I think often of certain moments back when I was in seminary in the Bay Area in the early 1990’s, and am reminded what an important period those years were in my life.

Going away to seminary, it was my first time “living away from home”, in a real sense.

I completed college in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico, and during that time, I still lived with my family in my teenage home in the Northeast Heights, sharing a room with my brother who was completing high school as I attended college.

After college, I was still slow to get up and to get out into life.

I lived for a year with a friend from high school in an apartment down near the Big I interchange while I worked evenings at the airport as a counter rep for Avis Rent-A-Car. I’m not even sure now why or how I ended up at Avis. I was a new college graduate, but I had taken an undefined college degree- a Bachelor of University Studies degree that showcased a smattering of psychology, math, history, and classical Greek classes, a liberal arts that pointed at no clear discipline for an educated person. Not exiting my bachelor studies with an engineering or science degree, I took what I could find in the job world, I guess, disoriented in terms of income. I don’t remember. I’ve never been overly fiscally motivated, to my dismay somewhat later in life. And back then, I had faith. My undergraduate studies were actually strategically selected, because I had expected to go to seminary at some point after finishing the bachelors degree, where my classical Greek, English, history, and psych classes would all find integration in pastoral studies. The classes I had chosen had fit a plan in my head: I’d finish seminary, finish a counseling or Psychology doctoral degree, and then end up preaching, teaching, counseling, and writing books. Well- that was how I thought back then as a 23 year-old.

After nearly a year of an inverted life schedule working at Avis, heading in to start my shifts at 5 PM and getting off at 1 AM, I was ready for life change, and seminary was where I’d hoped I’d go next.

Early on, as a Southern Baptist kid thinking about pastoral ministry and becoming a preacher, you thought first of the denominations’ notable schools. At that time, the biggest seminary in the world was the SBC’s school in Fort Worth, Texas- Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary- and as a Southern Baptist, Southwestern was really forwarded as the preacher’s school, and seemed like the place a Southern Baptist kid wanting to be a preacher should go. And you thought about SBC schools as a Southern Baptist because, well, denominational subsidies made that graduate school affordable. Across town from Southwestern was another school I had wanted to go to, if I had had money- Dallas Theological Seminary- but my choices of opportunities in seminary mirrored how I’ve weighed choices of opportunities in most every other area in my life: could I afford it? If SBC schools were comparable to state universities in the caliber of education they offered, Dallas was academically in many ways to me like an Ivy League institution, staffed by theological luminaries- and the school’s matriculation reflected that. I was a guy who didn’t have much, so the SBC schools looked decent enough, and Southwestern was the natural choice for someone like me, not to mention that regionally it was in my backyard. Of the denomination’s six seminaries, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, had a reputation as a more academic school. If Southwestern produced preachers, Southern produced theologians, which was an interesting arena to me. The problem for me, though, was that Southern was in Kentucky.

Somehow, in the spring of the year following my graduation, I ended up hearing about an SBC school in California.

In the Bay Area, no less.

A Southern Baptist Seminary in California? Really?

I think there had been a missions conference at the church I attended at the time, and in one of the sessions, a rep from this little school in Mill Valley, California, got up and spoke about the school. It was a school that had been started with an eye on missionary development, and also with an eye on intercultural ministry. It made sense. With the San Francisco Bay Area serving as a major gateway of the United States for immigration and trade with Asia and South America, and the Bay Area being filled with such a diverse range of nationalities and cultures within its environs, it made sense that the SBC school there would be piloted by a desire to connect Christianity with those who were specifically from other, non-American cultural contexts. It was a small school, but it had a good staff, and it was less dominated by denominational theological issues of the time- specifically, the meaning of Biblical inerrancy- and, as such, a student could quietly explore pastoral and theological questions in a “mellower” Southern Baptist environment. After all, at that school in the Bay Area, the focus was on how to win others to Christ, and not on deeper theological rifts within conservative circles.

The more I looked into that little school, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, the more it grew on me as the place I needed to go. I think I felt going to Southwestern, I would be a cookie cutter cutout when I got out of there, suit and tie, slicked hair, pushing the party line as a pastor and preacher. It’s not that I’m not for parties, and party lines. Somehow, Golden Gate came off to me as a less political place. Its distance from the South meant it could be less affected by denominational politics, less impinged on by theological dogmatics that disseminated from the South and the denominational’s political place of power. Golden Gate quietly did it’s thing in the West.

And as it turned out, California was a wonderful place to spend some time growing up.