Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

regent college

What Is Ministry?

About 18 months ago, I stepped down from my position as Associate Director of the Emerging Scholars Network and handed the reins over to my faithful coworker Tom Grosh. I kept my toe in the world of campus ministry by continuing to write for InterVarsity and leading a seminar at Urbana, but at the end of this month, I’m going to be stepping down (again) from my role as a blog contributor to focus on my new full-time job as web manager for a Cincinnati-based manufacturing company. It’s an unusual career move, but most of my career moves have been unusual. Next week, I’m going to share my thoughts about where ESN has come over the past several years and where I see it going in the future, but today I wanted to offer some reflections about the nature of careers and ministry.

In truth, I never expected to work for a Christian organization. When I finished my BA, I thought I would eventually get a PhD and become an English professor; the grantwriting job at the local orchestra was just a temporary gig to pay the bills. I chose Regent College for graduate school because of its focus on theological education for lay people, and I expected to use my education there as a foundation for a career outside the world of professional ministry. Only after several (very fulfilling!) years with a nonprofit with a non religious mission did I feel God pulling me toward an explicitly Christian organization.

Who Does God’s Work?

Between my time at Regent and my work with IVCF, did I cease to minister? Not at all! In addition to starting a community of 20- and 30-something’s in our local church, my nonprofit work focused on establishing standards for an ethical marketplace, mirroring many of the ideas I learned from Paul Stevens at Regent. Interestingly enough, this company I just joined reflects many of the concepts of sustainable business and stewardship taught by Regent’s Loren Wilkinson. [Read more…] about What Is Ministry?

Sorrow, Joy, and Academic Community on 9/11

et-cetera-issue-f2
The Regent College <em>Et Cetera</em> from September&nbsp;18, 2001

I was ready to write my second post about T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back when memories of this day intruded. September 11 is a complicated day for me. Here’s what I wrote back in 2007:

[On Sept. 11, 2001], I met Debbie Erickson on the way to our first Hebrew class of the year at Regent College. We were both biking down University Drive at about 7:30 am PST. “Have you heard?” Debbie asked me. By that time, both towers have come down. Because I had not turned on a TV or radio that morning, this is the first time I’ve heard about anything. We continue on to class.

That Tuesday was the first “real” day of class that semester. Tuesdays are the day for chapel and the massive communal meal simply called “Soup,” when about 300 members of the Regent community sing, pray, and worship together, then enjoy military-size pots of soup. That Tuesday was also the first official day of my role as editor of the school newspaper.

The day before, I had made my first trip to Copies Plus on West Broadway to drop off the PDF of the Regent College student newspaper, the Et Cetera. Over the summer, I had met with John Stackhouse, Maxine Hancock, the previous editor Won Jang, and my assistant editor Leland Ferguson to plan the coming year. I had also spent several hours in the Regent library reading student newspapers dating to the 1970s. Editing the Et Cetera fit perfectly with an idea I had been developing for my masters thesis — writing for a specific community. How could I have known that writing for the Regent community would have become so important that year? [Read more…] about Sorrow, Joy, and Academic Community on 9/11

A Hymn for Good Friday

What are your favorite worship traditions of Holy Week and Easter? For me, I love singing “Christ the Lord is Ris’n Today” on Easter morning, along with “Were You There?” anytime of year. Last Sunday — Palm Sunday — my family took part in an old tradition that was new to us: processing around the church sanctuary waving palm branches to celebrate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Though our small Lutheran church in suburban Kentucky has little in common with Jerusalem, it became Jerusalem symbolically for a few minutes on Sunday morning.

At Regent College, way back in 2003, I completed a masters in Christianity and the arts. I chose Regent, in part, because it allowed students to complete a “creative” thesis, a portfolio of artwork instead of a traditional, er, “uncreative” academic paper. As you may have gathered from my post a couple of weeks ago, poetry has been important to my for a while, and I enrolled at Regent intending to complete a collection of poetry.

While there, I became interested in the theology and practice of community, and I began to explore the idea of poetry written for other people. I began to notice that, for example, many of Auden’s poems were dedicated to or written for specific people, and he took his role as Professor of Poetry at Oxford seriously as a “community poet,” to be enlisted to write poems for the personal milestones of his colleagues. So I began to think of ways that my poetry could serve other people, rather than merely express my own thoughts and feelings. [Read more…] about A Hymn for Good Friday

Reading Lists and Primary Literature

In my post last week about advice for undergraduates, Katie Weakland shared a comment that I thought was particularly apt:

I suggest meeting your major professors early in your career – your first semester – and asking them to mentor you and/or let you do research with them. The early you can get your feet wet with research the better. I also suggest reading the primary literature in your field as soon as possible.

Meeting your professors and starting research early are both very important (I have stories I could share for each), but for the moment, I’m going to focus on primary literature. [Read more…] about Reading Lists and Primary Literature