Darcie sells mattresses. She also drives two hours one way every Tuesday evening from her home to attend classes at Metro Baltimore Seminary (MBS).
The 27-year-old Asian American says she developed an interest in disabilities ministry at a young age and has since tried to figure out how to turn this dream into a reality. MBS seemed like a way to get there.
“The applied portion of [the program] really appealed to me, and I was also not wanting to go into debt,” said Darcie, who plans to graduate in 2023. “I wanted to be a good steward of my time.”
Since January 2019, MBS, an affiliate of Metro Atlanta Seminary, has been seeking students like Darcie: nontraditional types who might be working, retiring from their careers, or seeking ministry renewal, and who can’t afford standard seminary tuition. But mainly, it’s seeking folks who want to join Jesus in bringing the hope and healing of the gospel to the wounds of the racially-strained Baltimore area.
It’s like the question Craig Garriott began posing when he helped form the Baltimore Antioch Leadership Movement (BALM), a church-planting and renewal effort tied to Jeremiah 8:22: “Is there a balm in Gilead? Is there a balm in Baltimore?”
While the hub of many internationally renowned hospitals and universities, Baltimore is also known for its poor neighborhoods, hypersegregation, and record-breaking homicide rates.
In the middle of this disheartening context, Garriott and his wife, Maria, alongside Stan Long, the African American pastor of Faith Christian Fellowship Church, created BALM in 2019 to help raise Christ-centered leaders to start new churches, renew failing churches, and make more disciples.
But it wasn’t until early last year that an accredited seminary became a part of that formula.
From 2012-18, Garriott and Long, who had both worked for decades to build the now multiethnic, cross-socioeconomic church that Faith Christian Fellowship has become, ran the LAMP program for prospective pastors in Baltimore. But in that time, they graduated only two men. And with the goal of raising leaders from and for racially and culturally diverse churches, traditional seminary just didn’t seem like a viable option.
“Affordability is key when we have pastors that are able to stay in their community and get training and then come out without debt they have to pay off,” says Dan Passerelli, MBS president and also an associate pastor at Chapelgate Presbyterian Church in Marriottsville, Maryland.
Around the time that Garriott and Long were brainstorming ways to disciple and train new pastors and laypeople in Baltimore, leaders from Chapelgate, a fellow PCA church about 15 minutes outside of the city, were having similar thoughts. The two groups then met with folks from Metro Atlanta Seminary (MAS), a small Reformed seminary dedicated to providing hands-on ministry experience for modern seminarians. MAS offered to allow the new group to use its existing model to open a satellite campus in Baltimore under its oversight and accreditation, and by January 2019, MBS was hosting its first classes on Tuesday evenings in Chapelgate’s building.
From the start, affordability was one of the fledgling seminary’s highest priorities. Thanks to an average annual tuition around $2,000, just about anyone with faith in Christ, a desire for ministry training, and a head on their shoulders could apply, without concern for long-term debt. Now that the seminary is two years in, its 44 students, hailing from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic situations, are proving this is true.
“None of these people would have been able to go to an RTS or a Covenant or a Westminster. So it’s filling a gap for the Kingdom and the church that has existed in this area,” says Garriott, who serves as the dean of Church Planting & Renewal and associate dean of urban ministry.
MBS keeps costs low by using Chapelgate and Freedom Church’s buildings for classes. It also has no full-time paid faculty, but relies on pastors, ministry leaders, and counselors from the community to teach all the classes, ideally reflecting Baltimore’s ethnic diversity.
From the start, affordability was one of the fledgling seminary’s highest priorities.
For instance, this semester Tom Wenger, the white pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Crofton, Maryland, is teaching “Work of Christ.” J.B. Watkins, an African American who now pastors Faith Christian Fellowship, is teaching Greek Exegesis. And Garriott, who’s white, is co-teaching New Testament Survey with Louis Wilson, an African American who is senior pastor of New Song Community Church in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood.
“The thing that I love about this is that it gives churches a stake in the theological training and leadership formation of the people who are going to be leading them … the problems that Baltimore faces are so profound that it requires that everybody that has a stake plays a part in bringing about any sort of change or solution,” says Passerelli.
MBS follows MAS’ model of mixing academic instruction with real-life ministry experience. Every student spends about 20% of his or her time meeting with a spiritual mentor, 40% in class or completing academic coursework, and 40% interning at a local church. Darcie, for instance, is interning with Tonya Cherry, who directs Chapelgate’s special needs and counseling ministries.
Passerelli says that nontraditional models like this are becoming increasingly necessary:
“I think one of the reasons it matters is because as our city, our region, and our country become more diverse, a one-size-fits-all model of seminary training will be less and less equipped to produce the kind of leaders that are needed, partly because what is needed from our leaders is not just knowledge and information but the ability to process that information in the context of the ministry.”
At the start of the 2020-21 school year, MBS opened a second location based at Freedom Church in northeast Baltimore, making classes even more accessible to city residents. Students can attend at either of the two locations in a one-evening-per-week format, with both in-person and virtual options now being offered because of the pandemic. As hoped, the student body is a mix. There are African Americans, Latinos, those of Asian and Middle Eastern descent, and Caucasians. There’s a 70-year-old deacon who works with special-needs students, a retiree from a high-level government job, a high school graduate heading toward the pastorate, a young cellist, a woman in her 80s, and a former Hindu priest. Many are already working in ministry; others are waiting for their first calling.
Garriott says he delights in watching the diversity come together around scriptural truth, as he reflected on observing a young Latino man excitedly discuss theology with a young Asian woman and a fellow African American student.
“This is exactly what the seminary is about – equipping emerging leaders for disciple-making, church renewal, church planting … I was just praising God.”
Because this kind of coming together, around not just social issues but around grace and truth, is what will bring true healing to a city such as Baltimore.
Garriott says, “At the heart of it, what is it that’s going to bring healing to any community or any city? It’s not just going to just be new policies and better policing and stronger education. All of these are very important, but it’s going to be Gospel-enlivened people who are living out the truth of the Gospel and who are sacrificing their lives to love their neighbors, who are not running away from the issues, but are running toward them with Gospel grace and love and mercy.”
For those interested in bringing something like MBS to their city, Passerelli advises to gather a team of trusted leaders, go slowly, reach out to group such as MAS that can help with guidance and accreditation, and pray about everything.
Learn more at https://www.metrobaltimoreseminary.org/.