Religion’s Caltech

The campus sits a stone’s throw from bustling Old Pasadena and is practically in the domed shadow of City Hall. Still, you can live in the area for years and never set foot on the oasis-like grounds of Fuller Theological Seminary.

The place isn’t unfriendly--it just makes its splash in other ways.

During half a century as a hub for evangelical Christian education, the school’s inventive approach has kicked up more than a few waves in the bookish world of theology.

As the graduate school celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, seminary officials, students and others say Fuller’s experimental spirit, which at times has displeased those on the left and right alike, has paid off with a national reputation among seminaries and a burgeoning 3,500-member student body.

Since the school’s founding by radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller and theologian Harold J. Ockenga, its nondenominational approach has spurred serious religious study, boosters say, while puncturing stubborn barriers among Christian groups. It is said with some pride around the seminary that every Fuller student comes to campus over someone else’s objection.

Other eyebrow-raising innovations, such as a School of Psychology founded in 1965 and later accredited by the American Psychological Assn., have been copied by other seminaries. When it was launched, Christians and social scientists alike were skeptical of a seminary promoting such a discipline.

“We’re looking pretty smart now,” said James Guy, dean of the psychology school.

The seminary continues to find ways to quietly surprise. There is its size: headquartered on a postage-stamp campus, Fuller is the nation’s second-largest seminary, with branches from Irvine to Seattle. There is its far-flung reach, shown by the 80 nations represented among its student body and thousands of graduates who have trooped off as missionaries to distant corners of the globe. And there is its local impact, personified by the dozens of Fuller alumni at the pulpits of nearby churches. At one Presbyterian church in Glendora, all five pastors are Fuller graduates.

“Fuller Seminary has become one of the great theological seminaries in the world,” said Bill Bright, who was a member of Fuller’s inaugural class in 1947 and later founded Campus Crusade for Christ. “It’s having a profound impact around the world.”

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Since its founding, the decades have brought bursts of turmoil and expansion, such as the creation of the School of World Mission and the graduate psychology program in 1965, plus dramatic growth in students under the leadership of former President David Hubbard. The school received national media attention in the 1970s over criticisms that it had departed from the doctrine that the Bible is error-proof.

Its leaders battled Pasadena officials in the early 1980s in a push to expand the campus, which opened at a former estate before moving to the Lake Avenue Congregational Church. In 1953 it moved to the current campus, a collection of Craftsman bungalows and modern buildings just south of the Foothill Freeway, between Los Robles and Madison avenues.

These are quieter days at Fuller, where officials and graduate students are more likely to worry over Internet access and scholarship money than high-profile controversies. Students now earn master’s and doctoral degrees in subjects ranging from theology to clinical psychology.

Beneath its placid face, the campus reflects the big demographic shifts that have remade seminaries all over. Launched with a class of 39 white, male seminarians, the Pasadena campus now has a student body that is 40% women and ethnically and racially diverse. Fuller bears an increasingly foreign stamp, with 451 international students last year. About 20 members of a Tokyo congregation traveled from Japan to watch a fellow church member graduate in June.

“We have students from all over the map--literally,” said Maria McDowell, a third-year divinity student who heads the student government.

Fuller also reflects a national trend toward older seminarians, often burned-out baby boomers seeking new careers or simply a brief return to the books. The average Fuller student is 35 years old.

“The old-fashioned model of a seminary is 30 or 40 young men living in a dormitory and eating all their meals together and going on in a fairly regimented way,” said Fuller President Richard J. Mouw. “Today we have men and women, many of them in their 50s, going back to school after being lawyers or after the kids went off to school.”

Aivars Ozolins, a Latvian national, embodies several of these trends. A former teacher, the doctoral student has scrimped and taken part-time preaching work to support his wife and three children while researching the toll of communist rule on the Baltic states of the former Soviet Union. Ozolins, a Seventh-day Adventist, hopes to carry his ministry work home as Latvians shift from communism to a free-market economy.

“I want to help them keep a balance and keep a spiritual life, too,” Ozolins said.

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Fuller students are consumed with humankind’s weightiest questions--and it shows. While fliers at other campuses might announce pep rallies and keg bashes, the bulletin boards at Fuller advertise upcoming Bible lectures and meditation sessions. But students can play intramural sports and the student government organizes occasional dances and movies.

“I don’t think the neighbors complain about us,” said Pauline Leung, a first-year student seeking a master’s degree in theology.

Leung and other students said Fuller’s appeal comes from the broad range of Christians who attend. The school includes members of 125 denominations--a departure from schools catering to a single group.

“There’s a range of beliefs I’m exposed to from which I can decide or find out what it is I actually believe,” Leung said.

It is that multidenominational, though generally conservative, bent that defined the school’s founding philosophy and makes it hard to pigeonhole. Charles Fuller envisioned “a Caltech of the evangelical world,” referring to the seminary’s rigorous standards.

He and others involved in opening the school were excited by growing fundamentalism during World War II, but were put off by the narrow mind-set of many conservative evangelicals. Fuller’s seminary was an attempt to remedy that, a scholarly training ground for future evangelical Protestant ministers.

At 50, the school faces a new set of challenges. Among the primary concerns are rising student costs, which can exceed $12,000 a year for doctoral students, and how technology will affect the future of teaching and preaching around the world.

The seminary is well aware that it needs to adapt to the changing trends in world religion. Missionary work is undergoing a shift with missionaries increasingly looking to cities rather than remote outposts to spread their word, said J. Dudley Woodberry, an Islamic studies professor and dean of the School of World Mission.

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And Mouw noted that the school’s future is tied closely to that of Christian evangelicalism, which through new kinds of churches, music and such movements as the Promise Keepers has displayed considerable experimentation and change.

“In order to bring the Gospel to hurting and broken lives, there will still be a need for places like Fuller,” Mouw said. “How that gets delivered, how it’s packaged, who can answer these questions?”