Truett Seminary: Dedicated to Service at Home and Abroad

Ministering to the Baylor Community

Truett Seminary students enjoy many unique opportunities to encourage Baylor undergraduates while also growing in their ministry skills. The resident chaplain program—a partnership between Truett Seminary, Spiritual Life, the Formation Department and Campus Living & Learning—engages Seminary students to live and be a pastoral presence in on-campus residential communities. Also, Truett’s sports chaplaincy/ministry program allows seminary students to work with and minister to Baylor students through internships offered by Baylor Athletics.

“Every day I get to be face-to-face with the girls on the team. I’m able to grow in relationships with them and love them,” said Hanna Gilmore, a current Truett student, former Baylor student-athlete and manager for the Baylor women’s soccer team. “Truett does such a great job letting grad students pour into Baylor undergrads. It’s a testament to Baylor to let this discipleship flourish in athletics.”

In addition to Seminary student involvement with Baylor, Truett faculty and staff are actively engaged with colleagues across campus to bring the unique perspective of the Seminary to various scholarly and community-building pursuits. Faculty members serve as collaborators on Baylor’s Spiritual Life Advisory Committee, focusing on new charter applications for campus ministry organizations and campus-wide worship services at the end of the fall and spring semesters. The Seminary also hosts a variety of lectures, conferences, symposiums and events that are open to the public and well attended by the Baylor community.

Connecting Churches and Pastors

Beyond the Baylor campus, Truett Seminary is committed to ensuring ministers are being connected with churches that will foster mutual benefit. According to Matt Homeyer, assistant director of church placement at Truett, about half of those who leave a seminary and go into ministry will typically leave ministry after five years.

“Connecting students with well-suited churches that match their personality, giftedness, theology, polity and background can help improve that and set both churches and ministers up for dynamic seasons of ministry,” Homeyer said.

Truett’s Office of Ministry Connections helps prepare students and alumni for ministry transition and also works with churches across the state and the nation through their hiring process. Homeyer meets with job seekers to develop a résumé and interview skills and to strategize the search process. He preaches most Sundays and works with church search committees to help discern which people and churches make a good fit.

“Truett, for many reasons, forms really healthy ministers, and if we connect them with the right churches, they’re set up to have excellent, fruitful, joyful lives of ministry,” Homeyer said. “For most of our graduates, we understand better than anybody else who you are, how you’re gifted, how you’ve been educated and trained and how you want to serve.”

Welcoming International Opportunities

“You are welcome” was the phrase used to greet Todd Still, dean of Truett Seminary, when he traveled to Ogbomoso, Nigeria to share his expertise and serve as the Bible Study Teacher at the 2016 Ministers’ Conference at the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary (NBTS) this past September.

“Their hospitality, generosity and magnanimity—these are the things that stood out to me about the people in Nigeria and challenged me to have that selfsame kind of joy and receptivity,” Dean Still said. “They have a level of commitment to theological education and to discipleship that I found to be both encouraging and challenging. They have comparatively few resources, but this neither seems to impede nor define them.”

In addition to teaching three Bible studies at the conference, Dean Still also preached at Shepherdhill Baptist Church in Lagos during his time in Nigeria. The president of NBTS, Emiola Nhinlola, had previously visited Baylor and Dean Still, forming the relationship that led to Dean Still’s invitation to Nigeria.

Dean Still and Truett look forward to continued collaboration with NBTS and to offering opportunities to each other to engage in research and dialogue. Each seminary hopes one day, as opportunity allows and availability affords, to exchange professors to teach at the other’s school. This partnership and others like it, Dean Still believes, are essential to the growth of not just seminary students, but of all of us.

“We live in a global village. We fail to engage and expose ourselves to the worldwide church at our own expense,” he said. “At our best, Baylor and Truett are for the church and for the world, Texana being a metaphor for the latter. At our worst, we are insular, parochial and provincial. These kinds of partnerships force us to get outside ourselves, and having done so, they form us in ways that no book read or paper written can do.”