God in the Digital Age: Finding Faith and Community Online

“Why, yes…yes you can. And with great compassion and integrity!”

Emily Askew, PhD.

This is the answer I have given hundreds of times to people who do not believe that

online learning can be as good as face-to-face (F2F) learning in creating community,

offering a rigorous curriculum, and attending to learners’ emotional, spiritual, and

academic needs. I can make this definitive claim because I recently retired

from 16 years of teaching theology at Lexington Theological Seminary, whose MDiv

curriculum is delivered 2/3 asynchronously online and 1/3 (24 credit hours) in-person, in

intensive courses each June and January. I am now on the receiving end of such a

curriculum, being a year 2 student in the WTC Spiritual Direction Program. Thus, I

believe I bring a unique perspective to the question of what is possible in terms of

offering a stellar education and quality Spiritual Direction services. (And I will note to

begin, that quite often, those who have expressed the greatest concerns about the

potential of online curriculum to me have often never experienced a dedicated digital

education.)

Here are four stories from my experience as a teacher and as a student that, I hope

will describe what is possible online.

1) Asynchronous education means that classes are conducted entirely through

recorded video and discussion boards. This makes it possible for working students, students with families,

children, and all manner of persons to access the curriculum when the time is best for them. In this

sense, asynchronous education is learner—- rather than professor—-centered. In the

first year of our online program, many on the Board of Trustees of my seminary

did not believe that we would be “as good as” the education they received from

the “monastic model” of theological education. In the monastic model, the

student (most often a man and most often white and middle-class) moves his

wife and children from their home state to the location of the seminary for four

years while he studies to be a minister. They then relocate again when he gains

a pastorate. I think you can see how financially unsustainable this model is when

both partners need to work to support a family, and often unnecessarily

disruptive for the children.

We came to understand that this idea of “good” education was actually “elite”

education that kept many amazingly gifted students from pastoral ministry

because they needed to work, their spouse needed to work, and the children

needed stability. Despite the Board of Trustees’ reticence, in 2009, we began

to deliver our MDiv curriculum asynchronously, with a monthly Zoom meeting,

called a “Covenant Group,” in which a faculty member meets with six students

to essentially ask the question: “How is it with your soul?”

This is the background for the first instance in which I saw the power of an online

community. In the very first year of our online venture, two students who had

only had classes together asynchronously and met via Zoom once a month

for three months became close friends. So close was their friendship that when

one student who lived in Florida was experiencing domestic violence, her friend

and colleague who lived in Ohio drove to Florida and returned her to her Ohio

home for weeks until the situation could be resolved.

Having taught F2F in both undergraduate and graduate school settings

(Vanderbilt Divinity School), I had never witnessed such an intense bond form so

quickly. The compassion shown and the witness of faith displayed was greater

than I had seen F2F. This is not to say that it doesn’t happen F2F, it is only to

say that it is definitely possible online.

2. The second story is about the great value of diversity possible online and less so F2F. Online

education, even asynchronous education, makes participation possible for students worldwide. My

student, RL, was married with one son. Both she and her husband had been in the US

Diplomatic Corp for several years and were, at that time, both stationed in Jerusalem at the US embassy.

RL not only experienced a call to ministry, but she also wanted a safe place to discuss the difficult

landscape of this central meeting point for the world’s Abrahamic religions. Through her

experiences in the Middle East, she was able to bring richness and depth to our

consideration of things like inter-religious dialogue, colonialism, gender-roles in

pastoral leadership, and so much more. By making education accessible, we

provided RL found a way to honor her call and, in the process, taught the

rest of us so much. This great diversity continues for me now as my WTC cohort includes a student from

Bali and a student from Canada, each contributing to our wisdom tools, how to be respectful and

knowledgeable outside our context. Online education keeps the classroom from becoming an echo-

chamber of people with like-minded ideas and experiences. For spiritual

directors, in particular, becoming sensitive to the ways that the Spirit, in all Her

diverse manifestations, moves across/between/among/within a great diversity of human beings can only

be life-giving for us and those with whom we sit.

3. A third example, that combines access, diversity, and social justice, comes

from an online Bible study I facilitated with two Swedish colleagues

from the Church of Sweden (a priest and a deacon) with LGBTQIA refugees who

had been resettled in the European Union by the UNHCR. We aimed to

address the six “clobber passages” of the Bible (the six passages from Genesis to

Paul used to “prove” that God hates homosexuals) and to provide a

historical and contextual reading of these passages to reveal

that they are not about homosexuality at all.

Most of our members came from internment camps throughout Africa where

being queer is punishable by death. LGBTQIA persons are recognized by the

UNHCR as a “vulnerable group” and thus allowed to seek refugee status. (The

designation of who counts as “vulnerable populations” has a checkered

history. Our Bible study, which started as a three-month endeavor and instead continued for six months,

became a refuge for all of us but especially those who had experienced horrors too cruel and graphic to

name here.

We were a group of white, black, queer, straight, clergy, laity, allies from Egypt,

Sweden, the UK, two places in the US, Lutheran, atheist, Evangelical, Disciples

of Christ, transitioned and transitioning—coming together to

recognize the violence the Bible can do, alongside the grace and healing

it offers in the hands of those who read God’s love as radically inclusive of all

people of all identities and races. It was a healing space for all of us. Even

those who thought we were “the teachers” learned that the Spirit taught

us through the Wisdom of those who have lived black, queer lives and survived

state-sanctioned violence, in the name of God. I have made life-long friends

from that group, though we never met in person.

Thus, I understand that Spirit is not limited by distance, by screens, by

gender, by race, but instead flourishes when every human-made boundary is

broken down and the remains shaped into bridges that look awfully like a

Zoom link. The work of justice, of inclusion, of healing and of praising God, is

now and can in the future be digital, without any loss of integrity, sensitivity,

compassion, attention, or rigor.

4. Which brings me to the present, and my experience as a student in Wisdom

Tree Collective’s Spiritual Direction Program. Perhaps because I came with such

a wealth of excellent experiences with online learning, I expected nothing less

than this from my SD curriculum and indeed, Kasey, Amy-Lyles, my mentor Jess,

and everyone who has taught us online has simply proven to me, now as a

student, that the work of God will not be hampered by human-made expectations

of what counts as “true” or “real” or “rigorous” education. God has brought people

into my sphere that I could never possibly have met otherwise. And my education

is all the better for it.

Because we are not generous enough as people to pay for the F2F education

of all who are moved to find God in the pastorate, or an office, or the woods,

we must believe that God will work around our shortcomings and short-sightedness and provide for her

people who hear Her call. She has now made it possible for me to do my second-year internship with four

individuals via Zoom across the country: they are Jewish, Catholic, Disciples of Christ, secular, ministers,

laity, mothers, fathers, child-free, and a whole host of other identity markers who come from Chicago and

Baltimore and Ohio and Seattle to help me learn to be a wiser spiritual director. Digital access makes this

diversity and richness possible and for all of this—from my early days as an online theology

professor to my present as a spiritual director in formation, I say “thanks be to

God for all that has happened to and for me undaunted—perhaps even made

possible— by a screen.”

~Dr. Emily Askew, Second Year Student in WTC School of Spiritual Direction