The State of Duke Divinity School

October 1, 2007

Dean L. Gregory Jones

The academic year 2006-07 was a time of new beginnings: the inaugural year of our doctor of theology program; the first year of our new academic leadership structure, with Randy Maddox, David Toole, and Laceye Warner moving into significant positions of leadership; the development of our Thriving Rural Communities program; and the appointment of Edgardo Colon-Emeric as the inaugural director of a new Hispanic Studies Program. It was also a time of building on strengths in our Master of Divinity program and in our relationships with denominational and other constituencies, especially United Methodism and those represented by our houses of study. The summer of 2007 brought a new initiative focused on clergy health in North Carolina, and the prospect of further development and enhancement of our initiatives to enhance pastoral as well as Christian institutional leadership.

Students

Yet again we welcomed a superb group of new students to Duke Divinity School this fall. Thanks especially to the work of Cheryl Brown, director of admissions, and her staff, we again had a significant number of applications. We have maintained our selectivity in offering students admission, and our yield of students accepted remains excellent. The median age of the entering Master of Divinity class continues to be low – this year it was approximately 24. The overall entering class has an ethnic minority enrollment of approximately 21 percent. The median undergraduate G.P.A. of the entering class is 3.61.

We also welcomed our second class of Doctor of Theology students. We have been pleased with the development of the program in the first year, and this second class adds richness and diversity to the student body. Eight outstanding students entered in this class, out of more than fifty applications.

As a result of concerns raised by the Association of Theological Schools about the viability of our Master of Church Ministries degree due to low enrollments, our faculty voted to discontinue admissions into the program. We will work with students already enrolled in the program as we phase out of that program.

The appointment of Edgardo Colon-Emeric, effective July 1, 2007, as Director of our new Hispanic Studies Program and Assistant Research Professor of Theology and Hispanic Studies, will help us develop stronger initiatives in ministry by, for, and with Hispanic and Latino/a persons. Colon-Emeric has his M.Div. from Duke Divinity School and will soon receive the Ph.D. in Religion from Duke’s Graduate School. We anticipate this program will enhance course offerings and field education for M.Div. students, while also addressing Course of Studies education and other workshops for practicing Hispanic and Latino/a pastors—especially in North Carolina.

We have also recruited Stephen Gunter to strengthen our work with the formation of students and faculty in United Methodist studies. Gunter will serve as Associate Dean for Methodist Studies and Research Professor of Evangelism and Methodist Studies. Gunter taught for many years at Candler School of Theology before serving as President of Young Harris College. We believe this new position will enable us to build on our strengths in Wesleyan Studies and strengthen our service and outreach to United Methodist constituencies.

We look forward to the ways in which the Hispanic Studies Program and the United Methodist Studies program will interface with our houses of study—the Baptist House (under the direction of Curtis Freeman), the Office of Black Church Studies (under the direction of Tiffney Marley), and the Anglican/Episcopal House (under the direction of Jo Bailey Wells). Associate Dean Laceye Warner coordinates the houses of study in cultivating synergies across their work.

Our field education program remains vibrant under the leadership of Connie and Joey Shelton. More than 180 of our students experienced summer field education placements, including many in rural United Methodist congregations (whose stipends were supported by The Duke Endowment), 12 in our Teaching Congregations program, 6 in the Center for Reconciliation’s Teaching Communities program, and 18 international placements in South Africa (5), Guatemala and El Salvador (4), Brazil (2), Canada (2), Peru (2), Uganda (2), and Kenya (1).

During the coming year we will be working on strengthening the interface of our spiritual formation program, ably led by Chaplain Sally Bates, with our field education program and the curriculum. Associate Deans Laceye Warner and Greg Duncan will lead this effort.

Faculty

We strengthened the faculty with the addition of four colleagues: Edgardo Colon-Emeric and Stephen Gunter (described above), Mark Chaves as Professor of Sociology, Religion, and Divinity, and Lauren Winner as Assistant Professor of Christian Spirituality. Chaves comes to Duke from serving as the Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona. As his title suggests, he will have appointments in two departments of Arts & Sciences as well as the Divinity School. He is the director of the ongoing National Congregations Survey, as well as the author of such books as Ordaining Women and, most recently, Congregations in America.

Lauren Winner, who has been serving as a visiting faculty member while completing her M.Div. at Duke, joins us now in a full-time tenure-track capacity. A Ph.D. graduate of Columbia University, Winner is well-known for such books as Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath. She also writes regularly and widely for such publications as Books and Culture, Christian Century, Christianity Today, and The New York Times Book Review. She will be on leave during 2007-08 as a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.

We are delighted that Dr. Amy Laura Hall was granted tenure by the university and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Theological Ethics. In addition, we are pleased that Mary McClintock Fulkerson was promoted to the rank of full professor in the Divinity School; and Laceye Warner was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of the Practice of Evangelism and Methodist Studies.

December 2006 brought the retirement of Professors James M. “Mickey” Efird and Jim Travis. Both have served this institution well (in Efird’s case, for almost a half-century!), and we join in celebrating with them in their transition even as we regret their departure from our regular faculty ranks. We are pleased that both of them have agreed to continue involvement in the Divinity School, with Efird continuing his teaching in Course of Study and the Lay Academy and Travis periodically teaching courses in pastoral care.

We were sorry to say farewell to Professor Teresa Berger, who left us in January 2007 to assume an appointment at Yale Divinity School. Berger taught for more than two decades at Duke Divinity School, and we shall miss her wide ranging research and teaching interests in such areas as liturgy, feminist studies, world Christianity, and ecumenism. We wish her well in her new appointment.

We also note the transition of Keith Meador to a focus on his tenured position as Professor of Psychiatry in Duke Medical School and Co-Director of the Center for Spirituality, Religion, and Health. He has resigned his faculty position in the Divinity School to devote attention to these other priorities at Duke, though we also are delighted that he will continue to be involved in the Divinity School as Senior Fellow in Theology and Health.

Notable books published by our faculty in 2006-07 include the following: Paul Chilcote, Early Methodist Spirituality; Jim Crenshaw, Prophets, Sages, and Poets; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption; Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew; Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University; Laceye Warner, Saving Women; and Sam Wells, Power and Passion.

Professor Jim Crenshaw spent the spring semester in Rome, where he occupied the distinguished Joseph Gregory McCarthy Visiting Professorship at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. In addition, Professor Ellen Davis delivered the Hulsean Lectures at the University of Cambridge in the fall of 2006.

Staff Reorganization to Advance Program Initiatives

One of the strengths of Duke Divinity School has long been our vital and active connections to various church bodies, in addition to our connection to the academy and the wider world. Our ties to the United Methodist Church, from which we receive financial support and to which we have special responsibilities, are broadest and deepest, but we also have strong connections with other denominations. These connections are particularly important and beneficial duringthis time of complex cultural and ecclesial change, when there are various forces increasingly questioning whether theological education is necessary (or, in some cases, even desirable) for preparing pastoral leaders.Our strong ties with leaders of diverse denominations are important for the school and also for our students as they go out to serve in a variety of ministry settings. Indeed, the primary goal of our new initiatives is to strengthen the ecclesial institutions in which our graduates work and serve.

Since the early 1990s, many of our efforts to be involved actively in the life of the wider church have been supported by the Lilly Endowment. These efforts have helped us cultivate intentional feedback loops from the lives of clergy and congregations to the lives of our students and graduates, and have strengthened our ties with United Methodists and others across the country. Throughout our history, The Duke Endowment has supported similar work through its support of field education, continuing education, and various special projects that have involved us actively in life of the United Methodist Church in North Carolina.

We have created several new staff positions and restructured our organization in order to enable us further to enhance our service to the church, our ties with the academy, and our engagement in the world. We have received expanded financial support from foundations and other supporters to undertake this work. This support, and the work it enables and requires, is significant; and although the monies we receive are restricted to the projects at hand, these projects indirectly enhance the financial stability of the school in substantial ways, while at the same time strengthening our ties to both the wider church and the United Methodist Church.

More than a year ago, The Duke Endowment funded the Thriving Rural Communities initiative. Central to this initiative are six full scholarships each year for students who commit to serving in the rural church. Last year we identified our first six Rural Fellows, and this summer they each had a field education placement in one of the model rural churches we have partnered with in the two North Carolina UMC conferences. On July 1, our alumnus Jeremy Troxler, a talented young pastor in the Western North Carolina Conference, joined the Divinity School as Director of Thriving Rural Communities. This initiative provides us an opportunity to strengthen rural church ministry as well as to develop stronger relationships and better coordination with the two North Carolina conferences and their clergy.

The collaboration between The Duke Endowment, the Divinity School, and the two annual conferences that has been an integral part of the Thriving Rural Communities initiative has proved so fruitful that it has now become a model for a new endeavor to improve the health of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina. The Duke Endowment first approached us about this project last fall, and as we announced in mid-July, the endowment has awarded the Divinity School a seven-year, $12 million grant to focus on improving the health of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina. This initiative, now in its early stages, will seek to improve the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of UMC clergy in partnership with the North Carolina and Western North Carolina Conferences of the United Methodist Church. It is an assumption of this initiative that by helping these clergy articulate and sustain a holistic understanding of health we will also improve the broader health of the congregations and communities in which they serve. This initiative will also involve a research component to track which strategies make the strongest difference in improving clergy health. We hope that this research will allow us to develop models that can be used in other conferences and settings across the country, where the issue of clergy health is of growing concern.

We are delighted that Robin Swift, a gifted administrator with a strong background in public health, has agreed to serve as the Director of the Clergy Health initiative. She joins us from a leadership position in the Center for Health Policy at Duke. In addition, John James, who has been working in the Ormond Center and the Center for Excellence in Ministry, will be shifting positions to work on the research component of this initiative. Administrative responsibilities for the existing Caring Communities and Health and Nursing Ministries programs have passed from Keith Meador to Jeremy Troxler and Robin Swift, who will collaborate with Anne Packett, Aly Breisch, and other staff as they continue their work on these Duke Endowment funded programs.

The Thriving Rural Communities and the Clergy Health initiatives have significant areas of overlap with regard to our relationship with the two North Carolina annual conferences. Susan Pendleton Jones has agreed to work with Jeremy Troxler and Robin Swift on these two initiatives and will be the point person for coordinating our work with the two North Carolina Conferences. As part of her work with the conferences, Susan will also focus on programs designed to mentor UM pastors in North Carolina in their early years of ministry. As a result of this shift in Susan’s work, she will adopt a new title, Director of Clergy Formation, which better reflects her shift of responsibilities.

With the support of The Duke Endowment and the leadership of those named above (among others), we are working to strengthen our ties to our United Methodist constituencies in North Carolina. At the same time, however, we continue to develop our initiatives focused on practicing clergy and institutional leaders in a variety of other denominations, as well as in the United Methodist Church beyond North Carolina. To date, much of this work has been funded by the Lilly Endowment, including our Advancing Pastoral Excellence initiative of Pulpit & Pew and our coordination of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program. In addition, we have other ongoing programs supported by other gifts and grants, including the Courage to Serve program, the Reynolds Program in Church Leadership, and our Episcopal Leadership Forum, which works with eighteen United Methodist Bishops. We are also developing an “Institute of Preaching” with the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Last spring I discussed with the Committee on Faculty and the Provost an outline of a proposal for external funding to increase significantly our support for these types of programs. With their encouragement, and with significant leadership from Janice Virtue, we have been working on this proposal over the summer. Meanwhile, in order to handle the increased demand for programs like those named above, we will be reorganizing the broad areas of Continuing Education and the Center for Excellence in Ministry.

I have asked Janice Virtue to serve as one of two Executive Directors for our expanding work in the continuing formation of pastors, bishops, and other Christian leaders as well as the congregations and institutions they serve. I am very pleased that she has accepted this invitation. Our strong relationships with pastors, judicatories, and institutional leaders across the country have been cultivated through programs under Janice’s superb direction over the past nine years.

In addition, we have recruited David Odom to join us as a second Executive Director for programs designed to help pastors, bishops, and others become effective leaders of congregations, institutions, and communities. Dave is a Baptist minister and strong leader who has served for many years as the president of the Center for Congregational Health based in the Baptist Medical Center of Wake Forest University. Dave has worked with our Baptist House of Studies on projects and has been a key leader in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program. He will continue his work with CBF, which promises to enhance our Baptist House’s outreach in the future. Dave began his work with Duke Divinity School on August 15.

The transitions involved in this reorganization will likely occur throughout the first half of academic year 2007-08. Eventually, Nathan Kirkpatrick, Dina Helderman, Tamara Kissane, and Deanna Johnson will shift their primary focus from our current continuing education programs to new programs for leadership development that Janice Virtue and Dave Odom will design and oversee. Meanwhile, we will still operate our current continuing education programs—Convocation and Pastors’ School, Lay Academy, Laity Weekends, and others—while also developing new programs as part of the Thriving Rural Communities and Clergy Health initiatives. We anticipate that all of these continuing education programs will be managed by a mix of current staff (e.g., Laura Webb and Marissa Lane, both of whom will become program coordinators for this work) and new staff we will hire in the course of making this transition.

As a part of our growing capacity in leadership development, we will also be undertaking a grant-funded initiative in communications: an informational, interactive Web site that will serve as a resource for pastors and Christian institutional leaders. This site will be in addition to our main Duke Divinity School website. This new site will build on our work with Pulpit & Pew as well as our online Sustaining Pastoral Excellence newsletter and will better enable us to communicate with constituents. My own writing will increasingly be drawn to work on this new website. My “Under the Baobab Tree” columns will shift toward a focus on web articles as a part of our new initiative. We anticipate launching the new website in the fall of 2008.

In order to carry out these new initiatives, I have restructured the responsibilities of several key administrative leaders. On the academic side, David Toole is now devoting a portion of his time to coordination of our work with The Duke Endowment and the ways in which this work overlaps with both continuing education and our core programs. His title has been changed to acknowledge his shift of responsibilities: he serves as Associate Dean for Academic Administration and Strategic Initiatives.

In response to the shift in Toole’s responsibilities, Laceye Warner has assumed primary responsibility for several areas that she and Toole shared over the past year. In particular, this involves working with the four divisions on curricular development and the Courses of Instruction, preceptor assignments, and oversight of the Center for Theological Writing. Warner also is overseeing the Th.D. program during 2007-08, as Professor Amy Laura Hall turns her focus to leading Divinity School efforts in connecting to the wider university’s initiative in global health. Warner’s administrative title is now Associate Dean for Academic Formation and Programs. Todd Maberry, a recent graduate of the Divinity School, joined Dean Warner’s office as the new Registrar.

In other areas of the school, Jon Goldstein is overseeing the development of our communication efforts as they expand to include the new website focused on leadership development, a website for the Thriving Rural Communities and Clergy Health initiatives, and, more generally, the increase in communications that is part and parcel of taking on board these new initiatives. In recognition of these new responsibilities as well as his strength as a leader in the Divinity School, I am delighted to report that Jon has been promoted to Associate Dean for Communications.

These new initiatives will not only expand our communications needs but also require an expanded financial management staff and accompanying oversight. Accordingly, I am pleased that Holly Durham, whose financial skill has contributed significantly to our ability to balance the budget in recent years, has been promoted to Associate Dean for General Administration and Finance.

As with communications and finance, so, too, with information technology. Thus in recognition of our increasing need for leadership in the area of IT, we have asked Jeff Mimnaugh to serve as the Divinity School’s Director of Information Technology, and I am glad to announce that Jeff has accepted the offer. To create time for Jeff to take on this role of director, which will involve working closely with a director’s working group at the university’s OIT, we will hire additional IT support staff, and we have also reconfigured the work of the Media Center, which is now coordinated by Reed Criswell.

Overall, Duke Divinity School is blessed with an extraordinary administrative staff. As a result of staff leadership, we not only are effective in our core day-to-day work, we are also able to broaden and deepen our programmatic leadership and our outreach to our diverse constituencies.

We celebrated with Roberta Schaafsma upon her appointment as Director of the Bridwell Library at Perkins School of Theology, even as we were very sorry to say farewell to her. Andy Keck has been promoted to the position of Associate Director of the Library, and Divinity School alumna Luba Zakharov has joined us as Reference and Serials Librarian.

Our degree programs, especially the Master of Divinity program that prepares men and women for ordained pastoral leadership in the church of Jesus Christ, remain at the heart of the school. We believe these program initiatives and staff transitions will enable us to strengthen our degree programs and provide significant leadership for the church, the academy, and the world.

Major Events and Activities

During 2006-07 we hosted several major speakers at Duke Divinity School. John Allen, the author of a major biography of Desmond Tutu, spoke in the fall semester. Eugene Peterson, Craig Dykstra, and South African pastor Trevor Hudson provided lectures and preaching at our Convocation and Pastors School. In the spring, we welcomed Archbishop Elias Chacour, a Palestinian-Israeli priest, educator, peacemaker, and leader, for several days of lectures and conversation. And the Right Reverend George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke at the Divinity School as a part of the efforts of the Anglican-Episcopal House of Studies.

The Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation convened a gathering of more than 40 Christian leaders in Africa in November 2006 to develop strategies for focusing the church’s work in addressing issues and conflicts such as genocide, civil war and AIDS. The Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life hosted two major conferences, one in partnership with the Presbyterian Church, USA and one focused on Jewish traditions in end-of-life care.

The Divinity School was delighted to host the Fund for Theological Education’s summer conference for African-American doctoral students in early June. In addition, we were pleased to host the Hispanic Summer Program, which brought to our campus Hispanic students and faculty for two weeks of coursework, worship, and reflection.

In June, the Divinity School hosted “Charles Wesley at 300,” a three-day conference celebrating Wesley’s life and work. The school also sponsored our annual Summer Wesley Institute for scholars from around the world to gather for four weeks of study, research, and conversation. And in August the Divinity School was well represented at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Studies, where eight faculty and one Th.D. student participated and several provided significant leadership.

The Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation again had an outstanding two-week academy for 60 rising high school juniors and seniors from across the country. This year several adult workers with youth were invited to participate as well in the academy.

Professor Ellen Davis and M.Div. student Andrew Rowell traveled to Sudan this summer where they taught at Renk Bible College. And Tiffney Marley and Emmanuel Katongole led a Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope to Uganda and Rwanda in July and early August.

Finance and Development

As we have every year, the Divinity School finished the last fiscal year in the black. We continue to face financial challenges, especially resulting from relatively flat income from the Ministerial Education Fund of the United Methodist Church and increases in allocated costs from Duke University. We must absorb these increases even as we charge a significantly lower tuition than any of the other schools of the university. We made a decision in 2005-06 to move to a “per semester” charge for tuition rather than a “per course” charge, effective in the fall of 2007. We planned a year of transition to enable students to make plans for the change in tuition charges. The new policy brings the Divinity School into conformity with other professional schools at Duke and enables us to plan and budget more effectively. Even so, we did experience some struggle in the transition period as students sought a better understanding of why this change is necessary for the long-term health of the Divinity School.

While we have been blessed with significant gifts for restricted program initiatives in the Divinity School, such gifts provide only indirect support for the Divinity School budget. We continue to rely on fund-raising support from individuals and foundations to strengthen the financial base of the Divinity School, enabling us to hold tuition as low as possible in support of students who are already making financial sacrifices as they prepare for vocations in Christian ministry.

I am pleased to report that the Divinity School has raised approximately $9 million toward our $10 million endowment goal for student scholarships as a part of the university’s Financial Aid Initiative (2006-08). We need to raise considerably more in the coming years to address student need and to enable us to strengthen our ability to attract the students who are discerning a call to ministry and have the highest levels of potential for leadership in the service of Christ.

In addition to this endowment support, the annual fund provides unrestricted expendable support that goes directly to student financial aid. In 2006-07, we set a new record for giving to the annual fund with approximately $572,000. We hope to significantly exceed $600,000 during 2007-08. Support for student financial aid is a crucial witness to our confidence in the future of Christ’s church and the ministry. While our yield on offers of admission is good, we still lose many excellent prospective students because of financial considerations. In a survey of those students who turned down our offer of admission in the spring of 2006, 80 percent of the respondents indicated that financial aid was a primary factor in their decision not to come to Duke. The challenge is very much before us, and we must strengthen our financial aid offerings if we are to sustain our momentum.

In order to accomplish these goals, we have a fine staff in external relations lead by Associate Dean Wes Brown. We were sorry to say farewell to Ginny-Len Hazel at the end of June, who left to enroll full-time in flight school. At the same time, we are delighted with the appointment of two new professional staff leaders in external relations. Jami Moss Wise has joined us as Director of Development. An undergraduate alumna of Duke with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Wise comes to the Divinity School from a position as Director of Annual Giving at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. In addition, Robin Fowler joins us as Associate Director of Development. Fowler holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and has served most recently in a development position in the Duke University Health System.

Finally, I write this “State of the School” report on the long airplane ride from Johannesburg, South Africa back to the United States. I have spent the last nine days working with leaders of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa on their strategic planning for the future of theological education of their ministers in the MCSA. It was an honor and a privilege to be a part of those conversations, and I believe they will bear considerable fruit. I mention this here, though, because my time there was a sign of the significance of our strategy of developing long-term relationships with key partners. I saw many friends of longstanding, even as I met new colleagues. Further, many of the people I met wanted greetings conveyed to students, alumni, staff, and faculty who have become friends of theirs. Our partnership with the MCSA began in 2000. Since that time close to 200 students, alumni, and friends have participated in field education, in pilgrimages, and in other relationships. We have welcomed several faculty and students for extended periods at Duke, and have had our faculty visit John Wesley College most summers to teach courses and share in ministry with the church. As we look to new beginnings, we also give thanks for the deepening of relationships that occur from initiatives whose roots are growing stronger and more vibrant. The ties that bind us together give us hope for the future of the ministry to which we have been called by Christ.