Big News Update
Hello all!
As many of you know, I have been working at the Institute for Spiritual Formation (ISF) for over a decade as a professor of spiritual theology. There has been a lot of changes going on for us over the past year, but one of the most significant for me personally is that I am taking over as Director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation. [For the official release, see here.]
I will be replacing my dear mentor and friend John Coe who I also write with (we co-wrote Where Prayer Becomes Real and we just submitted the manuscript for our follow-up book, When God Seems Distant).
Along with taking over as director of ISF I am also directing our Marriage and Family Therapy program, which is now a part of ISF itself. I will oversee as director and will co-lead with Berry Bishop who currently directs the program and who will serve as the associate director.
The obvious question in all of this is: Why?
I am convinced that the church is in desperate need of a Word-centered, Spirit-empowered, whole-life spirituality aimed at the care of souls. To do this faithfully we need to integrate, theologically, a full-orbed understanding of spiritual formation that takes seriously scripture, tradition, and the contemporary conversations about these things in other fields.
Our aim is to have an unapologetically Protestant vision that has sat deeply with an account of spiritual formation that is by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone.
Importantly, one of the distinctive features of our Institute, that permeates all of our degree programs, is a vision of integration that is not simply the integration of ideas. Integration is more than taking a set of theological ideas and slamming them together with philosophical, psychological, or other ideas, like we are running the seminary equivalent of a hadron collider. Instead, theological integration needs to happen in persons.
Integration, in this sense, is integrating more than fields of discourse, but is becoming an integrated human being. This means that the center of all of our considerations is what it means to live all of life before the face of God. Included in this is the reality of knowing as we are known (Gal. 4:9), so that we can love as we have been loved.
One of the guiding values of our programs, both in spiritual formation and in marriage and family therapy, is that our programs are formation-first. What this means is that at the forefront of our curriculum we emphasize the formation of the student. In running programs for the care of souls - which is a task of wisdom and love - our focus is on the devotional, communal, and internal dynamics of growth in the likeness of Jesus.
My friend, and associate director Berry Bishop, established the vision of our MFT degree as a Christ-centered program focusing on the spiritual formation of the therapist. This is the vision we will continue and advance, and is what sets our program apart from every other program I have seen. There is an integrated theological and spiritual vision undergirding and guiding our programs that unite all of our degrees at Talbot.
Talbot is a large and flourishing seminary, with many different degree programs and emphases. Each of these emphases includes a focus on spiritual formation taught by our Institute because we recognize that training in ministry is more than training in academic disciplines, but is always a training in wisdom and love.
In the degrees within ISF specifically, we focus on that completely, addressing communal, ministerial, and devotional dynamics in our life with the Lord that is rooted in scripture, weighed by the tradition, and tested against philosophical and psychological insights and modalities. Our hope, in other words, is to advance the most integrated emphasis on the care of souls in seminary education today.
There can be no doubt that the care of souls is at the heart of the church’s calling, and yet, as recent history has shown us, we are in a crisis. There is a crisis of mental health, pastoral failures, burnout, and sin warping the soul of the church. Too often we simply outsource our care to others, as if the care of souls is somehow outside of the purview of the church. In the face of this reality, we want to recover the care of souls with a biblically-faithful, spiritually-deep, and theologically-rich vision of life in the presence of God.
There is more news coming soon on how we plan to advance this integrated vision. For now, pray for us. Support your seminaries. Demand that we do more than simply train in academic modes, but focus on training for wisdom and for love.
If you don’t know much about Talbot, it is a seminary committed to the training of persons for the sake of ministry that is decidedly Word-centered, Spirit-Empowered, for whole-life service to Christ.
If you think of me, and of us, pray that we would be faithful to the task that the Lord has set before us. Pray that we wouldn’t be tossed by the waves of this world, or the ideologies of this evil age, but that we would embrace a richly Christian vision for the care of souls in the world today. That is our interest and what we all have devoted our lives to.
"The direction of souls is the art of all arts" (Gregory the Great)
So excited for ISF and Talbot to gain your leadership as you continue the great work that John and many others began. It's funny how many regular Talbot students I've seen who, once they get a taste of what you all are doing in ISF through their required spiritual formation classes immediately transfer over and join your program!! If I could go back in time, I would have done the same!!
Blessings to you dear brother as you serve God's people through your work!
This is exciting Kyle. I'm very happy for you, and more so, for the world of spiritual formation within theological educational institutions. For too long it has been about ideas, techniques, methodologies, and programs, when the real end we are called to is to love as God loves. And as you point out, that requires humble wisdom and the wisdom of humility.
Blessings and prayers to and for you as you walk with Jesus in this old/new way -