When I told my former colleagues about my new position at Yale Divinity School, with the title of “Associate Dean for Spiritual Formation,” they were thrilled for me. But their excited responses always went something like this: “That’s so wonderful! You’ll be great at that position… But what will you actually… you know… DO?”

The short answer to that question is that I’m honestly still figuring that out here on my third day in the new role. I have a general sense of what I’ll be overseeing: the internship programs, the chapel life, the denominational houses of study, and a whole bunch of curricular and programmatic assessment. But I’m hopeful that this role can be much more than administrative tasks.

I understand my new role to inhabit a unique space at the Divinity School, one that can serve as a hub of integration, not just programmatically but performatively as well. Now, I don’t mean “performatively” to suggest some sort of disingenuous cynicism. I simply mean that, in order to do my job well, I need to inhabit the role in a certain way that points toward the integration and formation that we hope YDS students will find ways to embody in their own lives in line with their own passions, traditions, and communities.

What does this performative element mean in practice? Again, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I know it has to do with the ways I interact with students, the collegiality and curiosity I show to faculty and staff, the very ways I move and speak in the spaces I inhabit here–and this is part of what really attracted me to this role to begin with.

An Associate Dean of Spiritual Formation need not be fully spiritually formed themselves (after all, who among us is?), but they need to be able to model a spirit of formational openness and intentionality that can help shape an ethos among students, faculty, and staff.

And that is my prayer for what I might be able to do in this role. Yes, I hope I don’t screw up too many administrative tasks. Yes, I hope I can provide deliverables or whatever else we want to call the basic units of productivity. But more than any specific goal, I hope I’m able to embody a way of being in the world that transcends the mundane (but important) tasks of the job and that points to the type of spiritual, theological, and vocational integration we want our students to pursue in their common life of study and discernment.

So, I invite you to come along on this journey as I reflect on the role of a Spiritual Formation dean, about the needs and methods of formation within a modern divinity school, about the important (spiritual!) work of assessment, and about anything else that strikes my theological and spiritual fancy along the way!