The Journey to Seminary
How I ended up exactly where my 18 year old self thought that I would be, but for entirely different reasons (plus, nerding out about classes and books!)
On the last night at my very last church summer camp, I felt that I had a revelation from God about my purpose in life: I was called to be a missionary in urban areas of the United States, with a particular focus on ministering to mentally ill women. I imagined myself standing beside a teenage girl in a hospital bed, after having shared my testimony with her about how God had saved me from depression by giving me purpose through writing and ministry. The girl reached for my hands and I took hers. I looked into her gray eyes and at her dark, greasy hair, and she told me she wanted to give her life to Jesus. I led her through the prayer, both of us in tears. As I held her hands, I felt the Holy Spirit enter her body. It was all in my mind’s eye, but it felt vivid; I felt pride, joy, and a rush of adrenaline. I thought this was an experience that God was promising to me, but to get to that moment, I figured that I needed to have more experience with evangelizing first.
And then I went to college and all my attempts to evangelize to my classmates “failed,” especially since my own faith started to fall apart. But my call to ministry never really wavered in the midst of that, it just changed in focus/direction. I got really into Christian spoken word poets during my first semester of college, and when I looked at their bios and saw where they were educated, that you could get degrees in ministry and theology, I was like, well, that’s what I’m doing for grad school! Even a few weeks into my first year, when a friend asked me what I wanted to after graduating, I told her I wanted to go to seminary.
During those first two years, I had my sights set on colleges that were progressive in some aspects, but would later discover were not affirming of LGBTQ+ people. I’m looking at you, Fuller Seminary. Y’all seemed so cool until I looked into the deep recesses of your website to find that y’all are not affirming, and neither were any of the other schools I was considering at the time…except for The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
The Seattle School had a booth at the very first Evolving Faith Conference in 2018, which I attended with my university’s chaplain since it was just a four hour drive from Hollins. It was a really vital experience for my spiritual growth, since I had just left the church I grew up in a couple months before, and I had just come out to my mom two weeks before (she happily made the journey to being affirming *before* I was affirming, actually1, so the conversation was kind of anticlimactic). I met so many people who would become part of my online spiritual community and heard from so many leaders, thinkers, and artists who I deeply admire. Little did I know that this conference also led me to what has become my new academic community as well! I talked with all the academic institutions that had booths there, but there was something different about TSS. The admissions rep and I had a conversation about the Bible as a living text in the sense that it wasn’t this rigid thing that evangelicals thought of it as. TSS was also the only institution to email me promptly after giving my contact info to them at the conference, and I had another great conversation with an admissions counselor, and she confirmed that the school was LGBTQ+ affirming (and I later realized that prominent gay Christian author/speaker/therapist Matthias Roberts has two degrees from the school, and also is adjunct faculty, low-key I’m really hoping I’ll get to meet him).
The more I looked on the website, seeing TSS’ curriculum being rooted in relationships, justice, connection, informed by multiple disciplines, I knew it checked all the boxes for the kind of program I was looking for. The only question was: MDiv or MATC (Master of Arts in Theology and Culture)?
This is a question that I discerned the answer to during my Episcopal Service Corps Year in Seattle (I did in fact choose the Seattle program out of the three offers I got because I was also interested in going to grad school there, among other reasons). The first month into my service year, I went on a walk, deep in thought and reflection, and I asked God, “Am I called to get an MDiv and be an ordained pastor?” And the answer was no. It was a beautiful no, because God was calling me to something different, something much more unconventional (and also less hierarchical, y’all! I love so many aspects of the UMC, the denomination I’m a part of, but I don’t like the bureaucracy and I also know I would not be able to get through the super complicated ordination process). As my service year went on, I started to realize that I was thinking about LGBTQ+ youth in non-affirming contexts (families, homes, churches) every single damn day, especially when the church I grew up in caused a huge fuss being against the new School Board policy that would protect trans and gender-expansive students. I realized this was a sign that this was probably part of my calling—to paraphrase Sarah Bessey, it was where my anger met my joy/passion. When I think about the cycle of religious trauma that so many LGBTQ+ youth face, my bones and all that is in me scream, “I have to do something!!!”
And when I had this realization I was like, “OK God, how? Do you want me to somehow infiltrate the church I grew up in and start handing out affirming theology resources on the down-low? How am I supposed to reach youth in non-affirming contexts if I’m at this point embedded in the progressive Christian world which can kind of be a bubble sometimes? In this polarized world, how can I help youth like me as a teen who didn’t even have the courage to Google “What does the Bible say about homosexuality?” and who had no curiosity about looking into other denominations/interpretations because I was that indoctrinated into what my church believed?
I still don’t have the answer to these questions. I just hope that my online presence, especially my podcast, will end up in the hands of the people who need it. But I do hope at The Seattle School I can start to figure these questions out and meet people with similar goals to partner in ministry/justice work with. There are now three MATC programs at The Seattle School, and I chose the Community Development Track (which, one of my professors has already noted, is not a perfect name, the term can be problematic, but that’s what it’s landed on for now) because I think it will equip me to work for LGBTQ+ liberation and thriving in the church and beyond. I’m so excited for classes to start on Thursday—after being out of academia for two years, my nerd heart is so excited to be back.
And speaking of nerding out, here’s my book list and what classes I’ll be taking!!!!
For God, Gender, and Sexuality (a course that I don’t even have to take for my degree but like, come on y’all, of course I do!!):
Multiple online snippets, but in terms of full books there’s:
Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics by Linn Marie Tonstad
Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide by Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw. I’m so excited to deepen my knowledge of queer theology and ways we can use it to bring about God’s dreams for the world.
For Service and Sustainability (which is about how to build resilience and care for yourself when you’re in a service profession):
Take This Bread by Sara Miles—this was already on my books-I-want list, so excited to read it!
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates—same as above!
The Least of These: Lessons Learned from Kids on the Street by Ron Ruthruff (the professor of the course)
The Active Life by Parker Palmer (if anyone knows where I can find a used book version of this that is not through an Amazon or Amazon-owned site, that would be great! The book is out of print and I prefer to have physical books)
For Intersections: Interdisciplinary Inquiry & Psychological Frameworks (part of the common curriculum with both theology + psychology students!):
Multiple online texts in scholarly journals and such
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (another one that has been on my books-I-want list for a while)
Toward Psychologies of Liberation by Helene Shulman and Mary Watkins
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
For Critical Reading Lab (a class on “how do we know what we know?” and “how do we learn?”, at least that’s the vibe I got from the syllabus—also a common curriculum course)
Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology by Esther Lightcap Meek
The other common curriculum course, Listening Lab, does not have readings, because the focus of the class is on building the skills of deep listening and thoughtful presence with a small group of classmates. Super unique and I’m looking forward to it!
You might be wondering…with all this reading and coursework, how am I going to keep posting on here? Each week, I will be mining from my collection of poetry over the past few years, giving some commentary on how that poem came to be. These will be pretty easy to write up. Besides a few weeks where I plan to write other things and unless I feel compelled to write something else, you can expect a poem (and in December, a short story) in your inbox each week! You can also follow me on Instagram @april_thewriter to keep up with what I post about seminary and my life.
What have you been reading lately? Have you read any of the books I list above? Feel free to nerd out in the comments.
And that is a story for another post (probably in January, since that will be the six year anniversary of the conversation where she told me she couldn’t call being gay wrong anymore)
'Take This Bread' is a wonderful book! The ending made me cry- it's such a beautiful picture of the kingdom and I think about it often.