Illustrations by Chema Parsanz

Jeremy Bill was in his mid-20s in 2013 when his grandfather, a former pastor of a church in the North American Baptist Conference and a foundation board member for Sioux Falls Seminary in South Dakota, asked him to consider taking his seat.

“It was kind of pitched to me as ‘Hey, you show up twice a year and hear about the investments from this nice investment manager; wouldn’t you like to try it?’” Bill recalls. “I’d been on church boards, but this was something a little different, so I joined.”

A 1999 University of Sioux Falls graduate, he had an academic and career background in math and business and has held executive positions in the insurance industry for 25 years. After a few years on the board, he became chair. The more he learned, the more he became concerned.

“We were pulling money out of the endowment for operating expenses, and it was slowly shrinking, and then not-so-slowly shrinking,” he says. “You start reading the handwriting on the wall and you’re like, ‘this endowment isn’t going to exist in five years.’” Enrollments had been declining, placing further financial burdens on the 166-year-old institution originally founded in Rochester, N.Y. (it had relocated to Sioux Falls in 1949.)

In 2013, Bill was appointed to the Sioux Falls Board of Trustees, serving as Finance Committee chair. Then-President G. Michael Hagan had recently announced his retirement, and Bill recalls when the search committee introduced its candidate to the board.

“They’re like, ‘This is a young guy, he’s super-energetic, he’s up-and-coming.’ He was there in person. He had energy, he had ideas, he had vision, and he just knew what he was talking about.

“I remember thinking ‘This is a slam-dunk. If we don’t hire this guy we’re missing the boat.’ He just spoke with such authority; I felt we’d be getting someone on the upswing, someone at an inflection point in his career.”

 

With the support of Lilly Endowment Pathways grants, a providential confluence of vision, execution, and mission has unified Kairos University around competency-based education.

 

Disruption

The Sioux Falls Seminary board voted to appoint Greg Henson as president of its troubled school in 2013, though at age 31 he did not appear (on paper, at least) to be someone who could extricate the school from its myriad challenges. In the previous six years, he had been vice president for institutional advancement at Northern Seminary in Illinois, and before that a district director for the Boy Scouts, a database developer, and a senior pastor and youth pastor.

But the Sioux Falls board had been studying the education landscape and exploring novel solutions to its near-existential crisis, a situation that was affecting many other Association of Theological Schools (ATS) institutions. It had done its homework on Henson: They knew that he had been part of a three-person team at Northern collaborating on admission and enrollment marketing, fundraising, and communication, effectively serving in chief officer roles. He had absorbed Clayton Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation and studied institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University and Alverno Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which have leveraged technology and student-centric models with success, expanding access with remote learning, stout academic support to encourage completion, and lower tuition.

“I would say that my age was a blessing and a curse,” Henson says. “A blessing in the sense that I didn’t carry assumptions. But I don’t think I did a good job communicating where theological education was and where it was going.”

Henson adapted, and began to build a case for a new model and a different future. Northwest Seminary in Vancouver, B.C., had pioneered competency-based theological education (CBTE) in 2012, and although Henson says he initially did not use that term, his vision of holistic education moved the board to action. Ultimately, it transformed the seminary.

“You can’t think about the different aspects of the institution, or even those of theological education, as individual pieces,” Henson says. “We began to see theological education as a system of interconnected, interdependent parts.”

Henson says the focus on outcomes departs from the traditional notions that educational quality should be measured by inputs, mainly content mastery of texts, lectures, and seminars. Instead, a more diverse, expansive, and accessible menu of content is offered. Quality is assessed by measuring competencies for each student’s particular context – an admixture of content, calling, and culture that summons a broader pool of prospective students – by age, denomination, ethnicity, and geography.

“We don’t impose one definition of excellence on everybody,” he says. “That’s the standard practice, but it’s problematic because of what scripture tells us, and problematic for cultural engagement. Somebody’s going to fail in that scenario, unnecessarily in many cases. We’re allowing the community to have a voice in what quality is, rather than making an assumption that we know best.”

 

Kairos Time

The innovations in the new educational approach have been both pedagogical and financial, in keeping with the goal of accessibility. Students follow a standard, ATS-accredited curriculum to develop foundational knowledge, and are instructed through in-person and robust distance learning platforms.

A formal team comprising a faculty member and vocational and personal advisors is selected by each student. These mentor teams foster education in a cluster of individualized cultural contexts: theological, geographical, denominational, and ministerial.

Students pay tuition by monthly subscription, with pricing scaled to the United Nations’ Human Development Index; the most a student will pay during a semester is $300 (a fee that has not changed in 10 years), and students may take a leave of absence, during which tuition is suspended.

“All schools think about affordability, and it’s usually managed by raising money for scholarships and discounting,” Henson says. “That just shifts the burden to some other part of the Church. We wanted to decrease the costs, so time is a major component through all that we do, allowing students to access what they need – and when. Kairos time allows us to think differently about affordability.

“It’s a reconnection to what theological education has always been – a formational journey that invites people to flourish where God intends. They still have faculty, they still have credit hours, a timeline to a degree. We just allow some power dynamics to shift.”

Since 2013, head count enrollment has grown from 150 to over 1,200 students representing some 60 countries on six continents studying in five colleges and schools. In 2021, Sioux Falls changed its name to Kairos University to reflect a focus on God’s time.

Kairos has found success in partnerships supporting, cost distribution, operations, and infrastructure. Today, there are nearly 100 partners in 30 countries on six continents. The seminary’s vision is supported through Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative.

 

It’s a reconnection to what theological education has always been: a formational journey that invites people to flourish where God has planted them.

 

Content, character, craft

Larry Caldwell, Ph.D., joined Sioux Falls Seminary in 2011 as chief academic officer and professor of Intercultural Studies and Bible. A native of Sioux Falls, he and his wife have pursued missionary work in Asia for over 30 years, including 20 years at Asian Theological Seminary and served as dean for several years. The faculty, he says, is mostly Asian, educated predominantly in the West.

“They were not necessarily training in ways that made sense for the Asian context. It was frustrating because I always had the feeling that we weren’t doing all we could for the students,” he says.

Caldwell tried various approaches to incorporate social context into the curriculum. In 2011, the Caldwells returned to Sioux Falls, and he joined the faculty at the Seminary; in 2015 he was appointed Chief Academic Officer and Dean.

Caldwell says that most Kairos students have been in ministry for five years or longer, people “who have never been able to consider formal theological training because it has not been affordable or accessible. Nor have they seen the relevancy of such training for their own ministry contexts.

“We envisioned this as a way to fully contextualize theological education – in content, delivery systems, accessibility, and relevancy so that we could extend into non-Western places and do it in a way that met different learning styles.

“We work with many who have been pastoring for years and don’t have the skill-set to thrive in a traditional seminary. But they have theological intelligence. The content is important, but so is character and craft, and CBTE gives us the freedom to say, ‘We’re going to make sure you have the content you need, but how you get that content is going to be specific to your learning style, your culture, and how you best apply it.’”

 

A vulnerable experience

Jenna Church and Taylor Wilson are enrolled in the Kairos Master of Divinity program, with different backgrounds and goals for their ministerial education. Both share an innate curiosity about theology and spirituality, and a shared appreciation for the flexibility and opportunities they have found at Kairos to pursue their callings.

Church is a 34-year-old married mother of two children, living in Alberta, Canada. She enrolled in 2020 after leaving a position as an organizational development consultant in the health care system and working on a small staff at a North American Baptist church.

“I grew up going to church off and on,” she says. “Neither my husband nor I had a long history of church beyond attendance once a week. It wasn’t until we were in our early twenties that we became invested in serving the church.”

She is attracted by the “fluidity and autonomy” of the Kairos program. “You are walking away with something that is organized in a particular manner. It’s for people who are able to articulate their starting point, and where they want to go. How you explore is up to the student. It’s an intimate, vulnerable experience.”

Wilson, 30, is reflective and scholarly. He grew up in a church, and admits to “going off the rails” as a young man. He chose to go to a Bible college “to be immersed in the Church in a deeper way.”

A philosophy professor took him under his wing with extracurricular reading in philosophy and theology, what Wilson now calls “a discipleship, a deep formation one-on-one with this philosopher. Obviously, there’s importance to the submission to a curriculum, but I’m more interested in serious, deep research and guidance from those ahead of me. Kairos seemed like the best fit. I’m growing in the virtues according to my mentors’ instruction and my reading, and I’m actually having to put these things into practice. It’s a total formation.”

 

I’m growing in the virtues according to my mentors’ instruction and my reading, and I’m actually having to put these things into practice. It’s a total formation.

 

No turning back

Kairos University is part of a generational movement in theological education, one potential pathway to address institutional viability. There are now 12 ATS-accredited schools offering some form of CBTE, and another dozen or so planning to offer such programs in the next two years, says Caldwell. Kairos’ example is alluring: In the first seven years, it became an international institution, erased $7.2 million in institutional debt, grew its endowment by $6.5 million, and expanded enrollment from 150 to more than 1,000 students.

Henson is already thinking about the challenges that lie ahead. “When we launched I could get all of the board, all of the faculty, all of the staff in one room,” he says. “That’s not really feasible now. This is really a distributed community with localized power and authority, but with a common culture and commitment to following Jesus.

“And so how do we do that without burning people out in the process? We’re developing systems and structures that can support our growth, but doing that without falling back on the traditional hierarchy and bureaucratic systems that tend to define higher education.”