Rachel Toombs Named to Faculty Position in Old Testament
CDSP has called Dr. Rachel Toombs to serve as assistant professor of Old Testament beginning May 22.
Toombs is the first full-time faculty member hired according to the parameters of CDSP’s new fully hybrid educational model and “4+2”-year MDiv and curacy curriculum.
“Dr. Toombs is a perfect fit for our new program, where each learning experience will be intensely focused on preparing priests for wise and practical leadership that makes an impact in their church and local community,” said Dr. Stephen Fowl, president and dean.
Toombs joins the CDSP faculty amid a career evenly divided between parish ministry and theological scholarship.
In congregational life, she has served as a lay professional in Christian formation positions at four different churches in three different dioceses, including her current role as director of children, youth, and intergenerational ministries at Ascension Episcopal Church in Stillwater, MN.
“My focus in parish ministry has been an invitation to go deep, to take scripture seriously and take the great treasures of the Christian spiritual tradition seriously,” she says. “In my last congregation, we saw especially clearly what could happen to parishioners’ vocational understandings when we walked with them and asked together, ‘How can this faith transform our lives?’”
As a scholar, Toombs’s specialty is intersections of Biblical Hebrew narrative with theology and literature. She is the author of Reading the First Five Books: The Invitation of the Pentateuch’s Stories, published in 2024, and Flannery O’Connor and Stylistic Asceticism, published in 2022. She holds a PhD in religion from Baylor University and an MA in theological studies from Regent College in Vancouver.
“The common thread of my research is stories—stories and readers,” Toombs said. “What captured my imagination is the way the early Biblical narratives are told: Imagine it’s just like Lego pieces of clauses stacked on top of each other. You don’t have complicated sentences. Seeing the similarities between Flannery O’Connor and biblical Hebrew narrative, especially in the spare style, helped me see the true invitation as a reader to put some skin in the game. There’s a whole lot of room and opportunity for readers to imagine, to infer, to guess, to extrapolate, to put ourselves imaginatively into those worlds.”
Toombs said her vocation as a teacher has been clear since her earliest jobs working with young people, after studying youth ministry as an undergraduate. She added that her five post-dissertation years as a part-time lecturer in the Baylor University Honors College’s Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) program are especially relevant to academic life at CDSP.
BIC students travel in small cohorts, and Toombs had the opportunity to grow in her relationship with them over multiple interactions in their program—a dynamic familiar to anyone teaching in a small seminary setting. Moreover, each course brought together voices and methods from different fields and academic disciplines, another hallmark of how CDSP’s faculty are teaching in the new program.
A candidate for holy orders in the Diocese of Texas, Toombs is scheduled to be ordained to the transitional diaconate this summer. She sees this temporal proximity to her future students’ ordination processes as a major benefit of her own vocational journey.
“I know full well the instability of being a postulant,” she said. “I know what it means to be under examination and sit before the COM. I know how much you have to let go of when you’re in this process because you have no idea what’s coming.”
Toombs lives in St. Paul, MN, with her husband, Dr. Lance Green, and two dogs, Rosie and Éowyn.
