Especially in these days, institutional church no longer works like it used to.
Like so many vocations, clergy must learn to adapt to new, challenging, and exciting ways of bringing their gifts to the world. But what does this look like?
In this course, we will start reimagining the context and scope of ministry in the digital age - how sharing Good News can be sustainable for clergy, life-giving for congregations, and life-changing for the growing number of those who are seeking a deeper relationship with God beyond church walls.
Students will consider conceptual and practical steps to serving the church within and beyond the traditional congregational model, online and in-person, and how to build a ministry that serves others while also allowing clergy to support themselves and their families.
This is primarily a video-based course, based on 4 Key Concepts: Identity - what is your ministry? Technology - how do you share it? Sustainability - how are you compensated for it? Good News - with whom do you share it?
The final project is to create a roadmap for future ministry - sustainable part-time, digital ministry, or other creative ministry, and consider the questions and challenges around implementing a new concept of clergy leadership.
- Teacher: Catherine Caimano
What does it mean to lead during a time of religious, sociocultural, and environmental upheaval? What can churches do differently to reflect and nurture gospel values and God's dream of a just, reconciled, Spirit-filled world? This course will use the vision and concepts of Beloved Community to interrogate our approach to mission. Participants will articulate big-picture values and explore everyday leadership practices designed to help ensure that our growing and changing communities avoid reproducing past injustices and divisions, contributing instead to their repair and reconciliation.
This course is not intended as an introduction to critical theories of identity, nor is it meant to reproduce the kinds of learning and skill-development that happen in intercultural competency and anti-racism training. However, it will require that we bring concepts and practices from those spaces to bear on how we conduct ourselves as faith communities, particularly faith communities seeking to grow, to change, and to serve more effectively. In this sense, we can rightly say with Dr. King that for this course and for the Church, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” (see also BCP p. 855).
- Teacher: Kyle Oliver