Now and Next: 2024-2025 Annual Report

“Now and Next.” These three simple words constituted Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School’s theme for the 2024-25 academic year, and they packed a punch.

As has been the practice in recent years, the theme was drawn from a portion of Andover Newton’s longstanding mission statement. The section, “[R]adically open to what God is doing now” became Now and Next, and through the theme our community considered important dimensions of Christian ministry.

We made the theme not just institutional but personal. In our first-year student colloquium, students took turns offering their testimonies as to what Now and Next mean to them as relates to their callings. I wrote about Now and Next in my weekly blog, and the theme guided our staff’s choices for everything from speaker invitations to graphic design.

Now and Next called on us to turn our eyes to the future of ministry. We sense that God is doing something new (Isaiah 43:19), and that sense replaces fear with hope. We believe that giving our community’s guidance over to Christ brings about new creation in it (2 Corinthians 5:17), and new creations cannot help but foster renewal just by living out their callings.

A Christian hope is by no means a naïve one, but neither does it oversimplify. Some characterize the mood in our society with a single word: divided. Yet so much more is at hand! Some are pleased by our nation’s direction, and others are terrified by it.

Most agree that we’re in an in-between time, where something is ending, and something new is beginning. We’re much more familiar with what’s being lost than what’s possibly to be gained, so we grieve. Yet our faith tells us that the new thing is coming, and God is making it, which will make it good.

Contemplating the meaning of “Now and Next” called upon us to contextualize ourselves by asking, “Who am I in the midst of this communal moment?” Then, it calls upon us to claim our ministries: “What am I called upon to do, Now and Next, to make the world what God has in mind for it?”

In faith,

Founding Dean
Andover Newton Seminary at YDS