Date: August 29, 2024
We require every faculty, every staff member, and every student to participate in Intercultural Competency Training. This requirement goes back to the early 2000s. For students, the requirement goes back at least twenty years; for faculty and staff, it goes back fifteen years. In its current form, over the last seven years, I have participated in the program twice; the Board of Trustees has been through the program. This program is important; we need to be a community shaped by this program.
I confess I don’t really understand the hostility to DEI or to “anti-racism training”. VTS is not exactly a “trendy” seminary; we tend to plod along focused on “class, chapel, and lunch” and seeking to make sure we produce graduates who are centered, Gospel focused, and well formed. We don’t require Intercultural Competency Training because we are “woke”. We require it because all people are made in the Image of God (Genesis 1:26) and that Paul tells us in Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). We do this work because we a Bible based Seminary; we do this work because it is Gospel work. So, for those who are participating in the program do so aware that this is holy work. May God help you look at the world through a divine lens of equality and justice.
Finally, thank you to our new Associate Dean of Multicultural Ministries – the Rev. Dr. Altagracia Perez-Bullard. Thank you to you and your team as you organize your first Intercultural Competency Training.
The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D.
Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and the President of The General Theological Seminary.