New Year, New Opportunities

I am now officially half way through my degree program at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I have been enrolled in the Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership Cohort program and enjoying it very much. It is a Virtual Learning Community where we do most of our work in an online Moodle Teaching and Learning Environment with face-to-face gatherings for eight days once each semester. I have colleagues in my classes from Alaska, Colorado, Ohio (Go Buckeyes!), Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and elsewhere. It is a great group of people to learn with.

Along with my learning, I have continued to do contract work in various forms – from manuscript editing to website creation and the job opportunities for this year look even more promising. This year is looking like a fun year so far with contracts to do website content management, social media strategies and editing a children’s book. Some weeks I put in full-time hours on my contract jobs, other weeks it’s only a few hours – that’s the nature of contract work.

Anna and Andy (a guy reading Seventeen Magazine??) from Shoreline Vineyard

In the volunteer realm, I have been helping with the Youth at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline since last fall and have taken on some new responsibilities this fall. VCC in Shoreline has been a great place for me to experience missional community and learn what it’s like to be a part of a smaller community church than what I experienced most of my adult life.

House Church, Anglican, Vineyard, Non-Denominational, …

“What is ordination?” my oldest daughter asked a few months ago as we attended my friend’s ordination celebration. My friend has been on staff at my family’s non-denominational mega-church for something like seven years. I think she was called pastor at her prior church, but I’m not sure. She acts like a pastor and has basically functioned on the church staff as a pastor for a long time. But, historically, my mega-church has held the view that women should not be pastors and only recently have they amended their view and begun ordaining women. My friend was the second woman to be ordained there. The lead pastor was wandering by as my daughter posed her question, so we asked him to help us understand. Artfully, he described ordination as a recognition of God’s calling on a person’s life and mentioned some passage in one of the books of Timothy, I think, about the laying on of hands. (I should have written it down.)

MAML and GMLDMIN @ Seminary

September of 2007 I started grad school at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I started out part time to test the waters and see if I could handle going to school with four kids still at home. I took what George Fox calls hybrid classes, where weekly class work is performed in an online environment with an all day Friday/Saturday classroom intensive scheduled sometime during the semester. I thoroughly enjoyed learning the hybrid way, but was planning to enter the traditional MDiv program taking up to 10 credit hours of classes offered in one day, commuting on the train down to Portland from Seattle on Sunday evenings, taking classes all day Mondays, and returning home Tuesdays. While I was testing the waters I heard about another degree program that was based on the hybrid model of learning with the added element of learning with a cohort.

Time to Write

Last weekend I got some time away from the normal rhythms and routines of my life to work on some writing. I updated my Evangelism book proposal and started working on a new book proposal at the urging of one of my friends. I’ll write more about my new book proposal as soon as I get more developed.

I had coffee with Jason Clark last weekend as he was in Portland teaching at George Fox. We talked about life and church and writing. Jason has asked me to guest blog on Deep Church. So many of my blogs last year were inspired from the work I was doing for Jason’s Missional Ecclesiology class. While I learned a lot from him, I still have so much to learn so I sat in on his class for a few hours last weekend for a refresher. It was refreshing. I especially enjoyed hearing him pronounce Greek terms with a British accent.

Currently, I’m very busy working for Todd Hunter. He is getting ready to launch an exciting church planting order on the west coast called Churches for the Sake of Others (C4SO) and I am thrilled to be a part of it. My involvement is mostly in helping to develop Todd’s web presence, but I am also considering joining as a church planter someday. I am in the discernment process right now. The C4SO website it scheduled to go live on Tuesday.