Gerontology in Theological Education

Local Program Development

Barbara Payne, Earl D. C. Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317839538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Gerontology in Theological Education: Local Program Development provides a source book for administrators and faculty in theological schools who are concerned about the increasing number of older persons in congregations and communities. Theoretical, theological, and practical chapters offer guidance to those interested in adventuring into aging for the first time or in revising present commitments.

Part 1: The Atlanta Experience

The locale of this project was Atlanta. In 1986 the National Meeting of the Association of Gerontology in Higher Education was in Atlanta. Under the leadership of David Oliver of Saint Paul Seminary, there was a preconference session of around 50 persons with concerns for the elderly in theological curriculum. The first presentation was by Jim L. Waits, the Dean of the Candler School of Theology of Emory University. He dealt with the issue of integrating gerontology into seminary curriculum. This is the first article in this section.

The cooperative experiences of the three seminaries and the gerontology center were traced as background to the current project by the codirectors.

This was followed by the reports of the three post-doctoral fellows representing the seminaries.

These three articles provide an introduction to the Atlanta experience as a central component of the Gerontology in Theological Education (GITE) project.

How to Integrate Gerontology into Seminary Curriculum

Jim L. Waits, DD

Summary. Dean Waits challenged the AGHE preconference session to integrate the theology of creation, covenant and care with the scientific findings in gerontology as important parts of the theological curriculum.

How do we integrate the concerns of the multidisciplinary field of gerontology into the multifaceted scope of a seminary curriculum? If our concern is truly to integrate gerontology into seminary education, then we will be cautious about a simple “add-a-course” approach. The whole theme will need to infuse our teaching and institutional priorities. Yet we need to steer clear of elaborate proposals to reorganize the curriculum as a whole. (The last thing we need is another reason to reorganize the curriculum!) How to bring the burgeoning field of gerontology to bear on the fiber of the seminary experience – that is what we all want to achieve from our varying perspectives. This common concern serves as our central focus.

Let us seek to do two things as we start our conversation. We will first of all draw on some central images from the Judeo-Christian faith that stand as foundational to our efforts. We will then move on to some preliminary reflections and, perhaps, models for institutional consideration. We will, in particular, look at some instances of institutional possibilities that have emerged and hopefully will be emerging out of our setting at Candler and Emory. These two components may be provocative enough to encourage a fruitful discussion.

Central to our self-understanding as religious persons is an awareness that we are part of God’s creation. We affirm that all creation is the Lord’s and that all persons are God’s children, made in God’s image. This affords an enormous respect to every human being and guarantees to him or her the dignity of a child of God. Where God’s children are vulnerable, sick or deprived of the quality of life, we are called to serve. Because God created us, we are of immeasurable worth – and so are all those whom God made regardless of their weakness or current insufficiency.

This insistence on our ongoing participation in God’s creation mitigates against our temptations to treat others and ourselves on the basis of some utilitarian ethic. It reminds us – lest we see life’s meaning only in terms of a person’s supposed usefulness or productivity – that our worth is God’s to determine. And God created humanity, male and female. And behold it was very good. In our work with and for the elderly of our various communities, and in our views of ourselves, this image of creatureliness is essential. “Very good” we are called, irrespective of job title, income, disability, age, giftedness, or awareness.

Related to the central image of ourselves as creatures of God is the relational notion of ourselves in covenant. The image of covenant has been a constant in Old and New Testament times and throughout church history. God covenanted to be with us, to be a tangible presence among us, living with us, guiding and directing us. The covenant, though originally instituted by God with rare individuals like Noah, Abraham and Sarah, or Moses, was never individualistic in character. The covenant by its very nature was for God and the community, the people, the nation, the world. The covenant tied the people in faithfulness to their God, but also to one another with bonds deeper than blood, and priorities that ordered the fabric of day-to-day life.

The church has understood itself as a covenant community charged with the dual command to love God and love neighbor. It can never exist as a body of isolated individuals, but only with an intentional interdependency on one another. Only in community do we discover our individual giftedness and participate in giving and receiving as God’s Spirit lives through us. In our encounters with persons who are aging, we all can see with new eyes our need for the perspectives of the old and the young. Just as we seek to love one another in community, in covenant, we have the happy experience of receiving from those to whom we would give. Over and over again our interdependency is proven as we relate across the generations.

But the affirmation most basic to our self-understanding is that we as religious people care. We love. Love, patterned after God’s love, is the overriding motivation. In the circumstance of service and the never-ending frustrations and pressures of institutional life, we sometimes forget that singular value. But love (and care) must be the dominant motivation for all action and meaning-making. It is the clearest imperative for our service.

Love has many forms as it motivates us in ministry. It gives us eyes of insight and discernment. It gives us courage to live with or alongside the deepest human agony. It drives us to employ our faculties and energies against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Thus, we understand ourselves as instruments of God’s creation, as a covenant community and as a people who are called to care. As we look at our task for this afternoon, then, these prior commitments stand before us to inform our question. How do we integrate gerontology into seminary curriculum? We begin by assessing and developing consensus about our motivation and theological rationale. But I would also like to recite some examples in our program as well as some future plans which we hope will advance this goal.

First of all, let us look at the curriculum, the course offerings that through a variety of perspectives and pedagogies address issues related to religion and aging. Since the mid-70s, Candler has offered a basic academic course on Religion and Aging, usually taught by Professor Earl Brewer, who is one of our leaders today. Out of this small beginning, a joint program with Georgia State University has developed so that our Master of Divinity students may receive a Certificate in Gerontology as well. In addition to the academic courses, set in the classrooms of Emory and Georgia State, students have also had the opportunity for more experiential learnings through our contextual program and supervised ministry. Second and third year students have had the option of participating in local congregations with large elderly populations or in institutions such as Wesley Woods and Northside Shepherd’s Center. In such settings, the theological commitments – creation, covenant and care – are brought into focus for the students as they experience an ongoing ministry with the elderly.

Some preliminary conclusions to our experiences with more traditionally academic settings and the contextual settings for students’ learning have led us to believe that students need both. They need the rigors of sociological, psychological and theological disciplines in the classroom, but they also need the experiences of one-to-one ministries of care, the exposure to governmental bureaucracy as it affects the aging, and the congregational and community life that can so often sustain us at all ages. For our purposes, as we seek to integrate gerontology into the seminary curriculum, this is an important conclusion. We cannot, in other words, resort to simply adding a course here and there, or even a department, but must allow for an infusion of perspectives of gerontology across the curriculum. We have a commitment to both the academic and contextual learnings for students in the area of gerontology.

Another cluster of programs in which Candler has been involved has been cooperative ventures with other educational or institutional settings. The Georgia State University certification program is one example already mentioned. The Atlanta Theological Association, a consortium of seminaries, has offered joint courses with Georgia State University for MDiv and Doctor of Ministry students and for area ministers. We have also been particularly pleased that in our setting we have Wesley Woods, a residential center for the elderly, located only a few blocks away. For some years the Clinical Pastoral Education and Supervised Ministry programs have been in place there, offering experiences of one-to-one counseling, worship and community life. We have also had limited experience in internships which prepare persons for administrative roles in such institutions.

But there is a desire on the part of both institutions to develop more educational opportunities in such a setting. Our desires for further opportunities converge with the University’s commitment to cooperate with Wesley Woods in staffing a major geriatric Medical Center adjacent to Wesley Woods. This center over time will provide care for thousands of people, as well as offer research and training opportunities for a number of disciplines. In theological education, our hope would be that the creation of such centers of intense care and learning might prompt us to create new understandings of our training of future ministers for the church. In such a center, theological education might include projects on topics such as the role of religious commitment to the aging process, demographic factors shaping our current and future communities and congregations, experiences in holistic health care inclusive of the spiritual dimension, and so on.

As we review the plethora of possibilities for research and teaching through such cooperative ventures, it is most encouraging. But to approach the many possibilities will take a commitment individually and institutionally. It will also require the best of our creative faculties to structure programs that include methods and content from the various disciplines within gerontology. Our focus, for example, cannot simply draw upon the discipline of psychology in setting up clinical experiences in pastoral care, but must also develop models of education that use the insights of social gerontology, social planning and policy studies, anthropology, cross-cultural studies of aging, and developmental studies. Bringing in such diverse fields will mean, as always in theological education, a continual dialogue or conversation with our theological tenets, and not wholesale adoption of methods without theological critique.

So in a sense we are brought full circle to the initial foundational claims with which we began – our commitment to the creation, to the covenant community and to care. These three in conversation with the methods, the insights, the research and the institutions of gerontology sketch out in broad strokes our agenda. It is time the community of theological institutions began to take seriously the dramatic developments in this field.

Jim L. Waits is Dean of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

Three Seminaries and a Gerontology Center in Atlanta

Barbara Payne, PhD
Earl D. C. Brewer, PhD

Summary. This section provides a description of Atlanta experience by the co-directors of the project. There is a brief history of the three seminaries and the gerontology center. Some responses of the students to the experience, a brief faculty survey and some suggestions for an introductory course complete this section.

The three seminaries (Candler School of Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary, Interdenominational Theological Center) and the Gerontology Center in Atlanta have worked together over a number of years to relate gerontology and theological education.

The Candler School of Theology is a professional school of Emory University and one of 13 official seminaries of the United Methodist Church. Candler serves to educate men and women for professional competence in ministry and the theological disciplines. Founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1914, the school became a part of Emory when the University was chartered in 1915. It occupied the first building completed on the Atlanta campus. The theology school offers programs leading to Master of Divinity, Master of Theological Studies, Master of Theology, Doctor of Ministry, and Doctor of Sacred Theology degrees. The school also provides continuing education opportunities for clergy, church professionals, and lay persons.

Columbia refers to the first permanent location of the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1828 a principal cultural, intellectual, and population center of the Southeast. The first idea of a theol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Atlanta Experience
• Part 2: Gerontological and Theological Disciplines and Practices