Chris: What was life like growing up in South Africa? 

Wynand: I was born in the 1960s when South Africa became a republic, meaning we broke away from the British Empire. In 1948 South Africa voted in a Christian Nationalist Party, called the National Party. They fought for independence and a strong voice against the Empire. There was a strong emphasis on South Africa becoming a nation that God had birthed, with a very particular calling, almost like Israel. I was born in the republic era, and the Prime Minister at that time, Hendrix Verwoerd, was a very staunch Nationalist. My generation is called the Children of Verwoerd because we were birthed into that worldview. I grew up embodying, feeling in my body and my bones, Apartheid long before I understood Apartheid, which was the national policy of segregation. I’ve come to understand that even though I could not articulate the doctrines of Apartheid, I felt in my body, in my being, the reality of Apartheid; certain things I saw, certain things I smelled, certain things I experienced, all of it, was just part of my experience. I grew up with a very strong sense of Afrikaner identity, Christian Afrikaner identity, or perhaps I should say Afrikaner Christian identity, because being an Afrikaner really defined everything. 

Growing up this way meant that I was very privileged; I got a great education, came from a very stable Afrikaner family, spoke Afrikaans, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t committed to God, to Christ, to the church. But, it was all preceded by nation. 

Chris: If you had to say one way that Apartheid and growing up during that time impacted you the most, what would that be?

Wynand: It’s a very complicated answer, that one. It’s hard to narrow it down to just one thing. But I think it shaped my affections, my desires, more than anything. A desire for the Afrikaner nation to survive, to thrive, because it also meant that in this world I was in, you were a good Afrikaner if you were a good Christian and were pleasing God. It instilled within me a desire and a passion for my nation which I confused with a passion and love for God. And I think what it has left in me is a deep appreciation for the power of affections and the power of these precognitive desires that we have that we can’t even put our finger on, but we carried them. In the positive it’s made me aware that everybody really struggles with that. In America, all over the world, people have precognitive desires, affections that they don’t even think about. They think they have a doctrine for them, a belief, but actually it is far deeper than what was mentioned as a doctrine. 

Chris: When did you first begin to notice you had an interest in studying theology?

Wynand: So I grew up in a very religiously rich environment, with the church front and center in my childhood. I was eight years old when I was baptized as a believer, and I began to minister quite early in my life, preaching before I was 12. Just a very accelerated understanding of church and ministry and all of that. I didn’t really think that I would necessarily enter ministry, but it was always in the back of my mind. There was, in the charismatic tradition during my dedication, a prophetic word that spoke about me entering ministry, which was interesting. I didn’t know that for a long time. When I was in my final year of high school, I was preparing for my final exams and was going to study Engineering, which was a very big thing in South Africa. I had scholarships and a place in the residence sorted, along with a job offer after I graduated. While I was preparing for the exam, I had this distinct awareness that that was not my future. I went to my father and told him that I didn’t think I was going to study Engineering; I had a strong sense that I would study theology. And do you know what his answer was? He said he and my mom always knew it. I wish I did, because I would have spent more time polishing up my English and Afrikaans language. He asked that I promise him I wouldn’t waste my mind and study theology at a university, which for him was the guarantee that I would take this next step seriously. 

Chris: Was there a particular moment that led to the idea of the Openseminary approach to studying theology? 

Wynand: I went to the Cape in the mid-80s when South Africa was in the midst of the anti-Apartheid struggle. As a white person I became part of that resistance, and in the educational system I became the Dean at an integrated college, which was technically legal at that time. Because it was such a tumultuous time, normal theology lessons were not really possible. We had to do all kinds of things to learn how to teach when there’s the chance for disruption. I taught for a little while at the University of the Western Cape as an adjunct faculty member, long before emails, and I had to write lectures, leave them somewhere, and my students had to go pick them up because it was such a dangerous time. And so I learned early in those days that theology and doing theology and teaching theology could look different. However, the curriculum we followed was a typical Western curriculum, going through the disciplines, looking at Old Testament and New Testament systematic theology. But I always felt it lacked a measure of integration, and it just felt like we were moving from theory to theory. The students really wanted to practice; they wanted to know what it meant for them when an armoured vehicle rolled onto the school grounds and shot at people. How could they make peace and seek reconciliation? So after Apartheid came to an end in 1994, I continued at that college for another few years and began to think and wonder what theology could look like in a different way. I became part of a church plant and was asked to help train these church planters who were committed to developing a new church that was different in a new South Africa,  but they were not going to go back to Bible school. This was before Zoom and all these wonderful tools we have today. I began to put pen to paper and realized that if I look at the six church practices we embody and that shape our affections, that perhaps using each one of those as a lens, we could then study Old Testament and New Testament systematic theology, thereby creating an integration from the start instead of waiting until the end of the course to create the integration. The students really loved that they immediately could look at something like worship, proclamation, or spiritual formation and apply it immediately to the churches they were planting, and it just became a great conversation from the start. The good news was that very quickly the program was picked up via college and ended up at the University of Victoria, and the rest is history, as they say. 

Chris: I think it would be interesting for individuals to get an understanding of how the initial connections happened with Palmer. How did it happen?

Wynand: One of our closest connections I had with an outside institution was via a book written by Ron Sider, one of the great thinkers of evangelism of the past century, who recently passed away. He came to our college, inspired us, and gave us hope that we could be a different kind of Christian in this terrible time we were going through in the 80s and 90s. After Apartheid, Eastern University decided to start a leadership development program in Africa, bringing over a delegation, including the president of the University, to the college in South Africa I was teaching at. A colleague and I were tasked with writing up the design of this program, and I began to sense and understand how Eastern University worked in these very early days. That program went on to deliver some great graduates for Africa. When I developed Openseminary, there was quickly an interest to bring it to Australia, and I knew that by bringing it there I could easily bring it to America because of the overlap in time zones. I became a college principal and reached out to Eastern University for some mentoring for this new role. When Dr Black heard about the Openseminary idea, he wanted to bring it to Eastern, which was also my dream. This was in the early 2000s, and we have had it for more than 10 years at Eastern University under Palmer Theological Seminary. 

Chris: What does the new doctorate program mean to you personally? 

Wynand: After a few years of teaching the Master of Practical Theology, Master of Theological Studies at Palmer, Dr Black asked that I consider expanding that program to be a Master of Divinity. His first desire was to develop a doctoral program that’s different, using some of the principles that I used in designing the Openseminary master’s program. The university prioritized the MDiv and has been working on the doctorate, the Doctor of Philosophy in Professional Practice. The name is really important: a Doctor of Philosophy because it’s a research degree, a higher degree, and it is in Professional Practice because we believe that every person has a calling, a purpose in life: we follow careers and vocations as believers and that we do this in faithfulness to living our lives in a way that would make a difference. Whether we know it or not, theologically we are involved in our professions. This degree gives people the opportunity to think about their professions, whatever they might be, to think about what they have done through a theological lense. The course starts with a theological reflection on one’s vocation and then looks at the artifacts, the work product you have created. Let’s say you have been a minister for 20 years. You may look at the body of sermons you have created over these 20 years, and this doctorate will then use that body of work, which we call an artifact, as the subject of our research. What was the impact of that body of work, what results came from that? So there’s first an understanding of that, and then a deeper understanding of the theology and philosophy that sat behind that. And then as we look to the future, this doctorate will enable a person who's at the pinnacle of their career, look at the future, and say, “If I could do this all over again, how would I do that differently”? In that way, this doctorate, which excites me a lot, is generative, because it makes a way for the next generation, and then those who come to the end of their careers and vocations can pass something on to the next. 

Chris: What are your hopes for those who participate? 

Wynand: What I’m hoping for with this doctorate, and it’s true for all the programs that I do and have designed, is that people learn how to think theologically. Of course there’s a lot of important knowledge, and we can be led by ignorance, but that’s not what we want. But if I know where to find the information but don’t know what to do with that information, then I am not better off than the person who doesn’t even know the information is there. So I’m hoping that the MDiv will instill in people a discipline of doing theology in a way that is constructive but also critical. 

As far as the doctorate goes, I’m hoping that it will create an opportunity for those at the pinnacle of their careers, vocations, and professions to get a chance to look back while also looking forward, and then secondly to create a pathway to be generative, to hand over to the next generation the knowledge that they have acquired. Not even knowing that they have acquired that knowledge, that it was part of their bones, so to speak, kind of precognitive even, and this doctorate gives the opportunity to unearth that and to pass that on as a gift to the next generation.