My first year of seminary was very difficult.

In the early 1980s my wife and I, with our two-year-old and two-month-old daughters, moved from Charlottesville, Virginia to Ipswich, Massachusetts.

We also transitioned from working with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to my being a full-time student. We didn’t realize what a culture shock this would be.

The culture shock was not moving from “Mr. Jefferson’s country” in the South to a small New England fishing village. The culture shock was moving from being in a pluralistic academic community to becoming part of a “monastic model” seminary. That is what Gordon-Conwell was at that time: a community of Christians who lived together, ate together, studied together, and worshipped together, retreating from the world for a period of time. It felt somewhat like a monastery.

Gordon-Conwell was on a hill, separated from the neighborhoods and the town. Once you turned from Essex Street onto the seminary driveway, you would encounter only Christians, mostly strong evangelicals who came to deepen their understanding of their Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal, Wesleyan, or [fill in the blank] faith tradition. There was much discussion over meals about issues like “limited atonement,” or plenary inspiration versus inerrancy, or the condemnation versus gracious salvation of those who have never heard the name of Jesus.

I was with Christians all the time, and I found it a little, well, hard to get used to. I felt a little oxygen-deprived. I needed to get out and talk to non-Christians. Was there something wrong with me? Why couldn’t I glory in the opportunity of being with Christians all the time? For many Christians this is the optimal Christian existence until Jesus returns, to live in Christian community.

However, my response, and part of my uneasiness even today, is that I believe the Christian existence is one of being both “called out” (ecclesia) while yet being together as a community, and then being sent out from that community. The church is a two-stroke engine of coming together and going out. Come. Go. Come. Go.

We know this is true because this is what Jesus said and what he did. Jesus gathered his disciples together before his departure. “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw them, they worshiped him . . .” (Matthew 28:16–17a, NIV).

In turn, in his final directions to his disciples, Jesus does not tell them to stay together and protect themselves from the world. Jesus did not say, “Stay close because it is a rough world out there. Form a huddle; circle the wagons.” In fact, he said the opposite. “Go!” Or more accurately, “As you go, and make disciples. . .” or “In your going,” which means it was assumed they would not simply stay together.

Jesus’ instructions are all about mission (even more so than Paul’s or John’s or Peter’s) centered around proclamation. He gave instructions while “on the way” for how they should bless others while they were “on the go.”

Which brings me back to the Christian existence as a two-stroke-engine existence. We gather to learn, to worship, to heal, and to be re-centered as “Jesus communities.” But most of our life is lived in the going. Going to work, going to the store, going to the city, going to Syria or Myanmar, or to the next town or neighborhood.

The memory of how hard it was for me to leave the world of the secular university, where I had opportunities every week to tell others about Jesus, to move into the monastic model seminary, remains very important in my present thinking about Gordon-Conwell. All of our campuses, including the residential Hamilton campus committed to Life Together, are “outposts” or “tabernacles” in a broader interreligious and secular culture.

In the near future, the Hamilton campus will have a new start; we are calling it a renewal of the campus and also the ethos. The campus will have a new identity, not as a monastic model, but as a community that is fully immersed in a neighborhood. Upon selling the six apartment buildings, we will have about half of the occupants related to the seminary and half that are not. We will be living, walking, sledding down the hill with, and maybe–more than ever before–having coffee with our Christian and non-Christian secular neighbors.

I believe this new Hamilton campus, with a semi-permeable membrane with the world, can easily stay connected with the world. We can live a neighborly existence.

In the past two years, working on our new campus model, a number of us have had extensive conversations with neighbors and other town folks. These new friendships with town folks and neighbors will be healthier for us as a seminary and will open the possibility of the seminary being a greater blessing to the town.

Come. Go.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

“Go and make disciples of all nations.”

Dr. Scott W. Sunquist, President of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is author of the “Attentiveness” blog. He welcomes comments, responses, and good ideas.