This article was originally published in the 2026 issue of focus magazine, the annual publication of the BU School of Theology. This article can be found on page 28. By Debbie Brubaker (’11), director of online and hybrid programs and lecturer.
Building digital communities that center justice and whole-person care for students
In my online course, Space, Place, and Change, students share media that document key aspects of their sacred spaces. Recording the exterior soundscapes of her church, one student’s audio poignantly captures the central role faith communities play in the work of justice today.
The audio begins with the ringing of church bells calling us to worship, then a voice cries out, “No justice, no peace. We’re here! We’re here!” Car horns overlap with the noises of a crowd shouting in approval. Then, a familiar call and response resounds and repeats insistently: “What do we want?” “Justice!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” The first voice returns, this time with a prayer: “Bring peace, God, in our country, and in our world…”
These digital assignments are designed to reorient and deepen students’ relationships to the places where they worship. By documenting the everyday happenings in our sacred places, we see how our commitments—to justice, peace, and hospitality— are lived out in our ministry contexts. These exercises also work as invitations for students to enter in and bear witness to the diverse worlds of ministry their colleagues inhabit. This theological classroom does not require students to leave their ministry fields, uproot their families, and relocate. Instead, remote students remain anchored in their home context, where they strengthen their formation as community leaders while engaging a wider, diverse expanse of Christian life.
Building equitable online programs means that we will continuously consider how historic and systemic barriers to wealth and technology impact our domestic international students.
Online theological education remains animated by questions that have long grounded residential seminary training: How do we prepare faithful leaders to serve God and others, to do good in a world shaped by systemic violence and injustice? Yet online theological education must also consider new questions: How do we cultivate digital learning communities in pursuit of justice when relational presence no longer requires being together physically?
These questions take on new depth in an era where social media functions as an instrument of misinformation, dissolving our bonds as public citizens, and when digital technologies are harnessed in service of the violent aims of profit and power. But these same tools can enable education, strengthen our communal ties, and empower our efforts to resist injustice and care well for one another.
I have trained and prepared to teach in the traditional, residential model of theological education, where formation requires learning in physical proximity, where students pray, eat, and study side by side. But seminary environments, even in their residential form, have radically changed. Students today juggle graduate studies alongside multiple jobs, caregiving, and ministry demands far beyond the walls of the school. And while once an exciting experiment, digital technology and online learning are now central to the preparation and practice of today’s faith leaders. These changes reflect the new realities of spiritual formation and faithful leadership, they reflect what life and ministry look like in a networked world, and this new reality requires us to prophetically imagine new futures for theological education and ministry.
Transformative theological education must include deep formation that engages the whole, embodied, and contextually situated student. Effective online learning can serve this goal and move us beyond transactional learning models if we consider how digital tools can aid collaborative and community- oriented theological training. How might we, for example, use asynchronous discussion to invite students to practice radical attention and presence with one another, to provide space for deep listening and the co-construction of knowledge? Can we design and record lectures with intentional breaks and guided assignments that require students to pause for contemplative reflection or test lecture insights within real-world ministry concerns? How will we use multimedia assignments and synchronous class sessions to provide opportunities for students to model and receive feedback on professional skills such as spiritual counseling techniques, preaching and liturgical leadership, or conflict mediation practices? Innovative online teaching must facilitate formation and engage students in these kinds of multimodal learning.
The rise of online theological education was accelerated by the pandemic, but its impact on the educational landscape stretches back much further. As the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) has reported, online enrollment at ATS schools grew by 195 percent between 2006 and 2016. Research emerging from this history affirms that online theological education is most successful when it intentionally designs and adapts curriculum, technology, and pedagogies for online learners and prioritizes accessibility and presence. These insights echo educational theories like the Community of Inquiry framework, which emphasizes cognitive, social, teaching, and learner presence in effective online education and the principles of Universal Design for Learning, which insists that multimodal and accessible learning designs benefit all students.
Building accessible, equitable, and sustainable models of online learning is our goal at the BU School of Theology. Centering accessibility will look like proactively ensuring course materials can be read by assistive technology and building enhanced options for online learners to choose and personalize assignments. Building equitable online programs means that we will continuously consider how historic and systemic barriers to wealth and technology impact our domestic and international students. We will ensure that program costs and scholarship opportunities are transparent, remain committed to reducing barriers to access, and work hard to increase financial support for students who need it most. We have learned from our peers that sustainable models of online learning are resilient, built to align and adapt to the capacities of the school and the changing demands of ministry. At STH this means we are committed to using scalable educational technology, will schedule courses to meet student needs and faculty resources, invest in our academic support staff, and build programs that reflect the core of our mission.
Our commitment to online theological education at the School of Theology is a commitment to building digital learning environments where we can practice faithful presence with one another. The media and reflections my students share, like the one included here, invite us all to bear witness to the labor and love required of ministry in an unjust world. Online learning and digital technologies open new opportunities that can enable us to be present, bear witness, and learn together across great geographic difference, to participate in one another’s formation as faithful leaders who “seek peace with justice in a diverse and interconnected world¹.”
1 BUSTH’s mission statement, found at bu.edu/about/diversity-statement/#mission