Our mission is to be a thriving, creative educational institution that counters systems of oppression and alienation through practices of co-learning and co-action for the purpose of advancing the pursuit of higher goods, the formation of durable communities, and the generation of faithful, structural change.
Re-imagining theological education to change the story, transform communities, and collaboratively build new spaces of connection and durable flourishing.
Though narratives of decline related to churches and other social institutions abound, we assert a counternarrative. Even in a society dominated by corporate and market logics, we believe in the necessity of congregations and social institutions in fashioning a just society that pursues the common good and the power of such institutions to achieve this goal. We seek to build and empower these institutions through the relational tools of theological action research and broad-based community organizing integrated with critical, theological reflection. Our work seeks to build power in organizations by thickening relational webs around common interests in the intersection of faith and social needs. This relational rehabilitation inevitably thins the boundaries between congregations and their local community contexts, allowing the church to exist and serve in a listening, learning, collaborative, and dynamic mode of being.
“I believe that the church holds a distinct power to offer hope and good news to the world. When teams of faithful leaders come together to learn and lead, they equip themselves to offer that hope and good news as the beacons of Christ that God calls us to be. I’m so grateful for the Black Mountain School of Theology & Community – I can’t wait to see how the Holy Spirit will be at work in and through it!”
Rt. Rev. Kristin Uffelman White
Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio
Embedded in our mission and vision are a series of core convictions:
The Value of Theological Education in Social Justice Praxis
Base (non-formal) theological education is a powerful and essential vehicle for training leaders, congregations, and communities to dismantle systems of oppression and alienation and to promote faithful, structural change in the pursuit of higher goods through co-learning.
Theological values (such as robust notions of love and human connectivity), theological questions (on the nature of our created world and the role of diverse cultures of humans in that world), and theological tools (dialogue, relationality, and participatory learning/dependence in a diverse society) are essential to the building of just and flourishing community because they provide vision and practices the promote and sustain such communion.
The Value of Relationality
Rooted in a Christian theology of incarnation and emphasized in broad-based organizing, practices of healthy relational formation and relational dynamics are foundational to our work.
Relational fabric is instrumental to forming personal and collective identities that enable power building and galvanize the courage necessary for meaningful action.
Relationships motivate the values of curiosity, collaboration, and inclusion expressed in listening, learning, and action. Our commitment to relational work necessitates forming liberative, intersectional lenses directed at social institutions and movements.
Collaborative Learning and Collaborative Power
We affirm a “funds of knowledge” approach that values local knowledges and local stories, acknowledging the sacred value of place and the unique insights retained in every community.
This approach promotes the importance of local histories and storytellers. Hence, ethical and faithful learning in every context should be collaborative. Collaborative learning tools like action research eschew forms of “banking education” (education as the transfer and passive reception of static information) that tend to serve the purposes of dominant cultures and classes through the imposition of knowledge regimes that deactivate and disempower citizens.
By contrast, in our view, education and research should promote a “power-with” (not over others or for others) that is rooted in relationship and listening so as to enable collaborative actions for just outcomes.
Sacred Nature of Place
In a theological geography, sacred meanings are distinctly connected to places and their histories. We seek to avoid “truths” and knowledges that are abstract and disconnected from bodies, communities and their histories, and the created (non-human) realities (such as plants, animals, the physical geographies) of every place.
Rejecting static understandings of place that affirm control, ownership, and other market logics, we understand geography to be dynamic and seek faithful practices of place-making.
The Black Mountain School of Theology & Community was born of a shared passion for the church and hope that congregations can live justly among their neighbors.
Long-time practitioners of theological education, congregational ministry, and community organizing, our core group had spent years discussing common concerns. Coming together in 2018 we began to articulate together the need for a new kind of theological educational institution — an institution that embeds collaborative research in the needs and knowledges of communities and localities with an unyielding emphasis on action and social change.
We knew the trends. Congregations were fracturing. Systemic injustices and inequities were compounding. Communities were fraying. And traditional theological institutions were increasingly ill-equipped to engage these challenges in their specific local contexts. In this gulf between the traditional academy and local needs, our team brought significant experience in the power of relationship building, co-learning, and collaborative action for change. We heard again and again, from our students, colleagues, and congregations, a deep hunger for substantive theological engagement. We had witnessed the difference that theological reflection combined with the tools of organizing and located research can make for strengthening institutions and communities and revitalizing congregations.
Catalyzed by the cultural moment, we began to envisage a new kind of platform where our passions, hopes, and expertise could serve communities and enliven churches. In 2019, we founded the Black Mountain School of Theology & Community as a space for reimagining theological education for cultivating just communities.
A shared conviction drives our work: that theological education for the 21st century must focus on helping congregations deepen their theological identities by connecting to their local contexts, collaboratively strengthening their communities, and building their power for making change through work rooted in their core ecclesial practices.
What is needed right now is a place for congregations, organizing communities, civic-minded collectives to learn how to learn together. The Black Mountain School of Theology & Community seeks to be just such a place—a platform for collaborative inquiry and shared action that capacitates congregations and communities to build knowledge, research, and power to make real change in their localities. We look forward to your joining us in this exciting, collaborative venture, as we together write the next chapter of theological education.
Why Black Mountain?
Just as we seek to help organizations discover the importance of place in their own identity and mission, Black Mountain, North Carolina, shapes who we are and the challenges we face. In the mid-20th century, it was the site of The Black Mountain College, one of the most innovative experiments in US higher education. The BMC reimagined formal (university) and informal educational paradigms, leaving an indelible mark on fields as diverse as art, literature and democratic education.
Situated at the “front porch” of the Appalachian Mountains, Black Mountain offers both a scenic environment for cultivating imaginative possibilities and proximity to the real issues of poverty and racial animosity that pervade US culture at large. Our unique location provides the opportunity to imagine new possibilities for theological engagement and community development that begin to heal the brokenness of our churches and communities.
The great tasks of theology — exploring the distinct character of God and the nature of humanity, our human connection to a non-human environment, the values and ethics that shape our lives, and the pursuit of goodness beyond our own interests and capacities — have often been hobbled by regulatory binaries and boundaries.
Our secular cultural predispositions to locate the spiritual and theological in the personal and private, to sequester the sacred from the mundane, and to professionalize and compartmentalize the various knowledges in separate schools and departments has rendered theology a niche discipline intended for only a select few and arcane and inaccessible for the vast many.
By contrast, we seek to enliven theological learning and practice, to relate it generously to other disciplines and modes of learning, and to embolden its pursuits by locating the passions of theology in dynamic, tangible spaces — in our daily lives, the rhythms and patterns of our communities, our social institutions, and even the vital, combative spaces of our politics where interests and experiences collide. Moreover, we believe this kind of theological inquiry can provide essential critique of the systems that exploit and profit from the fragmenting hold they impose on our communities and society.
Public theological education means far more than better theology; it denotes the pursuit of a better world.
Meet our team.
Discover the passionate people dedicated to creating impact.
