For Context: Season 02 Episode 01 🎙️ Episode Overview Episode Overview In this episode of For Context, hosts Gino Curcuruto and Luke Stehr discuss Northern Seminary’s move back into a local church context after years of operating in office park spaces (see the video announcement). Reflecting as current D.Min students and contextual theologians, they explore the theological and practical implications of physical location, community presence, and how seminaries inhabit their surrounding environments. Key Discussion Points * Northern Seminary’s Relocation: Gino and Luke share their thoughts on the seminary moving back into a church setting, critiquing the trend of educational institutions residing in isolated office complex parks. * The Importance of Local Context: They discuss how concrete, gray office complexes can detach students and faculty from the communities and churches they aim to serve. * Memories & Nostalgia: The hosts share lighthearted memories of their time around the former campus setting, including local food spots like Tacochella and the stark contrast of Chicago winter architecture. Featured Speakers * Gino Curcuruto: Program Advisor for the Contextual Ministry D.Min program at Northern Seminary. * Luke Stehr: D.Min student in Contextual Theology. Resources & Links * Learn more about academic programs at Northern Seminary. * Subscribe for updates on the For Context Newsletter. Resources & Books Mentioned * Northern Seminary: Learn more about the D.Min in Contextual Theology (email Gino at gcurcuruto@seminary.edu for info). * For Context Newsletter: Subscribe for more context behind the news. * Constructing Local Theologies, Robert Screiter. * Models of Contextual Theology, Stephen Bevans. For Context is sponsored by Northern Seminary. To learn more about the Contextual Theology program (or any of the number MA, M.Div, and D.Min offerings), visit seminary.edu. * Gino Curcuruto: Following Jesus Into the Ordinary * Luke Stehr: Faith In Situ 🤝 Join the For Context Community If you enjoyed this deep dive, consider becoming a paid subscriber to help us keep providing the context behind the news. * Subscribe to the Newsletter: forcontextpod.substack.com Leave a Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify For Context is sponsored by Northern Seminary. To learn more about the Contextual Theology program (or any of the number MA, M.Div, and D.Min offerings), visit seminary.edu. Transcript I’m Gino Curcuruto. I’m Luke Stare. And you’re listening to For Context, a podcast about Northern Seminary’s doctorate of ministry and contextual theology. For Context is brought to you by Northern Seminary. For over 113 years, Northern Seminary has been training women and men for leadership in the church. If you want to check out all of the academic offerings Northern Seminary has, including a doctoral ministry cohort in contextual theology, please go to seminary.edu. A new cohort for the D-Min in Contextual Theology is getting started in June of 2027. If you’re interested or would like more information on how to come study with Dr. David Fitch, Dr. Jonathan Tran, Dr. Cindy Westfall and others, Please reach out to me directly at gcurcuruto at seminary.edu. That’s G-C-U-R-C-U-R again, U-T-O at seminary.edu. And I’ll give you the information we can chat. Hey, friends, welcome to season two of For Context. This is episode one, and we’re checking back in. Luke is here with me. Yeah, it’s everybody’s second favorite contextual theology podcast. Yeah. Are there other ones? I don’t know. I can promise that we are literally one of the best contextual theology podcasts around. That’s absolutely true. That’s not even hubris speaking. It’s not. It’s a fact. Luke, by the time this episode goes out, actually today, right before we started recording, Northern made kind of a, I think, a big announcement. And I would love as contextual theologians and students in the program to kind of name what that announcement is. And then let’s chat about why we think that’s a good or bad thing and how that might affect students. Okay, well, I should have reread the announcement before I talked about it. But basically, Northern is moving out of their Lyle, Illinois campus, which, as a non-Chicagoan, is not Chicago. Yeah. Yeah. And they are moving from Lyle, Illinois in the office park where they had been to a church in Oak Park, Illinois, which is also still apparently not Chicago somehow. It’s much closer, but it isn’t. Yeah, still Western suburbs, right? Yeah. I live in Dallas-Fort Worth, where we just have accepted that we’re in Megalopolis, Chicago. Get on board! It’s a sprawl. It’s a large sprawl down there, right? It’s a large sprawl in Chicago, too. Let’s be clear. It is. But it’s a super exciting move, A, for a few reasons. First and foremost, it gets the seminary back inside the church. Yes. Which is such a good thing in this day and age. Yeah. I would love to pick your brain on that, but why does that space matter? Yeah, well, I mean, that’s one of the first things that I thought about. We’ll post the link to the announcement in the show notes so people can see it if they haven’t already. But the connection historically, I don’t have it memorized, but I do know that the church that eventually will be housing the home of Northern Seminary is... Gino, what kind of church is that? That would be an American Baptist. You want me just to say Baptist? Is that what you want me to say? I do. Gino likes to rag on Baptists, but he literally, most of his intellectual underpinnings that he cites are Baptists. Listen, I do this with everything. I critique because I love. That’s why. So why is this important? I mean, you made the statement, and I think it’s really worth talking about, is moving the seminary into the church is a really good idea. It seems like many, many seminaries are struggling right now. And there also there was some move at some point where people told seminaries or seminaries thought it’s a good idea to move outside of church buildings and into office parks. I critique because I love right that. So they get large office complexes that are so just removed from the context that the church serves in. I mean, we really, I mean, Tacochella aside, right? We could talk about that. I’m going to mourn Tacochella and its proximity to the church. Yeah, I’m from California and I approve of this place, but That aside, the office park, blah, terrible. Like, you just go to this segregated spot. Yeah, I’m not impressed by the clean lines. You know, I’m really going to miss a cold Chicago January day where the sky is gray and bleak. And you roll up to this bleak... Concrete structure with sharp angular lines where you walk up to the building and it’s gray and then there’s more gray and more gray and you walk into an empty lobby. And I feel like I’m a b***h right now. Keep going. Keep going. And you go up an elevator to a third floor because other stuff is apparently on the other floors. And you go up to the gray third floor where the wonderful Kelly Wunderlich has done everything she can to make the space as welcoming and warm as possible. Absolutely. Props to Kelly. Absolutely. And you go and you sit in a gray conference room and then you leave a gray building with a gray sky. Wow, that sounds like you should make recruiting videos for Northern Seminary. But what happened in that building was amazing. And so none of the programs are changing, which is great news. And I think this is really only going to strengthen Northern moving forward to be in contact with the church, to be in the church, and to re-kind of Kindle that relationship. I think it’s going to be a really positive environment for what is an already amazing thing to just continue to be everything that it can be for the sake of the church and the world. Well, I mean, I don’t know all the ins and outs of Oak Park, but I know that you and I will be doing a lot of walking together to find it all out. I do know that Frank Lloyd Wright’s house is there. There are a few Frank Lloyd Wright houses there. There are. Also, Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace. I saw that. We will be taking a visit there. Did you know that his mother raised him as a girl for the first two years of his life? That’s inside. No, I didn’t know that. Maybe that explains a lot of my critique of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace. It actually really does. But we’re not here to talk about Ernest Hemingway. Dang, I just need a moment right now. That blew me away. Wow, that’s great. So, I mean, one of the things that I’m excited about is that there’s a sense of place in Oak Park that intentionally an office park surrounded by other office parks does not have. Yeah. And that will change our experience, but also our experience of the place that we’re learning. And I just think there’s something pretty important about place, the place of our learning and the places that we participate in. So that’s a huge value to me. I mean, one of the things we wanted to talk about today is just the nature of cohort-based learning, which is so key at Northern Seminary, especially in the Doctrine of Ministry of Contextual Theology. You walk through just a very good, rigorous process with the same people every time. And it’s been so good. And I can’t believe we’re actually... We’re closer to being finished than we are to starting, which is a strange thing to talk about. But I have been really thankful for the cohort-based model. It has been such a good place, not just to learn, but to have people who are sounding bored, to have relationships that carry through the entire year, not just a week in January and a week in June. So I’m really thankful for the fact that Northern organizes education this way. I think everyone we’ve interviewed has referenced the significance of their cohort for them and for their learning. So I could go on
