This past week, I watched as my social media pages were flooded with “first day of school” photos. My friends’ school-aged children stood by their front doors, or perhaps a nice tree in their yard, smiling and adorned with new backpacks, lunchboxes, the perfect first-day outfits and the occasional paragraph their mom wrote about how time just keeps flying by.
As I clicked “like,” I began reflecting on my own scholastic journey, which is still in progress. Approaching my second year as a graduate student at Wake Forest School of Divinity, I’d like to share a few reflections.
‘Renew’
Prior to my first year as a divinity student, I attended a chapel service at Wake Divinity with a group of other prospective students. As part of the service, the congregation was invited to select and keep a bracelet that was hand-made by a student on the worship team, each of which had a word of healing or inspiration on it.
Mallory Challis
Standing in front of the sea of beaded bracelets, I grabbed one and went back to my seat so I wouldn’t hold up the line behind me. Mine said “renew.”
All year, I’ve been pondering what that might mean for me. Merriam Webster offers a few definitions, like “restore to freshness,” which I suppose is the most common interpretation of the word. But it can also mean “begin again.”
Looking back on my first year, what comes to the fore when I see this bracelet is the community of friends, peers and mentors I have accrued so far. These are the people I have giggled with between classes, vented to about my difficulties studying Greek and sought after for advice on how I might interpret my sense of calling (aka, continuously ponder whether I should be a pastor or a journalist). And I remember being nervous about this very thing.
After spending most of my undergraduate career mid-COVID, masked and distanced from everyone and everything, I wondered what it might feel like to start over. Honestly, having missed out on many of the perks of in-person friendship for so long, I was on a mission to create a good community and spend as much time there as possible. And my cohort seemed to agree. We learned the importance of community after it was revoked from us for so long, and we were ready to begin life together again.
“We learned the importance of community after it was revoked from us for so long, and we were ready to begin life together again.”
One of our orientation readings, in fact, was Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As we considered the text’s historical and theological significance, we used it to orient ourselves into the new place we’d be in for the next three years. Our journey through this stage of theological education not only requires academic dedication and vocational aspiration; It demands a community of people with whom we can ask questions, evaluate our faith and reflect on where God might be leading us.
And with this orientation toward community, my first year lent itself to challenge, vulnerability and exploration as my colleagues and I joined each other on the journey.
Aha, Bonhoeffer’s vision of collaboration and love in Christian community was coming back to life: We have begun the process of renewal.
Chasing A’s or chasing ideas?
Amid this process of renewal, one of the challenging parts of being a student of theological studies is learning how to measure the value of your work.
Markedly different from other fields of study, divinity students don’t necessarily work with scientific facts. (Unless you take an eco-theology course, I suppose).
There is no singular way of experiencing God, and our unique encounters with the divine lend themselves to unique theological wonderings and revelations. And because God’s nature is infinite, not only do our finite theological frameworks constantly fall short, but there are endless ways to approach theological questions.
While the academic validation of seeing perfect grades on a transcript might feel nice, the desire to constantly be “correct” is impossible to fulfill. God always will be at work in the world, reminding us of what’s forgotten and teaching us what has yet to be revealed. And we must be humble enough to reevaluate and reimagine our theologies as we learn more about God’s boundless presence.
“Constantly chasing A’s makes the work about me and my own sense of self-gratification.”
So, while I may be able to feel academic validation by reading all assigned literature, memorizing as many Greek vocabulary words as possible and always using the fanciest theological terms I can think of, my first year in divinity school has taught me to ask new questions when measuring success: What is meaningful about the work I’m doing? Why take this class, write this essay or become involved in this issue? What will it mean for the future of the church, my community and the world around me that I am spending time unpacking these hard things?
Constantly chasing A’s makes the work about me and my own sense of self-gratification. But asking questions like these helps me remember why I said “yes” to the ministerial call in the first place.
It teaches me to humble myself and focus on the meaning of my work, not how perfect it seems to be. It guides me back to the passion I have for learning and doing these things I claim to know so much about. And it reminds me that spiritual journeys typically don’t have measurable or predictable endings, but they do have rather meaningful discoveries along the way.
A new reformation
And in finding this openness and humility (which is not as easy as I am making it seem in this column), my cohort also learned something about the church: The norms are changing, and that’s OK.
Just as my college experience was turned upside down because of the pandemic, the life of the church has experienced lasting symptoms of post-COVID change. In response, we are going through a collective experience of growing pains, and the reality of church today looks wildly different than it did just a few years ago. As more Christians reimagine what church means for them, church life as a whole continues to shift.
It is difficult to train for ministry when it seems like every norm is shifting, but history tells us it’s not impossible.
My first semester, we talked about this reality in a History of Christianity course I took with our founding dean, Bill Leonard. We learned about the ever-changing “traditions” of the church throughout history and discussed how the specific social, cultural and political contexts have informed the activity of the church since it began. (After all, it was the political force of the Roman Empire that led to Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion all those years ago.)
One thing he told us stuck.
We were discussing the phenomenon of change — change in church practice, theology and “tradition” — throughout Christian history and especially during the Protestant Reformation. Our class was learning how the church constantly responds and adapts to its historical, social and political environment.
“The church today is in a time of reformation, and you will be its leaders.”
“Tradition” is difficult to define when you look at the broad scope of Christian history, because thoughtfully considering and reacting to big issues always has been a responsibility of the church. Sometimes those reactions cause the life of churches to change a little (or a lot). It goes through a reformation.
Leonard told us: “The church today is in a time of reformation, and you will be its leaders.”
And he was right. The church is reforming itself on all fronts.
Denominations are splitting over pressing social justice issues. More Christians are asking questions about their faith they previously were told could not be uttered. Pastors and other Christian leaders are constantly brought to the fore in scandals and abuse cases. Sunday mornings at the church house are no longer the primary way believers get their spiritual fix. Christianity, or at least the concept of it, is used not for worship but as an American political talking point.
Whether we like it or not, this reformation is happening, regardless of what “tradition” has to say about it. So, although the many shifts in norms we’re seeing and experiencing may be startling to think about, the life of the church is right on track with the history of God’s unpredictable and ever-changing work in the world.
The church working in this adaptive way is a sign of theological and social humility. It is evidence that the spirit of God is moving us to react to the world before us.
And here at the end of my first year, this feels like my biggest challenge, yet biggest source of hope. Because while the church’s future may be in a season of change, our God must be guiding us toward a great renewal.
Mallory Challis is a second-year master of divinity student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She is a former Clemons Fellow with BNG.