By Kathy Tuan-MacLean, Associate Director, GFM
When GFM Boston became its own area, we engaged in a strategic planning process to discern the potential for graduate student, international, and faculty ministry. As Area Director, I had the least amount of faith for faculty ministry. My experience with faculty over the years had not been promising. I was both afraid of them and judgmental of them. So when faculty ministry was suggested, I grudgingly put it into the plan. And all we did to implement our plan was begin praying that God would do something. It all felt impossible.
The stirrings of a faculty fellowship
Yet that fall I randomly started bumping into faculty. I sat down next to a woman I didn’t know at church and asked, "Are you here for school or for work?" "Both," she said, because she was a new faculty at Harvard. We had coffee together and I learned she's super missional and an intercessor to boot. God brought some faculty who I had known from college and graduate school. And then former students from our grad groups came back to Boston as faculty.
I said to Jeff Barneson, the team leader at Harvard, "Have you noticed that all these missional faculty are showing up here in Boston?"
“Hmmm,” he said, "You’re right."
"So, what should we do?"
"We should gather them and feed them."
“If you build it, we will come.”
Jeff wrote an email to all the faculty he knew, I added all the faculty I knew, and in December we gathered everyone at Jeff’s house (pictured). He made chili relleno casserole. I bought vanilla bean cake (our standby dessert at every meeting since). About twelve people from all different campuses showed up. I took them through a whiteboard exercise.
We asked, "What have you seen God do on campus?" They shared and I wrote their answers on the board.
Then we asked, "What would you like to see God do on campus?"
The conversation that came out of these two questions brought so much enthusiasm that when the meeting was over, a faculty walked up, held my arm and said, "I will host anything you ever want to do with faculty."
With that offer the Boston Faculty Fellowship (or BFF—the funniest acronym ever) was born! Because all we needed was a group of faculty excited about being together, and a faculty who was willing to host.
The faculty basically said, "If you build it, we will come." So, unlike any other ministry I've ever done with InterVarsity, I became the person who built this. I do everything that I would never, ever do for students. I send all the emails. I write the agendas. I organize the leaders and lead our leadership meetings. I cater the food--meaning I cook it. I buy the vanilla bean cake. I make postcards and mail them. I direct our January retreat.
The importance of trust and a winsome culture
At our first meeting after that initial gathering, we invited a junior law professor with a remarkable story. He left being a partner at a major Chicago law firm to plant a Vineyard church. His story was really a story of failing as a church planter. As he processed his failure with God, he realized he liked teaching and working with the youth group best. This led him to pursue teaching law.
The next time we met, an urban sociologist who's been tenured at Northwestern, U Penn, Harvard, and now John Hopkins, told two stories of failure: her divorce her first year of grad school, and being targeted by the most famous colleague in her department as racist.
Everybody who came to these meetings was completely blown away. They said they'd never heard such authenticity and vulnerability in any faculty context. In these stories of failure and brokenness, God’s goodness and the hope of the gospel leaked through. These stories set the culture of our group, a very winsome culture—so different than what I had experienced from faculty years before.
Other strange things happened along the way. The intercessor faculty woman I met at church wanted to bring a prophet to prophesy over the faculty fellowship. Because others in the fellowship were charismatic and open to the prophetic, they said, "Great!" It took me an hour and a half to figure out how to write the email announcing that a prophet was coming.
The prophet came and prophesied over about a dozen of us. This guy was a genuine prophet--it felt like he was reading our souls. Many were in tears because of what he said, so touched by his words of encouragement. That was our third meeting. We had these stories of vulnerability and then the prophet. Community got built, and the trust level got really high.
The value of yearly retreats
The next year, soon after the first meeting, two different faculty emailed me, "What do you think about having a retreat?" Surely that came from God! I connected them and they raised it at our next meeting. We learned early on that faculty are hungry to hear from each other. If Jeff or I taught anything other than the Bible, it just fell flat. So if I had said, "Let's have a retreat," they would all have looked at their feet like they did for the two straight years I asked for some of them to step forward as leaders. But when two of them independently said, "Let's have a retreat," everyone jumped onboard. That's how our January weekend retreat began.
Our retreats have been incredibly important because there’s great power in just getting faculty together. Our most well-attended retreats have been with Santa Ono when he was Provost at Emory (before becoming president at University of Cincinnati and now University of British Columbia) and Mary Poplin. Hearing from someone with Santa’s scope helped recruit faculty, and Mary’s testimony about coming out of secular humanism into faith is so compelling that faculty couldn’t resist.
It was at our first retreat, that when we talked about the vision of the group, the intercessor/prophet-inviting faculty called out, “Nothing less than the intellectual transformation of the world!” That looks a little too arrogant on a website or postcard, so we call it our “secret vision” with “Serving as Christ’s ambassadors on campus” as our official motto. Our other spoken but not written motto is “Always welcome, never guilty.” We don’t want there to be a whiff of guilt around attendance.
Building a leadership team
The most challenging part of the first two years was building a leadership team. Every time I raised the idea, I experienced some of my worst ministry moments. Complete, dead silence. I kept raising InterVarsity’s commitment to indigenous leadership to no avail. At our second retreat (the one where we found out we had bedbugs!), the faculty wanted to pray for me. I said my biggest prayer request was for leaders—and several stepped up after that. God is good! We've had a leadership team ever since. The leadership team meets about five times a year, and together we set vision, come up with meeting topics, and plan the retreat. The leaders rotate often—some people come on for just a semester or a year. Getting leaders will continue to be a struggle because faculty are so busy, but it's been key to have them.
Defining the group—who is a faculty member?
Another early challenge we faced was the question of where our boundaries would lie. Were we a fellowship for only faculty with or on tenure track? Where did adjuncts, lecturers, researchers, administrators, and post-docs fit in? I brought the question to the newly-formed leadership team and I’m so proud of how they responded. Rather than mimicking the hierarchy and values of the academy, they wanted everyone who called themselves faculty to feel welcome.
Establishing a Black faculty fellowship
When the Black Lives Matter movement began, God put on my heart the need for Black faculty to gather—especially since I have about thirty on my email list and they don’t all know each other. Every Black faculty I talked or emailed with said they were very interested. But with busyness it took eighteen months for me to find a faculty member willing to host and lead the conversation. We finally met in March and with a little nudging, I’m pretty sure they will continue to meet.
Currently, the Boston Faculty Fellowship has minimal programming. We meet twice a semester on Sunday afternoons and have our January retreat with one overnight over the MLK holiday weekend. We sometimes have a spring service project or a pool party in May at my house. I send out postcards for save-the-dates and then an email two weeks in advance of the actual meetings. I continue to do almost all the grunt work required for the fellowship, taking seriously the faculty request to build it so they can come.
What would happen if more faculty were reached?
I’ve been supporting the BFF for ten years now—always as a little tiny bit of my larger job. It’s been sobering to realize that there are sixty campuses in Boston alone and probably thirty-five to forty thousand faculty. What would happen to academia if a small group of faculty prayed on all sixty campuses for God’s kingdom to come? I can’t accomplish that dream. In fact, the only way that could happen is for all the campus ministries to work together to reach faculty. I’m praying for God to bring someone to Boston who can work with faculty full time. And I have hope. After all, it was just a little bit of prayer (with faith smaller than a mustard seed) that launched the Boston Faculty Fellowship.
