By Ray Waddle
As the Protestant Reformation’s upcoming 500th anniversary nears, Yale Divinity School has created a fresh slate of new directions and initiatives to strengthen the school’s leadership position amid the shifting challenges of the 21st century.
More than a year in the making, the YDS strategic plan asserts specific commitments—five “pivot points”—for carrying out the school’s Christian mission in an era of spiritual pluralism, ideological conflict, ecological threat, and dissatisfaction with established forms of faith.
“As we look to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, we have to rethink how we position ourselves—as a theological school, as churches and individuals—in a changing world,” says YDS Dean Gregory Sterling. “The need for leadership is urgent.”
The strategic plan calls for comprehensive fundraising efforts that will strengthen YDS as a leader in ministry training, scholarship, and interfaith bridge-building. The aim is to raise money for the five pivot goals and enact them by 2022, YDS’s 200th anniversary.
The five pivot points are:
Financial aid
YDS will raise enough money to go tuition-free for all students in need, ensuring that all students can concentrate on their studies and vocation without the burden of debt. Students who have been admitted to YDS but choose to attend other divinity schools generally cite financial considerations; they want to attend YDS but feel they cannot afford to turn down the larger financial packages offered by other schools. Restructuring YDS’s tuition, scholarships, and stipends will make the school more competitive with Harvard, Notre Dame, and other tuition-free theological schools. The goal is to raise $40 million by 2022.
Leadership and entrepreneurial ministry
YDS will enhance opportunities for Christian leadership and entrepreneurial ministry. This will include establishing a program that showcases effective leaders from various milieus of faith and life for mini courses, as well as exploring degree programs that support creative, non-traditional ministry possibilities.
Diversity
YDS will increase ethnic diversity in the faculty, student body, and curricula. This includes filling faculty positions in black religion in the African Diaspora and Latin American Christianity, intensifying recruitment of students of color, and creating new scholarship pools—all with the aim of reaching a point where 25 percent of students are from underrepresented groups.
Multi-faith engagement
YDS will become more adept at engaging today’s multi-faith environment and fulfilling the potential of religious faith as a global force for peace. The school will appoint faculty, add courses on interfaith relations and conflict resolution, and sponsor world religion conferences.
‘Green Village’ residential complex
YDS will construct a pioneering residential “Green Village” complex to provide affordable housing to students, promote an ecological stewardship, and build community. Research is under way to determine the cost of constructing the complex; current estimates place it around $50 million.
The pivot points do not represent a departure from YDS’s traditional academic excellence and commitment to social justice, Sterling says. They are, rather, a means by which the school can continue and strengthen the fulfillment of its mission in contemporary circumstances.
“We embrace YDS’s mission. The question is, ‘What does that look like today?’” says Jennifer Herdt, Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics. “These pivot points represent the goals we want to focus on in order to achieve our mission.”
Herdt says the Green Village plan, for example, represents a vision not just to build a dorm, but to make a distinct contribution to sustainability while creating an exciting learning environment and a vibrant community.
No pivot point is more important than the one addressing financial aid. On average, students enter YDS with $28,000 in debt and leave with more than $55,000. Substantially reducing debt and tuition is central to YDS’s mission and recruitment efforts, including recruitment of minorities and international students. The plan emphasizes that education for Christian leadership should not be restricted to those who come from economically privileged backgrounds.
“Making headway on this—being able to attract the best students and making education affordable— would empower everything we do at YDS,” Herdt says.
The strategic plan arrives at a time when theological schools and denominations face trends that threaten traditional patterns of belief and the role of church in everyday life.
The increase in religious non-affiliation, the violence committed in the name of religion, the rising social acceptance of atheism—these issues require ministers and scholars to find new ways to tell the story of belief, Sterling says, pointing out that while Christianity remains the world’s largest faith, but it accounts for only one-third of the global population.
“The Christian tradition cannot be adequately understood apart from its relations with other religious traditions,” the strategic plan states. “Nor can Christian leadership be pursued responsibly and effectively in today’s world without attention to Christianity’s multi-faith environment, both nationally and internationally.”
At the same time, Christianity is undergoing a demographic shift, growing in Africa and China, but receding in parts of the West. Western churches must try to forge partnerships with these far-flung sectors of the faith, Sterling says. The YDS strategic plan calls for new relationships with churches in Africa and urges more multi-faith immersion experiences for students.
“We should not think that Christianity is disappearing,” Sterling said in an address in Seoul, South Korea, last fall. “It is, however, changing. The center of gravity is moving from north to south and from west to east. This shift will have a profound impact on the way that we think ecclesiologically and theologically. If we believe that experience is a vehicle of theological reflection, we will need to learn to respect the different experiences that will shape theologies in various parts of the world.”
The strategic plan’s pivot points were shaped through a series of YDS faculty meetings, a student town hall discussion, student focus groups, alumni feedback captured via online surveys, and consultations with the YDS Dean’s Advisory Council, the YDS staff, and Yale University’s central administration.
“We’ve had a good deal of participation,” Sterling says. “We received ideas that helped us refine many of the details. I’m grateful to all.”
The next step will be putting it all in motion. Committees and task forces are now being finalized. Ultimately the entire YDS community will be invited to join the financial challenge to make the pivot points a 21st century reality.
“All members of the YDS community as well as friends who care about the goals of YDS will be asked to participate in funding these additional scholarships,” the strategic plan says. “While larger gifts (of $50,000 and above) will be sought for the endowment, every donor can participate by contributing to the annual fund, since the annual fund for YDS all goes to support student financial aid.”