OUR IMPACT

The co-participatory approach of the Activating Change Project has invited our community members to share power, visibility, and decision-making capacity to shape the future of our school. The human-centered approach of phase one of the grant was fundamental in establishing a significant impact within our institution. Not only do we now have a shared language and vision, but we are also seeing how different stakeholders embody Activating Change values and hold departments and programs accountable to these values. For example, the collective envisioning of the Institute for Generative Leadership is a direct outcome of the Activating Change Project’s impact on CST’s ethos. This Project has mobilized representatives from faculty, students, trustees, and staff to make decisions that affect everyone. Thanks to the Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, the emerging vision for the Institute is helping to guide efforts and bring new revenue-generating possibilities for CST’s future, leveraging the leadership, centering the community’s diverse lived and contextual experiences, and catalyzing a campus-wide culture change.

During July and August, stakeholder interviews and focus-group were conducted with CST staff, faculty, and students. In September, our community participated in a campus-wide survey. The responses were expressive; more than 260 people took the time to answer questions that ranged from demographics, relationship to CST, experience with the institution, values alignment, opportunities for growth, and vision for the future. Several stakeholder groups, inclusive of current staff, faculty, students, donors, friends, and alums, generated responses. According to the survey data, over 80% of our constituents have reported being highly or mostly aligned with CST values. Our progressiveness, commitment to justice, equity, and belonging, the diversity of our community, the educational legacy, the emerging anti-oppression efforts, and the movement toward transparency and accountability are why respondents were willing to strongly endorse CST’s assessment process that has been shaping a collective vision for our future. Activating Change’s transformative and community-building praxis directly impacts not only our numbers but how we have been able to tell our story and celebrate our community, despite the challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic, as our student population has also become more global and diverse than ever. Today, 38% of our students are international, and 68% identify as BIPOC; 57% of our core faculty and 53% of staff are BIPOC. In addition, we have an increasing number of LGBTQIAP+ students. This is reflected in the decision-making processes of our institution as more committees and departments see an increase in BIPOC and gender representation, which leads to changes in policies and our ways of relating.

The transparency and feedback loops embedded in the grant activities have allowed the school to come together on several occasions to discuss ways forward. For example, as CST’s litigation process closes, the Activating Change Project values have been sustained as we centered the needs of students, staff, and faculty in searching for a new physical location, an interim president, and a partnership with housing developments. Our leadership team has embodied the guiding principles of the grant through these transitions, communicating openly and transparently via emails, town halls, and campus-wide meetings on the litigation process, the dissolution of the partnership with Willamette University, and the campus relocation to the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In addition, the President, executive team, and deans have been instrumental in disseminating information and court decisions as they become available. The learning-teaching model has also been impacted due to the changes we underwent in 2022. As the Activating Change Project continues to foster momentum for change to respond to the needs of our stakeholders and community, CST realized that the programs would need to be offered in different modalities. Therefore, as of fall 2022, the faculty approved that all of our programs be offered in fully online or partially remote versions, with a few weeks of each semester dedicated to intensive and in-person learning. Our programs will still have an in-person component, and new versions of some of the residential degrees are currently being developed. Still, the approval of virtual learning demonstrates the institution’s commitment to remaining student-centric and shifting its offerings to meet the needs of a rapidly changing theological and higher education landscape. By providing online programs, our students can remain close to their communities of belonging and accountability while receiving world-class education with opportunities to come together in person a few times a year. 

The Project’s principles were also central as CST identified the need to migrate into a new learning platform: Populi. Based on cultural change activated by the grant through conversations held throughout the year, some of our staff and faculty realized that our current learning management system (Empower) is not as comprehensive as needed to meet our needs. Populi allows for an enhanced recruitment and registrar process. It will also serve as our online learning platform. In addition, we have transitioned from a physical library with a collection of 300,000 books to the Digital Theological Library, which now carries over 600,000 books and over 60,000,000 articles accessible to our students and faculty anywhere in the world.

Over the last two months, we have also welcomed the new Interim President into our midst, Bishop Grant Hagiya. After ten years of dedicated service to CST, President Jeffrey Kuan’s legacy of building a vibrant community will continue. President Hagiya’s leadership style is very much attuned to the Activating Change principles and values of collaboration, justice, and belonging. He has made himself available to anyone who wants to be in conversation and partnership and has communicated openly and transparently. His focus on overseeing the Arbitration Process with TCC, working on a viable alternative location to CST to be announced in the next few weeks, and working toward a significant fundraising and capital campaign aligns seamlessly with Activating Change efforts.

The organic emergence of the Activating Change Task Force and the Spirit Lab initiative are direct results of the impact of the grant activities in advancing a cultural shift. During the Activating Change retreat in January 2023, we identified the loss and need for community as we undergo significant shifts and transitions. As CST will no longer be on its current campus and will move toward more online modes of operation, building a robust virtual community that is spiritually, communally, and intellectually vibrant is fundamental to finding empowerment and agency. Both of these initiatives (the Task Force and Spirit Lab) believe that CST, as one of the leading theological schools in the western US, must equip leaders, congregations, and communities with the confidence, worldviews, and tools necessary to advance change given the most pernicious systemic inequities and challenges present in our midst. And by doing so, we are also making sure that we are carving out a path to sustainability for our institution. 

Navigating the challenges facing theological education and Christian Churches today, in particular the challenges that have emerged within this last year for CST, has required great adaptability, integrity, innovation, and detailed strategic planning. 2022 charged us to move at the speed of accountability and through a shared leadership model. As such, it has been essential to pay close attention to the emerging challenges and the kinds of opportunities they invite. The TCC litigation, the move out of Oregon, and the presidential transition were significant changes for the school. However, these events have accelerated the need to catalyze and sustain a culture change campus-wide. Our hierarchical management-centric structures have been challenged as more community members have had to be present in the decision-making process to respond and make collective decisions at this critical juncture. Meetings with staff, faculty, and students have had to be principled in transparency and accountability, reflecting the shift in administrative and operational functions while fostering cultures and practices that equip all to contribute to the decision-making that generates change across campus.

Beyond our institution, we have had to expand partnerships to include the expertise of alumni; consultants; advisors; pastors and church leaders; local leaders; and unforeseen professionals, such as those involved with housing development, for example. Some of our external consultants and partners work outside the context of theological schools. They have helped us expand our understanding of what it means to embody and embed EDJI values to advance culture change into our institutional structure, bringing human-centered research and strategy into our ways of organizing as such. These unforeseen institutional changes have forced us to expedite changes in our academic programs to meet the needs of students. Collectively thinking of how to diversify our offers allowed for the initial business model for the Institute for Generative Leadership to emerge. As one of CST’s efforts to offer non-degree programs and learning experiences to pastors and lay ministers, this is an opportunity to extend our expertise through unique teaching and consulting models to churches and smaller academic centers. This process has also invited us into the fashioning of feedback loops and the creation of a website that can host all of this information to both hold us accountable and provide opportunities for community participation, all while communicating our new values and vision to current and prospective students, staff, faculty, alumni, and key donors.

Given the cultural shift in course, we anticipate institutional engagement in the continuing strategic planning process to achieve an operational model that is just, interdependent, and collaborative. Moreover, the campus-wide renewal will continue to address structural inequities, institutional racism, and the marginalization of certain racial groups across the school. We hope that the Activating Change Project principles are sufficiently infused into the DNA of CST to impact all aspects of our community life. We also hope that the more we become a theological school responding to the most pressing needs of our students, churches, and faith communities, we can disseminate our findings and help train the future generation of church leaders.