Dr. Chris Willard (STH ’08) launches Administry

By Kimberly Macdonald June 19th, 2018 in Alumni/ae News

As a BU STH alum (MDiv, ’08), I’ve launched a new application I think will be helpful for pastors and other ministry leaders engaged in community ministry.

Administry is an online platform that helps churches track and manage requests for financial assistance, quickly run reports, and share data with partner churches.

In 2014, I was the full-time director of a local outreach ministry center in O’Fallon, MO. One day a frantic single mother called me and insisted our church had promised to pay her electric bill. Instead of spending time ministering to her, I had to take down her number, unlock our storage closet, search for her file, and spend the next 30 minutes digging through a pile of notes, pledge requests, and utility bills. I desperately hoped previous caseworkers had left me some clues about what was really going on in this woman’s life.

I knew there had to be a better way. Thankfully, my background in software development and database design gave me the tools to rethink the way ministry should be done. Instead of fumbling through paperwork, ministry leaders should be able to instantly retrieve and review your client’s history – without ever needing to hang up the phone.

In the years since, I’ve distilled these principles into Administry, an easy-to-use web-based platform based on boots-on-the-ground ministry.

Learn more and sign up for a free trial at www.administry.io.

Sincerely,

Dr. Chris Willard
BU STH class of 2008 (M.Div)

Rev. Bobby McClain Offers Reflections on the Life and Ministry of Walter G. Muelder

By Kimberly Macdonald May 17th, 2018 in Alumni/ae News

THE DEAN WHO NEEDED NO NAME:

In Appreciation of the Life and Ministry of Walter G. Muelder

by

William B. McClain

Mary Elizabeth Joyce Professor Emeritus of Preaching and Worship

Wesley Theological Seminary

Washington, D.C.

            If you were anywhere near Boston University School of Theology from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, or you hear anybody who was there during those years talk about Seminary, you heard them, and you hear them now say simply, “The Dean,”  Everybody still knows who that is, without ever calling a name.  The name was, “The Dean.”  Walter George Muelder, of course; he was “The Dean.”    And, indeed he was, from 1945 -1972.  He was the undisputed – although not always recognized and heralded – academic leader of Boston University.  It was no wonder that President Harold Case, himself a graduate of the School of Theology, invited him to give one of the most prestigious lectures of the University at the invitation of the Board of the Graduate School in 1955.  It was here that the phrase, “the responsible society,” which became the major theme of the ecumenical movement of that era, was introduced.  He later gave it greater substance and was one of its best citizens.

Both Time and Life magazines chose, printed, announced, and pictured  Howard Thurman as one of the “Ten Greatest Preachers.”  He had spent time with Gandhi, the Mahatma, the leader of the pacifist movement in India.  His work at Howard University, Morehouse College, retreats and the outstanding pulpits of the world had won him the honor given.  But when the  President of Boston University wanted to bring Howard Thurman, the great African American preacher, mystic, philosopher,  pacifist, author and social change agent, as Dean of the Marsh Chapel, Harold Case faced opposition from his  administration, faculty, and trustees.  But not from the Dean!  The Dean joined the President of Boston University in making the great preacher,  Howard Thurman the first African American Dean of the Chapel of a major,  predominantly-white university in the world!

Surely,  everybody knows that accounts for Martin Luther King, Jr., coming to Boston University.  Trace it back to The Dean!!   After  Martin Luther King left Boston University  to go to Montgomery, Alabama, as Pastor  of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church  and later to lead the civil rights movement, throughout the rest of his life he carried in his briefcase Howard Thurman’s masterpiece and signal work, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED, along with his Bible in his briefcase.  But I suspect that  he also carried in his heart and his head the theological,  philosophical, and sociological issues that Walter Muelder brought together in some coherence in his encounter with this scholar/teacher/mentor at Boston University, and his encounter and exchange with his major professor, a fellow-Personalist, L. Harold DeWolf.  Why else would Martin King leave his papers to Boston University where “The Dean” was still Dean, and  leave in his will that DeWolf from Boston University preach his funeral -- fact often lost in the story and re-telling of Martin Luther King?

I first met  “the Dean” on his porch at 82 Oxford Road in Newton Centre, the summer I was a rising senior in college.  The late  C. Eric Lincoln, who had been my religion and philosophy  teacher  and major professor earlier at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, and who was now “the Dean’s” doctoral student, picked me up at Back Bay Station in Boston and drove me directly to Newton to introduce me to his major professor, “the Dean.”  Eric wanted to make sure that I would receive some financial aid to attend seminary and that I would come to Boston University.  After drinking lemonade on the porch with the two of them and exchanging such “small talk” as the two of them were capable of and my youthful frightened southern self could try to stammeringly initiate, we got down to the business of our visit, my going to seminary or graduate school somewhere.

When we had finished discussing my college record [that I would finish  summa cum laude with a double major in English literature and religion and philosophy, and possibly at the top of my class, finishing in three plus years without staying to be valedictorian – even if it were so],  and my involvement in the school activities and the church, and my life’s goals, Dr. Walter George Muelder characteristically rubbed his hand under his chin and fell silent  and thoughtful for what seemed like an eternity to me as he sized up the situation.  Then he made an unusual decision – on the spot.  And he told me so.  He said they would award me the Walker Fellowship [which had not ever been  given to an incoming student], and this in addition to an academic scholarship and the three-fourths tuition reduction grant normally given to Methodist students at Boston University School of Theology.  He said Miss Dorothy Lord would be sending me a letter confirming all of this.

One has to imagine what that meant to an African American Methodist  like me in 1959, who could not attend  the Methodist  Emory/Candler School of Theology in Georgia, which was nearer, cheaper, and in the same Methodist Church,  because of his color.  Not only did the Dean say I could come, I was welcomed.  There was more: The Dean said that  I was to enter with “all expenses paid, and some…”  I was more than ecstatic!   I was beside myself.  So was C. Eric Lincoln.  He took me out to a wonderful Chinese food dinner [which I had never seen or had in Alabama or Georgia], and at the dinner he said: “See, Mac, not all white people are bad and evil, blue-eyed devils!”  He was working on his dissertation on Black Muslims then.   He added, “The Dean likes you!  I was so afraid you were going to light up a cigarette and turn him off, and blow away all I had set up.  I forgot to tell you about that!”

I could not wait to go back and tell my college and my schoolmates that I was going to Boston University, and that I have a fellowship!  I am still proud to say it after all of these years – even though my girlfriend did not share all of this joy.  But there were others, and some still around, who knew and know what it meant that The Dean made it possible for me to go to BU.

I had grown up and attended segregated schools in Gadsden, Alabama.  I had picked cotton for little or nothing as a boy and was treated like a piece of dirt.  I had worked in the yards of southern  white people who paid you in coat-hangers for you to sell to the coat-hangers company [factories], bell-hopped in hotels where my life had been threatened  in seductive settings as a part of sexual amusement, waited tables in restaurants, and other odd-jobs all in the segregated South.  I had attended a good Methodist College, but its student population was all black – some of the best minds of their age and time, but they were all black.  I believe that many of us could have competed academically anywhere – but that opportunity was not available – not in Alabama and Georgia where I had been.  This was the first white man I had ever met who suggested that I had some intellectual capital and any value as a human being.  That I was really worth something beyond just being a “Negro student” in a Negro world to serve a Negro church.  I was now going to go to one of the finest Methodist  universities in America.  And I was a Methodist, and so were all of my people, tracing back as far as we could go in this country.  I could not wait to get back to my college and tell them.

But that was just the beginning of my knowledge and appreciation for the person they were calling “The Dean.”  After completing my first semester with straight A’s at Boston University, I was permitted to take the Dean’s “bread and butter course,” which everyone knows was, “Ethical Aspects of Social Reconstruction.” Just ask anybody who went to BU in those days.   There the Dean lectured on his new book and his pioneering scholarly work on “The Responsible Society.”  He would come to class and open his notebook and begin his very carefully constructed and eloquently written lectures on topics related to the foundations and  major themes of social ethics of the ecumenical movement in which he was so vitally and actively involved as a world leader.    Along with Wayne Perkins,  Love Henry Whelchel, Ed King,  and a few others, we learned a secret: As soon as possible, and without being intrusive and ever seeming to interrupt him,  raise your hand and ask a very intelligent question from your always assigned extra reading on the topic of the day.  We used to take pre-assigned turns,  and then the Dean would leave his beautifully written lecture, and for a very long time he would passionately engage the class --- becoming animated and moving back and forth and writing on the chalkboard,  going far beyond what he had written and sharing with us his vast knowledge of concepts from many disciplines and their interconnections and moving to a new level of interdisciplinary integration.  What a teacher he was!  What a scholar!  What a mind! What a motivator!  What a mentor!  What an example of all that he taught and preached!

I remember a particular day in class with Dr. Muelder that one of my classmates [not among the pre-agreed upon group]  made the mistake of interrupting our great learned Professor.  He had mentioned “moral laws” several times,  and the student said, almost disdainfully,  ”Dean Muelder,  what moral laws?”  The Dean left whatever else he intended to do that day, and for the next two hours he outlined on the chalk board, reviewed, summarized, applied, and taught Edgar Sheffield Brightman’s  moral laws and the relationship to Personalism as the uniform and universal moral  principle of respect for personality.  As if he were back with Brigthman, the Dean lectured and illustrated and didacticized,  and then leaned back  when he was finished and exhausted, and breathed relief, and then  said: “My teacher would have said: ‘Without personality, no other values  exist;’ unless human personality is valued, all else is devalued.”   I still have the notes from the class that day, but I don’t really need them.  I keep them to remind me of what happened to me that day in a class with “THE DEAN.”  How well I remember it more than 40 years later!  And I saw my connections, too, as an African American, and minister and activist and  neo-liberal  And I see them now!  I had a great teacher!

But he never asked for a carbon copy of himself.  And he did not get one in me.   He didn’t need it.  Not “The  Dean!”  That was borne out to me when he and I locked horns on an issue on the Annual Conference floor of the Southern New England Conference over the question of whether or not the Annual Conference should go beyond its askings on the Fund for Reconciliation as well as offer “Reparations and support” for Black Methodists for Church Renewal, as  opposed to fiscal responsibility and some other concerns.  I was serving as pastor of  an inner city church in the south end of  Boston with all of the problems of the ghetto, plus the late 60s post-riots situation, and the strong  “Black Power” movement and the death of Martin Luther King.  The Dean was faced with these and other issues at Boston University.  This was a new era of protest in a new way.   He saw me in action at the Annual Conference, and I brought bus loads of folks from the inner city and from Union Church in Boston as “witnesses” and “evidence” for the cause.  In a few weeks [I think three], he just showed up in Union Church with his wife Martha that Sunday morning [as he did from time to time during my 10-year pastorate there, and he would usually leave immediately following the service], but that morning he lingered and he said to me as they were leaving: “I just needed to hear you preach this morning.  I saw your argument.”

One of the many great gifts of Walter George Muelder was his ability to work, as he used to put  it, “at the intersectional points of theological, philosophical, and social science disciplines” and to help us  find an emerging coherence.   Many students of his left his classroom and the encounters  with him in other settings with  a new understanding of scholarship and mission -- a new vision of the church and its relationship to society and an inescapable commitment to give leadership as clergy to a responsible society. I know I did.  I have no doubt that one of  his most famous students, Martin Luther King, Jr., was greatly influenced by that approach to truth and ministry, and added that to his African American Baptist Church background and grounding to give leadership that changed America and affected the whole world.  Too very often, “the Dean’s” influence on him and so many other outstanding leaders in various areas of the church, the academy,  and the  society has not been acknowledged.  The Dean never sought it.  He never needed it.   Walter Muelder’s joy and fulfillment was in seeing his students at work in ministry  and showing forth the love of Christ in the world in cooperation with God in the healing of the nations.

In one of the classes I took with the Dean, he was discussing class, race,  reconciliation, inclusiveness and the church and he was bold to do so—in those days--- he  made a statement that I have never forgotten.  In fact, I have quoted him several times as I have tried to address this issue in my ministry.   He leaned over the lectern in a way that only he could lean and look out at a class, uncharacteristically removed his glasses, and he said in a stern, accusing, and disgusting tone of voice: “There is more genuine communion, fellowship,  and true acceptance at the neighborhood bar than there is at the Lord’s table at the neighborhood church.”

“The School of the Prophets,” as Boston University School of Theology came to be known world-wide,   in his great days as “The Dean,” was the greatest school of theology in America:  no negative quotas [keeping out, as was true of the other major seminaries];  no creedal subscriptions [we had teachers who were not Protestant Christians and even those who subscribed to other religions]; but all who were taught to believe that we could become a “Responsible Society,” and that there were ethical aspects of that which needed  attending to, and which required “re-construction.”  And to that end,  the Dean was willing to prepare, propose,  profess [or], and preach:

                                    O Crucified and Risen Lord,

                                    Give us tongues of fire [now and  always]

                                    To preach Thy Word!