Keith Drury and Wesley Seminary (4)

Celebrating Keith Drury (1)
Keith Drury the Churchman (2)
Keith Drury and the Department of Religion (3)

Wesley Seminary would never have existed without Keith Drury. 

On the one hand, the conditions were right.  The relationship between Asbury and the Wesleyan Church was pretty low at the time. And more significantly, Wesley Biblical Seminary (WBS) was in conversation with IWU to perhaps form a branch campus at IWU.

The president of WBS at that time actually came up to Marion with his Dean. The meeting didn't go very well. An unnamed head of the Department of Religion (DoR) unintentionally insulted the president with his Jersey ways. Keith tried to soothe the WBS president's blood pressure on a walk.

As always, Keith brought the focal question. "The Wesleyan Church has one seminary card to play in the next 10 years. Is Wesley Biblical the card we want to play?"  

So we began a campaign to start a seminary. Henry Smith had recently become president of IWU, so that was a kairos moment too. He wasn't in the thick of it yet. There was the energy of the honeymoon stage, and he was wondering what his key contribution to IWU might be. 

Keith was part of all those conversations. He was the type of person that didn't need any credit, but his influence was all over everything. What mattered to him was the result, and he didn't care if anyone knew he had played a part. There were two task forces. First there was the one that proposed an MDIV degree. Then there was the one that proposed the formation of a seminary. Keith was a major voice on both task forces.

I believe Keith was also a whisper in Dr. Smith's ears from time to time. I'm pretty sure that it was his idea to devote the 1.1 million dollars given to IWU from the denomination toward scholarships for Wesleyan students in the first few years of the seminary.

2. We designed the MDIV degree over the summer. Because it was summer, it was often Keith, Russ Gunsalus, and I in the room, with David Smith and Norm Wilson joining as they could. Russ had some recent survey results from ministers about what they had found useful in their ministerial education. We also had that in hand. 

Keith and Russ were sure to point out to me that, in the survey, Greek came in as one of the least useful things ministers had been required to study in seminary and college. They had no fight from me. I had taught Greek for 20 years. I knew that -- especially given the way biblical languages had been taught -- it was one of the most wasteful requirements in the old ministerial curriculum. 95% of ministers never even mastered it, let alone used it.

So we come again to the practical and pragmatist nature of Keith. The DoR at IWU was known for being practical. It's not that we were against theology or biblical studies or the minute studies of scholarship. As I would later say to the seminary board tongue in cheek, "no one loves the irrelevant more than I do." But it was a foregone conclusion before we ever started that we would found a seminary that actually helped you do the work of the ministry. "May it never be said of Wesley that I never learned what I actually needed to know to do ministry."

I had one of my brother-in-law's voices in my ear. He didn't feel like seminary had taught him the practical things that he actually needed to know as a pastor from day to day -- how do you make a budget? How do you to run a board meeting? How do you run a capital campaign for a building extension? The quote in my head was my brother-in-law: "I never learned anything in seminary that I actually needed to know to do ministry."

Henry Smith would say, "This is not your father's seminary." And Russ would say, "Take your church to seminary." Students were going to have to be involved in ministry to be in the seminary. They were going to have on the job training. I likened it to an Indy car coming into the pit to get new tires before racing out into ministry. This was all the spirit and influence of Keith.

Seminaries were dying all over the place. In large part, it was because there was an onsite requirement that the Association of Theological Schools still required at that time. It was without question that we would provide an online option. This seminary would be accessible, affordable, and practical, as Henry Smith used to say. But this had everything to do with the culture that Keith had fostered in the DoR.

3. We designed a Keith Drury seminary. That was IWU then. And that would be the seminary then. And it had over 500 students in five years. And that's real students -- full time equivalents, not just a head count of how many took a class at some point during the year. I'll just slip in here that the founding formula of the seminary worked really well. I hear the seminary may be leaving its building, which pains me greatly. Perhaps if it returned to the founding formula -- perhaps if it would regain some of that Keith Drury flavor -- it would regain some of its vigor. 

Asbury has been able to buck the trends, and good for it. We saw no reason to found a seminary that was like the existing options. And since most seminaries were dying, why found a seminary like every other dying seminary? So while the traditional seminary had a 90 hour curriculum, we would give a practical curriculum that was 75 hours. 

In good Keith Drury fashion, we would focus on application. We would integrate Bible, theology, and church history into its practical courses. You would learn lots of Bible, but you would do it in connection with leadership, mission, worship, preaching, congregational formation, and congregational relationships. You would learn lots of theology, but you would learn it in relationship to these core practical areas. The same with church history. 

And in each course you would do a study that required you to bring Bible, theology, and church history to bear on a practical issue in ministry. You would learn how to draw on these disciplines for ministry rather than simply learning the Bible or theology in isolation.

So it would have a practical focus, and it would connect the foundations with application. Traditional seminaries in effect said. "We're going to teach you all this theory and then you can apply it yourself when you get to ministry." Our approach was to teach you how to apply it as the focus. And this had Keith Drury written all over it. 

The president of Asbury held up our curriculum in a faculty meeting with a condescending scorn and mockingly said, "We will not be doing this here." One of the faculty there blogged, "MDIV Lite: Tastes great, less filling." And I just laughed. You do you. And we'll give ministers what they most need to do ministry.

4. Spiritual formation was another missing piece in the seminary landscape at that time. Under Keith's influence, students were going to take a one hour spiritual formation class every semester. I remember sitting in a classroom in Noggle with four desks circled together as Keith whipped out a spiritual formation curriculum in a minute flat.

A lot of spiritual formation seemed like, "Go read the Bible. Be changed." Keith recognized that there is a human process of change that can be intentional. Once again, his practical wisdom made the seminary curriculum more profound than most people realized. First we would talk about change in general, and they would read Bobby Clinton's The Making of a Leader. Then they would figure out where they were now. Then they would set goals. Then we would talk about the importance of having a mentor or spiritual director. Only in class 5 would they get to the classical spiritual disciplines. A final course would talk about deliverance, crossing the finish line, so to speak.

This was all Keith Drury's doing. There was a profundity to the seminary's curriculum, a deeply profound underlying philosophy embedded. Like Wesley himself, you might miss it if you just focused on its practical appearance. Underneath, it reflected a deep hermeneutic and understanding of people and the world.

5. The actual process of designing the courses came from Keith too. We would get 5 or 6 people in a room -- a practitioner, a Bible person, a theology person, a church history person, and other key minds. We would start with 3 x 5 cards and brainstorm. What's every topic you can think of that might be in a course on Proclamation? Write, write, write. Everyone write. A bunch of cards on the table with lots of topics from the innovative minds in the room.

Then we would begin to congeal the cards into topics. What subject headings emerged? Eventually, we would have 16 sheets of paper on the wall, each representing a week of the course, each with a collection of 3 x 5 cards stuck to them. 

A regular flow to each course evolved. Subject matter experts were commissioned to write assignments. The rest is history.

6. Keith urged me to become the first academic Dean of the seminary. "Who else?" he asked. "Give five years of your life to founding a seminary," he said. I gave six. And when I stepped down, in his typical bluntness he said, "Helping to found a seminary may turn out to be the most important contribution you make in your life." :-)

Keith and Russ were instrumental in recruiting Wayne Schmidt to be the first permanent leader of the seminary (Russ was the first leader technically). They drove to Grand Rapids to see if he would be interested in teaching or, just maybe, in leading the seminary. Before Henry Smith talked to Wayne, they had prepared the soil.

Wayne very much was cut from that same practical cloth as Keith. Wayne would be almost religious in keeping the seminary focused on practical ministry. There was a sense that the gravitational pull of the academy was away from the practical. So Wayne focused on things like church planting. When the KERN option arose, Wayne was fine for it to be on the other side of campus so the seminary could stay focused. In that phase, it was no problem for the other side of the campus to do the more advanced study of subjects like Bible and theology. The seminary was focused on practice and application.

All this flavor of the seminary was Keith. It was the flavor of Keith. It was the flavor of the DoR. It was the flavor of IWU. And it was the starting flavor of Wesley Seminary. 

Keith's devotion to the seminary has never wavered. In fact, instead of flowers, donations to a "Keith Drury Memorial" scholarship at the seminary are encouraged.

I might do one more post as a wrap up.