D.Min. Graduation from Drew -May 17, 2009

My D.Min. cohort

My Drew D.Min. cohort is a great group of people. There are seven of us-- Sangchun, Candace, Mark, Dale, Chuck, Dennis, and me.

Sangchun is a pastor of a Methodist Church in DaeJeon, South Korea. He’s a smiling, quiet, serious presence in our group, both when we’re online and when we’re face to face. (Until about the fourth day on campus, none of us had ever seen Sangchun in anything but a suit and tie, even when he was signing on to a web chat at what was four in the morning his time.) Being at Drew for the month has been hard on him. He misses Korean food, for example. Aside from pizza, he really hasn’t found much that he likes, though he’s tried one kind of (largely vegetarian) food after another when we’ve eaten at different places. He’s not fond of movies—he sees them as largely a waste of time—but when the preaching class was required to see one and our group picked Ratatouille, he cheerfully went along and watched it . I’m always impressed by how he’s able to follow any of what we’re doing when it’s in both a foreign language and a foreign culture. He says that he can do that because he lived in England for six years, but still…

Candace is a Methodist pastor trying to plant a new church called Daybreak in northwest Las Vegas. (web.mac.com/clergymom/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html)
This is her second church plant and it’s clear once you’ve talked with her a bit that she misses her previous congregation, Song of Life Church in Phoenix, Arizona. She has a great understanding of the dynamics of various trends and movements in mainline Protestant churches these days and seems to enjoy meeting new people, so I can understand why the Georgia Methodists were willing to fund her doing a church plant in Nevada. Candace is out-going, left handed, and says what’s on her mind. One of her new experiences this summer was seeing fireflies when we did the Cajun cookout.
In July of 2006, Mark became the pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Las Vegas (http://www.tumclv.org/), a congregation that sounds like quite a challenge. Mark and Candace both describe him as a creature of habit. He’s very friendly and loves to laugh. He’s got not only a tech background (having worked as a computer consultant before ordination) but he’s a musician, playing both banjo and guitar. Candace and Mark have three daughters in their twenties, one of whom is a pastor, one a grad student, and one an attorney.

Dale is the youngest in our group and is a pastor in the United Church of Canada. He currently serves two Anglo congregations in the Quebec area, but in October he’s moving to a new church, St. Stephen’s-on-the-Hill, in a Toronto suburb. (ststephensuc.ca ) His wife has just gotten ordained and will also be serving a congregation in the same area. They’ve got a 10-year-old daughter who is currently visiting her grandparents in Nova Scotia. Dale must read a lot; whenever Cass, the Christian Futuring prof, brought up a book in class, whether it was science fiction, business, politics, or theology, it was Dale and me who had read it. He’s also recently taken up acting, playing the part of a pastor in a recent Canadian film and also in a Canadian T.V. series that’s just begun to be released (and which he hopes will do well-enough that he can do some more bit parts in it). He loves golf, movies, and gaming (which he assures us is the Canadian expression not for gambling but for computer games). When we had a little bit of free time between classes and dinner it wasn’t uncommon to find Dale either heading to the gym or back to his dorm room to play Halo or CounterStrike. He’s just gotten a new laptop with Vista on it, so we all spent a lot of time admiring all the bells and whistles of programs and options that came with it (and I spent a lot of time trying not to be jealous).

Chuck pastors Friendship AME Church in Clinton, South Carolina (http://www.friendshipame.org/). He’s got a warm quietness about him and is clearly a real family man. He and I spent a lot of time commiserating about what it’s like living with teenage daughters, since Chuck has a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. Before serving as a minister, Chuck was in the Army for twenty-one years and his “knight” personality was clearly strengthened through that experience. He describes himself as a homebody and was clearly counting the days before he’d be able to be back with his wife and daughters.

Dennis serves as minister to the United Presbyterian Church in Slatington, PA, a church that is the result of a merger of two former churches in the town and that still seems to feel some of that pre-merger separateness. Prior to United Pres he’d been in congregations in Ohio and Indiana and had also served for a good number of years as a pastoral counselor. Dennis plays guitar in a church band that plays for the contemporary worship service each week and hates Welsh hymn sings (and the food that comes with them)! He’s got a creative mind and a great grasp of biblical stories and their application to modern and postmodern cultures. And he’s got a book –Healing Death: Finding Wholeness When a Cure is No Longer Possible--coming out in October.

My Drew D.Min. courses

I'm finally home from the three weeks at Drew. It was a mixed time. Living in a dorm wasn't great and having constant problems trying to get through to people on my cellphone was very frustrating. The class times were generally interesting but much too long.

I enjoyed learning the Christian Futuring skills a lot and found Cassidy Dale an interesting teacher. His discussions in class and out on science fiction books, movies, and TV shows were great, his analysis of comic books (including the difference between Marvel and DC heroes) and how that plays into whether one has a knight or gardener view of the world was captivating, and his explanations for how to pick out cultural trends was very helpful. And I'm glad to have the skills to pick out cultural drivers and to know how to create and write scenarios of possible futures for any given question. I'm glad I chose to take that course instead of the preaching one.

My afternoon class on theological methods was also a good, if less exciting, one. It gave me the basic underpinnings for doing my D.Min. project by teaching about various approaches and research methods that we could choose to use, helping us define our narratives of concern, and giving us the basic skeleton for the next two years of work we'll be starting in August. Given the area my project is going to be in, Chris Hammon was a real asset, recommending various books that would have good theological background and asking me some key questions to think about.

But the best part of the three weeks was getting to spend time with the other six people who are part of my ongoing cohort for the next two years. Since my high school and college days I haven't had such a chance to spend such an extended intense period of time with a small group of people like I did these three weeks. Most of us went out to dinner together almost every night (sometimes joined by Cassidy and Chris) and the faces that I'd seen on a computer screen, the names I'd written to regularly, and the people I'd only talked with in structured classroom settings before have become not only real people, but friends. They serve different kinds of parishes-- one pastors a good sized Methodist Church in Las Vegas, one is moving from two United Church of Canada congregations in the Quebec area to a congregation near Toronto, one has a Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, one is a Methodist minister a little outside of Seoul Korea, one has a AME congregation in South Carolina, and one is a new church planter in Nevada -- and all seem to be interested in finding new ways to engage their congregations in the 21st century. On the next to last day of class, a photographer who works for the university taking pictures for their various events came to our class to take pictures for the new D.Min. brochure. After she'd been there for a little while, she said that she'd never been with a group who were so engaged with each other and seemed to enjoy each other's company so much. I think she was right. My cohort is a great one with which to be traveling on this doctoral journey. I'm glad to be home, but I miss them already and look forward to our online discussions over the next two years and our next face-to-face time together in October.

Almost the Same

Yesterday, while taking a break from working on a paper looking at what various futures of theological education might be, I walked over to see my old dorm,Welch Hall. Nothing much has changed over more than 30 years. It's still got the long, narrow, dark, ugly halls lined with door after door, the tiny rooms that would barely fit two twin beds with about a foot in between them and two desks along a wall and a little room with dressers off on the side, and a pretty nice lounge in between it and Holloway Hall. The only thing that seems to have changed is that there's no longer a piano in the lounge. That struck me as sad, since I have fond memories (perhaps my only fond memories of that time in Welch) of teaching myself to play various songs on that lounge piano.

Trees and Dead Trees

These days I spend lots of time walking between the dorm, Foster Hall (on the left) and my classrooms in the Hall of Science (on the right). I make at least three roundtrips a day and have begun to understand why Drew is nicknamed 'The Forest'. Most days I pass a (perhaps too) tame doe with her two tiny fawns, a baby racoon that seems fond of a particular tree, and a hawk that I watched teach her baby to fly this past Wednesday. The Forest is beautiful.

And yet as I walk I also spend a lot of time looking down, trying not to step on all the caterpillars that are all over. Like much of this part of New Jersey, the Forest is being infested with gypsy moths and Drew personnel are worried about whether or not the old oaks are going to survive through the summer.

This afternoon I'm off to a theological library orientation. It's supposed to show us the organization of the 'dead trees', which is what Drew's librarian calls books. The term startled me when he first used it. I never thought of books first and foremost in those terms and it seemed especially startling coming from a librarian. I guess, though, that the forest theme appears everywhere on this campus.

At Drew

I arrived at Drew yesterday afternoon since they said to arrive between 2 and 5 and so far things have been very tame. There was nothing to do yesterday other than check into the dorm. Because I'm one of two women in my program and the other woman chose to stay in a hotel I have the place to myself.

Today we began with breakfast at 8:30 and then an orientation morning, which was largely a repeat of information they'd already given us in writing and introductions. 31 of the 33 DMin students did introductions of the "I've one wife/husband and x kids" type. When the director of the program said that Drew prided itself on having attained balanced diversity in the DMin program in all ways I wanted to say "Really? Is anyone else gay? Or is there anyone who is single? Or divorced? Or..." The only other thing on the schedule for the day was to get ID cards and be back at the dorm to have our refrigerators delivered at 2. I used the afternoon to get some swimming in, but I hope that the "intense emersion experience" they keep saying this three weeks is gets more intense tomorrow when classes formally begin.



I'm heading off to dinner in a little while (both the cafeteria and the snack bar are closed during the summer so we have to eat off campus except for lunch time when there may be a place to get a sandwich) with the other six folks who are in my cohort for the rest of my DMin program. I hope it's a good chance to get to know them a little better.