Why Garrett? Why Now?

The shape of Christian life and community is being remade.

Many congregations are in crisis. Younger generations seek spiritual nurture outside their walls. Public trust in institutions is collapsing.The students who answer a call to serve—whether from a pulpit or in the public square—are increasingly precarious, with fewer resources and the burdens of a traumatizing world. In some ways this is a new story, but its broad contours are ancient: moments of disruption have always called forth new forms of faithful leadership.

For nearly two centuries, independent seminaries like Garrett have drawn sustenance from the institutional church. Now we have an opportunity to return that investment through deeper service. Against fierce headwinds, Garrett has emerged as a beacon of innovation and vitality: growing enrollment, widening access without making formation shallow, cultivating faculty imagination, building partnerships, and creating new forms of learning. We can strengthen not only theological education, but the leaders, churches, and communities whose work brings hope and healing to the world.

The defining challenges of this century are not simply technological. They raise deeper questions about what it means to be human, how we ought to live together, and what we owe one another. How will communities hold together amid polarization and declining trust? How will people find belonging in a time of isolation? How will leaders respond to mental health needs, economic uncertainty, environmental disruption, and technologies changing how we live?

Theological education has a vital role in helping people face questions like these. At its best, it joins rigorous scholarship with spiritual formation, moral clarity with humility, and deep conviction with the capacity to listen and act courageously. It forms leaders capable not merely of reacting to change, but of helping communities navigate it faithfully and wisely.

Garrett has a particular vocation in this moment: to form Christian leaders with the wisdom and skills necessary to meet a dramatically changing world and strengthen the communities in which their leadership takes root. Here, theological learning takes shape in relationship—with the communities our students serve, with the questions churches and leaders are confronting, and with voices and wisdom from across the world. Faculty, students, alumni, congregations, practitioners, and partners learn from one another, bringing the depth of particular contexts into conversation with a global community.

Something consequential is at stake. If theological education remains bound to forms fewer people can access, gifted leaders will be lost because answering their call requires sacrifices they cannot responsibly make. If theological schools cannot help churches and communities navigate the world they are actually entering, those communities will increasingly learn to live without the traditions, resources, and wisdom theological education provides. And if institutions capable of sustaining rigorous scholarship, Christian formation, intellectual freedom, global engagement, and preparation for ministry disappear, they cannot easily be recreated when their absence is finally felt.

This is not a departure from Garrett’s mission. It is how that mission must now be lived: with the depth, resilience, and freedom to respond faithfully. That is the future Abundant Spirit is designed to build.