News
God
Faith
For those who don't know, I will be starting my "Master of Arts in Ministry" classes at Saint John's School of Theology and Seminary on Monday. My friend Dan and I carpooled to the all-day orientation today, and it was such a positive experience!
The other students in the orientation were amazing, and I got this overwhelming sense of welcoming, humility, and warmth from all of the staff, including several who will be-- in one case, very imminently!-- future teachers of mine.
One of the things they had us do was fill out an inventory, to help us establish a baseline for the four aspects of ministerial formation: human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral. They operate in roughly that sequence: grace was described as "building on nature"-- so human formation raises our capacity for spiritual attunement.
In turn then, encountering Jesus as the image of the Triune God through spiritual development opens the door to the requisite humility required for intellectual growth: there is always someone smarter than us; how will we be equipped when such a person has a more sensible position than ours-- will we able to learn from those around us graciously?
Finally, all three of those feed into pastoral formation. I have often wondered at examples of great pastoral leadership both in my own community and elsewhere-- now I'm just beginning to understand the recipe which forms such wisdom.
We were given this incredible metaphor of the Church being like a river, with two shores. On one shore, one might have "Jesus is fully divine"; on the other, "Jesus is fully man." It is important for us to reconcile even such difficult concepts by flowing with the Church in our understanding, versus getting beached on the ground. Simultaneously, we mustn't form a rivulet by digging our own trench away from the river.
Another take-away from that inventory: I knew that there was a vast ocean between where I am in knowledge, and the whole body of theology, Church doctrine, and so on. The intellectual part of the inventory questions followed roughly this format: "In your ministry, do you perform some function X by leveraging understanding of theological concept Y."
Maybe I had heard of a tiny smattering of those ideas-- obvious ones, like the Trinity. But I quite literally had never even heard of most of those terms, much less knew what they meant. My knowledge deficit isn't an ocean: it's more like the distance from the Earth to the Sun!
As I have time during this very busy month ahead, I will try my best to describe many of the things I learn so that all of you can be on this journey with me, and hopefully also grow closer to God by knowing Him better.
The other students in the orientation were amazing, and I got this overwhelming sense of welcoming, humility, and warmth from all of the staff, including several who will be-- in one case, very imminently!-- future teachers of mine.
One of the things they had us do was fill out an inventory, to help us establish a baseline for the four aspects of ministerial formation: human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral. They operate in roughly that sequence: grace was described as "building on nature"-- so human formation raises our capacity for spiritual attunement.
In turn then, encountering Jesus as the image of the Triune God through spiritual development opens the door to the requisite humility required for intellectual growth: there is always someone smarter than us; how will we be equipped when such a person has a more sensible position than ours-- will we able to learn from those around us graciously?
Finally, all three of those feed into pastoral formation. I have often wondered at examples of great pastoral leadership both in my own community and elsewhere-- now I'm just beginning to understand the recipe which forms such wisdom.
We were given this incredible metaphor of the Church being like a river, with two shores. On one shore, one might have "Jesus is fully divine"; on the other, "Jesus is fully man." It is important for us to reconcile even such difficult concepts by flowing with the Church in our understanding, versus getting beached on the ground. Simultaneously, we mustn't form a rivulet by digging our own trench away from the river.
Another take-away from that inventory: I knew that there was a vast ocean between where I am in knowledge, and the whole body of theology, Church doctrine, and so on. The intellectual part of the inventory questions followed roughly this format: "In your ministry, do you perform some function X by leveraging understanding of theological concept Y."
Maybe I had heard of a tiny smattering of those ideas-- obvious ones, like the Trinity. But I quite literally had never even heard of most of those terms, much less knew what they meant. My knowledge deficit isn't an ocean: it's more like the distance from the Earth to the Sun!
As I have time during this very busy month ahead, I will try my best to describe many of the things I learn so that all of you can be on this journey with me, and hopefully also grow closer to God by knowing Him better.