by Melanie P. Moore
The New Hampshire School for Ministry (SFM), one of 38 local schools of formation in the Iona Collaborative, has graduated eight priests serving in New Hampshire and two neighboring dioceses, with three more priests-to-be (God willing and the people consenting) graduating in June. A dozen lay preachers who studied at SFM are already licensed and preaching in New Hampshire. (Deacons for the New Hampshire Diocese are trained through a partnership with the Province 1 School for Deacons which organizes the collaborative formation of deacons in northern New England.)
The Rev. Canon Kelly Sundberg Seaman is the Canon for Formation and Vocation for the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire and became dean of SFM in January 2020, just after SFM joined the Iona Collaborative.
“Iona, and the wider Seminary of the Southwest circle, and all they are doing for the church that’s emerging is one of the great joys and gifts of my life,” Sundberg Seaman said. “It’s an amazing bunch of people and an institution with a commitment to understanding and then responding to the way that church is really happening and the way that church is changing. And it does all that in a spirit of generosity and genuine collaboration. That ethos of research and realism, collaboration, and generosity makes anything that any one Iona School does that much more valuable because we know it’s been informed by and shared with people who care deeply about the church.”
“Prior to joining the Iona Collaborative, New Hampshire had several priests who were formed in ways other than sending someone off for a three-year M.Div. (Master of Divinity),” Sundberg Seaman said. Several “read for orders,” or took a patchwork of courses from residential seminaries within driving distance. “The other thing that was in our diocesan culture was participating in the Province 1 School for Deacons. I think there was this growing awareness of what was happening in the church and an attentiveness to the size and scope of Episcopal churches in New England (fewer and smaller than in some other parts of the country). Bishop Hirschfeld knew things were going on at the Seminary of the Southwest and, specifically, with Iona, that fit what churches in the Diocese of New Hampshire needed. In a good sense, it was a perfect storm of what Iona was envisioning meeting the reality of the needs of the church in New Hampshire.”
The first classes in the SFM began in Fall 2020—the first full academic year of COVID-19. While they had planned and envisioned one way of doing things, Covid changed all that. In the years since then, the school has continued to evolve.
“The forced pivot to not being in the same building with each other taught us a lot about what can happen on Zoom and what can’t,” Sundberg Seaman said. “We’ve come to a place now where, for example, we still use the ten-month academic year and have study weekends, but because of students’ and instructors’ work schedules, the Fridays are online and the Saturdays are on-site together.”
“We’ve found a rhythm that has enough ‘human-bodies-in-the-same-room time’ to nurture that sense of community; we round that out with time on Zoom to balance the different nature of relationship and connection online with where people also spend time together. We’ve found a sweet spot, I think, to accommodate travel, schedules, and weather.” Part of that is complementing monthly study weekends with gathering online every Wednesday evening during the academic year for learning, conversation, and Compline.
Sundberg Seaman is enthusiastic about the local school model of formation because, as she says, it makes “yes” possible for a lot more people.
“Because the standard expectation for a long time was that formation could only be in a residential M.Div. program, there have always been people who wouldn’t even go as far as asking the question (of discernment) out loud because they ‘couldn’t possibly go away to seminary.’ Local formation makes formation accessible to more kinds of people with a wider variety of backgrounds and commitments. The answer still may be to ‘go away to seminary,’ but what is holy is that it keeps concerns about ‘going away to seminary’ from blocking the question in the first place—not just for priests but for people called to be deacons and lay leaders.
“And when you know the answer to the discernment question is ‘yes, you are called to this,’ now there are ways to honor that person’s household commitments, work commitments, and existing ministry in the community where they are rooted. That’s one of the things I love about the power of local formation.
“We have done local formation with everyone from young parents to people easing into retirement—folks whose experience and training has been in industry, business, human services; engineers, and artists, people who have graduate degrees and people who don’t. It’s about as mixed a demographic as you can have in our context in terms of age and gender and background.”
Sundberg Seaman sees a bright future, especially in terms of more licensed lay ministers.
“We’re already training lay ministers with materials from the Iona Collaborative,” she said. “The Episcopal Church canons have a small number of roles designated as licensed lay roles—including preachers, pastoral leaders, worship leaders, and more. As SFM continues to grow, we aspire to form people for more of those roles. Beyond that is making sure that theological education is there for anyone,” she said. “That’s a more complicated ecosystem because there are dozens of seminaries and organizations that offer all levels of remote learning. Some congregations are extraordinarily good at formation and some don’t have the resources to do formation. Partnerships will be crucial for us.”
The New Hampshire SFM partnership with Iona has the potential to continue growing, in Sundberg Seaman’s vision.
“We’re going to keep forming preachers but the growing field for us is how to make the resources available to more individuals and congregations. How do we keep partnering with Iona and other resources not just to provide education for individuals but to form communities? What does it mean to form a congregation, to keep reminding people it’s not just about having a well-formed clergy practitioner but having profoundly formed baptized people who have particular strengths and are called to leadership roles?
“We’re also growing partnerships across diocesan lines,” she said. “That’s another place for New Hampshire’s local school to keep doing new things, to be open to cross-diocesan connection. I’m just so grateful that New Hampshire is not doing this work by ourselves, that we’ve got encouragement and resources that come from the Seminary of the Southwest and Iona.
“The notion that Iona is a Collaborative is taken very much to heart. Not only do we get resources but (we get) the resources and wisdom of all the other schools. The fact that every Iona affiliate school is unique, we’ve got this amazing network of diocesan schools and deans doing things that are locally adapted, and this culture baked in of sharing it. To be in a landscape shifting so dramatically and rapidly as formation and the church, it’s such a gift not to be inventing things by yourself.
“Rebecca and Nandra and the deans are constantly in collaboration with other groups who are trying to figure this out,” Sundberg Seaman said. “Last year’s Unconference was a great example of that. It wasn’t just Iona’s leaders who gathered. Some of the residential seminaries were there and other diocesan schools were there. This group is intentionally collaborating—we’re in this together.”
