For more than a century, Southwestern Seminary has remained grounded in Scripture and committed to God’s inerrant and unchanging Word. But over those decades, this seminary has also consistently adapted and innovated our curriculum to meet the needs of the local churches we serve. Today is no different.
In this episode, Provost W. Madison Grace II and Vice President for Institutional Relations Chandler Snyder explore how theological education is developing in the 21st century.
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Chandler Snyder 0:06
We are excited to be here with you all today. We relish the opportunity to connect with Southwesterners that are deployed around the globe and to talk about what the Lord is doing in and through Southwestern and we’re thankful that you’ve taken this time to join us. My name is Chandler Snyder, and I serve as the Vice President for Institutional Relations here at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I have had the joy of serving Christ in Fort Worth for about two and a half years. I myself am a Southwesterner and a current PhD student at this institution, so I hope to join your ranks soon as distinguished and fine alumni deployed all over the world. I have the pleasure of serving in this role after serving 10 years in Sub Saharan Africa as an IMB missionary. So I’m thankful for the way that Southwestern has shaped me and now the responsibility and joy I have of serving in the community. Dr Grace, would you mind introducing yourself? Talk about how you find yourself in this seat today, through the journey in Fort Worth?
W. Madison Grace II 1:11
Thank you, Chandler. My name is Madison Grace, and I serve as the provost and vice president of academic administration, as well as the Dean of the School of Theology and a professor of theology. I came to Southwestern after college in 2003 so over 20 years ago, the Lord led me here to spend three years get my MDiv and then go serve in the local church. And at the end of that time period, the The Lord said, No stay, and my wife I met here. She’s a two-time grad from Southwestern in Christian education, in marriage and family counseling, and we were serving at a church together, doing well and then seeking what the Lord would have next. And what he had next was for me to stick around here at Southwestern. I do my PhD, work on staff here. I started adjunct teaching in 2010, came full time on in 2014 after a few years at a local church in Fort Worth, I’ve served at local churches while I’ve done the academic work here, but have had the great joy to serve the kingdom through Southwestern Seminary and the many students and then now the faculty here at Southwestern Baptist Seminary and Texas Baptist College. So that’s my role. Love this place. Love what we get to do.
Chandler Snyder 2:26
And I know that that story of meeting my wife here is one that’s very common. We have a current student who gets married on Sunday afternoon, and I’ve met his parents yesterday. They met on campus, and I found out that his grandparents also met on this campus, so I bet that’s similar to many of your stories out there today.
All right. Dr, Grace, we are talking all things curriculum today. It’s important to us, but not a lot of people could define what curriculum is. So let’s start really broad, and then we’ll drive down to the realities of Southwestern right now. So do me a favor and define curriculum and why it matters.
W. Madison Grace II 3:08
Yeah, curriculum simply defined is just a course of study, okay? And so when you think about going to school, you often think solely about classes, and classes are the the middle part, the foundational part of what any curriculum is. But it’s a way in which you take courses and you put them together towards certain outcomes for students. You think about jobs, vocations, training, equipping and education along the way. And so you have elements in there that the faculty of an institution owns. So here at Southwestern our curriculum is owned by our faculty. It’s important. Across higher education, the faculty own the curriculum. This is not just something that someone at the top decides what we should do, but something that those who are actually teaching the courses come together collectively and determine how they look at the outcomes they have for students, how they think about the types of training they need for a particular task of students will do in a field, in addition to other educational elements that will supplement those things.
So sometimes students say things like, I will never use this in my career, or I never had this in my career, right? I think we’ve all went through college at some point said, Why did I take that course? But when a faculty puts together curriculum, they have good reasons why you take that. So for many of us that are not in math fields, we still are engaging in elements of logic that help us make decisions in the everyday life, leadership decisions, personnel decisions and ministry decisions. So that’s part of a curriculum. So we have a variety of elements in the curriculum here at Southwestern that lead to the ministry training that we provide, which is part of our mission that we’re aiming at: God-called men and women to help equip them for ministry in the 21st century. And so we want to put together curriculum that effectively helps them accomplish that task.
Chandler Snyder 5:04
Okay? So if that’s the goal, to build curriculum that effectively equips them to do the work and the mission that we have set out, what would be drivers in changing that then, not only here, but broadly across theological higher education?
W. Madison Grace II 5:19
I think that’s right for any type of curriculum, especially if you’re thinking about the vocation that’s at the end of it. You need to understand that vocation and the world changes. The ministry world has changed. When we think about the types of engagement–local churches and missions work–those the two kind of lungs of Southwestern that we’re aiming at, and those things have changed since since we were young, since we grew up in churches.
Chandler Snyder 5:49
To be very clear, I’m still young, but go ahead. Dr Grace, since we were young…
W. Madison Grace II 5:53
And we grew up in churches that had different focuses, different ways of engaging, and the world has changed around us. We’re more global. The advent of the Internet kind of changed us completely. And so ministry needs to constantly look at the issues that are going on around us with a foundation that is unchangeable, an unchangeable God and unchangeable scriptures. That is the foundation of everything that we do here, and so building out from that. So we still need Bible and theology and languages in order to do ministry well, but we also need to think about the people that we’re ministering to, the different worldviews that they’re coming up against, and being able to address the issues for them. So curriculum needs to be something that’s changed constantly, so that we are making sure that we’re not just sitting back and saying, I’ve taught this class for 10 years, or this has been our curriculum for 20 years, and it’s still meeting the needs of students. Much of what we do still meets that, but there’s much that we need to constantly look at, re-evaluate. This is one of the reasons why we need to have assessment in our programs. Accreditation is very important.
Chandler Snyder 5:53
I was going to ask about that– balance the mission, who you are as an identity, and then external realities like accreditors.
W. Madison Grace II 7:11
Accreditation. At the end of the day, creditors aren’t out there to get you in higher education. They’re there to hold you accountable to doing what you said you would do, and so they have standards that they look at, that look at the courses that you teach, the way in which that you manage your resources, etc., and they have standards that we have to live up to, we have to report to, and we have whole offices that manage that for us to make sure that we’re doing that well. But they’re not there to say, teach like we want you to teach. They’re there to say, we want to make sure that you are accomplishing your mission, especially for the students that you bring in. And so it’s helpful for us to have that third party, so that we can say, Yes, we are doing that. We’re assessing all of our courses. We’re assessing all of our curriculum for the sake of our students. Because here at Southwestern student-focused, we’re ministry-focused, we’re Kingdom-focused, and we want to make sure that the students that graduate here, that walk across our stage, are equipped, ready to do ministry. We all know that we have those students that have come through seminary, and then say, Seminary didn’t train me for this!
Chandler Snyder 8:14
This group never would say that!
W. Madison Grace II 8:18
And for those of us who’ve gone through that, there are elements that are like, yeah, this wasn’t on the curriculum that we went through. Maybe it should be. But the reality is, we can’t train you for everything, so the faculty is trying to look and see, what are the high points, what are those rocks that we’re going to put into our jar that if you didn’t have this, you really wouldn’t do well? So I hear that sometimes, and we do some things really well, and a lot of times that people are looking at the curriculum saying, like, I wish I had this… But do you realize what this curriculum did for you? And that’s a large part of curriculum as a whole, that students don’t always recognize what a specific course or courses have done for them to help them become the leader that they are today.
But there’s always this feedback that we need, and we need from our alumni to tell us, like, we really need more help here. I’m talking to a guy last night. He’s like, I could have used more conflict management in my time at seminary. Like, that’s great feedback. We want to hear that feedback, and I can address that in the type of courses where that would situate, and we can put that into our plan to make sure that we increase that so that we can create better, effective ministers.
Chandler Snyder 9:24
Okay, so there’s two threads that I want to follow as we get a little more particular about our reality at Southwestern and not just higher education. The first one is, you’ve mentioned assessment. Let’s demystify some of that, because that’s one of those words we can throw out and say, Yeah, we’re assessing, but how specifically do we assess our curriculum, and how do we even assess particular classes in the reality of an accreditation? And then how are we assessing qualitatively with churches and other institutions and entities that inform how we shape curriculum here?
W. Madison Grace II 9:57
So on the accreditation side, with the assessment. If you’ve taken a class here and you’ve looked at your syllabus, and at the very top of it, it says, student learning outcomes, those are the things that we assess at the end of the day into the course. Did we actually accomplish those for the student? So you think about the tests that you take, the paper that you wrote, all those are assessments that lead to the outcomes as we build a course out, as those courses are then built into the larger curriculum. So we have those assessments that students engage in. We sometimes do pre-test, post-tests here at Southwestern. What did you know coming into the class? What do you know now? And we can evaluate the exact same test and measure how much you’ve learned. We take that data and we come in it’s like, okay, we need to change our teaching, because we want to have our students meet the outcomes. And so those are important for us to look at as we have assessed our outcomes and making sure that we’re following through on those outcomes. We do that on courses. We do that on whole curricula. We put this into a program that we have here, and we have an office that keeps us in line and manages that.
Additionally, we have more implicit ways. So getting feedback is what I would call it, from our constituents, from those that are doing ministry today, that are pastoring churches, that are missionaries on the field, that can come back to us and say, like, this is what we really need. So we’ve had different venues for that that you’ve helped with. To some degree, we talk to pastors all the time. I get emails all the time, and then we take all this seriously, because we don’t want to just think, no, we know better. We are in partnership with the churches that we serve. We exist for the churches that’s part of our charter and I take that very seriously as we put together our curriculum, that we understand that we’re not doing this because we like the classes and we’re academic nerds that just want to see more papers being written. We’re like, we are student-focused and making sure that our students can do this well, as they’re pastoring, as they’re leading as missionaries, as they’re part of parachurch organizations and other type of ministries that all of our students go throughout the globe.
Chandler Snyder 12:12
I think there’s in addition to what you said on the qualitative side and the natural relationships we have, you mentioned this in your kind of testimony and biography. All of our faculty members are church people. They’re embedded in the body and the bride of Christ all across the DFW area and even beyond, globally, in some cases. So the feedback that faculty are able to bring to bear in their curriculum development and classroom learning outcomes are informed by the needs of a local church on that level.
But another way that we’ve taken a step to formalize that and position ourselves as hearers and learners is a survey that you all hopefully received yesterday, in the alumni newsletter that went out. If you didn’t receive that, please let us know. We want to get that to you. But we have created an alumni survey where we’re asking our alumni for feedback on what they got, what they didn’t get, what they were set up well for from their learning here at Southwestern and what we can improve in current reality and climate that we’re in, because we want to continue to listen and continue to get better, all for the glory of Christ.
So, all right, let’s take a little closer to home. All right, what curriculum changes have been happening recently at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Texas Baptist College. Why? Stuff’s changed, what is it?
W. Madison Grace II 13:35
So we’ve looked in particular at our central degree here at Southwestern which is the master of divinity. It has been the classic degree in seminary training. So if you go to any seminary, even though the numbers of the mdivs have changed and there’s different products at a lot of different seminaries, this still is kind of like the standard that you look at for Ministry preparation. It covers the wide gamut, from Bible to theology to church history to ethics and philosophy and practical ministry, like preaching and evangelism and missions are all included in there. So the curriculum is very broad, because these are all the elements that we think are needed for any type of ministry. So when I was in my undergrad and thinking about what degree I should go with, the mentors at my undergrad said, do the MDiv. It’s going to prepare you most broadly for ministry. And so that has been central to us.
But in the ever-changing world around us, the seminary world, the needs of the churches and the community, we have come together and have created a revision to the master of divinity. So it’s there’s not much that you really can change to an MDiv. An MDiv is an MDiv. There’s certain elements that have to be there. But we have created a revised one that gives us a fewer number of hours for our market. We understand that students are taking courses all around the globe, that they are engaging in vocational ministry earlier, and so the habits of students have changed, the needs of students have changed. And so we want to look at the master of divinity and reach those needs. So we put together a curriculum committee to look at our current offerings and then evaluate that. But we evaluated that, not from, I want my course in and this course out, you know, or this person speaking my ear. This is my pet project. We evaluated from the sense of saying, what competencies do we want for the average Southwestern student that’s going to do ministry for the Lord? What competencies do they need? Let’s define those and then from those competencies, build out courses, instead of coming at it from courses. So we spent a year doing that work together with our deans, with other constituents here on on the faculty here at Southwestern.
Chandler Snyder 15:53
Could you talk about that committee a little bit more? Because I know that either triggers or makes a lot of this group listening in the local church context either happy or a bit stressed. So how’d you build that curriculum to reflect the diversity of the Southwestern ecosystem?
W. Madison Grace II 16:09
Sure, since the curriculum is owned by the whole faculty, we took a cross section of that faculty and had them come together. So this included, we have five schools here at Southwestern and faculty from all five schools were on the committee, including someone from the library, including our registrar, because some of those administrative elements created in curriculum changes, they need to be aware of as well. So that team, it was chaired by Dr Joshua Williams, who is a phenomenal leader, even-handed. He helped the committee, for over a year, to think through the right processes and lead them to a proposal that then came to my office, and then I took it to the deans and worked from it from there. So it’s from the ground up. It was a faculty process that was a cross section of Southwestern so it wasn’t just a bunch of the Biblical Studies faculty and the theology faculty. We got together and said, that’s what we want to do. It was the stakeholders across campus, those that in preaching, those that were in pastoral ministries, those that were in worship studies, those that were in educational ministries, etc, were all there to help speak into what we need to do for ministry today.
Chandler Snyder 17:17
Okay, so developing curriculum for this century in this generation and future generations. How did those developments reflect Southwestern history and heritage since 1908?
W. Madison Grace II 17:33
Yeah, so when we started, the dream and desire of B H Carroll was that the Baptists in Texas would have a place where they could be equipped for ministry, and the primary central focus of that was training pastors. And we have been training pastors ever since then, but we also have included other types of education here as well. From the very beginning, we weren’t solely that. We started going into other types of education. A women’s Training Center was here on our campus as well. We grew into a school of education and a school of sacred music, which is now the school of church music and worship early on. And so those three schools were historically part of us as we’re equipping people for pastoral work and mission work, equipping people for educational type of ministries, Sunday school, as we grew from there, and then that key person that’s leading in the worship ministries of the church, especially in music. And we’ve seen changes throughout the years, as the types of needs of churches have changed.
There was a day and age when you had two staff members, you had a pastor, you had a minister of music, and a lot of churches still do it that way, but a lot of churches don’t. There’s a need for an executive pastor, for a multi-minister church, or discipleship pastor, or something like that. And so we try to see those needs and utilize the quality faculty we have in these different schools to come together for a curriculum.
So we’re aiming at elements like a theology of worship that is now in our MDiv. It’s a selective that any one of our students could take. Biblical counseling is now a selective in in the program, as we see a greater need for counseling in in pastoral ministry, disciple making, through our through our spiritual formation courses, and through a selectives, particularly on disciple making, has been highlighted that come from some of our other schools that aren’t part of The School of Theology, because as a whole, Southwestern has been unique in the way in which that we’ve had this multiplicity of curricula. And we wanted to make sure that we were keeping that historic nature in this MDiv, even though the majority of the MDiv is still school of theology courses like Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, theology. History, philosophy and ethics, etc.
Chandler Snyder 20:02
Okay, so what are a couple of the other things that haven’t changed that align with the heritage? And then what has changed, like, what’s new with the curriculum?
W. Madison Grace II 20:10
So, I mean, like I said, we’re still doing Bible. That’s not going to change. We still are doing languages. We’ve kind of tweaked how we do languages, as a lot of schools have looked at that. We want to make sure that our students are understanding Greek and Hebrew syntax, that this is something that they can continually use in ministry. We wanted to make sure, and we want to say this loudly, because it’s the heartbeat of Southwestern, is that our missions and evangelism courses are still in the curriculum, and we’re going to push that. We want to make sure that our students are equipped to be able to go out and share their faith around the globe and hopefully lead people to Christ as the Lord leads. So we want to equip them well for that. So we’re not moving away from that. We’re not moving away from pastoral, ministry or preaching. We want to make sure that our students can effectively communicate the Word of God in the places that they go.
Some of the other things that have changed. Our ethics content s is not really changing. We were broadening the scope of that course into a Christian worldview and cultural engagement course because the world has access to so many different types of worldviews today, and I mean worldview, not in kind of the Enlightenment sense, but in the sense of like a different way of understanding God, or not believing in God, understanding society, different values that are clashing together, but we want to make sure that we are equipping our students to think through those populations, that they will engage with the gospel and understand how to reach them with the gospel. So this world is constantly changing in those areas. So in that course, we’re still going to look at the major social issues, the family, LGBTQ issues, issues with technology. We’re all having to deal with that. What do we do with AI? What does it do for church? What does that do in so many different ways? And we want to be able to take that course from the basis of worldview and then go into issues that we’re dealing with. So that really is that cultural piece. We want to make sure that all of our students know the Bible well, can engage theologically from that, but also understand how to read culture and engage culture with that foundation.
Chandler Snyder 22:29
I’m going to frame two things, and then I’m going to ask the thing that nobody asks, okay, and this isn’t in the notes. All right, so Southwestern, we’re guided by core values. We’re a grace filled, Christ centered, scripturally grounded, confessionally guided, student focused and globally engaged institution. You’ve spoken and weave throughout what you’ve talked about, how those values shape curriculum and lead to student outcomes. Okay, but the question that doesn’t get asked that everybody thinks: We reduced hours, that’s a reality. How is this not a race to the bottom, and how is what we’ve done different than that?
W. Madison Grace II 23:22
Anyone that looks at a lessening of hours in a program is going to say like, yeah, you’re just trying to make this simple and easy. And there’s a good reason to think that, because there’s a lot of part of higher education that is is not always thinking about the outcomes that are there in front of us. Here at Southwestern we are we are student focused. We are globally engaged. And as we were thinking through the revision of the MDiv, as we wanted to reduce those hours, because we are hearing from students and alumni, we’re hearing from them all the time saying, like, I’d love to come there, but it’s a time issue and it’s a money issue, and so these other schools are offering these shorter programs, and I just want to move on with ministry. And these are elements that we weighed heavily a few years ago as people were going there, Southwestern went the other way. We added more hours, and I think the people who graduated with those degrees that had, you know, 97 hours in them, I’m like, great, you were really well equipped.
So in the process of trying to have a market realignment and to engage where our sister schools are engaging, it was how do we reduce the total number of hours without actually removing the competencies that we want to teach? So that’s why we went through that process. So I’m glad you asked about the curriculum committee and what they’re aiming at was because we knew where we wanted to go. We could have just said, Let’s just cut these courses, done, and we didn’t do that. That’s not how we approach this. We said, What do our students need? And let’s see, let’s be creative. And how we can put some of those things together.
And there were a lot of ideas that came out of this that like, let’s tuck those away, you know. So curriculum is not something like, it’s one and done, right? Okay, the curriculum is something, as I said, that we need to look at the needs of our constituents, and we’re constantly evaluating it. And so there’s some good ideas from our faculty that as we go forward, don’t think that we’re going to change the MDiv every year. So don’t, don’t hear me say that. Because we need stability as we go through that. But we have good ideas from our faculty that want to be creative, that as we go forward in the future, that we’re constantly thinking about what is best for the Kingdom. What is best for our students is preparing them for Kingdom work and then creating curriculum that that engages there.
Chandler Snyder 25:47
So curriculum is not static. It’s it’s not flippant, driven by the wind. It’s intentional, driven by our mission, our core values, with outcomes in mind, owned by our faculty. But how does this affect our undergraduate students at Texas Baptist College? And then the next question is, since it’s not static, is what’s on the horizon? What else could change?
W. Madison Grace II 26:09
Yeah, so I’m glad you brought up Texas Baptist College. Across undergraduate education right now, I think you’ll see, there are all of these programs that, whether you call them a five year program or a plus one program, what we’re finding is that the trend is to create an avenue for undergrad students to do their bachelor’s degree and then fold in a master’s degree on top of that. So we have that product here at Texas Baptist College, multiple ones. You come get your Bachelor of Arts in Christian Studies, or Bachelor of arts in humanities, or one of our other Bachelors of Arts, and then couple that with the master of divinity or with the Master of Arts in Christian education. So we have these. We already, presently have these five year degrees. I think these are the most robust degrees for if you’re looking for effective ministry training right now that you start with our excellent faculty in Texas Baptist College and move into our excellent faculty at Southwestern Seminary. So we want to constantly tweak those and grow those.
And then to think about what Texas Baptist College is in our undergraduate program that’s different than Southwestern and the type of students that we bring in there aren’t always aiming directly at a ministry vocation. Many of them are, and we’re going to equip them, but some of them are still thinking about, What does God really want me to do? And this is why we have a humanities program. So we’re interested in just the larger sense of Christian vocation that every Christian is called to do service for the kingdom, some way, somehow, and our undergraduate program wants to help equip that. So we’re in conversations with our Dean of Texas Baptist College, Carl Bradford, who’s doing a phenomenal job of just thinking through what are some of the other types of majors that we should be investigating and bringing in to our program that from a vocation perspective, Christian worldview, perspective that then supports the elements that they could come in and go to Southwestern that sees a particular vocation in a local church, or in the mission field, or they could think like, I got a great foundation, biblically, culturally, theologically, and I’m going to be the this great businessman out there, or this educator or or just engaged as a councilman in in our community as a Christian. So we want to help create that type of environment that prepares our people to be the light of Christ, vocationally throughout the globe.
Chandler Snyder 28:37
So good, so good. And I’m going to take this unashamed moment. Those of you that don’t know we do have an undergraduate program and an undergraduate college. So if you are a minister, a pastor, if you’ve got kids, grandkids, college ministry, young adult ministry, please think about directing people to Texas Baptist College, where we commit to helping your student love Jesus more robustly through our incredible faculty and the curriculum that we teach, preparing them for whatever the Lord has called them to do in an environment that will produce a Southwestern heritage in them. So direct folks our way.
