Scott Bader-Saye, a layman and longtime academic dean at Seminary of the Southwest, was promoted to dean and president as of July 1. TLC’s Kirk Petersen caught up with him in early August to talk about his background and his new role.
Are you a cradle Episcopalian?
I grew up Presbyterian. I was teaching at the University of Scranton [Pennsylvania], and at the time, my wife was a [United Church of Christ] pastor. We both made our way to the Episcopal Church while we were there, largely drawn by liturgy and sacrament. That was something that we missed, but we didn’t know we were missing it until we started getting connected to the Episcopal Church in Scranton.
After we had our first child, my wife wanted to work part time. The UCC churches in the area, none of them were big enough to have a second person. You know, the only way to be part time was to be a solo pastor who is part time. And we know that doesn’t actually exist. You can’t be part time if you’re the only person.
You can have a part-time salary!
Exactly. Friends of ours said they were looking for a half-time youth minister at [Church of the Epiphany in Glenburn Township, a Scranton suburb]. She could spend a little more time at home with our first child and work half time at the Episcopal Church. As a Presbyterian teaching in a Catholic Jesuit university, it was inevitable that I would become Episcopalian, and that’s what happened.
Jesuits do education really well. Right from the start, it was very clear that Jesuit education is about the formation of the whole person. And you don’t get that at every undergraduate institution. Seminaries, by their nature, are concerned about formation of the whole person. So coming here to Southwest was not a big transition in that respect.
Has Seminary of the Southwest been growing in recent years?
When you’re working with relatively small numbers, there can be fairly big fluctuations from year to year. We have been hovering between, say, 110 and 120 students for at least the last five years. Of those, roughly 75 are students in our counseling program, and we have usually somewhere between 30 and 40 in the M.Div. [master of divinity]. And then we’ve got a handful of students in two other programs: a master of arts in religion, and a master’s in spiritual direction. Those are both small programs, but they speak to important things that we care about.
So it’s been steady, basically.
Last year we had 19 new M.Divs. Looks like this year we’ll have nine new M.Divs. So year to year, it can be very different, but averaging out to around 15 is usually where we land.
How many of your students are residential?
All the M.Div. students are residential. We do not have any online or hybrid M.Div. programs, but we do have our Iona Collaborative program. It was originally founded [in 2012] to provide resourcing for local formation of priests and deacons, but has expanded since then to become much more attentive to lay formation. Iona has been our way of trying to figure out, how do you do theological formation for folks who can’t come to a residential seminary? Iona doesn’t offer a degree. We offer a certificate of completion, and the final assessment of students happens at the diocesan level, so we leave that to the deans of the program and the bishops and commissions on ministry. That’s been our way to expand our reach beyond those who can physically be on campus.
The gold standard of priest-making is the three-year residential program, and there’s an obvious benefit to being in community with other people who are wrestling with the same kinds of things as you look toward a career in the priesthood. Garwood Anderson [former dean of Nashotah House] certainly favors residential, but says even for people who have the will and the interest, they can’t necessarily make the math work in terms of the cost and the lack of full-time opportunities.
The Episcopal Church is going to need, and increasingly has, a mixed economy of clergy formation. I think we’ll live with that mixed economy for quite some time. We continue to need residential seminaries, but we also need other options for people who can’t get to a residential program. Maybe it’s a spouse or family that makes it impossible to move. Sometimes it’s finances. Sometimes their goal really is bivocational ministry, and it doesn’t make any sense to leave your job if your goal is, in the end, to be bivocational.
At the same time, I really believe residential seminary provides something that you can’t provide in online and hybrid programs. You have people living together, people who are involved in a common life throughout the day. It’s life in the classroom, but it’s also meals together. It’s also chapel together. It’s social time together. It’s events on campus. It’s getting together and going into Austin and going to a concert or going to a show, or going to a lecture at the University of Texas, or taking advantage of something happening at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. Being in physical proximity with one another and with the sorts of resources that you can have surrounding a seminary makes for opportunities for formation and growth that can’t happen in the same way when you’re online. So I think we need both.
I think residential formation is always going to be an important part of how we help students create that pattern of holy living that helps them embody priestly formation. The challenge of online and hybrid programs is figuring out how that piece works. We all spent a lot of time teaching online during COVID, and we found ways to make that as good as it could possibly be. And I can’t tell you the level of relief our faculty had when they got to go back in a classroom and physically be present with their students.
Are you going to continue teaching as president?
I’ve taught the core ethics courses for the M.Div. program, and I’ve also taught ethics for the counseling students. As president, I’ll cut back on the teaching a little bit, but I can’t imagine not being in the classroom.
One of the things I saw in the announcement of your appointment was your research on the ethics of trans identity. It’s a potentially controversial topic. Tell me something interesting about the ethics of trans identity.
The wider public conversation around sexuality and gender issues shifted after the Supreme Court made its decision about same-sex marriage. A lot of the energy and conversation shifted to transgender issues, and there was not a lot of good theological reflection that I could find on transgender questions. I felt there was a gap to be filled, so I started working on that. What I try to do in my work across the board is to start by listening really well to the people I disagree with, and trying to figure out what it is about their position that leads them to make these sorts of statements or have this kind of stand. What’s important to them?
Genesis describes the creation of male and female, [implying] these are always clear, distinct categories, and any sense of in-between is ruled out by the way the creation story is narrated. What I’ve tried to do is explore the possibilities of the in-betweenness of things. I want to affirm the witness that we’re receiving from transgender Christians, but I also need, as a theologian, as a Christian, to be able to test that with my faith and see how this can make theological sense for us. Is there space within our theological understanding for this witness to find a place?
That’s the question — what’s the answer?
Yes! I think there is. In a scriptural understanding of what it means to be a human being, there are all sorts of ways we can grow and change. Some of those changes are the development of what God planted in us as seeds of our flourishing, and some of those changes are redemptive work of fixing and transforming things that are broken within us. I think trans people are no different in that respect.
What do you want the readers of The Living Church to know about you, or about the seminary, that I haven’t asked you about? And what gives you hope?
The seminary is working on building Beloved Community. This is Episcopal Church language for the racial justice and reconciliation work that we want to be doing. But it’s bigger than just that. It goes to broader questions around ethnicity and sexuality or other ways in which we do, or do not, create a space of belonging for those who are different from ourselves. We have taken very seriously our calling to model a space of holy belonging for everyone who becomes a part of this community: faculty, staff, and students.
Part of what gives me hope is that I see us doing that well. It’s an ongoing process. We’re really concerned about polarization and really concerned to be a place that models good conversation across theological and political difference. We don’t want to be a one-note seminary where we assume everybody is either going to line up in a conservative way or line up in a liberal way.
When our students go back to their various parish settings, some of those places lean more conservative, some lean more liberal. We want them to have the resources for a rich and vital and theological conversation that affirms everyone’s voice, and also affirms some basic things about being a place where we respect the dignity of every human being.
