Viewing seminary study as “a time of exilic self-examination,” Hoch feels “the connection between the church and the seminary appears most starkly in the event of chapel worship … a middle ground between church and classroom.” Through essay, sermon and poetry, this teacher/preacher reflects on the process of being “called,” “equipped” and “sent.” In “Calling,” to be “called to the church” involves a move “from information to vocation, beyond what I know, what I choose, what I prefer, to the kind of person that I ought to be, the kind of person that God would make of me.” “Equipping” emphasizes scholarship that is able “to find its way out of the library, into the classroom, and ultimately into the larger church.” In “Sending,” Hoch does not soften the realities of the world into which we are being sent. “The climate of the seminary can sometimes … look a bit like the church, squaring off over one issue after another, slaughtering sisters and brothers with as many salvos as possible.”
Reminded of the Latin root, seminarum as “nursery,” this tender gardener of hothouse seminarians recognizes “that the church and the narratives we belong to are larger than we are” and that “preaching in such a setting is accented by formative concerns” in which “every classroom … exists in close proximity to the church through chapel, an intersection where church and seminary foster crucially important conversations” and where the sermon serves as the “most delicate expression of God’s compassion in a crushing world.” “We may still be breathing as churches and institutions of higher learning, but it’s ragged breathing, the patterns indicative of institutional and missional health difficult to discern.” The seminary is in a “position to help the whole church recover its vocation as a classroom of the Spirit.”
When he sees the seminary chapel filling with seminary students, Hoch wonders “about the world they are going to, the church they are seeking, the communities that will receive them.” While some predict the “collapse of [the] mutual house[s]” of church and seminary, he perceives the crisis as “an opportunity for constructive visioning of today’s church and its relationship to the classroom” and asks, “How do seminary and church inform each other through shared dialogue and a shared sense of vocation?”
Though the “language of the church and the language of the seminary can interact in incongruous ways,” I recommend this personal and professional collection of essays and sermons. The “sneak peeks” into the exegetical process of sermon construction only add to its value to pastors and seminarians alike.
MARGARET ELLIS HAYWARD is interim pastor at Northwood Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Md.
