By Jeff Brumley
A community service effort at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology is pushing the seminary into deeper relationships with Atlanta-area neighborhoods and recently landed the Baptist school on a list of the nation’s most prestigious seminaries.
More importantly, some McAfee students and staff say, the Community Engagement Fellowship that ran from 2012-2013 transformed the way participants view their own interests and passions for ministry.
“This has really shaped how I approach church and what it means to be the local church to me,” said Karen Zimmerman, a seminarian who used the fellowship to create ministries and services tailored to help internationals living in Atlanta. “I will never be the same again.”
It all started in mid-2011 when Wayne Meisel, an ordained Presbyterian minister then working with a local foundation that promotes services to the region’s poor, approached McAfee about creating a fellowship program through which students would work in impoverished neighborhoods and in local race-relations.
“He started that program to attract more of that kind of student — those who are socially engaged — to the ministry,” said McAfee Dean Alan Culpepper.
About a dozen other divinity schools were similarly approached, including those at Duke, Vanderbilt, Yale and Wake Forest universities. At McAfee, the program that took shape included existing and newly recruited students working in racial reconciliation, international and prison ministries, voting rights, non-profits and theological studies, among others.
As a result, McAfee was selected as the inaugural “Class of 2014” on a new website Meisel launched in November titled “Seminaries that Change the World.”
‘Viable options’
In a November blog, Meisel said he got the idea from two decades of working in various service initiatives, including being a charter board member for Teach for America and being on the commission that crafted and launched AmeriCorps. He was also the founding president of the Bonner Foundation, which supports students’ access to higher education through service opportunities.
“Through it all I have seen talented and passionate college graduates who are searching for ways to strengthen their skills, deepen their knowledge and sustain their commitment,” he said in the Huffington Post religion blog.
He added that it was about time the nation’s brightest students come to see the seminary as a valid option along with other post-graduate opportunities, including law, business and education.
“As individuals … seek avenues in higher education to connect their passion to impact the world to a life of meaningful work, I believe that theological education and ministry must to be presented as viable options.”
‘Students already very engaged’
But Meisel didn’t pick McAfee simply because it happened to be located in the same city where he was working at the time. Rather, it was an acknowledgement the seminary was already committed to community service, said David Garber, the McAfee faculty member who oversaw the fellowship program.
“We were recognized because our students were already very engaged in their communities,” Garber said. “There were many people doing community work, justice work and advocacy work.”
What changed with the creation of the fellowship, he said, was that all those efforts were organized and overseen under one umbrella.
“The fellowship gave us an opportunity to provide a framework for the work we were already doing,” Garber said.
Funds for the fellowship have run out since Meisel’s recent move to Chicago, Garber added, and efforts are under way to find new sources of money.
But the work McAfee students were doing through the program will continue. Plus the impact students had during that one-year program have energized faculty and students, he added.
“It continues to inspire and help me … to see the things that students are doing and the passion they have,” he said. “It’s contagious.”
‘Welcome in the stranger’
For Zimmerman, it’s meant becoming open to a whole new field of ministry — the local church.
For her fellowship, Zimmerman worked at Peachtree Baptist Church in Atlanta, where she launched outreach programs to help refugees and other internationals living around the Cooperative Baptist congregation.
The North Carolina native said she was interested in divinity school primarily to explore her interest in international missions. Before coming to McAfee, she spent a year in Nepal as a missionary intern.
But through the fellowship at McAfee she also got to explore another interest: helping refugees cope with life in the United States.
What she wasn’t interested in — she thought — was ministry in a local church.
Since the fellowship expired, however, she’s been hired as a pastoral assistant for international outreach.
“I would never have considered this position if I had not been placed here by the fellowship,” she said. “I’ve grown in my love for the local church and it’s been great to see the church open its arms and welcome in the stranger.”