“Developing Leadership” Day 1

After worship services on Sunday, a quick lunch, and some final packing, Joleen and I headed for Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY around 1:15 pm. We made good time (good weather and traffic was not bad at all); we arrived in Wilmore about 10:15 pm. Needless to say, it was a very long day!

Our first day is now "in the books." We’ve been a little tired today (understandably), but it’s been a good day, too. Dr. Russell West ("Russell" from now on), our professor for this class, is a sharp guy; we look forward to the rest of this class.

Russell uses some creative approaches to teaching so this is definitely going to be an interesting and challenging week! In fact, you will probably see more of these approaches (I think we’ve tried to do some things along the way) played out in our ministries in various contexts — meetings, leadership development sessions, and even worship gatherings.

Yeah, some people won’t like it, but the same people wouldn’t have liked Jesus’ approaches, which were very creative and edgy for his day!

Anyway, we spent the first hour today playing a game — tossing around a beach ball, then several other fairly safe objects — at the same time! Actually, it’s a game we’ve used in youth ministry settings before; it’s a good way to learn names, if nothing else. Russell gave brief instructions and left us to play on our own and even make up our own game. The object was to help serious people to loosen up so they can learn. It took us a while! 🙂

Hopefully, we’ll do better tomorrow, and even better by the end of the week.

This is our 8th and final leadership class in this D.Min. program. Only the dissertation writing class remains after this one. We’ve enjoyed every class and they’ve all been different. This one looks to be a good class to bring together a lot of what we’ve learned up to this point.

The first day of class is usually a getting-to-know-you kind of day, a day where we’re all getting acclimated into the environment. Now that we’ve begun building this foundation, things should really start to get exciting around here!

I hope to write each evening this week, so be sure to check in from time to time!