small reworkings he made as he went about sharing the fruit of that labor each Sunday.

And then there were the one-to-one meetings over coffee Tim began early on with people in New York, listening to their stories and questions about the gospel, praying with them, caring for them as he engaged his new pastoral context. It was a practice he continued over the years.

When I found my old notes, I read the series of “invitational questions for ministry involvement” with which he closed the seminar.

Is there a particular need? Are there people to work with you? What are you willing to invest? And do you have the physical and emotional resources?

These are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself before starting out in a new ministry, he explained.

It was not long after Tim retired from Redeemer that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. But as he shared this news with those around him and wrote about it in places like The Atlantic, he did so in a way that revealed how his faith, prayer life and trust in Christ were deepening. How he was dwelling more deeply in the presence of God’s love as he faced death.

We each have strengths and weaknesses across the course of our lives. Tim’s witness these past years took place in a season marked not by physical strength and vitality but by his brokenness and tears.

It seems that this was Tim’s concluding seminar on ministry. And it came not in the form of a traditional lecture, book or sermon but in a new series of invitational questions.

How do I do ministry not just with my strengths but with trust in God to lead through my weaknesses and vulnerabilities? How do we recognize we are built for something more, something else, for God? How do I live daily life with a hope that does not deny suffering and injustice but challenges it by looking and living toward God’s new creation and the life to come?

Until the end, Tim kept living the pastoral calling and questions God had given him. And he learned what the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr has observed: that when we fall down, we may be falling upward.

Thanks be to God for Tim Keller, who lived the gospel with beauty, joy and grace, pointing in hope to the crucified and risen Christ.

For more than a decade, master of divinity degree programs have faced downward trends in residential enrollment. Spurred by the pandemic, many institutions have responded by offering more hybrid (blended residential and remote) and fully online programs.

It might be supposed that distance theological education is primarily an alternative form of education, a technological innovation, even a concession of sorts. But a review of the New Testament, and specifically Paul’s letters, reminds us that distance theological education has been around since the beginning.

In fact, Paul’s letters offer a dynamic view of distance, embodiment and the collaborative formation of the Christian, providing church and academic leaders today a biblical and theological framework for welcoming hybrid and online learning.

Theological distance learning is not new

The apostle Paul formed early Christian communities all over the Mediterranean even though he was unable to be with them in person much of the time.

More than a substitute for his physical presence or a concession to circumstance, Paul’s letters were an intentional feature of his teaching, allowing him to be “absent in the body yet present in the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 5:3). While it is true that Paul sometimes wrote letters because of difficult circumstances (several were written during his own “lockdown” period), he also strongly believed in forming Christians from afar.

Indeed, the fact that a significant percentage of our New Testament canon is made up of Paul’s outgoing mail tells us that theological formation can and does occur at a distance.

Now, Paul’s relationship with the churches he helped form and educate in the faith was, like the state of higher theological education, complex. The apostle visited churches when he thought his physical presence would be helpful for formation.

But by that same logic, teaching remotely allowed Paul to rely on an intricate network of collaborators, including those named as co-authors of his letters, like Timothy and Sosthenes, as well as contacts in the churches’ local communities, like those named in the postscript of Romans.

Additionally, Paul’s absence in the body empowered young churches to raise up their own leaders rather than rely on a limited circle of apostles. For these reasons, some like theologian Russell Haitch have called Paul the “prototypical distance educator.”

Teaching the “body of Christ”

Whether in person or by correspondence, Paul’s commitment to forming Christians and leaders found expression in the image he introduced to the world — the “body of Christ.”

Imagining people as parts of a body, he declares that a body’s feet need its hands just as its ears need its eyes. Members are to treat one another as “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22), that all may belong in Christ, in order to keep the body whole and flourishing.

In terms of theological education, however, restricting the scriptural image of the body to bodies in a physical classroom dilutes our understanding of Paul’s formative ministry.

For example, what about all the potential students not able to resign their jobs, sacrifice income in addition to paying tuition, move their families to a new city, and leave their material and spiritual networks behind? Historically, such barriers have especially hindered prospective students of color, those with fewer means, and those in midcareer called to serve churches.

Such would-be students are no less members of Christ’s body, even if the physical requirements of a fully residential M.Div. program create distance between them and their inclusion in theological education.

Hybrid and online degree programs are more obviously forms of “distance” learning, but viewed from another angle, they remove distance. That is, by allowing students to remain in their ministry contexts as practitioners, they enable students to learn in context with immediate application of their learning.

Additionally, forms of remote learning often provide greater access and affordability overall. Welcoming remote learners and the programs that support them actually expands our conception of the body of Christ, while reminding us of the limits of exclusively residential models of formation.

Embodiment and embeddedness

In Christian theological education, the default critique of distance learning is rooted in the conviction that God took on human flesh and dwelt among us and therefore did not meet us via Zoom.

Alternatives to residential learning, it is thought, can lead to separating the soul of teaching from its physical embodiment. However, hybrid and online programs do not negate the “embodied” learning of residential models; they reverse them.

Human beings come from local contexts, which rely on specific material and spiritual networks. The best distance education programs recognize the embedded nature of remote learning, drawing on the strengths of learners’ contexts. Such learning may take the form of collaboration with local practitioners, field education in a local ministry context, and the immediate application and integration of academic learning.

Thus, while some might be inclined to reject remote learning for its “disembodied” feel, there is sometimes a deeper embodiment among remote learners in their contexts. Indeed, the rise of bivocational (or even trivocational) ministry leadership suggests that the situation most remote learners experience reflects emerging realities in ministry today.

Paul imagined that his “remote learners” had everything they needed to grow where they were — intermediaries to deliver and interpret Paul’s teachings, contextual collaborators to equip learners, and a local network of material and spiritual resources.

Certainly, remote learning is not without risk. More agency rests in students’ hands. Instruction does not orbit as tightly around institutional faculty members. More educational ground is ceded to practitioners in widely varying contexts.

Risk comes with the trust and choreography required among faculty, staff, practitioners and students to make learning work. Such trust and its inherent riskiness is evident throughout Paul’s letters. But Paul’s conviction remained steady — namely, that he could teach Christians from afar.

While shared physical space is important for formation, Paul reminds us that just as important are the relationships, networks and influences that compose the contexts in which Christians live and move.

As more theological institutions consider hybrid and online learning modes, new questions arise about the role of local churches and ministry contexts in the formation of theological students.

If churches in the past have been content to send their prospective leaders to faraway schools to be trained, a new era may require theological schools to rely increasingly on churches and their communities to help them equip leaders.

Learning lessons from Paul’s teaching by correspondence can help inspire churches to renew their focus on being equipping communities, allocating considerable resources and energy to the next generation of Christian leaders.

As interest (and, likely, angst) around remote learning continues to grow, we can be assured that we are neither alone nor without scriptural precedents. The original distance educator can help equip us to face the challenges of the future.

It was an hour before the doors would open. I was beginning to panic. The chairs were set, the sound check was done, and the speakers were ready. All I had left to do was set up the giant TheoEd letters on the stage. The problem was, the lowercase e would not stay in place. It leaned a little to the left, a little to the right, and sometimes it would flop over on its side.

After 18 months of planning and promoting, I thought, this e was about to ruin everything! In truth, it was the least of my concerns.

What I was trying to pull off back in 2017 was risky. At that time, I was a scholar-in-residence at a large church in Atlanta, and I was working with a group of lay leaders to re-imagine the congregation’s annual sermon and lecture series.

We wanted something fresh, something that could reach out into the community. We wanted to make the best learning available in a format that was accessible and engaging to a broader audience.

We wanted to bring a little bit of TED to church.

But could we really pull it off? Would leading thinkers in the church and the academy be willing to give the talk of their lives in 20 minutes or less, as TED Talks do? Would audiences show up? Could we produce the whole thing with the impeccable quality of TED?

We sold out that first TheoEd event, the speakers were fabulous, and the e stayed put.

Since then, we’ve put on seven TheoEd shows, with several thousand in attendance and more than 100,000 viewing our talks online. We have developed discussion guides to go along with each talk and a prize for graduate students. For the first time this February, we took TheoEd on the road, visiting Charlotte, North Carolina.

Through TheoEd, we’ve tried to do for the Bible, theology and spirituality what TED has done for technology, entertainment and design. In the process, we have been learning a lot about what it takes to engage public audiences in conversations about God, religion and the power of faith to shape lives and communities.

Here are three discoveries and how they might help churches and seminaries rethink their approach to education.

Re-imagining the sage on the stage

Conventional wisdom has it that the sage on the stage is dead. At least, that’s what I took away from Parker Palmer’s “The Courage to Teach” when I read it in seminary. Palmer describes a “community of learning” in which the expert is displaced from the center of attention and learning happens through a nonhierarchical web of relations between students, subject and teacher. I love this model and use it in the seminary classes I teach.

Much like Palmer, the TED organizers are convinced that the traditional academic lecture is not an effective vehicle for engaging most audiences. What Palmer solves through decentered, discussion-based learning, TED solves through well-coached speakers, compelling short-format talks, an attractive stage and high-end production.

We’ve followed a similar path in TheoEd. Getting there isn’t easy, as most of our speakers are more comfortable reading lectures from a lectern or delivering sermons from a pulpit. If there’s a secret sauce to TheoEd, it’s the insistence on the highly polished, no-notes, short-talk format that TED popularized.

What TED reminds us is that the church and the seminary of the future will need new wineskins, not just good ideas. We’ll have to let go of some well-established models of education, and we’ll have to lean into creative experiments. Some of those might look like what Palmer describes. Others might, like TED, try to re-imagine the role of the sage and the design of the stage.

Reaching the second audience

What sets TED apart from most speaker series is that its primary audience is not the people who attend in-person conferences. Rather, TED is all about the “second audience” — those who experience its content only digitally. Focusing on the second audience doesn’t just involve remembering to turn on the camera and set up the livestream. From how the speakers are coached to where the cameras are placed, the whole point of TED is to make the second audience feel like the primary audience.

We try to do the same with TheoEd. A case in point: During our February 2020 event, a speaker’s microphone malfunctioned during the first few minutes of the talk. The in-person audience could still hear the speaker, but the malfunction would render the digital recording unusable. Having prepared for this scenario, we paused the talk, fixed the microphone and asked the speaker to start over.

It was a bit awkward for the in-person audience, but we were convinced that this was worth it, because we knew that far more people would eventually listen to this talk through our website than were actually in the room that day.

If churches and seminaries are going to get serious about using digital media to reach new audiences, they will have to start designing offerings with the second audience squarely in mind.

How will that change things? It will mean paying more attention to elements like lighting, sound quality, camera angles, stage design and run of show. It will also mean making strategic decisions about which offerings should be online and which should not — doing less might well be the key to doing better when it comes to reaching the second audience.

Creating communities of curious souls

The look and feel of TED is inviting and inquisitive. The talks prompt the audience to ask questions and to consider new ideas — or to revisit old ones. The point of TED, as its website says, is to create “a community of curious souls.”

Isn’t that what a church should be — a community of curious souls? Becoming such a community will mean valuing questions over creeds, dialogue over dogmatism (whether conservative or liberal) and wrestling with difficult texts over trying to protect God from people’s doubts.

It will also mean rethinking where education happens. We’ve chosen to hold TheoEd in community centers and performance venues rather than church sanctuaries. We’ve found that these spaces can be more inviting to those for whom the institutional church has ceased to be a place of meaningful belonging.

Rather than inviting people to their buildings, perhaps it’s time for churches and seminaries to do their work out where their audiences are already gathering — coffee shops, pubs, community centers, art venues, gyms, parks.

Taking TED to church is no panacea for all that ails traditional models of Christian learning and theological education. But learning from TED is, as their tagline puts it, an idea worth spreading.