Doctoral Course Introduction

I'm now in residence for my first Doctoral course at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. With two days under my belt, so far so good. I'm in a cohort with six other clergy including Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, and Episcopal. We come from churches that worship 30 on a Sunday morning and churches that worship 1,300 on Sunday mornings. To prepare for class, we each read six books and wrote five papers.

This first course, taught by Chuck Mendenhall, is called "Ministry and Context." On our first day of class, we shared our papers with one another. During the rest of the week we will explore different ways of engaging our congregations in qualitative, narrative research. We will get to know one anothers' congregations by the five papers we have shared with one another. So far, I have shared a brief ethnographic description of our choir and an even briefer family systems analysis of the parish house. I will also be sharing a narrative research about the chaplaincy, a paper on culture and identity which is very similar to what I shared at our Advent suppers, and finally I'll be sharing the timeline we created together during the second Advent supper.

Our classes meet from 8:30-12:30 each weekday for two weeks. Our professor will give us an assignment on Friday which will take much of the weekend to complete to be presented on Monday. This weekend work will be the background material we will work with in Week 2, and the basis of a research project we will do in our congregations in the next several months. Our final project for this course will be due April 15th. Currently, there are many exciting possibilities in our congregation. I haven't yet decided what the focus of my paper will be but I am confident that it will be both informative and useful as we look into Harcourt Parish's future together.