FROM THE PRESIDENT

Dear Friends:

The practice of ministry is an exciting and challenging vocation. As ministers we have the challenge of integrating multiple perspectives and needs every time we are faced with a ministry opportunity. For instance, when you walk into a hospital room to visit a sick person, you are doing pastoral care, theology, Bible, worship, and spiritual direction all in one visit. The skilled pastor brings a variety of disciplines to bear upon that pastoral opportunity to minister to an ill person. Ministry requires interdisciplinary integration of multiple fields applicable to the context of ministry.

These same interdisciplinary skills are necessary for creating and conducting worship, writing sermons, working with the deacons, developing the Church School, or organizing the church budget. Ministers are not so much experts in the field of religion as they are skilled interpreters of the Bible, theology, church history, and the pastoral arts as they apply to the practice of ministry. How do ministers get the training required to know how to make these applications in the contexts of ministries to which they are called? How do we train men and women who can apply what they know about the Bible, theology, church history, and the pastoral arts to both the needs of their people and to the needs of worlds in which they live and work? How do we equip servant leaders to lead in the strange new world of the 21st century?

The faculty of ABSW has been asking these questions for some time. We have gone through a long and careful process of inquiry and study that has led to the development and implementation of a new curriculum for our master of divinity program. We are now into the second year of our new curriculum and are in the process of evaluating the first two years even as we design the third year. You will find a report on how all that is going in this issue of Perspectives.

It has been my privilege to be a part of the teaching team in the Middler Colloquium, the second-year required course, which includes placement in a ministry site. In the second year we are integrating an introduction to the New Testament with study of worship, preaching, and pastoral arts such as pastoral care, Christian education, and leadership.

While students are studying the New Testament, designing worship services, and constructing sermons, they are also working 15–20 hours a week in a ministry setting under the supervision of a teaching pastor. The teaching team for the second year includes both ABSW faculty and teaching pastors.

The involvement of the pastors and the placement of students in ministry settings enables the faculty to hold in tension questions both about integration of theory and the nature of the context in which the students are placed. We have multiple contexts in which our students are working. We can therefore ask how the biblical text from which all the students are preaching in a given month relates to the place where they preach. Is the text heard differently in a Chinese church than an African American or White church? What are the differences? How do you focus on making preaching incarnational, taking on flesh in the place where you are preaching?

Students are evaluated by faculty, pastors, and lay people on each assignment. The work requires the same academic rigor that would be expected in any introductory course but requires much more immediate application and evaluation than a typical introductory class. Our students are actually learning how exegesis applies to preaching, and how preaching and worship are related. They are learning to understand not only what they are preaching but where they are preaching. This second year has been a wonderful experience of "on-the-job training" supported by solid academic study. The only complaint that I have heard from our second-year students is that we "require too much reading." I would guess that the complaint signals we have about the right balance in our treatment of both academic and practical work.

We are able to try this more experimental approach to teaching/learning in large part because of our connection to the Graduate Theological Union. As a small school we cannot provide everything that a student needs by ourselves. Because we are a member of the GTU, we can share in hundreds of courses each year in addition to our own offerings. I am grateful for the freedom that ABSW has to give leadership in some new and innovative curricular reform.

Please pray for us as we work on fully implementing our new vision. Rest assured that an exhaustive evaluative process is in place so that we can make corrections and additions as we proceed. God is blessing us in these days! Thank you for your commitment and interest in our ministry.

Faithfully yours,

Keith A. Russell
President