“My life has been in chapters,” says Dr. Clayton Jefford. “There was the chapter where I grew up in North Carolina, there was a chapter where I was in graduate school in California. There’s the chapter where we had kids and raised them. If I were to write a book of my life, I could easily identify what the different chapters were. This would be one, but it’d be a really long one.”
In May, Dr. Jefford retired, closing out 37 years of teaching Scripture at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, he found his way to a Catholic seminary in southern Indiana by way of a few nudges from people he respected.
After graduating from high school in North Carolina, he attended Furman University in South Carolina, where his hometown pastor went to teach in the religious studies department. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life at this point. He thought about studying psychology; other people suggested pursuing law, but neither of those stuck.
After a year or so, his pastor convinced him to go into ministry. The New Testament was his pastor’s specialty. Having an interest in history, it soon became his specialty as well. Dr. Jefford graduated from Furman with a bachelor’s degree in 1977 and became an ordained Southern Baptist minister in 1978.
He went on to attend Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) in Wake Forest, NC, with the intention of going into ministry and serving as a pastor somewhere. While at SEBTS, two faculty members asked him separately if he had ever thought about teaching.
“I’ve always respected people who teach. For me, they carry some authority,” he says. “When these two professors came to me at seminary and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about teaching?’ I thought, sometimes you hear God working. How can you just ignore this?”
After earning a Master of Divinity and Master of Theology from SEBTS, he and his wife, Susan, moved across the country to California so he could pursue doctoral studies at The Claremont Graduate School. While there, they had their three children. He also met Fr. Damian Dietlein, OSB, a monk of Assumption Abbey, who taught Scripture at Saint Meinrad for 47 years. When a faculty position opened at Saint Meinrad, Fr. Damian encouraged him to apply.
“I said, ‘You know, Damo, I’m not Catholic.’ He said, ‘Doesn’t matter; apply,’” explains Jefford.
He was hired in 1989 and began his teaching career thinking he needed to give his students the answers. As a Protestant teaching at a Catholic seminary, he found his perspective to be an advantage. His teaching style evolved into encouraging his students to think about the issues and questions.
“On the first day of class, I would say, ‘I know what the questions are. Your job is to see if your answers answer my questions,’ and then it’s game on,” he says. “What I hope to teach them is that I don’t care about their answers so much. They need to be thinking, ‘what do I need to do to answer this?’ Most of them are going to be priests, and eventually someone’s going to come to them with a life-challenging question.”
From the very beginning, he developed a reputation for being tough. In a biography Susan wrote, she said, “One student described going in to take a ‘Dr. Jefford test’ as akin to ‘showing up at the Gates of Hell with a water pistol!’” She quoted another student who said, “he’s tough, but he works hard to help us feel safe in his classes. … We know it’s OK to make mistakes (particularly in Greek class) and to explore our own ideas, even if they don’t agree with his.”
The impact of Dr. Jefford’s work can be seen in the lives of his students—quite literally, in the dozens of monks he taught whom he still sees at Saint Meinrad today. His work may have shaped him just as much as it shaped his students. After reading and teaching the Gospels over and over, there are two things that stick with him: don’t judge and find yourself in the other.
“It’s not my place to judge you. I don’t know where you’re from, what you do, what you’ve experienced, how you feel. It’s not my job to judge; that’s God’s job,” he explains. “The point is that everybody counts. It’s not only about you—everybody brings something worth experiencing.”
Dr. Jefford leaves Saint Meinrad as an internationally recognized expert in New Testament studies and early Christianity, with a career’s worth of books, lectures, and honors behind him. But what he says he’ll miss isn’t the scholarship—it’s the students.
“I’ve never regretted one day of being an educator,” he says. “I’ll be 71, and I’m perfectly happy with what I’ve done in life. That’s also what I want for my students. I have a lot of years left, hopefully. I could easily do something else. I could do another chapter. I just don’t know what it is yet.”