Even though Wesley Theological Seminary is a rather small school it still boasts a student council. Students need to feel worthy in some way, you know. When I first arrived at Wesley, my plan was to study hard, keep my head down, and finish my degree as quickly as possible so that I could get on with the work of being the greatest pastor known to God or man. Near the end of my second semester, though, I was informed that I somehow would be a replacement council representative for my class year. From that point forward, I had ambition.
My ambition probably stemmed from admiration for the president at that time. Mr. Thomas was not only cool and funny, fast becoming a friend, but he also worked for the seminary and had fascinating stories about playing for football for Furman University. If that school lightly rings a bell for you, it's because they occasionally upset a Division I-A team. Plus, he played guitar, and so could clearly get any girl he wanted--but he was engaged to be married, surely making him more desirable. I was in awe. He was graduating at the end of that year and and, obviously, I'd be the next president.
Mr. Thomas actually convinced me not to run for president. Though he put an end to my hopes and dreams, even his arguments were amazing. I had only been on the council for a month and a half. How in the world would I know what a good president would do? Some day, he said, I'd make a great president, but I should settle for treasurer in my second year. That plan worked for me, not least because Mr. Thomas recommended it, but also because the treasurer at the time was and is the son of a bishop in the UMC. Putting myself next to Bishop's Son in the record books seemed like a good move for my prospects in future evaluations of greatness.
Serving as treasurer was actually enjoyable. In retrospect, I made the job harder for the treasurer after me because there was one account controlled by the student council that I never understood. At the time, however, it seemed obvious that my administrative services to the school and council were incomparable. We had about fifteen forms that we used for students to ask for reimbursement or budget adjustments and it seemed certain that only a handful were necessary. For the first time in memory--which, admittedly, only went back three years, as the majority of seminary students graduate in three years--I activated the finance team and we reviewed the forms, updated them, and eliminated a bunch of red tape. My star was rising. The presidency was a formality at that point. The only remaining question is where I'd be ranked against other council presidents.
Before I finish telling my epic, I should let you know that there were two reasons why I chose Wesley Theological Seminary. First, I wanted to attend Boston University's School of Theology but it was the only Methodist seminary that, at the time, required the GREs. Why would I bother with another test in my senior year of college if I didn't need to? Second, Wesley responded to me with a scholarship offer before I finished my application to Duke Divinity School. Third, it's a liberal, progressive school. When applying, I was theologically conservative and wanted to challenge myself with new and better ways to convince those liberals why they are tragically misguided.
Without question, studying at a school in which you are in the minority brings significant challenges, particularly existential and spiritual challenges. I can't imagine what racial minorities have and do experience.
Perhaps the most frustrating challenge represented itself in the person of Joe. Joe is Asian-American and wrote a number of articles for the school's journal arguing that the school needed to work harder at diversifying the curriculum. We didn't need to learn the theologies and histories of the same old white, European dudes, Joe argued; we needed to learn the theologies, histories, and biblical interpretations of those thinkers that numerically represented the student body and the congregations and communities we would later serve. In other words, Joe wanted to disregard the canon of accepted Christian thinkers. Seeing as I planned on being the greatest pastor known to God and man, Joe's ideas seemed toxic. I needed to learn what the best and brightest thought and believed. And obviously the canon of seminary curricula would, over time, lift the cream to the top. It was my godly duty to write counterargument articles against Joe.
Thanks to Joe's shy but determined courage, the argument never ended. I didn't seem to be winning. My only recourse was to speak to him in person and destroy his opinions that way. Our first conversation, planned to be a ten-minute smackdown, lengthened into the entirety of the lunch hour. From there, we became friends. By the end of our seminary careers I'd be talking about how Joe and I should live together in a beautiful glass house with his husky dog. What began as an attempt to broaden my horizons at a liberal school led to actual appreciation of liberal and progressive thought and belief (and would later result in my shifting on the spectrum). Not what I had planned.
Inevitably, I did coast to student council presidency. I won in an actual landslide. Votes did not need to be recounted. History awaited.
My first order of business was to call my cabinet together before the end of the prior semester. We'd start our work in the fall but we all met and discussed our plans on graduation day in the spring before. No president had ever done that before, as far as we knew. When we were officially installed as council leaders, I read our constitution. I imagined that no president had done that before, either, because it mentioned that the student council president was supposed to regularly meet with the seminary president and attend seminary board meetings, and also that council leaders were supposed to hold regular office hours. When I checked out the room designated as the student council office, it was clear that it had been years since anyone had used it for a purpose other than storage. Being outgoing has never been among my strong suits but I was determined that by meeting with the school president, the board, and cleaning out our office and holding office hours, I'd be able to secure a larger budget for the council as well as more respect. Our demands would be met! Better food in the refectory! Better pay for the refectory workers! What else did we want? I'm not sure, but surely we had demands.
At the annual open house day in the early fall of my presidency, some students from other schools in the D.C. seminary consortium attended and informed us that we had an open invitation to consortium events. Assuming that if I had never heard of these events, no one else had, either, I made it a point to reintroduce Wesley students to those events. I'd attract a crowd by plying my stand-up comedy trade. That went well a couple of times but, as Jesus says, a prophet will never be accepted in his or her hometown, so the only colleague who ever joined me at those events was a girl who was interested in me, and vice versa.
It was after the second consortium event that I realized something was going terribly wrong with my presidency. The average Wesley attendance at those events was two. No one else seemed interested. The person I had tapped to be council parliamentarian rarely showed up, didn't seem to know what was going on, and generally was disliked. My VP had to resign. Office hours were a dismal failure, even when we moved them to the library, a more public place. The treasurer, the only other cabinet member who bought into my vision, approached me about that account I never understood. My misunderstanding led to obvious mismanagement that he then had to fix. The seminary president like me, and I him, but our conversations went nowhere. Despite all my attempts at creating a legacy, I did nothing but continue the trend, the status quo. I vividly remember our second-to-last council meeting in my presidential term: the budget setting meeting. There were no issues to debate. The budget the treasurer and I had put together was apparently perfect. I say, "apparently," not to pet my ego but as a sad commentary on my hope to encourage more passion and involvement in the council. That no one had anything to say seemed, to me, like a final kick in the pants.
From every possible perspective, I was a mediocre student council president. Maybe I had good ideas but I couldn't implement them. To this day I have nightmares about becoming an ex-oficio president of the council, the first ever former student to be awarded the honor, and then being unable to make the meetings, unable to gather a quorum, and having to resign early. There is extra guilt heaped on because, a few years after graduation, I received a notice from the then council president alerting the seminary community to the lack of interest in running for council office as well as the ineffectiveness of the institution, so changes would be made. Perhaps I actually weakened the office of the president and the council.
If I were to more kindly reflect on my time in office, I'd conclude that, a) everyone else had grown to expect less of ourselves and the council, and therefore student democracy had become destined to fail, and b) I didn't need to carry the weight of being the greatest. After all, why be a pot stirrer when all is working well? Of course, not all was working well but there is some truth to these generous conclusions. A general feeling of smallness and uselessness had pervaded student democracy at the seminary. In many ways, it could serve as a microcosm for democracy in our country today. Merely saying so probably, hopefully, sets your mind running with similarities.
As far as I'm concerned, what most deserves page space concerning my presidential disaster is not political comparisons but rather awareness of how often God laughs at our plans and ambitions. I don't think God laughs in a mean way. I believe God laughs as a parent would responding to a child who has just declared they are going to fly to the moon on the back of a dragon: "I'd love to see you do that, child of mine... and while you're concentrating on that lovely albeit impossible dream, I'll gently prepare you for other great and meaningful adventures."
All three years I spent at seminary were saturated in dashing and crushing my plans, hopes, dreams, and visions. I became more comfortable with progressive theology, I switched my degree from an M.Div. to an M.T.S. because I became certain I wasn't called to be a pastor after all, I sought out the presidency and then failed, I took up riding a rode bike and then rode it across the country to fight human trafficking, and after and during a mental and spiritual crisis I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
Speaking of things being crushed, by the way, I had a crush on an older woman who worked in the art center of the seminary. Alex wasn't old but I had always had a thing for older women, she was beautiful even without the older bias, and she seemed mysterious in a gothic kind of way. She checked all my boxes. I wanted to date her in the worst way. Unfortunately, I was terribly shy. I had to use the old, find-out-about-her-through-a-friend trick before working up the courage to ask her out. Then Alex said no, but she'd be happy to meet me for lunch somewhere. We began chatting and seeing each other in a non-romantic way quite often, and the more I learned about her the more I fell in love, or thought I did anyway. An artist, her parents had a lot of money so I could sit around writing the rest of my life while she painted, and she actually laughed at my jokes. One time, as I was sitting with my group of friends eating lunch, Alex actually came over and asked if she could sit with us. She always sat alone in the refectory so I felt honored and loved. That same lunchtime, I admitted to everyone that I thought babies grew in the mother's stomach. I didn't realize the uterus expanded. All my other friends were shocked and horrified but Alex calmly accepted my ignorance, told me it was okay, and then explained the truth to me. My heart was on fire.
Over time, however, it became clear to me that our budding friendship would never translate into romance. Yet when Alex asked me to host a major art event she and the arts center was putting together, I happily acted as MC. Afterward, when the night clearly went well and people loved the art and music as well as my event hosting, I looked to the back of the crowd and say Alex smiling. The next day she thanked me as she couldn't have imagined it would go as well as it did. I realized then that, a) I was far more pleased offering her my friendship in that way than I would have been if we dated, and she may have felt obligated to ask me to host; and b) I had suddenly an unexpectedly overcome my shyness and awkwardness. I'm still an introvert, I still incline toward shyness, but I embrace my awkwardness and quirkiness and I'm not afraid to ask people on a date (or for something else, since I'm married now and don't need to date).
The point is, seminary changes us. If you plan on going to seminary you should be prepared to be different than when you first apply and arrive. If you don't plan on attending seminary, you should know why seminary changes people: God is always foremost on one's mind. It is impossible to spend two or three years thinking about, writing about, struggling with, and praying to God and hardly anything else and not be transformed in some way. Not just transformed from glory into glory, though hopefully that happens, too, but you will absolutely exit with different priorities, practices, beliefs, behaviors, and perhaps even appearances. What we want isn't always going to happen. In fact, usually what we want won't happen. Things change. Things change because of God, the Living Creator and Sustainer of all that is, including you and me.
God's grace that changes us first affirms us. God affirms our worth as a child. Perhaps that is the only affirmation that we need, which is a good thing because God will rarely affirm the opinions and ambitions that we hatch on our own. Encounters with God will both increase our pride--as a child loved by God--and humble us, because we are so far from understanding God, so behind God's intentions for us and for others. God's power to change us is so great that He is the only one who has the power, right, and authority to change God's mind. Whether or not God has ever changed His mind, changed his character, I don't know, but He absolutely could. If God were to change His mind, it would surely be for the good and betterment of God's children as well as for God's self. God's changing us is for our good, too.
We thus should be open to the working of God's Spirit in our lives and in the lives of others. We can't possibly tell God what should or will happen. If we do, we won't succeed. Things change. God has other plans. God alone knows what is good and right. God alone knew that my current wife was and is a better fit for me than Alex, and God alone knows who is the best partner for each of us. Why do we try telling God who each person should marry? God alone knew that the presidency wasn't the right role for me and I really was called to be a pastor (it would take me an additional two years to confess God was right), and God alone knows what is the good and right and best role and ministry for each and every person. Why do we try telling God who He should ordain to pastoral ministry, or anything else?
Things change. God has other plans. Better plans. I am thankful. We should all be thankful. As a token of gratitude, we should allow God's Spirit to change us, to change others, to change generally, and do what only God's Spirit can do, what only God's Spirit would think to do. Praise God and the Holy Spirit!
(Long-term readers of this blog might recognize that "Alex" is actually Alexandra N. Sherman, artist extraordinaire. She, too, is happily married, so I think we--really, she--made the right choice. More importantly, I invite you to check out her work at https://www.ansherman.com/)
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