I'm almost there. The Finish Line of this quarter is in sight. I am looking forward to the end with anticipation. I’ve really enjoyed this class. I think it has opened my eyes to a lot of things about teaching and developing a learning community. One of the struggles I have is that I want to take this information back to my community and use it, there’s so many ways I can see that I could put this learning into practice, but seminary is like taking a hiatus from my real life, and while I’m good at adapting to new places and changes (I moved 23 times before I was 20), I don’t necessarily like being away from my community. My roommates here are awesome and we definitely have community, but I wonder if I’ll remember the inspiration I’ve gotten and what I’ve learned once I bring this information back to my “other” life. In looking at my world in that other place through the lens of our curriculum project, I am wondering how to retain the things I’m learning so that they will be useful to me in my future ministry.
I definitely needed to be physically removed from my life in Orange County to expand my thinking about what God’s kingdom looks like. This relocation has also changed my personal walk with God by being in the northwest Pasadena culture. I love walking places and the lack of emphasis on achieving the “American Dream”; which in Orange County looks like working hard in business all week, driving the latest Mercedes on lease, partying at Bandera on Friday nights and going to Laguna Beach every weekend. There is something about living for one’s own self-interest that is very real in Orange County. Even the Christians try to make it look like it’s in God’s interest that they’re living high on the hog (i.e. I’m building this custom McMansion to use as a ministry “place” for people to come and play Halo). I’ve really been challenged this year that living for Jesus is downward mobility, as Henry Nouwen says.
This is something strange for me about this learning community called Fuller. While in seminary, it seems impossible for me to remain substantially involved in the ministries that I care about and yet that’s what I’m training for. So how do I keep safe this knowledge and this whole learning transformation so that I don’t lose it when I return to my ministry later? Will those opportunities even still be there for me when I return? Or is this seminary process supposed to expand my mind so that I will want to minister in different ways and places? Or is it just that this learning process will change me and then I’ll be able to live and teach differently? I find as this quarter closes I have so many questions still unanswered. Some of my questions are about teaching and curriculum, and forming a learning community, but a lot more are about the seminary process. What does it do? Is it working? I know for sure I’m supposed to be here, even though it’s something that women in my church don’t do, or men really for that matter. But I’m questioning whether it’s supposed to change me or change my mind, or both. I don’t have a lot of answers, but one thing I have noticed is that in many ways I’m still the same person at the core. I still have my story and my identity intact in the ways that God says matter. Overall, as I think about the process of being “prepared for the manifold ministries of Christ and His church” I’ve really come to appreciate how He’s made me and to find ways to appreciate the story I’ve been given and the journey I’ve been on.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Linking my Story
"Rockharbor is a community being transformed by Christ to be a catalyst for changing lives in and beyond Orange County." - Rockharbor mission statement
This week in class we've been working in groups on a presentation that will be hypothetically used in my church, Rockharbor. We are supposed to present a pitch for a multifaceted curriculum to a hypothetical church education committee (the rest of the class will be the real audience). The curriculum is supposed to touch one or more groups of a church and we have freedom in what we will teach and how we will go about teaching it, as long as we use a variety of learning styles and engage multiple intelligences.
I'm excited for this project and one of the things that it has brought to mind is story-linking, which we're reading about in Anne Wimberly's African-American Christian Education, and how much of my Christian story is linked with the story of Rockharbor.
I began attending Rockharbor in the fall of 2001, but I had been recently wounded by an experience with a ministry leader, so I mostly sat in the back of the church and chose not to interact with anyone, especially those people who appeared to be in charge. I was in the middle of a four year healing process at the time, so I just simply attended for that first year. After the following summer, I heard clearly from God that while I might remain in my healing season a bit longer ( I had a lot of work to do), I needed to step out and find some community beyond that. So a friend and I joined a Life Group on Balboa Island. And the rest is history. Four years leading Life Group. Hours and hours setting up, tearing down and loading the trailer. Counting the offering. Filling in for the receptionist. Stuffing envelopes. Ushering on Sunday. Driving to the printer. Praying at the crosses around the room. Defining moments and defining seasons.
It's been interesting to tell my group about Rockharbor from a perspective that is as objective as I can be. For me, it is family and I feel so many conflicting things about it. I love it more than anything, but I hate a lot of things about it too. It is so closely woven together with my own narrative, it's interesting to step back and look at it as a church from someone else's perspective. I find it easier than I thought I would to admit its faults and blind spots and yet, I want to make sure my group knows how lovable it is, in all its faulty flawedness. A church really is the people and when it comes to Rockharbor, so many people think it's this thing or that thing (usually so hip and young, or so alterna-church and emergent, or such a mega-church with 7,000 people every weekend) but I want them to know the inside, my friends and my staff people there who are flawed and lovely, trying their best to follow Jesus missionally, reflecting on God's goodness personally, doing a lot of things rightly and some things wrongly.
My personal story with Jesus can't be told without Rockharbor. It is in my story and I am in its story. I'm not the poster-child for it (I'm much too much of a misfit) but I still want people to see it and know it and love it as much as I do, and be able to see past the 7,000 people and the nightclub services, to a ragtag group of volunteers that love Jesus and are trying to do church in a real way.
This week in class we've been working in groups on a presentation that will be hypothetically used in my church, Rockharbor. We are supposed to present a pitch for a multifaceted curriculum to a hypothetical church education committee (the rest of the class will be the real audience). The curriculum is supposed to touch one or more groups of a church and we have freedom in what we will teach and how we will go about teaching it, as long as we use a variety of learning styles and engage multiple intelligences.
I'm excited for this project and one of the things that it has brought to mind is story-linking, which we're reading about in Anne Wimberly's African-American Christian Education, and how much of my Christian story is linked with the story of Rockharbor.
I began attending Rockharbor in the fall of 2001, but I had been recently wounded by an experience with a ministry leader, so I mostly sat in the back of the church and chose not to interact with anyone, especially those people who appeared to be in charge. I was in the middle of a four year healing process at the time, so I just simply attended for that first year. After the following summer, I heard clearly from God that while I might remain in my healing season a bit longer ( I had a lot of work to do), I needed to step out and find some community beyond that. So a friend and I joined a Life Group on Balboa Island. And the rest is history. Four years leading Life Group. Hours and hours setting up, tearing down and loading the trailer. Counting the offering. Filling in for the receptionist. Stuffing envelopes. Ushering on Sunday. Driving to the printer. Praying at the crosses around the room. Defining moments and defining seasons.
It's been interesting to tell my group about Rockharbor from a perspective that is as objective as I can be. For me, it is family and I feel so many conflicting things about it. I love it more than anything, but I hate a lot of things about it too. It is so closely woven together with my own narrative, it's interesting to step back and look at it as a church from someone else's perspective. I find it easier than I thought I would to admit its faults and blind spots and yet, I want to make sure my group knows how lovable it is, in all its faulty flawedness. A church really is the people and when it comes to Rockharbor, so many people think it's this thing or that thing (usually so hip and young, or so alterna-church and emergent, or such a mega-church with 7,000 people every weekend) but I want them to know the inside, my friends and my staff people there who are flawed and lovely, trying their best to follow Jesus missionally, reflecting on God's goodness personally, doing a lot of things rightly and some things wrongly.
My personal story with Jesus can't be told without Rockharbor. It is in my story and I am in its story. I'm not the poster-child for it (I'm much too much of a misfit) but I still want people to see it and know it and love it as much as I do, and be able to see past the 7,000 people and the nightclub services, to a ragtag group of volunteers that love Jesus and are trying to do church in a real way.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Invested
Yesterday's class session was an "Aha!" moment for me. We discussed in groups our answers to the following questions:
1. In all of the course assignments and activities, what has been the most engaging and motivating?
2.1 Concerning the concepts and processes we have engaged in class, what are you learning about the work of shaping a congregation as a learning community, what has been most important and valuable?
2.2 Concerning yourself as a learner, as one who is being shaped to help churches learn, what has been most important and valuable?
3. If you had two wishes for the remainder of the quarter, concerning the class and your participation, what would those wishes be?
After going around and hearing each person's (4 in a group) answers to the questions, we tried to sift through what each person felt were the key points/ key words in their answers to the questions. Then we distilled all the key words into some key points that we put up on poster paper on the wall near us.
The answers varied widely. Our class has a policy that if your cell phone rings in class, you must bring snacks. One person used one of their two wishes to ask for more phones to ring so we could have "more pizza." I liked that. I like when people ask for specific, concrete things. Especially in ministry, people always seem to be blathering on about outcomes like "transformation" which are really hard to put your mental arms around. Of course, transformation is specific and concrete for an individual person; they can point to how they were in sin and how now they're not, or how their perspective was small and now it's been widened and enlightened, but to look at a ministry or group of people and ask, "Are they being transformed?" That's hard to discern and quantify.
Anyway, so as we discussed all the things that have been valuable to us, what has been engaging and motivating and what we would do with two wishes, I realized that every person had something golden to offer the group. Especially in my little group, I felt bonded to the people's input. Then we took our posters and put them up with the other group's posters in the front of the room and tried to distill our posters into some common themes/wishes that we want to focus on. As I was sitting and looking at all the posters, especially our group's poster, I had my Aha moment: I'm invested. I really want what we have to say to matter and I really want all the other posters to matter. This was a conscious thought but also a deep feeling at the same time.
I want to be led by leaders who listen to those they're leading. I've been blessed by awesome pastors, teachers, mentors and leaders and I've had some definitively bad experiences under incompetent leaders and teachers. These experiences have caused me to develop a leadership philosophy that agrees with John C. Maxwell when he says, “He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk."
1. In all of the course assignments and activities, what has been the most engaging and motivating?
2.1 Concerning the concepts and processes we have engaged in class, what are you learning about the work of shaping a congregation as a learning community, what has been most important and valuable?
2.2 Concerning yourself as a learner, as one who is being shaped to help churches learn, what has been most important and valuable?
3. If you had two wishes for the remainder of the quarter, concerning the class and your participation, what would those wishes be?
After going around and hearing each person's (4 in a group) answers to the questions, we tried to sift through what each person felt were the key points/ key words in their answers to the questions. Then we distilled all the key words into some key points that we put up on poster paper on the wall near us.
The answers varied widely. Our class has a policy that if your cell phone rings in class, you must bring snacks. One person used one of their two wishes to ask for more phones to ring so we could have "more pizza." I liked that. I like when people ask for specific, concrete things. Especially in ministry, people always seem to be blathering on about outcomes like "transformation" which are really hard to put your mental arms around. Of course, transformation is specific and concrete for an individual person; they can point to how they were in sin and how now they're not, or how their perspective was small and now it's been widened and enlightened, but to look at a ministry or group of people and ask, "Are they being transformed?" That's hard to discern and quantify.
Anyway, so as we discussed all the things that have been valuable to us, what has been engaging and motivating and what we would do with two wishes, I realized that every person had something golden to offer the group. Especially in my little group, I felt bonded to the people's input. Then we took our posters and put them up with the other group's posters in the front of the room and tried to distill our posters into some common themes/wishes that we want to focus on. As I was sitting and looking at all the posters, especially our group's poster, I had my Aha moment: I'm invested. I really want what we have to say to matter and I really want all the other posters to matter. This was a conscious thought but also a deep feeling at the same time.
I want to be led by leaders who listen to those they're leading. I've been blessed by awesome pastors, teachers, mentors and leaders and I've had some definitively bad experiences under incompetent leaders and teachers. These experiences have caused me to develop a leadership philosophy that agrees with John C. Maxwell when he says, “He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk."
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Servant Leaders, Servant Structures
For my book report in CF526, my partner Daryl and I were assigned to read Servant Leaders, Servant Structures by Elizabeth O'Connor. It's a book about the Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C. written from the perspective of a woman who was on staff there for a number of decades.After reading this, we were assigned to present the essence of the book to the class using one of six learning styles. Some of the other groups were musical, intrapersonal, or visual learning styles but we rolled the dice and were the lucky winners of the "logical" learning style. This was tricky because this book is entirely a narrative. It rarely even reflects on why decisions were made in the church it is surveying, and it certainly doesn't lay out a "logical" reasoning for events in the book. So it took us doing some digging to logically analyze the strategy of the church and extract some logical gems of knowledge for the class.
One of the logical items we saw was how Gordon Crosby, the pastor of Church of the Saviour, used his experience of breaking soldiers into chaplaincy groups when he was an Army Chaplain as a model for the church he planted. Every person in the church was invited to be a part of a smaller group where they could be in covenant with other believers, be challenged to live missionally and develop their inner prayer and devotional life.
This model allowed each member of the church to be in contact in their daily life with the shepherd of their group and their missional project. These projects took the form of homes for at-risk people, a coffeehouse/ministry center and a retreat center.
Another logical model the church used was not taking financial offerings in centrally and then re-distributing them to the projects, but having each person tithe towards their groups own projects so that each person had a time and money investment in the project as they prayed for it and were challenged by the working community relationships needed to run the project.
Although this book isn't a nonfiction instructional type of book it does illuminate how allowing each person to be a servant leader and live within these servant structures developed the people of this church into truly committed followers of Jesus. And it doesn't take much of a leap to see how these concepts can be applied to many other churches.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Pazmino and what an Adler review can do for you
In the first week of class, Linda and I were assigned to do an "Adler" review of the book Latin American Journey by Robert Pazmino. An Adler review is just shorthand for using Adler's model to summarize the main points of a book after a quick skim of its contents. With 16 units and an internship this quarter, I may be using this technique a few times (but definitely not in CF526, Dr Branson!!). When I saw our handout on Adler in the course syllabus I was reminded that for Christmas my cousin actually gave me Adler's book, cunningly entitled: How to Read a Book. I never opened it for three reasons:
1) I am in grad school and don't have time to read books that are not required, unless they are cookbooks.
2) I was offended by the title. As a first-generation college student and now a grad student, I have completed more formal education than my forebears and it's sometimes within the realm of their sense of humor to try to remind me that I'm not as smart as I think I am. (For the record, I am quite aware that college degrees are mainly a measure of perseverance, not necessarily intelligence.)
And
3) I went on vacation to Santa Barbara over Spring Break and while I brought the book, it just wasn't as enticing as the online episodes of Eli Stone and Men in Trees that I missed in primetime during Winter quarter.
So I didn't read How to Read a Book when I got it for Christmas. But after doing this assignment with Linda in class, I realized what a valuable tool an Adler review is. I only earned how to do it via an outline from class, but even the summary of the technique is helpful.
Essentially, with Adler's outline in hand, you can take a book that you haven't read and outline the major points, shifts in thinking and critiques of the ideas just by skimming through it and looking at the introduction, chapter headings, topic sentences and chapter summaries. While I'm aware that this is not a useful tool for reading comprehension, my experience of it was eye-opening.
When I first looked at this book, it just looked awful to me. The title turned me off. I'm not interested in the Latin American Journey - my worst memories of freshman year in undergrad include the slow death of my aspiration to be a Humanities major after reading a volume called, The Conquest of New Spain. Reading Pazmino's title made me feel like I was about to embark on the long and embattled history of a continent -- a Latin American Journey. The subtitle, Insights for Christian Education in North America, also seemed dull and stilted. But after looking through this book with Linda and using Adler's questions to mine out some of the ideas, I realized I had been judging a book by its cover. Pazmino himself went on the Latin American journey so he tells a firsthand report of it (and does it quite crisply in the Introduction) and he has some interesting insights into developing Christian education. He also clarified some of my confusion about what "liberation theology" is. Altogether, I am now highly interested in reading this book, however, now my dilemma is whether to read it now or wait until week eight when it's assigned to be read.
1) I am in grad school and don't have time to read books that are not required, unless they are cookbooks.
2) I was offended by the title. As a first-generation college student and now a grad student, I have completed more formal education than my forebears and it's sometimes within the realm of their sense of humor to try to remind me that I'm not as smart as I think I am. (For the record, I am quite aware that college degrees are mainly a measure of perseverance, not necessarily intelligence.)
And
3) I went on vacation to Santa Barbara over Spring Break and while I brought the book, it just wasn't as enticing as the online episodes of Eli Stone and Men in Trees that I missed in primetime during Winter quarter.
So I didn't read How to Read a Book when I got it for Christmas. But after doing this assignment with Linda in class, I realized what a valuable tool an Adler review is. I only earned how to do it via an outline from class, but even the summary of the technique is helpful.
Essentially, with Adler's outline in hand, you can take a book that you haven't read and outline the major points, shifts in thinking and critiques of the ideas just by skimming through it and looking at the introduction, chapter headings, topic sentences and chapter summaries. While I'm aware that this is not a useful tool for reading comprehension, my experience of it was eye-opening.
When I first looked at this book, it just looked awful to me. The title turned me off. I'm not interested in the Latin American Journey - my worst memories of freshman year in undergrad include the slow death of my aspiration to be a Humanities major after reading a volume called, The Conquest of New Spain. Reading Pazmino's title made me feel like I was about to embark on the long and embattled history of a continent -- a Latin American Journey. The subtitle, Insights for Christian Education in North America, also seemed dull and stilted. But after looking through this book with Linda and using Adler's questions to mine out some of the ideas, I realized I had been judging a book by its cover. Pazmino himself went on the Latin American journey so he tells a firsthand report of it (and does it quite crisply in the Introduction) and he has some interesting insights into developing Christian education. He also clarified some of my confusion about what "liberation theology" is. Altogether, I am now highly interested in reading this book, however, now my dilemma is whether to read it now or wait until week eight when it's assigned to be read.
Monday, April 7, 2008
CF526?
Welcome to my blog for CF526, also known as Christian Formation 526: Congregation as Learning Community.
I am taking CF526 as part of my Master of Divinity degree at Fuller and while I was encouraged to use my personal blog for my assigned "public writings" (aka weekly blogging), I feel like that would academia-ify my deltadawn blog and I don't want to do that...I want to preserve the personal narrative/commentary feel of my blog....you know, in case I ever get offered a book deal for it. ;)
What?!? It could happen.
Plus, you know I wanted to start a new blog for the sheer pleasure of posting the first post entitled the same as the blog and with a question mark (see above aforementioned post title) so I could explain it. I'm in grad school--- we like knowing a lot of salient theological details and explaining them to you in all their hermeneutically extensive glory.
With all that said, stay tuned for blog #2...er, assigned blog #1.
I am taking CF526 as part of my Master of Divinity degree at Fuller and while I was encouraged to use my personal blog for my assigned "public writings" (aka weekly blogging), I feel like that would academia-ify my deltadawn blog and I don't want to do that...I want to preserve the personal narrative/commentary feel of my blog....you know, in case I ever get offered a book deal for it. ;)
What?!? It could happen.
Plus, you know I wanted to start a new blog for the sheer pleasure of posting the first post entitled the same as the blog and with a question mark (see above aforementioned post title) so I could explain it. I'm in grad school--- we like knowing a lot of salient theological details and explaining them to you in all their hermeneutically extensive glory.
With all that said, stay tuned for blog #2...er, assigned blog #1.
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