Imagine . . . you begin the day in the classroom of the earth, learning about God’s good creation by feeling it, working with it, helping coax its fruit to maturity. After a scrub and an exchange of work gloves and hat for pen, notebook, and laptop, you sit around a table with professors, peers, and community ministers, learning about God’s good creation in lively discussion about Genesis 1-3, Jesus’s agrarian parables, the challenge of preaching familiar texts, eco-theology, human sexuality, practices of Sabbath, science and scripture, humanity’s call to be co-creators with God, the beauty of creative arts in/as worship.

With the conclusion of this lively seminar, the rhythm of the day shifts as you enter with the community into worship, praising God for the gifts of work and play and study. Afterwards, you join in the community’s shared meal, partaking of the earth’s fruits, in fellowship with others. The evening’s activity is a return to study, as well as time for self-care, and at day’s end, rest, before beginning another day of celebrating God’s good creation.

Sophia Theological Seminary, its name derived from the Greek for “wisdom,” is seminary re-imagined, the integration of two entities forming a single community: a small seminary sustained financially by a working produce farm.

Students, faculty, and volunteers labor together on the farm, and proceeds from selling the farm’s produce fund the seminary, so that students attend Sophia without tuition and housing expenses. Sophia is a seminary with dirt under its nails.

Our students are creative, innovative, risk-taking, and self-motivated—in their seminary work, in their labor on the farm, and in their embodiment of Christian ministry. They are committed to creation care as a central expression of fidelity to God and as an intersection of God’s justice, the minister’s calling, and the world’s need.

We aspire to join with students who are deep-thinking, hard-working, world-changing disciples of Jesus Christ. Is this a community in which you would want to learn and labor? Or is this a community in which you would want your future minister to learn and labor? If so, please visit our website for information or email studentinfo@sophiasem.org.

The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace. James 3:17-18 NRSV

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Sophia Theological Seminary
Sophia Farms
P. O. Box 266
Dinwiddie, VA 23841
804.432.8026

Mail to: info@sophiasem.org

Sophia Seminary website: www.sophiasem.org

Sophia Seminary website, student page: www.sophiasem.org/apply