Report from Dean Drummond

Embracing Transformation

Whether my daughter was Patient Zero, or just one among many people attending my installation as Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School’s Founding Dean with an incipient bug, we will never know. Here is what we do know: many from my extended family attended my installation on September 21, 2019. Seeing them intermingle with clergy colleagues, students, friends, and coworkers was a highlight of the day for me: worlds coming together. My spouse Dan and daughter JJ were in attendance too, and the three of us formed a short receiving line from the service into the reception. Dan and JJ mostly shook hands as I gave and received bone-crushing hugs.

Dan is a teacher, and JJ a student, at the Hopkins School here in New Haven. A truly nasty bug was going around Hopkins that September, but both Dan and JJ felt well at the Installation itself. JJ woke up with “the crud” the morning after, however. Soon, I was hearing reports of similar illnesses from installation attendees from all over, such as my uncle in Virginia; my sister in Suffield, CT; and my colleague Sharon, our University Chaplain. I was among the last to fall, and I was still coughing at Christmas.

 Getting people together and embracing is, and always has been, risky. When we come together, we share our germs. We share ideas that might get us into trouble or change someone’s mind. We eagerly greet those with whom we are in right relationship and simultaneously court the possibility that a person we welcome warmly won’t reciprocate. When we come together, there is no hiding from each other, and there is no protecting one another from each other perfectly. Being alone at home is so much easier and less complicated, but it is not enough.

 Before the Covid-19 pandemic, it never would have occurred to me that simply not gathering for months and months was an option. Now that not-gathering has become a necessity, the shortcomings of staying away from each other have become obvious, even heartbreaking. Just a few weeks ago, higher education’s critics were wondering if students across the nation would say, “I am getting so much out of learning on Zoom and online, I have no idea why I’ve been paying so much to be on campus!” Perhaps some students are saying this. Our students at Andover Newton at YDS, however, miss being together so much that tears flow daily.

 Intuitively, without frequently discussing why, Andover Newton has always prioritized bringing people together in the flesh. Between 2005-2010, I was part of several discussions that explored how much of our education we could imagine offering online (decision: some but not all could happen online, just like ministry itself). Where several of our peers moved their operations into office parks and created distance-learning and hybrid educational models, that idea never captured Andover Newton’s imagination. I participated in merger negotiations that took entirely for granted that we would have a campus life somewhere.

 One of the dimensions of a partnership with YDS that attracted us was its vibrant campus community. YDS worships daily. Its campus is a single, quadrangle-shaped facility that puts all educational functions under one roof. Students eat together in one refectory, study together in one library, laugh together in conversation-friendly common areas, and take classes in spaces adjacent to faculty and administrative offices. These signs, along with student residences built for an adult learning community, indicated that YDS shared our understanding that togetherness is part of formation for ministry.

 In publicizing our relocation and affiliation, I don’t remember emphasizing this point of commonality between the two schools. The Andover Newton community was so emotional about letting go of our beautiful Newton, MA campus that perhaps we deemphasized the campus factor. Now that we are building a new sense of identity, and are currently unable to be together physically, it seems high time to celebrate how essential Andover Newton believes togetherness to be. God is challenging us to make togetherness happen in previously-unimagined ways.

 When a cross-section of Andover Newton’s leaders arrived over the summer at the theme “Embracing Transformation” for 2020-21, we did so out of recognition that we face a daunting challenge. In 2019-20, we had to move to a distanced style of gathering with only a few weeks left in the semester. Students, faculty, and staff members already knew each other. This year, we need to transform ourselves even further, in that we are welcoming new people to the community whom we have never met in-person.

 Embracing each other and embracing transformation are similar: both call for wholeheartedness, and both come with risk. When we try to worship together using a new medium, we risk embarrassment and miss feeling like experts. Then there’s the question of what we do when we get together, as so many topics have us on our guard these days. It’s risky to talk together in times of social unrest, especially unrest connected to anti-Black racism: the most painful of topics, and one left undiscussed for too long. It’s always scary to talk politics in an election year. What if we move heaven and earth to come together, only to hurt someone, find ourselves hurt, or discover we weren’t the ally we thought we were? The stakes are high, as is the potential payoff.

 This Annual Report will give you glimpses into a year like no other, with transitions we foresaw – like the installation of a new dean – and some we might never have imagined. 2020 has thrown us curveball after curveball, so we’re embracing transformation, tangling with it, and trusting that God sent the angel we’re wrestling. We fully expect that angel to tell us our name and point us in the direction of God’s purpose: for each of us, and for our community as a whole.

Embracing transformation,

 Sarah Birmingham Drummond