Illustrations by Cynthia Kittler

In the second chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus returns to His house in Capernaum after a solitary respite in the open country. He is, in Mark’s straightforward telling, immediately inundated by townspeople (including a few scribes). Four friends arrive, carrying on a mat a man who is paralyzed and unable to walk. They have come seeking healing for their friend. People are spilling out of the door and into the street; there is no traditional ingress. So, the enterprising friends find their way to the roof. They dig through it (roofs in those days being made of thatch and hardened mud) and lower their friend, still on the mat, into the house.

Jesus sees them – or, as Mark recounts, sees the strength of their faith – and says to the paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven.” The scribes think Jesus is blaspheming: Who but God alone forgives sins? Immediately, Jesus divines their intent. He asks them which is easier: to say “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say “Get up and walk?” He then turns back to the man and says, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” Which the man does.

This Gospel’s implications for community relationships, social responsibility, and collective faith in action have reverberated for more than 2,000 years. Three years ago, it was a central rationale for a Lilly Endowment Pathways For Tomorrow Phase III grant awarded to Union Theological Seminary and several of its partners.

Titled “Taking off the Roof: Cultivating Collaboration and Ministerial Ingenuity,” the grant is fostering cohesion among seven institutions and organizations working collaboratively on three overarching objectives: expanding shared administrative services for more efficient campus operations among geographically proximate organizations near Union; implementing an academic and student collaborative for two theological schools to advance student success; and creating a Technology, Innovation, and Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL) that is leveraging design thinking to “teach, learn, mentor, organize, and worship.”

The project goals are to create financial efficiencies, strengthen the quality and scope of services, and expand each institutional partner’s capacity to work with increasingly broad audiences of students and stakeholders.

“All of the different levels of interaction the organizations are having with each other improve the work of each of them individually,” says Rev. Serene Jones, M.Div., Ph.D., President and Johnston Family Professor for Religion and Democracy at Union. “They all are inherently focused on many of the same issues; they problem-solve together, but they approach it from different angles. All you need is one success, and then everyone is immediately more interested.”

 

An Alliance of Friends

Jones came to Union in 2008, the first woman to lead the now 172-year-old institution founded by Presbyterian pastors near the docks of the Port of New York. Their guiding mission – that formation is best done where there is greatest need – holds fast: Union remains a school committed to the concerns of the world, and continues to welcome students of all denominations, Jones says.

Union’s home since 1897 has been the Morningside Heights neighborhood in northern Manhattan, adjacent to Riverside Park along the Hudson River. The roughly four-square-block area is a locus of religious and educational organizations; over the past 15 years, Dr. Jones says, they have developed close bonds of mutual assistance in pursuit of their discrete missions. Some of the relationships are curricular, and some are administrative.

“We’re all essentially across the street from each other,” Jones says. “The presidents have been talking for years now about developing a shared services consortium so we could really save on our back-office functions or other services.

“We’ve worked together in ad hoc ways for years,” Jones says. “And for a long time, we made it possible without a formal agreement.” Early wins included shared procurement services, free event space sharing, and support for event technology for consortium members, particularly with the large event capacity and expertise of neighboring Riverside Church and the Manhattan School of Music.

“Taking Off the Roof” took the effort to another level, Jones says. Significant cost savings have followed the bundling of energy procurement. For three of the schools, shared food services have created economies of scale and permitted students to choose where they eat, creating cross-institutional cultural interaction.

“Every time we discuss a service, a school can decide whether or not to join,” Jones says. “If a school doesn’t see any immediate benefit to them, they can just say, ‘We’re going to step back from this one.’ I think giving people a sense of their own agency has been a key feature of the Lilly grant.”

The alliance is currently considering shared security services and business services, Jones says. “All of these institutions have hired their own security firms. It’s a function with high personnel and equipment costs, and we could probably, again, cut our security costs almost in half by sharing a security detail.”

For now, a formal agreement to incorporate a separate entity has been considered, but Jones says the group wants to consider “one or two more pilots” before moving forward.

“All of the different levels of engagement strengthen the work of each school because we problem-solve together,” Jones says. “The knowledge base that we have now is just so much larger. And it’s affecting our bottom line.

“I think it’s a way forward for small schools in particular, because we just don’t have enough internal capacity to get the needed quality.”

 

“I think giving people a sense of their own agency has been a key feature of the Lilly grant.”

 

Wellness and Accommodation

The coronavirus pandemic posed significant challenges for higher education generally; for theological education – with its critical focus on discernment and formation – the impact of physical distancing on spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being was an additional burden. “Taking Off the Roof” includes funding for an Academic Student Experience Collaborative, supporting theological partnerships for student wellness and other student support services at Union and Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York (Initially, New York Theological Seminary – located in Morningside Heights until it closed in mid-2024 – was included in the funding set; two of its legacy programs are now part of Union’s curriculum: a D.Min., and a 40-year-old Master of Professional Studies degree program offered to inmates of Sing Sing Correctional Facility).

Managed by the leaders of student affairs at each school, much of the collaborative’s programming is focused on accommodations to improve student outcomes, according to Jones, including shared staff for writing support, mental health and wellness services, accessibility care, and career services and professional development. Many of the programs are recorded and made available online.

“We did not have a collaborative operating relationship with Union prior to the Lilly grant,” says Angela Sims, Ph.D., president of Colgate Rochester Crozer. “We’re the only progressive seminary in western New York, and student support services was an area around which we could leverage economies of scale. We’ve been both a beneficiary and a contributor to the effort in support of students.”

Three years into the partnership, the schools are in the early stages of exploring a more formalized approach, she says.

 

A new digital era

David Gastwirth is a polymath of educational technologies and brings irrepressible energy, broad experience, and deep commitment to his role as Vice President of Learning Innovation and Strategic Initiatives at Union. He came to Union in 2021 during the pandemic to manage and grow emerging online programs, particularly those offering master’s degrees.

At the time, Union offered a few non-degree programs online, which provided conduits of potential students, and Gastwirth’s initial work focused on expanding them. Once the Pathways grant was secured, he began shaping a multi-faceted vision for online learning and the design and delivery of new online and hybrid programs.

Gastwirth holds a B.A. from Duke University, an Ed.M. from Harvard University in Higher Education and an M.P.A. from the University of Southern California. He joined Union from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, where he served as Director of Online Education. There, he led program development and a team responsible for enrollment management, student affairs, and academic operations – precisely the areas that Serene Jones targeted for innovation leadership.

“It was clear to me that there wasn’t an appetite for just wholesale ‘Okay, here are the best practices in online education,’” he recalls. “But we have amazing faculty, incredibly smart and generous with their time, excellent with working with their students. So, to get them to be willing to teach online as a modality, to be fully engaged with it and comfortable with it, was the most important thing to me.”

Gastwirth initially opted for an incremental strategy. “I would say, ‘Try posting a few minutes of video of your lectures that folks can watch online before the class.’ The approach I took here was not ‘We need to have studios and we need to hire six instructional designers and make every course look like we spent $100,000 on it.’”

Financial restrictions and size of the student cohort, he says, precluded accessing out-of-the box educational technology tools that would help Union transition from in-person gatherings to virtual and hybrid formats: minimum contracts typically require 2,000 students or more. Union, he says, “might have been able to scrounge up 200.

“So, I thought: What if I get six more schools to join? And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but it would all have to be done under one agreement.’ So, OK, there needs to be some entity that coordinates this one-stop shop to address the collective challenges of organizational limitations and information asymmetries, to use language from my public policy school days. And that’s how TIDEL was born.”

TIDEL is a collaborative center funded by the Pathways III grant that “helps faith-based organizations use technology and design to create innovative solutions for the common good,” Gastwirth says.

“So that’s where the idea of looking for other small seminaries emerged” to create a critical mass, he says. “And then we asked, ‘What other student support and student experience roles and academic experience functions are we either not providing or not providing as much as we would like, or we think we could do better in collaboration?’”

Union recruited other organizations in the Morningside Heights enclave, and negotiated a contract for 500 students (a typical contract is for 2,000). An early win came with the Union Writing Center; the shared approach enabled more students to access the service, and allowed the Center to guarantee high-quality coaches would have enough hours to make it feasible.

This spring, TIDEL has begun offering TimelyCare, which provides online mental health support for students, with dozens of counselors, social workers, a wellness coach, and nutrition counselors. And Union and Colgate Rochester Crozer are jointly offering career service courses in fundraising.

Gastwirth is continuing to develop TIDEL; he says the challenges are aligning organizational cultures, making decisions about what stays and what goes in a different direction, and identifying revenue-generating programs, including conferences and professional development certificate programs.

“We are leveraging what we have as small institutions, whether they be independent colleges or nonprofits,” he says. “We have the agility to do things that large institutions can’t. We don’t have the levels of bureaucracy, and we can be targeted in meeting the needs of our participating organizations.”

 

“What other student support and academic experience functions do we think we could do better in collaboration?”

 

“Spaces where everyone is welcome”

It’s hard to doubt that names are destiny when you meet someone like Rev. Liz Theoharis, Ph.D., whose surname is Greek for “God’s Grace.” The Executive Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice at Union grew up in a family of activists rooted in social justice work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her father, a historian on the faculty of Marquette University, was among those who exposed the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s secret surveillance files of peace and justice activists in the 1960s. Her mother was engaged in the Black freedom struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and her older siblings were each involved in social justice activities. The activist Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., spent nights at their home.

Precocious as a child, Theoharis taught Sunday school at 13, and was a deacon in her local Presbyterian Church by 16. She enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, and became active in anti-poverty work; at one point, she says, she visited 40 churches in 40 days and began to realize a calling. After graduating, she was accepted to study at Union (supported by a William Sloane Coffin Scholarship), and earned a Ph.D. in New Testament and Christian Origins.

Now an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, she founded the Kairos Center at Union in 2018 to address the persistence of poverty, and on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples Campaign, launched an online church, Freedom Church of the Poor. “What’s facing us today is poverty amid plenty, but also a distorted theology and pretty strong political movement which is putting out a theology and a practice that is counter to the teachings of our Holy Scriptures,” she says. She and Freedom Church Coordinator Ana G. Lara López (who has an M.Div. from Union) are using the TIDEL platform for a Wordly program with AI translations to reach a global audience for the Freedom Church’s work. “We want to create spaces where everyone is welcome,” López says.

 

A pragmatic future

As Union’s President for nearly 17 years, Jones is accustomed to taking a long – and broad – view. She is encouraged by the progress of “Lifting Off the Roof” and foresees the creation of an independent entity to manage and grow the relationships and programs being created.

If ambitious, she also is pragmatic. “The most positive outcome is that it’s affecting our bottom line,” she says. “We’re seeing it very clearly in all of these different areas, and I think every school who chooses to join a service is seeing it.

“From time to time, we’ll have to bring in new partners, and that’s just a challenge for theological education right now.

“However, I think an important side benefit is that the conversations schools are having with each other improve the work of each school because they are collaborating. They’re inherently focused on many of the same issues, and they approach it from different angles.

“The knowledge base that we have to build off of is just so much larger.”