If you’ve noticed a drought in my posting, there’s a reason. I’ve been spending much of my discretionary writing energy listening to the past, attending to the present, and wondering about the future of a community that has profoundly shaped my life.
I’ve taught at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology since 2004. More than two decades. Long enough to have witnessed remarkable beauty and heartbreaking loss, courageous experiments and painful missteps, seasons of flourishing and seasons when we weren’t entirely sure we’d make it. Long enough to know that an institution is never merely an institution. It is a living web of people, relationships, memories, convictions, wounds, hopes, and holy possibilities.
This fall, I was invited to take a portion of our faculty retreat to share my understanding of the story of our school’s becoming.
I wasn’t attempting to write a comprehensive institutional history. Nor was I trying to defend a particular theological position, settle old arguments, or offer a nostalgic account of some imagined golden age. I wanted to listen for something deeper: What has been unfolding among us across these decades? What has remained remarkably consistent, even as nearly everything around us has changed? What might our shared story reveal about who we are becoming?
As I listened, researched, remembered, and wrote, I began to discern five overlapping movements in our school’s life. Not five neatly sequential eras, but five movements that emerge, recede, overlap, and return. Each, in its own way, seems to express something of the school’s founding imagination. And each appears recursively in the others, as though the school’s deepest commitments keep finding new ways to become embodied.
What began as a relatively modest invitation became something much larger.
I found myself returning to old institutional documents, revisiting conversations, listening to founders and colleagues, and recovering stories that had nearly disappeared from our collective memory. I was reminded how differently people can experience the same institution, and how necessary those differences are if we hope to tell a story with integrity.
The more I wrote, the more I realized that remembering is not simply about retrieving what happened. It is about discerning what we have inherited, including the gifts we cherish, the wounds we carry, the patterns we repeat, and the possibilities we have yet to imagine.
Our president, Dr. J. Derek McNeil, has introduced our community to the wisdom of Sankofa, a West African concept often expressed as the invitation to go back and retrieve what is needed to move forward. That wisdom has become a guiding metaphor for this project.
We do not return to the past to live there. We return because something in our history may be needed for the journey ahead.
Following the faculty retreat, my colleagues encouraged me to develop the work further and offer it as a gift to our Board of Trustees. Our school is entering a significant leadership transition as President McNeil prepares to retire and the Board undertakes the formidable responsibility of calling our next president.
A presidential search necessarily involves questions of leadership, organizational capacity, institutional sustainability, and strategic direction. But it also raises more elemental questions: What kind of community is this? What has G-d been cultivating among us? What must we faithfully carry forward? What might we need to release? And what future is seeking to be born through us?
I’ve come to believe that the story of a community’s becoming can help us ask those questions with greater humility, imagination, and courage.
So, for the past several weeks, I’ve been writing, revising, researching, listening, and revising again. What began as a faculty retreat reflection has become a substantial narrative, provisionally titled The Seattle School’s Becoming: Re-membering Our Story toward a Jesus Way Future.
The hyphen in re-membering matters to me. This is not merely an exercise in recollection. It is also an invitation to bring the scattered members of a story back into relationship—to acknowledge what has been fragmented, honor what has been forgotten, and make room for voices that have not always been heard.
And perhaps that’s part of what I’ve been learning through this writing season: communities, like people, are never finished becoming.
We inherit stories, but we are not imprisoned by them. We receive traditions, but we are not called merely to preserve their ashes. We are invited to tend the living flame.
My hope is that this work might help our Board, faculty, and staff listen more deeply to the Spirit’s invitations as we discern the school’s next chapter. Not because my telling is definitive—it most certainly isn’t—but because a lovingly offered, necessarily partial account might invite other stories, deeper conversations, and a more faithful imagination for what comes next.
I have become increasingly convinced that the heart of our school’s calling is not simply to sustain an institution, but to participate in G-d’s shalom for all and everything. Our educational work, our commitments to theology and psychology, and our three institutional expressions are different ways of participating in that larger calling.
Perhaps the same is true of all our communities. Their deepest identities are not found merely in what they have built or accomplished, but in the quality of life they have sought to cultivate and the love they have dared to embody.
So that’s where I’ve been.
Not absent, exactly. Just immersed in a different kind of writing. A little less public, a little more archival, a little more contemplative, and considerably more demanding than I anticipated.
And I suspect this work has been working on me as much as I’ve been working on it.
I hope to return to this space with renewed energy soon. There are other things stirring—questions about the Jesus Way, public theology, Christian nationalism, faithful presence, and the possibilities of communities becoming agents of healing in a fractured world.
But for now, I’ve been reminded that sometimes the most faithful way to move forward is to turn around, listen carefully, gather what has been scattered, and then face the future together.
May we have the courage to remember truthfully, the humility to recognize that no one holds the whole story, and the imagination to participate in the beauty still becoming.
Toward shalom, for all and everything.
Peace, dwight
