It typically takes two to three years to earn a master’s degree in theological studies. For author and Bible teacher Vivian Mabuni, it’s been more than three decades.
“I’ve been on a 34-year journey to a seminary degree,” Mabuni told Faithfully Magazine in early November. “When I joined staff with Cru — it’ll be 35 years in January — I took graduate classes. I took seminary classes fully expecting that I would finish a seminary degree, and then I fell in love and got married and had three kids.”
Mabuni, 57, tried several times over the years to pick up where she had left off but was never quite able to follow through for one reason or another. One major setback was a breast cancer diagnosis, which she wrote about in the 2014 book Warrior in Pink.
But then, in 2020, she joined the board of trustees at Denver Seminary, a private Evangelical Christian school in Littleton, Colorado.
“When I joined the board at Denver, I just thought it just makes sense for me to finish my degree here,” Mabuni said.
Having made that decision in January, the experience has been “challenging and wonderful,” she said. But Mabuni, who also produces resources for AAPI Christian women, isn’t on her seminary journey alone.
The author and national speaker partnered with the seminary to launch its inaugural Women’s Leadership Cohort this year. The three-year program, two years in the making, has brought together a group of women to jointly pursue their Master of Arts degree in Biblical and Theological Studies. The classes are primarily online, though there are a few on-campus gatherings.
The program’s courses are no different from what is available to other students at the seminary. However, professors assigned to the cohort have no other students. And the inaugural cohort is a closed group — “because we’re figuring it out as we go,” said Mabuni, who is a semester ahead of her classmates.
The 18 members include pastors, Bible teachers, ministry leaders, and authors. Some are married, some are not, and some have children. They are diverse generationally, ethnically, and in their theological expressions. Among them are Be the Bridge’s LaTasha Morrison, foster care reform advocate Tori Hope Petersen, preacher and podcaster Brenda Palmer, author and podcaster Rebekah Lyons, and She Reads Truth co-founder Amanda Bible Williams.
Sharing photos of the cohort online in September, Mabuni described it as a “group of phenomenal women” and said their “generosity, laughter, support and camaraderie” was “unmatched.”
Support in Community
Denver Seminary’s Women’s Leadership Cohort is not wholly unique, as it shares similarities with Wheaton College’s Women in Leadership program, inspired by speaker, author, and activist Christine Caine.
But for Mabuni, the program’s purpose is personal.
“The inspiration is really trying to build something I wish I had,” Mabuni, who is Chinese American, told FM.
The cohort model in education suggests that members are more likely to be successful by learning together, collaborating, and providing social support.
Mabuni thinks she likely would have earned her M.A. degree sooner had there been a group of similarly focused women to cheer her on through the tough times.
“I’ve talked with several women who started seminary and then eventually just stopped because it just wasn’t very encouraging,” she said. “So my dream is to build what I wish I had. And I think that there’s something so powerful about women linking arms and being able to understand each other’s worlds a little bit.”
According to the 2018Â State of Clergywomen in the U.S. report, the “percentage of women overall who are earning the masters of divinity degree, the basic degree for people who want to be pastors, chaplains and so on, has dropped slightly in the last 20 years.”
However, the study also found that the number of women of color in seminary has grown. That is a trend Mabuni, passionate about intergenerational and multiethnic communities, is eager to help maintain.
“In my greatest dreams, I would love to see simultaneously cohorts of women starting this three-year program,” she said when asked where she sees the Denver program a decade from now.
“I would love to eventually see a cohort made up entirely of women of color because I think that it’s one thing to have women studying the scriptures together, which is so powerful, but I think the shared experience of being women of color would be so rich,” Mabuni told FM.
In the meantime, the married mother of three is focused on finally completing her decades-long seminary journey — which she got a taste of, vicariously, when she spoke at the seminary’s 2023 commencement ceremony.
“It was such an honor, and I think I just wept as I watched each graduate walk across the stage and get their degree,” Mabuni said.
She speculated on their paths to that point, saying how “the entire community and the family and friends that surrounded that person” helped to make it possible.
At the end of the ceremony, “the entire faculty circle the graduates, and they pray for them, and it’s just so incredible,” she said. “I can’t wait for when that day is mine.
