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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
Christoper Hays
My name is Christopher Hays, and I am the president of Scholar Leaders.
David Capes
Dr. Christopher Hays, Christopher, good to see you. Welcome back to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” You were here a while back, and we’re going to put a link to that episode in our show notes, talking about Scholar Leaders, because you had just become the president of Scholar Leaders.
Christoper Hays
My pleasure, David. It was pretty early in my tenure when we spoke about it.
David Capes
A lot has happened with the Ukraine and Russian war, and you’ve been very much involved in that. We’re going to hear some things about that, and some stories about people. But let’s start with Scholar Leaders first. For those who didn’t hear the first podcast. Tell us a little bit about what Scholar Leaders is, what the mission is.
Christoper Hays
In more technical terms, we’d say that we exist to cultivate theological leaders from the majority world. Think Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, for lifetimes of impact in the church and on society. That’s the glossy brochure version of it. In layman’s terms, man, we really want to be the very best friend that a majority world Christian leader could possibly have, so that they can have all the impact that they think God has called them to have in the church in the world.
Now we do that in a bunch of different ways. We generally start a relationship with a promising Christian theological leader with a doctoral scholarship. But then we try to find ways to track with people over the course of their career, and that might look a lot of different ways. Sometimes it would be about us working with a seminary president on their institutional strategy and financial sustainability. Sometimes it’s helping provide the things that their institution needs to thrive. For example, we have a program called Theological Book Network, where we send bespoke library collections around the world. And sometimes it means working with these sorts of leaders to go after the big, hairy problems that are
too complicated for anyone’s school or scholar to go after on their own. Yet those are problems that are of existential importance to the church and that require the unique gifting of a theological leader.
So we have a lot of different things that we do together, but it’s all driven by this conviction that the theological leader has a unique role to play in the body of Christ. One, because you have this amazing capacity for multiplying impact. Like we all understand that the gospel is going to be most effectively spread across cultures by people from that culture and with a theological leader from the majority world. They train people within their own cultural context to be pastors and evangelists. But beyond that, these are the sorts of people who are uniquely capable of solving the kinds of problems and challenges in the majority world that a Western theologian like you or me wouldn’t know how to go after.
And then the third reason that they are so exciting to us and feel so missionally important to us is because when you build capacity in a global theological leader, what you ultimately end up doing is releasing this cascade of local human and financial resources in that context that will continue to overflow far beyond the initial investment that scholar leaders might make with a scholarship in that place. So that’s our jam. We exist to be the best friend of the global theological leader.
David Capes
I like that way of describing it. How long has it been around?
Christoper Hays
Scholar Leaders was founded in 1983, inspired by John Stott’s vision, but for 30 years, it was really just a mom-and-pop scholarship organization. It’s only really been in the last 12 years, a little bit more, that we’ve been doing this more complicated work of tracking with people after their PhD.
David Capes
You’re talking about longevity. You’re in it not just for the sprint. You’re in it for the marathon. You describe several things that you guys are involved in, and one of the places that you’ve been involved has been in Ukraine. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve seen there for leaders who are in that part of the world.
Christoper Hays
Day one of my job was the day the Russian tanks went across the border on February 24, 2022. This is a place where our staff was actually on the ground. This is a place that we had scholarships with a number of really exceptional leaders. Many of whom were at the heads of seminaries that were responding to the war. This is a place where my colleagues, Evan Hunter and Taras Dyatlik, were working with Eastern European seminary presidents on their financial sustainability and missional strategy when the war started.
So we had a very fast come-to-Jesus moment, asking, what’s it look like for us to be faithful to the people that we’ve been investing in over the years, in Ukraine that we love, who are suddenly having their campuses invaded and their homes are suddenly the sites of genocide. What’s it look like for us to be their friend? And we said, well, it probably means that we asked them what they want to do. So we did. And that set off this extraordinary container of missional actions that they led and we supported that enabled them to have the sort of gospel impact in their context that I don’t think any of us had dreamed would be possible in a place where evangelicals were only 2% of the population.
David Capes
It seems like one impulse might be just to get out.
Christoper Hays
Oh, yes! We might have said, “This isn’t what we do. We’re a scholarship organization. Come back to us when the war is over and we’ll see what happens.” That would have been the mission-aligned thing to do. We don’t want mission drift, right? But we felt like, no, we’re going to be partner-driven. We’re going to we’re going to trust them. We’re going to follow their lead.
So the first thing they asked us to do was to help fund refugee work. And sure enough, we said yes, and they did this incredible ministry of going to the front lines and pulling people out in little cars, two to three people at a time. And those numbers mounted up into the thousands of people who got out. Then they would bring them back to their seminary campuses. They would give them sometimes short, sometimes long-term housing. They ended up providing food assistance to like, 400,000 people just in the first year of the war. They passed out Bibles. They shared the gospel.
It was this amazing ministry that they very quickly then parlayed into asking the next question about, what’s it mean to train ministers to respond to this new situation of the war? So they began to rebuild their own seminary campuses because a number of their campuses had been destroyed or damaged. I think of Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary just outside of Bucha. Their campus got hit by six missiles before the war started. They had 250-300 students on campus. Today, they have 600 students on campus because they have so effectively rallied, rebuilt the campus, changed their programs and
welcome new people in because they know that Ukraine is in an amount of deep spiritual need, and this is a chance for the gospel to go forward.
Because of the faithful work that they did in responding to people’s needs as refugees, the pastors that they train now have a unique credibility that they didn’t have before the war. So it’s been a really important learning opportunity for us about the merit of allowing the theological leaders in our fellowship to tell us what it looks like to support them in their callings. And it’s worked.
David Capes
You didn’t say to them, “Why don’t you guys get out and we’ll just come back later?” You just said, “What’s the thing you need now? And how can we come along and help you?” That’s an amazing response. I mean, it’s the right response given what has happened, and when you see the positive growth that has happened. What’s been the disposition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to these kinds of works.
Christoper Hays
There are two Orthodox Churches currently in Ukraine. In 2019, there was a shift that happened in the Orthodox Church, which had previously been under the Russian Orthodox Church, what’s called the Moscow Patriarchate, and a new Orthodox Church was made autocephalous. It means that they had their own primate, their own head. So that Orthodox Church of Ukraine has rapidly become the dominant form of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine. There is now a very small minority of Orthodox churches that remain under the Moscow Patriarchate. Those churches that are now autocephalous have had a number of priests who have done really impressive work staying behind to pastor people. Much like a number of Protestant pastors have done, and there has been a warming that’s happened
between the Orthodox and the Protestants. Because of their experiences of being faithful in this war, whereas Protestants, before the war started, were so small that they were seen as a sect.
