"Dear Students of MHGS:
At their recent meeting, the Board of Trustees decided we will change the name of Mars Hill Graduate School. The question has been under consideration for some time with faculty, staff, students, alumni, donors, and board members. We have all lived with the coffee shop questions about where do you go to school or where do you work? Our names matter to us. We don’t come to this decision lightly.
We made this decision for several important reasons:
1. We obviously have some confusion about the name in the Seattle area because of our neighbors at Mars Hill Church. We also have confusion with other schools or organizations elsewhere in the country which also share the same name. We don’t seek to distance ourselves from our fellow followers of Christ as much as to bring increased clarity for our distinct mission and our unique Kingdom calling.
2. Secondly, we are committed to a “Seattle Strategy” that will take us forward in (re)introducing ourselves to Seattle as a place of story, transformation, and missional teaching. Our mission guides us: “MHGS trains people to be competent in the study of text.soul.culture. in order to serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships.” We believe a new name will help us tell the story of MHGS to our city.
3. Finally, we are moving forward with new programs and initiatives at many levels as a school which includes an additional embodiment of our mission through conferences, recovery weeks, and seminars. We are also developing strategies for our work in North Carolina, Washington, DC, Texas, and St. Louis. This is an opportunity for a fresh start at what some call positioning and branding.
In the next month, the board will receive serious suggestions and recommendations for a new name. The proposals will be reviewed by an internal committee and an external organization and then presented to the board for their process.
I want you to remember this: Naming is a serious and holy activity. Yahweh named and re-named many people as we read in scriptural texts. In the ancient world, to know the name of the other was also to know something of their identity, heart, and soul. Names were taken seriously. Our name, Mars Hill Graduate School, has a rich history in the biblical text of Acts 17 that speaks to our commitment to pedagogy of text.soul.culture. Our name has also served us well in the past to tell the story of our mission. At the same time, as many of you have experienced, it has and continues to create a confusion of identity and mission both in Seattle and around the country.
As we move ahead with this holy process, we want to tell the story of who we are as opposed to who we are not. We start this project with a heightened sense that this is a time to listen well and then to speak our story with clarity, grace, competence, and authenticity in an honorable and respectful way. I am aware that we lose something precious in the story our Mars Hill name has told in the past. I also want to say to you all---this is a time for respectful and honoring conversations with one another and with those outside our school, especially with those institutions which also bear the name “Mars Hill.” We are a place that honors stories and other people---not in judgment but in engaged discourse. This is a time for respectful discourse. We don’t serve the kingdom of God well as we speak in ways that dishonor others.
For the past year we’ve worked with a branding and marketing company to help us clarify and articulate our mission and our message. We are sometimes better at talking internally about who we are than we are at articulating our distinctive mission to those who don’t know MHGS. Our friends at the Stone Agency identified five distinguishing characteristics about our mission.
1. In our curriculum, we prioritize introspective examination of one’s own story:Where many seminaries emphasize doctrine and cognitive information, our pedagogy distinctly focuses on the formation and re (formation) of the person. We are distinguished because we engage students with their own story as a means of transformation. We have long insisted on incarnational theology based first in the redemptive incarnation of Jesus and then in the incarnation of truth in people’s stories.
2. MHGS is a community of conversation. We have a missional commitment to relational conversation as essential to the pedagogy of the school. We want to be a place which creates space for transformative discourse.
3. The outcome of the MHGS mission is in practical application. MHGS is practitioner-based. This includes preparation for the professions of therapist and minister, and more. We have about 280 students in a given year in our three degree programs but over 2000 people annually participate in recovery weeks, conferences, workshops, and other extensions of MHGS faculty. It is our stated mission that we train students to serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships. We train people in the classroom and we train people for life through our many programs.
4. MHGS distinctly prioritizes the intersection of theology and psychology, theology and ministry, theology and spirituality. We practice the integration of theology in all of our programs. That is our mission. We are intentional about teaching therapists, ministers, artists, and all of us to think theologically as we become competent in the study of text.soul.culture.
5. MHGS takes a Free Church non-affiliated stance, drawing from multiple traditions. We acknowledge there is a large “tent” in Christianity and we are also a school with a unique history in the evangelical movement. We draw many students, faculty, board, and supporters from traditional evangelical churches. Missionally, we set a large table with many voices and traditions invited to the table. That means we stand firmly in clarity about our essential convictions but remain a community open to engage the larger world of theology and culture and to respectfully engage those who don’t share a similar commitment to Christ and scripture.
In the next month, we want you to invite you as students of MHGS, to continue to join us in this process. As a result, if you have serious names to suggest, I invite you to write them up and email them to Kristen Houston, our registrar. Once the Board of Directors has made a decision regarding the future name of Mars Hill Graduate School, we will gather as a community and celebrate the new name together.
Until then, as we search together, it is not only our identity but God’s future for us that awaits."
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