People frequently ask Sophia faculty and trustees what we intend to prepare our students to be and do. In order to answer that question, in part, my faculty colleagues, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, and I have attempted a rough assessment of the state of affairs prevailing in Western, particularly American, Christianity today. This will be the first in a series of the elements of our analysis. Each will include a statement concerning how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for having the mind and doing the work of Christ more authentically today.

First, of course, we need clearly to identify the entity/ies for whom we are educating leadership. In so doing, we must interrogate the word “church,” and we must seek clarity regarding the Gospel (“God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self”) and regarding the key function of believers in relation to the larger world (“the ministry of reconciliation,” peacemaking).

Because of its associations with denominationalism, with buildings, and with institutions, the continued use of “church” presents difficulties for some of Christ’s followers, including ourselves, who wish, rather, to focus attention on communities of people actively seeking to encourage and assist one another in the ministry of reconciliation. By implication, then, a Sophia education will not aim at preparing its students to fulfill denominational or institutional roles. Its students may certainly choose such a trajectory, but Sophia recognizes that any number of new incarnations of communities of faith, ‘para-church,’ or non-profit settings may be appropriate contexts for “the ministry of reconciliation.”

What term, then, can best serve as an alternative to “church” that can communicate primarily the idea of the gathered community, rather than of the structures that contain it, both physically and systematically, and too often stifle it. Kyriake (oikia), kyriakon doma, “house of the Lord,” used beginning in the third century CE suggests structures;  Hebrew qahal and Greek ekklesia, the origins of words used in Romance languages (eglise, iglesia, etc.), resonate with the idea of a “body convened for a purpose,” but quickly came to focus on institutional entities (as in usages like ‘the Catholic Church,’ ‘the Methodist Church’); German baptists refer to their congregations as Gemeinden “communities/fellowships,” an option that does not imply hierarchical structure or expectations of rigid doctrinal conformity, but that also does not point to any purpose other than togetherness. The recent coinage, the “kindom” of God, or the biblical image of “the body of Christ” may come closer to describing the entity for whom Sophia seeks to prepare servant leaders. A major factor influencing the erratic trajectory of Western Christianity today is a Christendom mindset that sees Western forms of faith as normative. The fact is that there is no normative, universal Christian faith defined as a set of doctrines or system of structures. There is no one way to live a “Christian life.” As Lamin Sannah has noted, the Christian faith is “infinitely translatable” and each manifestation is faith being lived and believed in a local, cultural idiom. This recognition implies something about the need for theological education to be honest about its limitations: it does not involve requiring assent to a set of answers – doctrines – concerning questions of faith, but engagement with the Christian tradition’s efforts at “faith seeking understanding” (Anselm’s definition of theology). Just as Sophia does not understand the body of Christ as a hierarchical human institution, it does not understand Christian faith as a structure of doctrinal statements. Along the lines of Orthodox apophatic theology, Sophia finds wisdom in acknowledging that, no matter how true a statement concerning God may be, it is also profoundly inadequate.