Renewal At The Seminary | Archpriest Chad Hatfield

The following is part of my interview with Archpriest Chad Hatfield, former President of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Christian Seminary. I begin by asking him about what new things have been happening at St. Vladimir's...

WATCH VIDEO HERE.

Fr. Chad Hatfield: Well, Herman, I have mentioned SVS Press, which continues to be strong. It's still the largest English-language Orthodox press in the world. We do a nice partnership with Ancient Faith Ministries. Sometimes we'll receive a manuscript and we'll say, well, that's not quite our genre, but Ancient Faith and vice versa. But we are working with them on, I think, a very exciting new initiative to bring about Spanish-language translations and Mandarin Chinese translations. So we're doing that jointly. We also have our own project going with Portuguese.

We've done work with Mother Barbara at Holy Nativity of Our Lord Monastery in Kemp, Texas. She's Brazilian, and she actually came to us with a proposal, and it's very exciting, and we're actually at a point where that's close to going to the printer. Also, with the support of the Orthodox Vision Foundation (OVF), we're doing audiobooks, and that's taken off really well. Everywhere I go when I'm traveling, people tell me they're listening to the audiobooks.

As I mentioned earlier, with assistance from the Farah Foundation, we were able to do the digitization of tapes that we were actually losing. We almost got there right in the nick of time for several of them, and some of them are not the best quality because the tapes weren't great, but at least we've got them preserved.

Another initiative is our library. Because we're looking seriously at expansion and relocation, we had to do updates. Thank God, again, from a generous donor we were able to do that. So everything is barcoded. The students now have access to the library 24/7 with self-checkout.

Orthodox libraries are a conversation. There are people who say, “Oh, you just go online or whatever else.” But I think maybe in medicine or law, that's okay. In theology, we need these books. And it needs to be the kind of space where a student can come and spend a lot of time and a lot of hours in a comfortable way. So that's another initiative—keeping pace with changes in that arena.

We've been rebuilding the faculty here, which is very, very exciting. We have some remarkable new faculty and some of the more senior faculty are coming up with new ideas and new initiatives as well. So it's a nice cross-pollination of old and new. This again is something that's been well received by ATS. As I said earlier, when we get to the actual expansion of the seminary that means continuing on that path of expanding our faculty.

The next initiative I think that is very significant comes from the two Lilly grants. One, Pathways for Tomorrow, will involve better seminary resources with training for permanent deacons. But this may be the most exciting one, at least from my perspective, which is: so many of our graduates and other priests have been reporting to us that they have very large groups of catechumens, and we all know, and we can all thank God, that we are seeing more inquirers, more seekers in our Orthodox communities—small and large, new missions to old established parishes.

I had a conversation with a woman in an urban, not-so-thriving parish, but she was so excited. She said, “Father Chad, we've got a catechumen.” You know, it was one, but it was so exciting because it was inspiring others who were sort of locked into the mentality that, well, we're on our way out. There are priests who have over a hundred catechumens in their community. Some of them have been saying, you know, we need some help. So we want to provide the resources and we're working on that.

Father John Parker did his Doctor of Ministry with us. I was actually his first reader, and he did a study of what preparing catechumens looks like. And it's everything from, “Oh, come and have a cup of coffee with me on Saturday morning and we'll grease you up on Sunday,” to two-year programs and everything in between. So we're trying to get some universality about what that will look like, trying to touch base and communicate with other entities that are working on this independently. But part of this will be the ability to certify lay catechists. So it really is a kind of bringing back into the Orthodox world the standing of catechist as a ministry in the Church.

Herman: Excellent.

Fr. Chad Hatfield: The compelling ministry work that we're doing I think can basically be summed up like this. The Lilly Foundation recognizes that preachers used to have a very significant impact in American culture and society—look at movements like slavery abolition, the civil rights movement, even environmental matters; they had a strong push from preachers. They recognize they don't have that standing anymore. Stop and think—who is the great preacher in American society at the moment? So they actually came and knocked on our door, and we went through the process and we did receive, again, a second million-dollar grant. So we're working on the process of improving preaching in the Orthodox Church, not only with our students, but also as something for priests who have been in the field for many years. We received in a survey a lot of responses saying, “I've been in the parish for 25-plus years; my preaching is getting dry; I need new resources.” So we're responding in that way.

Other initiatives also have to do with our student body. We are intentionally very pan-Orthodox. We've had students from as many as 19 countries. About one quarter of our students now are from Oriental Orthodox traditions. And that is something for which we are firm—we expect to be the center in the next few years for reviving the dialogue between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox that's been languishing. When you look around the world, what other Orthodox institution is there that actually pulls that off other than this one? I don't say that in any sense of arrogance—it's just a fact. So that itself is another very exciting initiative and we don't apologize for that.

Sometimes, Herman, I get a little tired of comments I receive from people like, “You're raising a lot of money for Ugandans or Ukrainians—what about the Americans?” Well, open your eyes because we're doing, as I said earlier, everything we can to get our American students through here debt-free. So it's not an either/or—it's all of the above.

Herman: Was there something more about vocations?

Fr. Chad Hatfield: Yes. I think I'd be irresponsible if I didn't say something about the vocation crisis. It's not just us—it's across the board in different traditions. We Orthodox are really suffering with a priestly vocation shortage. When you look at how many priests are working well past normal retirement age, that's not good for them and it's not good for the parishes.

But I can say this with some real thanksgiving: we've been encouraging people—St. Vladimir's, our donors, and others—to pray for vocations pretty strongly for the last five years, and we're beginning to see the Lord hears. We have a full house—counting extension students, 101 students. That's remarkable for us. It's another reason why we're jam-packed here and don't have any room for expansion. The Lord is hearing us.

There is a difference in students now. Many of them are coming right through their first steps through the gate with a recognition that they probably won't be put in a place that can afford full-time ministry. So they're prepared to leave here to be bivocational, what St. Paul might call a tent-maker priest. But not so very long ago, 25 or 30 years ago, we could easily graduate students from here and they would get full-time jobs as youth ministers or full-time jobs as choir directors. There were other positions in the Church; those have largely disappeared. Parishes that used to be able to afford a second priest—which is a really good way to launch a newly ordained priest into pastoral ministry—are getting thinner and thinner as well.

So the vocations are there, and St. Vladimir's is being realistic about who we're preparing. We need to be working with the various metropolises and dioceses on strategic planning so we know how to nourish and prepare them—not just the priest but, if the priest candidate is married and with children, how to support them if they're going to be put in, say, rural Montana where 15 people are meeting in a lodge. We need to prepare for that and find the support so we can make that work. The same is true with dying urban parishes and all the rest. So we're very anxious to actually have conversations and work with the various groups that support us as part of our base. That's what we're here for—we're here to serve the Church.

Herman: Excellent. You were talking about the Lilly Grant for preaching. In 2019 I gave a talk at St. Tikhon’s—they had this follow-up conference after the one at Jordanville.

Fr. Chad Hatfield: Oh yeah, Speaking the Truth. I spoke at the one in Jordanville.

Herman: That's right. I interviewed Father Anthony Gilbert and Rod Dreher at that time and some other people. Six months later they did the one at St. Tikhon’s and I gave a talk, and while I was there they had the Willard Preacher from State College. I was very impressed by him and inspired in a lot of ways. It seemed to me—I'd imagine you've contemplated a class in rhetoric or how to speak to the culture—but to be able to do what he does, to stand in front of all sorts of people who don't care about what he's talking about and he helps change their way of thinking, that’s powerful. So I was wondering: have you contemplated doing rhetoric or something to help priests be able to engage?

Fr. Chad Hatfield: We have a full-time professor of rhetoric and homiletics—Fr. Sergius Halverson. So he does rhetoric as well. But I'd actually take this in a little different direction. What I said earlier about St. Innocent—I think it's all about communication. That's another aspect of how we've got to work into particularly the Master of Divinity degree: how do we communicate with people? Some of it is language, but it's also the various aspects of social media.

I actually spoke about this this morning in my parish administration course. There are way too many priests who avoid teaching Orthodoxy because it might be controversial. “I might lose a parishioner. I might lose a pledge.” I told the students this morning: it's a disaster when the priest basically operates like the activities director on a cruise ship. Your parish is so busy with English tea or a blini dinner or something like that, and you think you're succeeding in ministry, but for the most part that's why we're losing our young people—cultural dance doesn't hold them. We're living in a very aggressive anti-Christian culture, and so we have to get our apologetics down. If you read St. Vladimir's vision/values/mission statement, apologetics is in there a couple of times, and when we changed it there were some people who objected to that. I recently reread it on the website and noted that apologetics is mentioned. I was a bit dumbfounded by Orthodox people who really did not have any understanding of what that means. When I speak in a parish—though I do less of this than I used to—there was a time when I was a sort of hot-ticket item to talk about evangelism, and Orthodox people would say, “Father Chad, we don't proselytize.” They didn't hear what was being said at all. I think that's another big challenge for us: our people have to accept the fact that Caesar no longer protects us and DNA is not the way to transmit our Orthodox faith.

Herman: Yeah. Could you talk about the St. Vladimir’s Quarterly?

Fr. Chad Hatfield: The St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly was a kind of gold standard for many years, but it went into decline, and this was on my watch here. I actually reached a point where I was prepared to kill it because we were losing money. I had certain people inside and outside of St. Vladimir's who were appalled when they heard that I was ready to put it on the chopping block; I was told things like, “Well, a theological journal shouldn't be raising money anyway; you probably should be losing money.” Well, that doesn't work. We had to think about content and other things. There is a recognition by the current faculty that there's been a shift in what people in Orthodoxy are particularly interested in at the moment.

With the enormous heft of Dr. Alex Tudorie, our academic dean, he's taken that on. We now operate with an advisory board with other faculty—Dr. Vitali Perikov (Deacon Vitali), Father Bogdan Bucur. It is double-blind peer review now. It underwent a facelift. It looks different; the content is different. One thing I hear sometimes is, “It's pretty heavily Romanian.” I'm going to answer that this way: anybody who was paying attention to the Council of Crete recognized that it was often repeated that the best-prepared theological delegation were the Romanians. That's another shift we have. So it's not that I just happen to have a Romanian academic dean or Romanian patristics professor; it is a fact that the Romanians have really taken theological education very seriously. I edited the first English-language book about Patriarch Daniel of Romania, and in a private session with him that was supposed to last 10 minutes—and I believe it went on for an hour and 10 minutes—he said something to me that inspires what I do here. He basically said: theological education is difficult enough to teach, but in a Western context it makes it even more challenging because in the West we do everything as a head exercise like a debate. Where Orthodoxy is, is here [points to heart]. He said, “When you teach theology separated from our ascetical tradition and practice in Orthodoxy, theology quickly becomes a weapon. It's impossible to teach Orthodox theology apart from ascetical exercises and tradition.” For me that sums up exactly the model I want to see here.

Do you know the other thing—since we've got a few moments—I talked about the academic and the pastoral side of blending things here. There's a third leg now, equal to the other two, which is spiritual formation, and we have a full-time spiritual formation director. We were the only Orthodox seminary chosen by the Templeton Foundation for a study on the impact of spiritual formation on a clergyman's character. Now that's embarrassing—why was Templeton interested? Well, the clergy scandal. So we've made that an integral part of the experience here. We don't want people losing their hesychia; they've got to have that as an anchor for their life here. We have a Protosingelos monastic as the spiritual formation director here.

Herman: Thanks be to God. That was my thought regarding “St. Vladimir’s 2.0”...

Fr. Chad Hatfield: Well maybe not a full monastery, but at least something for monastic students. You have a significant number, both men and women. Married people live differently; single students live differently than they did a decade ago; and monastics do, too. Yes, exactly. We have to provide for that monastic presence as well.