Cultivating Transformation

It’s not audacious to say that the United States is suffering a leadership crisis. Between rising authoritarianism, a Congress that struggles to pass even basic legislation, and rampant polarization that afflicts local communities, the one thing people seem to agree upon is that our current models are broken—that we need new kinds of leadership to pull us back from the brink. This isn’t just a crisis for civic institutions; it affects our churches, too. “For more than 150 years, Garrett Seminary has worked to train parish ministers,” says Garrett President Javier A. Viera. “This is not the first time that the church needs to address a fractured culture, and we take seriously our responsibility to nurture people who feel called to repair this breach.” Now, with the help of a multi-million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment, the new Faith and Leadership Collaborative seeks to build resources that can offer pastoral leaders a playbook for how to help communities navigate transformational change and networks to support that work.

To guide this mission, Garrett hired the Reverend Gail Song Bantum to serve as the Collaborative’s executive director. Rev. Song Bantum brings a wealth of experience leading congregations and coaching non-profit organizations through pivotal moments in their history, most recently serving as the lead pastor of a multi-urban congregation, as they sought to navigate significant internal and external shifts—theological, denominational, cultural, and social-political. “Rev. Song Bantum is someone who, for decades, has approached conflict not as a failure but an opportunity to reimagine who we can be together,” says Rev. Becky J. Eberhart, Garrett’s Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships. “We want her to marshal that wisdom and help resource exponentially more people to do this work.”

Rev. Song Bantum also served as an advisor for several social impact organizations desiring consultation around capacity building, change management, and leadership transitions. “Through these opportunities, I’ve experienced the gaps that exist in how we train pastors and other institutional leaders,” she says. “So many of us, myself included, made lots of mistakes as we learned those skills along the way. Right now, I’m asking, ‘How can we cultivate a more holistic and collaborative educational model that is theologically equipped, contextually fluent, socially mindful, and organizationally adept, empowering not only leaders in this moment, but for the emerging leaders who will come after us?’”

One of the Collaborative’s most significant strengths is the ability to draw upon the widespread network of partners who comprise its membership. In addition to Garrett’s bountiful centers and institutes, the Collaborative will connect visionary institutions like The Association for Hispanic Theological Education, The Oikos Institute for Social Impact, Northwestern University’s Kellogg Center for Non-Profit Management, and Dakota Wesleyan University among others. As each brings its own unique gifts, it nurtures a fertile ecosystem where innovation can flourish. “We continually need each other’s expertise, additional lenses for how we can walk together in this world,” Rev. Song Bantum explains. “We need that diversity and multiplicity in order to holistically shape our clergy.”

Part of what drew Rev. Song Bantum to Garrett was the seminary’s long history of commitment to precisely this kind of work. “Too often in the Western world, a desire for individualism—the belief that ‘this is my center, this is my garden’—obscures the fact that we’re all cultivating, growing, and nurturing something on the same farm,” she notes. “I love the way that Garrett’s senior leadership, faculty and staff envision their work as necessarily intersectional. I want to work within the resources that are already within and among us and offer more connectional tissue to multiply the impact of these gifts.”

Over time, the insights and best practices from this collaborative work will be compiled into a physical and digital playbook that ministers and other ecclesial leaders can reference to guide them through whatever challenges they face, even for issues that far outstrip the bounds of traditional seminary curricula. “I recently had a conversation with leaders at Wespath Benefits and Investments, which is a general agency of the United Methodist Church,” Rev. Song Bantum offers as an example. “But they’re also deeply engaged in thinking about what can foster broader holistic clergy well-being—questions not only for the thriving of an individual leader but communal flourishing as well, i.e., how might we re-imagine assets like church buildings to serve the wider community and revitalize a congregation?”

By gathering a wide range of highly specific and contextual insights through problem based learning, the Collaborative will build a flexible resource that can help leaders navigate myriad crises and opportunities—even ones we cannot presently envision. “Garrett is blessed to have a faculty who are also robustly engaging these issues in their research every day,” says Dr. Jennifer Harvey, Vice President for Academic Affairs. “Pairing our professors, centers, and institutes to our partners’ expertise will create learning labs that are relevant, contextual, and shaped by the Collaborative’s collective wisdom.”

But forming pastoral leaders isn’t only about increasing knowledge, it’s also a call to build relational networks of emerging practitioners who engage in learning labs centered around real-life problems and issues. Through these efforts, the Collaborative will create a scalable playbook that can serve as a resource for other educational ecosystems around the globe. “The most effective leaders are the ones who feel supported by networks of care, with access to expansive practical tools that facilitate this work on the ground,” Rev. Song Bantum explains. The newly launched Garrett Collective offers an exciting avenue to build just these kinds of coalitions. While the Collective’s impressive digital resource library has thus far garnered the most attention, it also actively coordinates relationships between practitioners to nurture faithful ministries. As the Faith and Leadership Collaborative seeks to support the church and a wide array of leaders who might never pursue formal seminary training, the Collective offers another ideal ecosystem to house those efforts.

“In the last eight years I served as a pastor, I intentionally hired Gen Z and young millennials, because I saw them already in this work—doing ministry or contributing full-time hours to social impact organizations,” Rev. Song Bantum says. “What these leaders often lacked was access and resources. Most were from marginalized groups, women of color and queer folks. Many didn’t have the wherewithal to uproot for three years, move to a new city, and pay thousands of dollars for a formal seminary education.” The people she saw habitually lacked institutional support, trying to fill that gap with passion and overwork. “Even as their generation is reported to be leaving the church in droves, these leaders feel deeply called to serve their local communities,” Rev. Song Bantum observes. “These are the faces I have in mind when I think about the Collaborative. How do we offer relational access, resources, and creative educational on-ramps that can empower them to fulfill that passionate vision?”

A project this expansive won’t happen overnight, but the work is already stimulating connection between the Collaborative’s participating members. “When I meet with other institutions’ leadership, I hear wide excitement for how the coming years will strengthen our interconnections,” President Viera reports. “This work is too demanding and too significant for any of us to pursue it alone.” Over the five years of grant funding, Rev. Song Bantum seeks to make this project self-sustaining, buoyed by the mutual benefit it will offer all its stakeholders. “It’s an incredibly exciting opportunity to create a multi-pronged, diverse, and interdisciplinary model to cultivate pastoral leadership for this moment and beyond,” she says. “We enter this initiative with humility and curiosity, and I realize it’s an unparalleled opportunity to invest in problem-solvers with not only sound theology and intellectual rigor, but the tools to contextually address our deepest social, political, and organizational needs.”