Leading With Love: A Campaign for Andover Newton Seminary
Community and Education
Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School empowers leaders to bring healing to the world through God’s abundant love.
Students and faculty experience an academic community that serves the mind, heart, and soul. Embracing students in their wonderful diversity, Andover Newton is engaging in the conversations needed to address evolving trends in Christian life.
Today, Andover Newton is living into its mission to educate inspiring leaders for faith communities by committing to a $6 million campaign to endow a new faculty chair named in honor of Newton’s first African-American graduate George Washington Williams, grow endowed scholarships aimed at improving access to theological education and eliminating seminary debt, and funding a reimagined travel program called Emmaus Encounters: Building Community on the Road.
Building on Tradition, Shaping the Future
As part of Yale Divinity School, Andover Newton honors its history of innovation. In 2018, it designed and adopted a new educational model: a diploma program strategically tailored to fit the needs of Christian ministry today. This sustainable model offers the best of two worlds: a small seminary culture within a world-class university Divinity School. The curriculum forms students holistically for ministry in locally governed faith communities.
Unlike so many other settings of higher learning, even graduate theological schools, Andover Newton remains passionate about the church, which itself ministers in a world of evolving needs. People seek connection, community, and a sense of belonging. Churches can and are fulfilling this need. Leadership is essential to the church’s capacity to respond to the times.
Tuned into what ministers need to know…
The overlapping crises of political division, a catastrophic public health crisis, a reckoning with systemic racism, and widening economic disparities unearthed overwhelming, intergenerational pain. The specter of climate collapse due to global warming looms over all these crises, challenging our capacities for activism and hope. The world needs settings of theological reflection and moral reasoning. Just as it has so many times in the past, Andover Newton has stepped into the breech of preparing leaders to ensure such spaces’ continuity.
Leading with Love: A Campaign for Andover Newton Seminary
While Andover Newton is on dry ground now, the water is rising for all theological schools and the churches their graduates serve. Now is the time to strengthen the school’s foundation to ensure a vibrant future. Andover Newton is taking a bold stance of hope for faith communities’ ongoing relevance and potential. Philanthropic support will make this vision a reality. Investing in this campaign will make a difference immediately for students and will shift the landscape for students and churches of the future.
Yale University, in which Andover Newton is embedded, launched its “For Humanity” capital campaign in the fall of 2022, and its timing coincides with the Leading with Love campaign. As a seminary passionate about creating communities, your support for Andover Newton will be best understood as a gesture of love: for God, for the church (as it is, and as it can become), for humanity, and for all creation.The George Washington Williams endowed faculty chair to honor the past and shape the future…
Andover Newton has two faculty positions under its direct purview at Yale Divinity School, and only one is currently endowed. The other will not only become endowed through this campaign, but it will be designated to focus on issues relevant to historically marginalized populations and churches. The church must play a role in addressing those issues in our nation, and our students must learn to do meaningful social justice ministry in their churches.
George Washington Williams was Newton Theological Institute’s first African-American graduate. He was a pastor, statesman, historian, and advocate for the freedom of all people. Learn more…
An open door through student financial support…
To assist in eliminating financial barriers for aspiring leaders, Andover Newton is collaborating with Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School (an Episcopal embedded partner) to provide robust student financial support. The support will allow any student who is qualified and called to enter the Andover Newton program and discern their callings without constant worry over seminary debt. The extended Andover Newton community emphasized and supported this goal early on in Andover Newton’s time at Yale. Along with the named, endowed funds transferred from Massachusetts, Andover Newton raised an additional $1.25M in new endowed scholarship funds between FY ’20 and FY ’22. Learn more…
Emmaus Encounters: Building Community on the Road…
If one were to name a single ministerial competency most needed in the world of alienation and fragmentation, it would be building community. As a residential seminary community, Andover Newton is uniquely situated to create and share new knowledge on how community is built, and to enable its graduates to carry that knowledge out into the world. Travel seminars provide the ideal educational model for teaching students to build relationships within groups and build partnerships beyond them. Andover Newton has employed travel seminars as a form of educating for three decades.
Emmaus Encounters: Building Community on the Road will continue this tradition while creating (and sharing with others) new methods for forming leaders who can bring people together. Learn more…
