Institutional Change in the Church: A Theological Reflection

Background to change

Since 2017, I have served as principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College, widely known simply as “Dio.” Founded in 1873 as an Anglican institution, since 1914 Dio has been part of a consortium that delivers ecumenical theological education in conjunction with McGill University. The partners in the consortium have occasionally changed over the years to reflect changes coincident with the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925 but the most stable model has been Dio; The Presbyterian College, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of Canada; and the United Theological College (UTC), associated with the United Church of Canada. From 1968 to 2021, these three colleges pursued largely parallel tracks recruiting, training, and preparing students for ordained ministry through a shared agreement with McGill, shared ministerially focused courses among the colleges, and a shared accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. The consortium has been known by various names but for the last two decades has worked under the name the Montreal School of Theology (MST).

This extensive and rich set of interinstitutional relationships allowed the schools to survive in spite of their small size and to focus on Christian ministry in the unique context of French-speaking Canada. In particular, the relationship with McGill University ensured that a large portion of the academic portion would be delivered by the university while students remained affiliated with a college. But there were also drawbacks to the system. The colleges had many similar functions—development, recruitment, student registry services—but pursued these largely in isolation from one another. Governance was cumbersome. Each of the colleges, as well as MST, has its own governance body, meaning that there have been at times more people involved in governance of the institutions than there were students. The cooperative nature of the agreements meant that decisions are often reached and made by consensus. One result was significant organizational redundancy and complexity. At a time of diminishing student numbers with the consequent impact on finances, this redundancy and complexity imposed costs of money, time, and people that were increasingly difficult to bear. Three factors led to change: an impending accreditation visit, frustration of all who worked within the system at the costs the system imposed on us, and a change in leadership that opened the door to new conversations. Informal conversations among the principals about the strategic direction of the consortium led in 2019 to the striking of a joint taskforce to make recommendations for institutional change. As this process was unfolding, it became clear in 2020 that UTC was approaching a state of financial exigency that would necessitate the sale of its building. This raised questions about the future viability of UTC’s work as well as an obvious practical problem: where would the college be located if it no longer owned a building?

This, then, is the necessary background to a story of institutional transformation. There was on the one hand a consortium of colleges that inherited a rich set of gifts: a long-standing relationship with one of Canada’s leading universities; assets, including buildings, and endowments, that had built up over decades; and a culture of cooperation and consensus among institutions that were aligned with complementary senses of vision and mission. On the other hand, there was the pressure of finances in the face of increasing costs and decreasing revenue as well as the cost that come from working within a complex system. There was also a shared recognition that the existing system was no longer fit for purpose and a desire to study this system and make recommendations for change. Finally, there was the spark that was provided by personnel change and the exigency of one of the member institutions.

Exploring change

Over the course of nine months, the taskforce struck by the colleges conducted extensive self-study, interviewed the heads of other theological colleges that had recently undergone major transformation, and worked with a higher education consultant. In April 2020, it offered a final report that outlined a path to amalgamating the three colleges into a single institution and offered legal, financial, and other research to support this idea. This final report proposed a motion authorizing a continuation group to pursue amalgamation further. Coming as it did at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, this report did not have its intended effect. The governing bodies of the colleges did not lend their full support to the motion or the idea of a continuing group. Instead, these boards independently arrived at a similar conclusion: press pause on work toward amalgamation and pursue bilateral conversations between the colleges in the summer of 2020 instead. It was in these bilateral conversations that the strong overlap in work between Dio and UTC became evident. In the ensuing months, as UTC took steps to sell its building, this relationship developed further and the outlines of an agreement began to emerge.

In January 2021, Dio and UTC publicly announced an agreement for what we called a “strategic alliance.” It was a carefully chosen phrase and one that we hoped indicated that what was envisioned was a period of exploration and deeper cooperation. Under the terms of this agreement, Dio undertook new responsibilities for United Church theological education, including delivering an educational program that met the requirements for ordination in the United Church of Canada and employed sufficient staff for this purpose. For the period of the strategic alliance, Dio also agreed to offer its principal to oversee both this program and the broader relationship with United Church constituencies such that the interim principal of UTC could move toward her planned retirement and not be replaced. UTC agreed to move forward with the sale of its building and guaranteed a minimum level of income to Dio in line with its expected income for the year. Importantly for UTC, it retained ownership of its assets and preserved their capital value, leaving itself options for the future that it could explore independently if it chose to. The term of the strategic alliance was for eighteen months, from January 2021 to summer of 2022. The first six months were spent in the sale of the building and moving into Dio’s premises, and then there was a single academic year to try out the shared arrangement of separate programs cohabiting under a single roof with shared staff. The most crucial aspect of the strategic alliance was the commitment to a planning process to explore and make proposals for a future relationship beyond the term of the strategic alliance. So, in summer 2021, with the move complete, a small steering group of Board members from the two institutions began to meet for precisely this work.

As principal of one of the member colleges, my work in negotiating the terms of the strategic alliance and then serving on the strategic planning taskforce occupied much of my attention. Yet—somewhat to my surprise—I found this to be a surprisingly fertile period for theological reflection. My experience of this work was deepening my reflection on some key questions that have long been part of my vocation.

An overriding question, I began to realize, is about the nature of the church. In a class on mission, I have often taught my students about the debate in the 1950s coincident with the emergence of the term missio Dei, the mission of God. The Dutch theologian, Johannes Hoekendijk, emphasized the centrality of shalom and the kingdom of God and wanted to relegate the church to a mere instrument, if that, of action in the world. Ecclesiology, he wrote, “does not fit” in his missiology. ³ By contrast, the Church of South India bishop and later secretary of the International Missionary Council Lesslie Newbigin made the witness of the church central to the mission of Christians: “A salvation whose very essence is that it is corporate and cosmic . . . must be communicated in and by the actual development of a community which embodies—if only in foretaste—the restored harmony of which it speaks. A gospel of reconciliation can only be communicated by a reconciled fellowship.” ⁴ With the hindsight of history, Newbigin, I am convinced, was right. The church—the life of the Christian community—has an integrity we must respect. The Church, as the Second Vatican Council (drawing on Newbigin’s work) would phrase it, is a sacrament and a sign of the relationship of God and humanity. ⁵ As a student of mission history and a participant in the life of the church today I am, of course, aware of the many ways in which the church has been complicit in wrongdoing in the past and the messy reality of the church’s actual existence today. Like many others, including the Episcopal theologian Verna Dozier, I have sought to draw a distinction between the church as “institution” and the church as “body of Christ.” ⁶ St. Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ has resonated with me: individuals within the church are given different gifts and it is only by living in such a way that these gifts can be released for the good of the whole that we can apprehend the truth of the gospel and live as Christ’s body in the world. Time and again in my life and ministry, I found myself tempted to say, “I have no need of you,” only to realize that is precisely the thing I cannot say. For all of these reasons, the church makes theological sense to me.

My work with the UTC helped me develop my ecclesiological thinking further in two distinct fashions. First, the church may be institutional but it is not a single institution. Rather, it is a collection of institutions. These include parishes and congregations, diocesan offices, theological colleges, national or regional church bodies, para-church ministries, and others. This thinking was crystallized for me in the recognition that in the context I was encountering we were dealing with separate institutions with separate financial accounts, separate governance and accountability structures, separate charitable registrations, and separate legal charters granting the power to confer degrees. Each of these institutions in turn was related to a whole other set of church and non-church institutions who had a stake in its future. If we were interested in transformation, we would have to pay attention to all of these institutional realities. As principal of Dio, I had a fiduciary responsibility to my institution. Often, this fiduciary responsibility acted as a theological security blanket. For some time, it was the first and often only place I turned to when I considered how to work through a difficult situation: how will this affect Dio’s bottom line? What I came to realize is that the process of transformation would transform what my responsibility was directed toward. I needed to come to share responsibility for the bottom line of the entire consortium. We were only as strong as our weakest member.

This was not just a financial realization but a theological one as well. I saw that the logic of the body of Christ can give us insight not simply into the life of a collection of individuals who seek to share a life in Christ but also to the collection of institutions that are collectively known as the church. While it was true that I have a fiduciary responsibility to the single institution that gives me a paycheck, I could not let that set the confines of our ministry. Much as I want my individual students to be enabled to release their gifts for the good of the whole body, I wanted Dio to be able to release its gifts so that these gifts enriched other institutions. Moreover, I wanted Dio to help create an environment such that other institutions could release their gifts as well and Dio could receive them.

There are, however, limits to this line of thinking. Human beings in Christ are new creations with whom I am called to reconciled relationship. Church institutions are not made in the image of God and do not have an innate dignity as human beings do. It is right and proper that some church institutions cease to exist. I was not called as the leader of an institution to indefinitely overextend myself to ensure that certain institutions continue in existence out of some misguided sense of tradition or inertia. There is a challenge of discernment that is very real. Happily, the final decisions needed to be made not by me but by our Board of Governors who authorized the beginning of these negotiations, supported the process in a prayerful and critical spirit of discernment, and reached the decision that the strategic alliance was a faithful expression of our mission and calling in the world.

These reflections on the institutional church were complemented by further reflections on the nature of Christian hospitality. The prompt to my mind was the line from the Rule of Saint Benedict: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” ⁷ Having been the recipient of Benedictine hospitality in the past, I am well acquainted with this generosity and grateful for it. (Indeed, I have often had in mind a joke told to me by a Benedictine monk: What does a Benedictine say when a stranger knocks on his door? Jesus Christ, is that you again?) When UTC’s exigency and need to find a new home became clear, these Benedictine thoughts came to mind unbidden: when another theological college shows up at your door, welcome them in! This hospitality was manifest in two important aspects of the agreement that helped the strategic alliance move forward: Dio’s decision not to charge UTC rent during this period and Dio’s decision to continue to pay the entire salary of the principal while extending my responsibilities to cover the new United Church relationship.

But hospitality is never just about what the host gives to the guest. It is about the way in which the host is transformed by the guest. As Dio created space within its walls for UTC’s people and programming, what Dio had once encountered from the safety of institutional separation and somewhat distant ecumenism became much more present. Ways of prayer and worship, of eating and sharing common life, of relating to other staff members and students, suddenly were unavoidable. This did create tension and friction. Mostly, it led to generative conversation and deeper relationship, particularly among the students. Dio began to realize it was being transformed as well by this act of hospitality. This in turn deepened the transformation begun in the strategic alliance.

Institutional transformation

The planning process called for in the strategic alliance unfolded over ten months between June 2021 and April 2022. The group leading the process met regularly and contracted with an external consultant who was invaluable in facilitating our work, surveying various constituencies, and holding us accountable to our process and our hopes. An important part of the process was a two-day meeting of the combined governors of the two colleges that worked through a range of possibilities and established incarnate relationships between people who had previously only known each other on Zoom. This gathering made clear a shared desire to establish a combined, shared institution on a long-term basis and led to the creation of several sub-committees focused on specific tasks. All of this work fed into the drafting of two documents: a covenant between the two colleges expressing the shared hopes and aspirations that would come from a deeper relationship as well as a legal agreement outlining the bare minimum of action from each side necessary to establish the groundwork for those aspirations to be realized. Though the conversations ranged across a huge number of topics, three areas of focus occupied the bulk of our time, attention, and dispute: the identity and governance of any shared institution; the staffing model and budget of a shared institution; and the place of French-language education and preparation for bilingual ministry. I want to speak about each in turn.

I would imagine that questions of identity are at the heart of any institutional transformation. People naturally become invested in and attached to a particular institution and there is a range of emotions when it needs to transform or disappear. What became clear in our work was that Dio would provide the legal and institutional “backbone”—through its legal charter and charitable registration—of a combined institution. This meant that UTC would cease to exist. In order for this to happen, it needed assurances that its values and ethos would continue in the programming of a combined college. At the same time, precisely because of Dio’s experience of hospitality, it could no longer remain the same. In addition to making programming commitments necessary to satisfy UTC that its work would continue, Dio realized it also would have to change. Rather than defining itself as an Anglican institution, as it did in its constitution, it would amend its constitution to understand itself as an ecumenical institution and require representation from the United Church of Canada on its governing bodies. Through conversation and discussion, the two colleges came to understand that the amended constitution needed to require equitable representation of Anglican and United Church members. The formal legal change was a reflection of the changes that arose from the act of hospitality. Offering hospitality had allowed for the institutions to be transformed: one formally disappeared but ensured that its ethos was carried forward within the transformed remaining institution.

Still, not everything was agreed. If Dio was transformed and UTC no longer existed, should the college not therefore operate under a new name? This was the most challenging question and raised questions not only of identity but also of legality, strategy, publicity, and communication. Ultimately, the answer was delayed. Dio continues to operate as Montreal Diocesan Theological College and advertises a “United Church Studies Program at Dio.” A broader conversation about institutional name will be part of a forthcoming trategic planning process.

Another major area of conversation was budget and staffing models. Given the resources potentially available to a combined institution, what was necessary and what was possible in terms of employment models? This likewise required extensive research—if the United Church of Canada was to approve this program what sort of staffing profile did they require?—and ultimately agreement was reached in a way that reduced employment costs and ensured the successful delivery of the program. By removing some institutional complexity, the combined institution was able to redirect savings into enhancing the staff team in important ways.

The final and major area of conversation concerned UTC’s long-standing commitment to French-language theological education and the preparation of students for bilingual ministry. It was this commitment that was an appealing part of the relationship to some Anglican constituents who had long admired what UTC was able to do. Yet there were significant obstacles to folding this programming into Dio’s work. In the Quebec context, the United Church of Canada is further advanced in reaching francophone populations. The Anglican Church of Canada has historically had greater struggles in this regard. (The clue is in the name.) Both colleges needed to work through their perceptions and misperceptions of the other and the church it represented. UTC in particular needed to be reassured that Dio had the leadership and commitment necessary to carry forward this important work. In this regard, the most helpful step was to be as concrete and specific as possible. A sub-committee with both Anglican and United Church members worked together to outline shared high-level programmatic commitments as well as the concrete steps necessary to implement those commitments successfully. This provided the groundwork for an informed conversation at the Board of Governors that demonstrated sufficient support to move forward. Meanwhile, an external grant application yielded ongoing financial support for this aspect of the work and was vital in reassuring all concerned that there was support and the reasonable possibility of success.

In addition to the matters recounted here, there was much else that needed resolution. A vital piece was communication with the colleges’ external partners, a surprisingly long list given the relatively small size of the two institutions, and including denominational bodies, partner institutions, accreditors, alumni, students, and others. Nothing about this was an easy or straightforward process. At several moments, everything seemed likely to collapse. The strategic alliance provided for either party to walk away from continued relationship in the summer of 2022. The work and the commitment of the members of the steering committee to one another were vital. Each faithfully represented their own institutions but also held on to a vision of what could be possible through deepened cooperation and relationship. The planning committee itself became a microcosm of the multilingual, multidenominational community we were seeking to bring into being. The trust and goodwill engendered in these frequent meetings, along with a consultant who held us accountable to the goals we set for ourselves, flowed down to the work of the various sub-committees and task groups and ultimately resulted in the covenant and agreement that set out the terms of a combined ecumenical college with an exciting and sustainable future.

There was a further factor as well that contributed to our success, though it was mostly invisible to members of the Boards of Governors: our students. Uniquely among members of the planning committee, I was experiencing the life of the strategic alliance on a daily basis while also working toward a sustainable combined college through countless meetings. I soon came to realize that the students were farther ahead in this work than those of us in the planning process were. On a daily basis, I saw developing new and deeper relationships between siblings in the body of Christ who had previously known each other only at a distance. I saw the way in which Dio students generously extended hospitality to those who were new to the premises. I saw how all students were reaching deep into their Christian tradition as they understood it to offer these riches for the good of the whole. I saw how naturally they assumed that a single institution was the way theological education should move forward. Again, this was not without conflict. There were disagreements, sharp at times, about the nature and practice of worship, doctrine, and other matters. But there was a deep reservoir of goodwill and faithfulness that helped turn these challenges into constructive moments. I came to realize that the job of the planning committee was simply to help work out a structure to support what the community of students was already realizing. The structure we devised was not forced on an unwilling community, I think, but was an expression of what they were already becoming. Johannes Hoekendijk encouraged Christians to get out into the world and join in the action of God, a call that is often repeated in the church today. The danger of this language is that it can make it seem like God is only active in the world and not within our institutions. In this instance, the reconciling Spirit was present in the lives of our combined community and our job was to join in with that work. The challenge is again one of discernment. Where is God at work and how can we structure ourselves so that we are as free as possible to join in? God was at work in our institutional relationships.

During one meeting with students to share with them what was taking place, one perceptive student asked me,

We can see the way in which the church is going and it is likely that in our ministry we will have to deal with a situation like the one our two colleges are dealing with. What advice do you have for us when we reach that point?

In a sense, this essay is my response. The challenges facing Christians today, particularly those who lead institutions in the church, can seem insurmountable. The Covid-19 pandemic will almost certainly bring forward institutional change in the church in ways that we are only beginning to recognize and understand. It would be a mistake, however, to allow the pressure of these challenges to push theology to the side for a focus solely on the bottom line of institutional survival. As I experience theology, it provides me the resources to grapple with precisely the challenges that are before institutional leaders and it provides the inspiration necessary to work toward the transformation that is so vitally needed. In deepening my thinking about the nature of the church, the centrality of Christian hospitality, and the importance of people committing to people in the context of the Christian faith, I was able to help this process move forward.

Our work of transformation in Montreal is not complete. An ecumenical Montreal Diocesan Theological College remains in consortium with the Presbyterian College. We need to continue to explore the transformation of our programs to ensure they serve our church. Still, for a century the UTC and Montreal Diocesan Theological College have operated in parallel along University Street in Montreal. For much of that time, that structure of separation likely made sense. It no longer does and through a process of prayer, theological reflection, and hard work the institutions have now been transformed into a combined college that is better suited to minister in the world in which it finds itself now.