What Will CTS Look Like Next Year?

Editorial:


(Written for the CTS Prophet student newspaper)

What Will CTS’ Community Look Like Next Year?



If you participated in last week’s Chapel service organized by ISO [International Students' Organization, you should have heard the message loud and clear: Community is important to us. It has been in the past, and despite major changes in student housing, it continues to be a top concern.



Some of you know I was around for Benny Liew’s Gospels class a year ago, before deciding to transfer here. During that time, I got to know about community life here through that class and mooching off Community Lunch, thanks to hospitable classmates who waved me in. I have been thinking how the life of the community, or at least the student body, has changed since then.



I’ve heard from students who have been here longer than me that McGiffert functioned as the center of community life. Not just in friendships and close proximity, but in on-campus and community organizing also. It was space for international students especially to be visible and integrated with the rest of our seminary community—particularly spouses and children who can’t work in this country and don’t know anyone else. Those needs are still there, even if student housing isn’t.



As I look around now, I wonder where the center of our community is. What pulls us all together? Is it class? We are spread out among many classes and different days, and there are many people from my orientation group I haven’t seen since September. Is it worship? Well…we can really turn out for our faculty tenure celebrations, but other days it’s a little sparse. So I started asking around, and the consensus arrived at was: ....lunch. Lunch? Uff-da.



For some of us, our life realities—families, work, and long distances—mean that we simply can’t be here as much as we would like. For others, we arrive at seminary having left our former lives behind, and are starting from scratch. We’re looking for community along with classes, a place to belong and a place to matter.



Except perhaps for those of us camped out on George Commons couches, we are now a 100% commuter campus. This year we still have a core of people who used to live together on campus that keep the rest of us together in this diaspora, but as time passes, our community life faces radical change. Will we become the kind of campus where most students just show up, take their classes, and leave, and whatever community that happens is, at best, accidental? Will we continue to think of ourselves as too-small, too-poor, too-busy, and too-stressed to get involved in life beyond the books? Will seminary become for us a mere inconvenience on the way to hoped-for better things in our futures?



We will have to change also, to keep what we hold most precious about this place. We need to work together to find creative solutions to our housing problem. We students will have to pitch in more to help Alison and Neil organize community life. I am grateful that we now have the newspaper as another way to meet the need for communication in this place, and particularly to get to know each other better. I am hopeful for a good student government, that even when we can’t all be here all the time, we will have people we trust to raise our voices and needs when it counts. Finish finals and rest up over Winter Break, and come back in the new term ready to help us all through these times.