Missional Leadership Focus

Theology of Missional Congregations

This course lays the foundation for a missional theology developed from within the pastor’s leadership postures, habits, and practices of cultivating environments of communal discernment as their congregation participates in God’s mission in the congregation’s specific context. This course will transition into the identification of a specific research project as the pastor’s embodied setting from within which missional leadership postures, habits, and practices will be cultivated.

Research Methods Seminar

This course will explore and develop the pastor’s research project by refining the research question and identifying an appropriate research methodology within the embodied setting while giving attention to the “lived experience” of the persons and community from within which the pastor will engage the rest of the program.  Consideration will be given to defining theological reflection paying attention to developing a practice which allows us to be open to trust God as the initiator and guide of both vocation and call.

Race Response, and Scripture

This course explores authority and interpretation of Scripture with a focus on how race has operated in scriptural interpretation in the United States. Particular attention is given to sociocultural realities that shape the way individuals and institutions approach Scripture.

Pastor as Adaptive Change Leader

This course is a historical, theological, and practice exploration of the role of the pastor as leader of adaptive change. It re-interprets the key marks of ordained ministry—word, sacrament, order, and service—for the new missional context. The aim is one of transition from a focus on the pastor as adaptive change leader into a focus on the pastor’s congregation as missional community, and therefore, the need for an appropriate ecclesiology.

Re-thinking Church: Ecclesiology

How does it look to think about congregations not as communities that have to participate in God’s mission but that already are? What does it look like to think about the church not as a voluntary organization but as a community constituted by God? These are the kind of questions we deal with in this course as we explore the relationships between God’s mission in the world, the church, and salvation.    

Practicing Communal Discernment

This course will explore a variety of ways in which the pastor as adaptive change leader can cultivate environments of communal discernment in their congregation for the sake of participating in God’s mission in their specific context. This course will transition from a focus on the congregational environments of communal discernment to a focus on how the congregation’s missional discernment is shaped by a relational engagement with their specific context.

Plunging into the Neighborhood

Building on the previous course’s habits and practices of communal discernment in a congregational setting, this course will take such processes of discernment into a journey of discovery in the neighborhood by using the postures, habits, and practices of community exegesis, by deep listening to the neighbor, building relationships, and forming bi-cultural bridge communities as an integral part of discerning the congregation’s participation in God’s mission in their specific context.

Public Theology and Prophetic Witness  

This course will explore what it means to do public theology with an emphasis on reading and understanding the larger operations of power in church, neighborhood, and culture. Understanding that God is actively at work in the world, students will be challenged to explore how they can lead their communities to join in that work of God and to offer prophetic, embodied witness to God’s call to love and justice.

Leadership in the Midst of Conflict and Change 

The premise of this course is that engaging conflict and change in productive ways is a crucial part of a community’s discernment process and can lead to a clearer understanding of how the community might participate in God’s mission in the world. Consequently, this course focuses on helping congregational leaders learn how to encourage healthy conflict, rather than the fear or avoidance of conflict, in their particular settings.

Noncredit Seminar

Will be taken online. For students needing assistance in project development. This course is not for credit.

Missional Leadership Final Capstone Seminar

This is a capstone seminar in which students share both their project and final results. This will be a shared evaluation process, in which students offer support and careful critique of themes which will become part of an ongoing dialogue for this cohort and future cohorts. Prior to this, students will complete a three-credit elective of their choice to address a particular theme or aspect related to the question and project they have been developing all along.   Faculty who have taught in the program will participate in guiding this final seminar.

Missional Leadership Final Project

The program requires satisfactory completion of a doctoral project and paper which must demonstrate the candidate’s ability to identify a problem, issue, or concern in their own ministry, integrate appropriate theological, biblical, and professional resources, and develop a method for resolution. The doctoral project/paper must reflect depth of theological insight and its positive integration with the practice of ministry.