 Good evening. Welcome to the Seminary Preview Webinar for AMBS. I'm glad you're able to join us today. During our time together, I invite you to think about what God is calling you to do. Is Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary a place that will help you fulfill that call? I'm Mary Ann Weber, the Director of Enrollment here at AMBS. I'll share a little bit later this evening, but first we will hear from some other folks who will help you become better acquainted with the AMBS learning community. I'm delighted that Dr. Melinda Berry, the Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics, will share with us this evening. She'll give you an idea of what it would be like to be in one of her classes. Following Melinda's presentation, Isaiah Friesen, a student who currently lives on campus, will share about his time as an AMBS student. Following that, I will share about some admission items, and then the AMBS President, Dr. David Bushart, will share parting words with us. And now at this time, Melinda, I invite you to share with us. Good evening, everyone. I'm so glad that you could join us for this webinar. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, which will just take me a moment here to make sure I select the right window. Here we go. What I'm going to be presenting this evening is a mini lecture that gives you a sample or a taste of some of the kinds of things that I teach about. I, as Marianne has said, teach in the area of theology and ethics. And one of the things that I have become passionate about is that theological education, a secondary study, is one way that we can work at doing the work of social emotional learning. This involves embracing the emotional parts of our humanness. In fact, I believe that naming our feelings actually helps us participate in God's reconciling mission in the world in a more deep and enriching way. So I work with these ideas in several of my courses, but especially one that I am teaching this semester. It's called Practicing and Embodying Nonviolence. This course introduces students to what I call Shalom Theo Ethics. And Shalom Theo Ethics refers to the form of Christian nonviolence that generations of professors and students at AMBS have contributed to both the church and the academy from the United States and Canada to places like Ghana and Australia, Germany and Argentina, and so many other places in between. So there are three big ideas that are part of how I think about Shalom Theo Ethics. And the first two involve identity and faith formation. Identity and faith formation refers to the ways a Christian community contributes to the environment that shapes us and communicates its beliefs and practices. And then the castle five of social emotional learning. Castle is a reference to an organization called the Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning that has developed an educational model called social and emotional learning. And in their framework, they talk about or define social emotional learning as having the knowledge, skills and attitudes to do five things. Develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve goals both at the individual level and as part of a community. Feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. So these are, when we're talking about faith formation and social and emotional learning, these are two things that contribute to what I like to call biblical Shalom and Shalom Theo Ethics. I've already defined Shalom Theo Ethics as peace theology and radical discipleship in this kind of Anabaptist Mennonite tradition that we steward here at AMBS. Now part of what I'm teaching here in this mini lecture involves my own identity formation, my own experience of faith formation, my own introduction to social emotional learning, and my own introduction to Shalom Theo Ethics through my own study at AMBS. And one of the things that I have learned over my years of living and studying is that our identity has layers and using critically reflective practice to learn from both my direct experience as well as integrating ideas I learned from seminary into how I view the world and think about these things, especially Christian and live out my own Christian discipleship. I've developed the perspective that Christianity has never been one thing. Even the Gospels give different accounts of what God was doing in Jesus. And because Christianity has never been one thing, I encourage us to embrace both differences and similarities among Christians as we work at faith formation. When we do this, we see how our identity has multiple layers. And so I'm going to give you a quick example of this for myself and the communities that I'm connected with. So the first level or the first layer is the Christian layer. The Christian layer is a way of understanding that our tradition that we are part of kind of in a particular way is connected to this much bigger thing. Christians are people all around the world who love worship and serve God, our creator, redeemer and sustainer. While there are differences among Christians, we all believe that God loves and heals the world through Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God. Our scripture is the Bible, even though our interpretations of this sacred text differ. Then there's another layer or another circle. This is the Anabaptist circle. The Anabaptists are Christians who approach faith and religion in continuity with a movement that started 500 years ago in Western Europe. Today there are Anabaptist communities on six continents. We put our beliefs into practice so that others might learn something new about God from our lives and our choices. Mennonite World Conference is the place where we express our Anabaptist identity most visibly through global assemblies and our seven shared convictions. These convictions describe our theological understandings about God, the Bible, church and worship, and our belief that following Jesus involves something we call radical discipleship. There are four dimensions to radical discipleship, renouncing violence, building justice, making peace and sharing what we have as we form and nurture connection with God and each other in the ecosystems that make our lives possible. Excuse me. We can think of this history and how it has moved and changed over time as our tradition. Then there is what I'm calling here the denominational circle or the Mennonite circle. This is my more particular identity within Anabaptist tradition. AMBS's sponsors are at the denominational level, our Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA, which are two of several organized denominations or associations whose members are called Mennonites. This expression of our identity is most visible through the organizations and institutions that we have built and over time and work to maintain and provide leadership for. But most of us experience our Mennonite Anabaptist Christian identity in very local and particular places. I'm thinking here about congregations and households. Community is the particular group of people we join with to worship God and it's where we strive to share nurture, love, social connection, values, hopes, sorrow and faith, all the things that we need to grow and thrive as Christians. To sum up what I've been saying, looking back over the last 120 years or so, Mennonite Anabaptist Christian faith has often been focused on radical discipleship, renouncing violence, building justice, making peace and sharing gifts in this beautiful and wonderful world that God has made. And the Anabaptist movement has become a deeply and truly global movement. For a variety of reasons though, even as I embraced all the beauty in my tradition, I found myself wondering where and how feelings or emotions fit into this faith formation process. And this is part of what animates me and is part of my passion as I work at teaching what it means to embody and practice nonviolence from an Anabaptist Mennonite perspective. I think that Anabaptist Mennonite faith formation is at its best when it gives us tools and teaches us the skills to form and nurture connection with God, self and others or our neighbors. But just how do we think about this faith that's being formed in us and what are some of the emotions that are part of that developmental process? Well, before I answer that, I want to talk a little bit here about biblical Shalom. In his book, Shalom, the Bible's word for salvation, justice and peace, Harry Yoder, who was one of my teachers at AMBS, explains that the biblical word Shalom helps us see the interconnected dimensions of reality. Shalom refers to material and physical well-being, what we might call wellness, relationships with others both near and far, I'm calling that justice, and the kind of people we are. It has to do with our character and being people of integrity. So when we start to shift our idea of peace to biblical Shalom defined by wellness, justice and integrity that in fact are the ingredients of understanding salvation and healing, we can start to see that Shalom involves and connects us with all of the levels of reality between us and the cosmos. I like to think of this using the children's toy of this rainbow stacker of these kind of concentric circles that stack up in this three-dimensional way, but I'll also represent them in a more two-dimensional way. So there's a long distance between me and the cosmos, and I experience reality mediated through the household or the family that I'm part of, the community that I'm part of, the watershed that is the one of the ecosystems I'm part of, that is located in a country that's located on a continent that's located on a planet, and that planet is part of a solar system that is part of the vastness of all that God has made. So to think about Shalom is this thing that connects me with all that exists for me is a deeply powerful awe-inspiring thing that stands at the center and kind of the mystery of my faith. It can be tempting to think of wellness in terms of just me and my personal health or fitness, and it can also be tempting to think of justice as something we look for on a national level or integrity as either personal or something that has to do with kind of the integrity of our family systems and relationships. But again, Perry Yoder and Mary Shirts, also one of my teachers at AMBS, have encouraged me to think about all three of these aspects of Shalom at all of these levels. So my relationship within my family or household is interconnected with the relationships in my watershed. Of course, I may have more power or impact within my family than I do in the country that I live in. But the invitation is for us to consider how or to just believe that how we treat the land where we live, how we treat the people who are closest to us, spills out into how we treat everything and everyone else in all these other circles. So when I started to reflect critically on these layers of my identity as an Anabaptist-Mennonite Christian and affirm that radical discipleship is indeed a meaningful way for me to think about what it means to follow Jesus and to be a Christian, I still was kind of scratching my head and wondering, well, what about feelings? Like I have a pretty clear sense of what the right thing is to do and how to express my beliefs. But I wasn't always sure about the emotional aspect of my faith. So as I've come to think more about having a kind of deeply balanced identity as a Christian, I've come to really appreciate the theological integration and the educational integration we work to develop at AMBS as part of our learning community. Our identity as Christians is doing really well when we bring together knowing that is thinking or cognition with doing, that is how our ethics and how we live out our faith. But we also want to bring along being. I like to sometimes think about this being dimension as representative of spirituality, the feelings, the affections that animate our life and faith as Christians. In other words, I think that information, attitudes and skills that kind of goes back to this working definition of social emotional learning that I presented earlier are really important components of how I define and think about radical discipleship. Because in my direct experience, radical discipleship has been really good at emphasizing knowing and doing. But when we start to bring a social emotional learning informed perspective to faith formation, that can help our tradition integrate the being part of what it means to have a healthy identity as a Christian. And one of the ways we can do this is by forming and nurturing connection with God, self and neighbor. Now this has come into even sharper perspective for me through something called nonviolent communication. And there are some things that nonviolent communication helped me see about the way my faith had been formed as a Christian that I wanted to reform and change. So a number of years ago, when I was introduced to nonviolent communication, it changed the way I think about Christian faith in general and the work of Christian peacemaking or shalom seeking in particular. So whenever in according to nonviolent communication, we have been many of us have been shaped and formed in what Walter Wink the biblical theologian calls domination culture or the dominate by we've been shaped by the domination system. In the domination system, we're told that whenever something happens that is uncomfortable or unsettling or creates conflict. We have two options for how we respond. First, it's either your fault, or it's my fault. The domination system teaches us this game of shame and blame. Well, one of the things that I appreciated about the faith formation I received as an Anabaptist Mennonite Christian was I was told no, there are actually more than two chairs. And one of the ways that this was taught to me was through a biblical example of Jesus and here I'm going to share a little story from Luke chapter 10. And this comes this version comes from the message. There's an exchange between Jesus and a lawyer. The lawyer says teacher, what do I need to get eternal life? Jesus sensing that maybe a trap is being laid here for him, turns the question back to the lawyer. What's written in God's law? How do you interpret it? The lawyer offers back that you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence, and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself. Good answer. Do it and you'll live. Jesus says. But then the lawyer comes back and says, and just how would you define neighbor? Now we could have a whole other mini lecture on just on this passage in our biblical hermeneutics surrounding it. But the reason I brought this particular passage into focus is to again reflect a little more on my own experience of faith formation. So using this passage where Jesus reaffirms something that's a part of the law, a part of Torah that he's quoting in fact some passages from Leviticus night chapter 19. Something that came into focus for the Sunday school teachers and my parents and the congregation that raised and nurtured me is that in addition to the world's chairs of shame and blame, there is a principle called self sacrificing love that we talk about this as the double love command that we are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. In other words, it's kind of this big comfy armchair. When something goes wrong and there's a conflict or a problem, maybe my best response is to not shame and blame, but ask the other person, what is it that you need? What is it that you need to feel comfortable for me to fix this situation to say that I'm sorry? Well, when we focus on the other person's needs, making them comfortable at some cost to our self while there is some beauty in this self sacrifice, this is not about this faith formation at its best because we've forgotten that our capacity to love our neighbor comes from our own sense of self acceptance because Jesus says, love God, love your neighbor as yourself. This is where nonviolent communication has helped me because nonviolent communication says, no, in fact, there aren't just three chairs. There are four chairs and this third chair isn't a big overstuffed armchair that's about making other people comfortable. This third chair is about self empathy. There's an invitation to ask what am I feeling and what do I need? Once I've sorted out what it looks like for me to be compassionate to myself, to pay attention to my own needs, that allows me to move into what NBC calls the fourth chair and I like to depict the fourth chair actually as a bench because in this space of the fourth chair there's room for me, there's room for you, there's room for what I'm feeling and what I need and there's room for what you're feeling and what you need. This I think is Anabaptist Mennonite faith formation that's doing a lot better. I offer this as an example of what I call a critical incident in my own life that has impacted the kind of Christianity that I want to pass on to others. A critical incident is an experience that you can never quite forget. It's a story you often tell or something you think about every day. Now if we were in a class setting, I'd stop my comments and pass around a talking piece inviting each of you to share your own reflections. But this is not that. So I hope I've let your appetite for what more conversation would look like if you were to join our learning community at AMVS. Good evening everyone. I'm Isaiah Friesen. I'm a senior master of divinity students majoring in theological studies with a concentration in peace studies. Workwise I'm currently interning with the pastoral team at Assembly Mennonite Church and I work as the administrative assistant and communications coordinator at the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism where we publish this newsletter. I grew up at two fairly distinct both dearly beloved to me Mennonite Church USA congregations. Paoli Mennonite Fellowship in southern Indiana which was founded in the 1970s and first Mennonite church in Beatrice, Nebraska which grew out of Prussian and Ukrainian Russian migrants that came to Nebraska in the 1870s including some of my ancestors. I spent my teen years and early 20s wrestling with my beliefs about the divine and my own relationship to the church. And at the same time really enjoying Sunday school and listening to sermons and eventually taking undergraduate courses thinking about authentic mission religious peace building and Anabaptist history. I studied Spanish language and peace justice and conflict studies at Goshen College about 20 minutes drive from the AMBS campus and during that time and even before then starting in high school many people around me affirmed that I should go to seminary some day and probably even pastor in a congregation. In fact I participated in AMBS's explore program for young adults wanting to learn about church leadership and that was a great experience for me and if you know any young adults interested in that program is still going. So shout out to explore and everyone who was involved in that over the years too. So all these things in general affirmed that I should at least keep seminary on my radar. I was open to possible vocations in theological studies and pastoral ministry and I developed a natural affinity to AMBS faculty and students during my time as an undergraduate student at Goshen College but before I could come and roll AMBS I really felt like I needed to explore Christianity beyond Mennonites first at age 23 thanks to the connections made through the Forum for Theological Exploration, FTE and Lutheran Volunteer Corps I found myself in a young adult ministry residency with United Methodists in Minnesota during which they also offered me the opportunity to take a couple of classes as a non-degree student at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. I appreciated Medjelka Lutheran Church in America, the ELCA and the United Methodist Church and getting to know some of their communities across the state of Minnesota. Also these very ecumenical encounters helped me to clarify that I would appreciate actually studying at an Anabaptist specific seminary after all. The Dean and others at AMBS were very open to my vision of being an MDiv Connect student for a few years followed by a year or two to finish my degree on campus so I went for it. I really appreciated the MDiv Connect program which I was enrolled in from August 2019 through the end of 2022. For a few years this distance option allowed me to stay on campus. I also had the opportunity to share a dialogue with others thinking about what it means to live and minister in the world as Anabaptists while following my own path as married life led me to Guatemala and later to Columbia. It was a gift to get to know Anabaptist communities and their stories from across the Americas during that time AMBS professors did a magnificent job including me and other distance students in their blended classes. To name a few suffering and hope with Melinda Berry who you just met biblical foundations of peace and justice with Drew Straits and human development and Christian formation with Rachel Miller Jacobs just to name a few. Carl and Kaysa and others at the AMBS library provided excellent services as I needed access to resources for research at a distance. The distance format made possible my favorite course from Seminary Earthkeeping where Melinda again facilitated really amazing learning opportunities among an incredibly diverse and multicultural group of both online and in-person students. Between the places where students were all living at that time and our countries of origin we must have represented 10 to 15 U.S. states and 10 to 15 countries in that single Earthkeeping cohort states and probably Canadian provinces to people from all over the world and from great diversity within each of our countries we represented to all that to say I loved my experience as a connect student and it was very life giving to me and at the same time I've been exposed earlier on just enough to the AMBS campus community and the Elkhart River watershed to know that there was a kind of formation and ecclesial vision a vision of the body of Christ of the church that could only come from being an everyday relationship and practice with the faculty and the students if I could only do it for one year as it turns out I'll probably be doing it for about a year and a half total out of my life. Since my wife Andrea and I moved to Elkhart campus life has been very good to us. It's currently a small campus community but within that community there is vast international and intercultural diversity which is really a gift. I love getting to have relatively easy access to teachers on a more casual basis as we cross paths regularly on campus. It's also a gift to be able to join special breaks and events when guests come to AMBS from across this continent and across the planet. Extended time spent on campus is a really unique opportunity to interact with and learn about every aspect of AMBS as a theological institution. The church leadership center is a place where you can learn a lot about the community. It's an ongoing racism team, the library, the prairie, the community garden, the Institute of Mennonite studies and its publications, vision and anabaptist witness, chapel services, the rooted and grounded conference, the maintenance shed. I really appreciate the maintenance shed, I'll be honest. It's a place where you can learn a lot about the community across the parking lot from the seminary, not to mention our broader Elkhart city context. So I do hope to see this AMBS campus community grow in coming years and hope to see the AMBS community grow far and wide. Thank you and blessings. Thank you Melinda and Isaiah for your words. There are many seminary graduates who go on to do pastoral ministry in a congregation. But that's not all that seminary graduates do. AMBS graduates have gone on to be leaders in other areas as well, including teaching and faith formation, working as spiritual directors, chaplains, leaders and staff of nonprofit organizations. Some have gone on to teaching, some have gone on to further academic study, and these are just some of the possibilities for seminarians to pursue. And of course there are always students who feel led to seminary even though they might not quite know what will come after their studies. And that's okay too. AMBS is a great place for discernment, for questioning what God is calling you to do, and we'll see you next in your life. As a graduate school, we offer several master of arts and master of divinity degrees. We also have a doctor of ministry degree. We also have two graduate certificate programs, and I'll share a little bit about our master's level programs. We have programming both on campus and online. For those of you who are at a distance, there are two programs you can do completely online. We have a master of arts and theology and global anabaptism, and a graduate certificate programs, one in theological studies, one in spiritual direction. Taking advantage of one of these programs will allow you to remain in your home communities, working in your ministry while you study part-time. These study options are also important to people living around the world. So if you join one of these programs, you will experience a global classroom. We offer another program that is mostly online, though we do require a few credits to be earned on campus through intensive hybrid weeks. It's called the master of divinity connect program. It's something that Isaiah spoke about. This is one of our most popular programs because we offer the master of divinity degrees on campus, including degrees in Christian faith formation, theology and peace studies, and more. We do offer scholarships and financial aid, but just to alert you that the scholarship application deadline is March 15, so you don't have to go to college. We offer the master of divinity degrees on campus, including degrees in Christian faith formation, theology and peace studies, but the application deadline is March 15, so you need to have applied for admission prior to then. You can read more about our scholarships on our website, ambs.edu. Maybe you aren't quite sure if graduate studies are for you, and to that I say just try it out. You're welcome to take up to six credits as a guest student prior to going through the admission application process. I recognize this is a quick overview of the academic programs AMBS offers, so I do invite you and encourage you to go to the AMBS website for more information, and in a few days I'll send you an email that summarizes our study options. As our time together comes to an end, I want to express my thanks to you for joining us. I also want to give a special thanks to one of our students, Janet McGeary, for providing technical support for this webinar. And now our president, Dr. David Bushart, will have some parting words for us, and following his words, the webinar is over. You may consider yourselves dismissed. David. Thanks, Mary Ann. And thank you for joining us for this webinar. And about to Smennonite Biblical Seminary is a very special learning community. As you've heard from Dr. Melinda Berry and student Isaiah Friesen, the learning that happens at AMBS encompasses the whole person. At AMBS, we are not just concerned about educating people for knowledge, but the whole knowing doing being cycle. Everyone at AMBS is on the discipleship journey. We are all learners here. We learn from one another, even as teaching happens, whether we are teachers, students, administrators, or staff. AMBS is a place where people are searching for identity, for meaning, for belonging, and all of the layers that Dr. Berry was talking about in her lecture this evening. And I want to assure you that wherever you are on your own discipleship journey, on your own search for meaning in your life, there is a place for you in the learning community at Annabaptist Smennonite Biblical Seminary. And we would love to see you here, studying with us, furthering your journey, seeking meaning, belonging, and identity. Thank you for joining us tonight. May God bless you.