A $55 MILLION CAMPAIGN COMMITMENT
Essential
Because pressing communal crises need an immediate response.
Work that changes lives deserves resources to grow.
Too often, an initiative develops momentum, relationships deepen, and evidence of its value begins to emerge—just as the funding that made it possible approaches its end.
Our challenge is not simply to begin more good work. It is to recognize what is making a difference, learn from it, and give the most consequential work a future. Abundant Spirit will expand Garrett’s intellectual, relational, and financial capacity.
Investment in faculty and scholarship can sustain the thinkers, teachers, and practitioners whose work engages the world’s pressing questions. It can create opportunities for scholarship to reach people beyond the traditional classroom, enriching both academic learning and the communities in which that learning takes root.
Investment in convening and lifelong formation can bring pastors, lay leaders, congregations, scholars, and community partners into sustained conversation. Lectures, retreats, and other gatherings can become places where new relationships form, ideas are tested, and leaders return to their communities better prepared to serve.
Investment in centers, institutes, and strategic partnerships can strengthen the infrastructure through which Garrett works alongside others. It can improve contextual education, support reciprocal relationships, and ensure that promising initiatives do not depend on one person, funding cycle, or moment of enthusiasm.
And investment in the Garrett Collective can extend learning beyond the classroom, project, or community in which it originated—across languages and cultures.
Philanthropy gives scholarship room to engage the world. It helps promising ideas become enduring contributions. And it allows Garrett to build relationships measured not merely by the number of people reached, but by the depth of what becomes possible together.
Balm for an Aching World
A congregation searches for a faithful way forward in a changing neighborhood. A pastor navigates questions of belonging, justice, and community that no single course of study could have anticipated. A lay leader recognizes a need that has long gone unanswered and wonders how to organize people to meet it.
These are not abstract theological questions.
They emerge organically as people worship, work, struggle, celebrate, and care for one another. They ask something of the leaders who encounter them: intellectual depth, spiritual imagination, practical wisdom, and the courage to respond when familiar approaches are insufficient.
For generations, theological seminaries have helped prepare people to engage these concerns. But their formation must extend beyond a degree program. Questions are too urgent. Needs are too varied. And the wisdom required to meet them is too widely distributed to reside within any one institution.
Explore how Garrett bridges connections between church and academy, creates opportunities for contextual learning, and the ways that Abundant Spirit will expand this work.
Community Engagement Stories
Empowering Impact
The Oikos Institute helps Black churches recognize the capital they already possess.
An Investment in the Local Parish
The Center for Ecological Regeneration helps create a “Cathedral for All Creation.”
Nurturing Hope in Chicagoland
Moises Mendez (DMin) guides economic empowerment through vocational training.
Coming Home to Jeong
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
This year, Dr. Wonhee Anne Joh received the prestigious Sejong Academic Book Award for the Korean translation of her landmark work, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology. Awarded each year by the South Korean government, the prize honors scholarly excellence that deepens understanding and appreciation for Korean culture, and ensures that winning books are distributed to libraries, civic buildings and more. This award is even more thrilling because the book’s translator is a Garrett alumna, Dr. Choi Yoojin ’11!
This story embodies the reach and impact you can have when you make a gift. Philanthropy helps give faculty the time and resources they need to author field- and world-changing scholarship. The influence of their work extends far beyond the initial publication. As books are translated into new languages, read in new communities, they create relationships that nurture Christian communities and improve subsequent scholarship.
We must bring faculty scholarship into sustained conversation with pastors, congregations, community organizations, and leaders. Learning must continue throughout people’s lives. And seminaries must listen as deeply as we teach, letting local knowledge shape academic questions.
God’s kingdom will not be brought closer by knowledge alone, but in the collaborative relationships where learning takes root.
Through Abundant Spirit, Garrett has an opportunity to become an even more essential partner: a seminary whose scholarship, formation, and relationships strengthen churches and communities, and whose self-understanding is shaped in response.
The Garrett Collective Brings Theological Education to the People!
The Garrett Collective offers a multilingual, global avenue through which learning developed across Garrett's classrooms, centers, institutes, partnerships, and communities can travel farther and reach people in new ways.
Our aspiration is to engage one million people around the world—not simply by distributing information, but by creating opportunities for meaningful learning, stronger leadership, and continuing connection.
The distinction matters. Reaching someone with a resource is valuable. Helping that person deepen their understanding, strengthen their community, and return to learn alongside others is something more.
Across this vision, relationships are not an activities added to Garrett's academic mission.
A relationship is one way that mission comes to life.
A Faculty That Puts Theology to Work
Engaged scholarship testifies to the brilliance of Garrett’s faculty, but it also reflects the health of Garrett as an institution. Your generous giving creates an environment where academic freedom flourishes.
It helps to fund the sabbaticals, research grants, and travel stipends which nurture excellence and share its fruits. And it brings the very best and brightest thinkers to this community, drawn from more than a dozen countries.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
From the Academy to the Public Square
In the fall of 2025, the Reverend Dr. AHyun Lee published Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. This landmark work is the first book to specifically examine clergy sex abuse in immigrant churches, naming reasons why so many victim-survivors choose not to report and how migrant communities’ overarching political vulnerability can be weaponized to protect perpetrators’ power and shield them from accountability.
During a year filled with news about ICE raids—as federal agents enacted mass deportations here in Chicago and in cities across the country—Dr. Lee’s scholarship became particularly crucial for understanding this immigration policy’s cascading consequences. After delivering a powerful address at the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature annual conference that named deportability as a risk factor for sex abuse, she translated that scholarly work into prominent feature articles. The Christian Century selected “A Betrayal of Refuge” for publication in the magazine’s June print issue, and The Persistent—a prominent feminist news company—published her analysis in the wake of the César Chávez abuse revelations.
This intellectual journey from academic research into public dialogue exemplifies a role Garrett Seminary faculty have long played. While our professors are prominently published in academic journals and scholarly presses, many are also pastors, clinical practitioners, elected officials, and public intellectuals—applying knowledge into practice.
Through annual giving, you offer faculty the freedom to focus on student mentorship and community engagement. Travel grants empower professors to bring their work to professional conferences, connecting with the country’s leading thinkers. Sabbaticals offer rest and freedom to cultivate vibrant life beyond the classroom. All these gifts manifest in the breadth of what they teach—to the Garrett community and beyond.
Extending Our Reach
Garrett’s centers and institutes bring the seminary to local, national, and global communities.
They enrich seminary life through lectures, workshops, and conferences. They also offer new perspectives, resources, and continuing education opportunities to the wider community outside of the seminary.