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A new faithfulness to a long-standing legacy
The programmatic focus on Women and Gender Studies represents a new faithfulness to a long-standing legacy integral to the unique character and calling of the Divinity School, and most specifically to the agreement made when the Baptist Missionary Training School, a training school for women founded in 1881, came to Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1961. The agreement called upon Colgate Rochester, "To provide and furnish Christian young women opportunity for higher education...so that Christian young women may receive instruction on a graduate level." Thirty years later, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender was inaugurated and began to extend this legacy of training women for ministry with an unprecedented intentionality.
The vision of the program embraces not only the inclusion of women into already extant offices and orders of ministry, but also the cultivation of women's uniquely creative gifts for ministry. Taking these gifts seriously offers the opportunity to address fundamental questions about the nature of ministry in church and society, as well as about the person of minister. The program as it is developed through curricula, colloquia, and collegial support groups attends to the implications of women's uniquely creative gifts for the practice of ministry, for pedagogy, and for understanding what it means to be church in and for the world today. The program is therefore carried out in close cooperation with laywomen leaders and clergy women in Greater Rochester. An advisory committee is composed of divinity school faculty and students and Rochester area women in ministry.
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