A Truthful Blue Book Report on the State of The General Theological Seminary of The

Episcopal Church
Dear Bishops of The Episcopal Church,
We write to you as former doctoral students at General Theological Seminary (GTS) who were
forced to withdraw from our programs last fall because of the administrations mishandled
response to the recent crisis at the seminary. We are concerned about the disastrous toll this crisis
has taken not only on particular persons livelihoods and vocations at GTS but also about the
future of theological education and ultimately the future of the church. Our purpose, therefore, is
to offer an honest theological and ethical perspective on theological education as it is rooted in
the ministry of all the baptized and to call upon you to help lead the whole church into a muchneeded conversation about theological educations important place in the mission and ministry of
the whole body of Christ.
You recently received a communication from eight of the bishops who sit on the Board of
Trustees of GTS. That letter expressed great anxiety that the churchs ministry, across all
mainline denominations, is facing a rapidly changing world to which it must readily adapt. As
the bishops put it, The Episcopal Church is not the same church it was 100, 50 or even 10 years
ago. Life has changed; our context for mission and ministry have changed [sic]. Systems must be
more agile, adaptive and lean. These bishops now call upon you to join them in solidarity by
justifying their actions during this crisis on the basis of a decisive need for change.
And indeed the administration of GTS has made widespread changes to the basic structures of
GTS: a full tenured Faculty has been reduced almost completely to replaceable adjunct labor; an
institution formerly premised on the basic baptismal notion of the collaboration of all members
of the community has been transformed into an insulated hierarchy in which collaborative
community has no place; the seminary now exempts itself from requirements for safe space,
failing to provide basic structures of accountability for accusations of discrimination and
harassment; students are now understood to be consumers, bishops and dioceses customers.
Worse still, these bishops have failed to tell you the disastrous effect these changes have had on
the basic building blocks of every institution: its people.
In their letter to you, the eight bishops made no mention of the great exodus of students these last
few months; nothing of the fact that seven of the eight protesting Faculty are gone; nothing of the
decimation of the only ThD program in an Episcopal seminary to which we are witnesses;
nothing of the staggering loss of staff; nothing of the considerable financial and psychological
cost their intransigence has exacted not only on students but also on their families and loved
ones; nothing of the few, dejected, and considerably ill-formed MDiv, MA, and other students
that remain. They know that the seminarys substantial endowment has been egregiously
mismanaged and that the incoming class of Fall 2014 was reduced by 30% by mid-semester.
Scholars, postulants for priesthood, deacons, lay theologians, spiritual directors, faculty
members, and otherswe all came to GTS because we discerned that this was a place committed

to nurturing the flourishing of our baptismal vocations and our spiritual gifts. We believed our
vocations for theological education belonged to the church and its ministry, not academia, and
that GTS was the place to nourish those gifts. But the Dean and Board treated our vocations as
commodities to be bought and sold. The seminarys response to its crisis was dehumanizing to
us, and it has maligned the baptismal dignity of persons involved: faculty members and students
like us, as well as our spouses, partners, and children, our homes and our jobs.
Even now the seminary sends fundraising letters from current students who used to be our
colleagues and other invested parties of faculty and alumni. Such responses are shortsighted, as
are the remaining faculty whose silence allowed injustice to thrive, and the replacement
faculty who have sought personal advancement at others expense. They are shortsighted and
callous because they ignore the ways we, along with the Faculty, have become the collateral
damage of change, treated as less than human, and how our families lives have been turned
upside down. These appeals give no account of the children of faculty members and students
who have been removed from their homes and their schools; how spouses and partners have lost
friends, employment, and church homes; how basic spiritual discernment and even faith have
been disrupted. They do not mention that some have been pushed out of the church, for good. As
bishops of the church called to care for all members of Christs body, this should concern you
greatly.
Thus, in the light of what change has meant for the real lives of people caught in the middle of
this conflict, the attempt of these eight bishops to associate the crisis at GTS with an undeniable
need for change, which all mainline churches are facing, is shameful in its cynicism and deceit.
In no way have the actions of the Dean and Board of Trustees of GTS during this long crisis
been truly concerned with the future of the church in the new mission field to which all baptized
Christians are called. Rather, their actions represent the intransigence of obsolete structures
operating at their very worst to bend the gospel of Jesus Christ to their own interests.
Indeed, while Dean Dunkle himself called for this same sort of change in his peculiar widelycirculated letter to the beloveds of Gods church in the world (October 3, 2014) he also
obliquely suggested that the Faculty represented entrenched interests eager (and vocal) to return
to the way it used to be at General. By framing their letter in terms of the demand for change
amidst a changing world, these eight bishops likewise intentionally cast the conflict at GTS as
one between the visionary leadership of a forward-looking Dean and a recalcitrant, privileged
Faculty. We can tell you, however, that this is an intentional and scandalous misrepresentation.
The vision the Faculty set forth in their Way of Wisdom declaration proposed widespread and
comprehensive changes to the entire curriculum and mode of life at the seminary. Clearly the
Faculty are not resistant to change; they were concerned, however, with the kind of change
necessary to theological education and its place at GTS and in the wider church. Their bold and
visionary declaration respected theological education as a basic gift that belongs to the ministry
of all the baptized. In it, these Faculty also gave our own gifts a place, truly carving out a space
for our voices and our particular ministries within the church. It is an expansive and inclusive
vision. Contrast this with the administrations diminutive vision of changean insulated world
for which GTSs Close, with its wrought-iron gates, is a perfect metaphorwhich is fixated on
a leadership of exception and domination and workers as cheap, replaceable labor.

Misrepresenting the truth of the situation at GTS, as these eight bishops and other recent
communications from the seminary have done, helps no one. It further empowers a floundering
and aimless Dean and Board of Trustees, while specifically inhibiting the kind of true healing
that is necessary at GTS. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents us from having the more pressing
conversation about the real integrity of theological education within the mission of the church
and its importance to our future. This is a conversation we as lay theologians are eager to engage
in, and one to which the Faculty at GTS offered a comprehensive vision in their Way of Wisdom
declaration. Unfortunately, that vision was largely silenced by the leadership of the seminary.
Our common calling in baptism carries specific ethical obligations. As we seek to be faithful to
the mission of God in this world, we all vow in baptism to seek justice and peace and to respect
the dignity of every human being. In doing so, we align our lives with the most basic dictum of
Israels Torah: Gods gratuitous creation of humanity in the image and likeness of the living
God. In Genesis, that image is tied in a special way to our work, the charge we are given to tend
and nurture the flourishing of creation and one anothers lives. What is often translated as our
having dominion over creation really means we are to attend to the worlds needs, to sustain it
and the lives of our fellow creatures. That labor is what Gods image in us is.
This is why Scripture speaks so passionately against the mistreatment and exploitation of
laborers. When our work is most free, most vitally alive, then the image of God is most fully
realized and creation itself flourishes. But the oppression, frustration, or exploitation of laborers
and their work not only hinders life but assaults human dignity and, by extension, Gods good
creation. Laborers share in Gods own creative labor. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that any
attempt to connect the kind of change God wants for us to the exploitation and mistreatment of
human labor is simply a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.
Sabbath is thus more than rest from labor; it is the celebration that reveals our sharing in Gods
eternal delight in creating (Exod 31:15). We attend especially to the needs of the poor and
oppressed, the orphaned and widowed, the stranger because they are the ones for whom
we labor. They are the ones most likely to be forgotten or shut out from the dignified care of
creation. Managers are commanded not to withhold wages until morning because to do so, as
Leviticus says, is to steal from (oppress, extort) the laborer (Lev 19:13). Isaiah insists that
religious practices are meaningless when coupled with the unjust treatment of workers (Isa 58:3).
The New Testament is no different. James commands Christians not to extort wages because the
cries of the worker goes immediately to Gods ears (Jas 5:4). Jesus comes announcing the light
burden of those who bear his yoke. Indeed, the very biblical vision of salvation is summarized in
the moment when shalom and justice (or fairness) kiss each other (Ps 85:10). In the economy of
Gods work of salvation, no labor is truly for buying and selling but exists only for the
proliferation of Gods shalom. Shalom is not simply peace (or the absence of conflict) but the
active presence of restoration, renewal, righteousness, justicethe wholeness of relationship.
Unfair and inequitable treatment of workers is a sin against Gods shalom, a violation of human
dignity, and so of Gods creation.
All catholic Christian communities acknowledge the importance of this link between labor and
the image of God, and so also the place of labor rights in social ethics. Vatican IIs Constitution

of the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), for example, declares: Among the basic
rights of [the human person] (personae humanae) is to be numbered the right of freely founding
unions for working people (III.2.68), linking this basic right explicitly to the dignity of the
image of God (I.12). Our own General Convention has passed numerous recent resolutions,
echoing Gaudium et Spes (see, e.g., resolutions 2006-C008, 2006-A125, 2006-D047, 2009D039, 2009-C083, 2009-D032, and especially 2012-D028). Indeed, our Book of Common Prayer
clearly affirms that that our social obligations are inseparable from our daily life as baptized
Christians.
If this is the guiding vision of Scripture, our Christian heritage, and our common baptismal
vocation; if this is the vision that stands at the root of the basic ethical teaching of the Christian
church; if this is what God wills for those who labor to proclaim salvationhow, may we ask, is
it possible that the Christian men and women of Generals Board of Trustees, some of them
bishops of the church, have treated us, other students and staff, and especially the protesting
Faculty as they have?
It is this biblical ethics that the Board has most egregiously distorted in their treatment of the
Faculty. Having sought respectfully and discreetly to correct the breakdown in their working
relationship with the Dean, and under conditions that they found increasingly unbearable, the
Faculty were ignored or rebuffed. Warning leaders on repeated occasions that the situation was
reaching a breaking point, no action was taken. And when they finally acted in such a way that
they could no longer be ignored, asking simply that the Board meet with them, they were
summarily fired. That decision cannot plausibly be defended as consistent with Christian
witness, theology, ethics, or the churchs mission. It is, by all scriptural accounts, a violation of
the dignity of the image of God, pure and simple.
These facts are of special concern to us as doctoral students at GTS. Because we are lay
theologians, the spiritual gifts bestowed on us by the Holy Spirit at baptism are for teaching and
service to the church through theological education. This is our work as baptized members of
Christs body. These gifts and that work belong in the church. It is the only place they can truly
thrive. However, the actions of the seminarys leadership this year have said to the whole church
that these gifts are superfluous, expendable products to be bought and sold like commodities.
They have turned away our deepest desires to serve Christ in the church and the world, and have
left us to fend for ourselves.
In her recent Commencement Address at GTS, the Presiding Bishop praised this leadership,
saying that sometimes we need reckless leaders to make the changes necessary for our survival
in the future. Dear bishops, the kind of change enacted by the Dean, Board, and these eight
bishops, including the Presiding Bishop, requires us all to be willing publicly to embrace the
violation of the most basic dignity of human life as revealed to us in Scripture, to build a future
for our church that explicitly refuses to participate in Gods own way of working and creating. It
is a church in which our gifts have no place; where we are expendable and our labor is exploited;
where, instead of being integral members of the Body of Christ, we are all of us reduced to
numbers in an accounting ledger, customers and consumers only. Such a future is opposed to all
that we are as The Episcopal Church. It is opposed to the ethical orientation of our common
baptism. It is opposed to Scripture and Gods will for the churchs mission in the world.

Here, we commend to you once again the facultys Way of Wisdom declaration as a true, biblical
vision of change. They claim that truly transformative change in theological education will
actively reconnect with the life of the church in order to recover its purpose within the mission
and ministry of all the baptized. It will reject the false separation of spiritual life from theological
reflection because it has distorted the purpose of teaching in the Churchs life and damaged the
formation of laypersons, priests, and bishops. It will promote collaborative work across the
whole church to promote an integration of theological education with the mission and ministry of
the whole church, an extension of our baptismal mission in the world.
Baptismal life is in fact our most basic vocation as Christians. Martin Luther said that baptism,
though it only happens once, is a reality we never get beyond, but is a daily dying and rising
with Christ. The Spirit richly bestows distinct gifts on the whole church in the baptisms of each
one of us. Those who receive gifts for theological education fulfill their baptismal calling in their
labor of service to the whole church. The church has no other mission than to deepen and expand
the ministry these gifts support. Not even ordination transcends our basic baptismal calling, but
only deepens it. In this water-bath of rebirth, we all set our faces with Jesus toward Jerusalem,
marked with his cross forever. And marked as his own, we are never free to commend any
system that impugns this basic baptismal vocation. We are not free to define value in any other
terms.
Two paths stand before us: one paved by the labor of all the baptized, the other by those who
claim power and use it to perpetuate outdated systems that rule our world. What kind of future
our church will have depends on the kind of change we now enact. For we have much to give the
church that is built up by our common baptismal labor; indeed, we will give the whole of our
lives and all that we are. If the future of the church lies with the vision of change offered by the
Dean, the eight bishops, and the Board of GTS, then our work, our lives, our families, our wellbeing, they are all as expendable as these eight brave faulty members. We pray you will choose
the way of wisdom.
With urgency and in the Peace of Christ,
J. David Belcher and Shane R. Brinegar