February 22, 2003

"Haiti is a nation of contrasts,” says Rodney Babe, who meets our church’s team of mission workers at the airport. We soon understand what he means. BMWs and Hummers are weaving through the open-air market in Leogane. Someone is boiling a cow’s head to remove the hair for sale, and the smell mingles with odors from mounds of decaying garbage, fresh mangos, burning charcoal, diesel fumes, dust and assorted frying meats.

Daniel Aleshire has been executive director of the Association of Theological Schools since 1998. The Pittsburgh-based association is the accrediting and program agency for graduate theological education in North America. The ATS has 244 Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox member schools. Before joining the ATS staff in 1990, Aleshire, an ordained minister with a Ph.D. in psychology, served on the faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, for 12 years.

1. Church members want pastors to succeed. Yes, there will always be resistance to change, and we pastors tend to fall into thinking that the church and its members are against us. But when we do, we are theologically and practically wrong. The church is our friend and our ally. It is in the church’s self-interest for those of us in pastoral roles to do well.

What would seminary leaders do if suddenly money were no obstacle—if a generous donor left them, say, $1 billion?

What have I learned that I wish I knew before I came to seminary? I wish I had known that I’d be enriched far beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge by learning in community, particularly in this community. By engaging scripture, theology, the church and the gospel through the eyes and perspectives of my fellow students, faculty and staff, I have experienced the Spirit moving among us, molding mere knowledge into something that, hopefully, approaches wisdom.

Spike Lee's desire to explore the nuances of black life is admirable, though the scope of his ambition has often proved to be his artistic undoing. Each film not only tells a racially charged story that (he hopes) teaches a moral lesson, but insists on driving home the points again and again in superfluous scenes that drag on and on (one of the reasons his films tend to run well over two hours). This is an especially distressing problem in Bamboozled, his 2000 film about a black television producer who brazenly puts on a minstrel show.