Doctor of Ministry

Submitted drafts to our mentor today; hoping to submit proposal drafts to D.Min. office next week! Today, we finally emailed our second drafts to our mentor, Dr. Russell West. Whew! This latest phase was very challenging. In the last few weeks, it has felt like the project that would never end! But we took a … Read more

Good reminder as we plow through our dissertation work! Awhile back we wrote about the movie, “Meet the Robinsons.” Recently, in the midst of pretty intense dissertation work, we remembered a key phrase from the movie: “Keep moving forward!” It’s great advice for whatever stage of life’s journey we find ourselves in. In our case, … Read more

The ministry project for Randy’s dissertation. Earlier, we said we’d write more later about our specific ministry projects. In the conversations with Russell West that we wrote about in that post, both of our ministry projects changed. Rather than conducting ministry projects in our local settings, we will now be looking for leaders who are … Read more

Looking forward to graduation one year from today! One year from today, 24 May 2008, is graduation day at Asbury Theological Seminary. As long as we stay on track and complete our dissertations this year, we expect to be in Wilmore, KY one year from today to receive our doctor of ministry degrees! Needless to … Read more

Dr. Russell West (our faculty mentor) presses us for the puzzle behind our dissertation topics! In our last post related to our dissertation work, we reported that we mailed our first drafts to our mentor, Dr. Russell West, at Asbury Theological Seminary. We both had very productive conversations with Russell last Friday by phone as … Read more

Previously, we wrote about our first dissertation-related deadline. We had a little work remaining after the weekend, and we also wanted to read/edit each other’s work before mailing them, so it took a little longer than we had anticipated. It was intense, but it was also a very good first step in the process. But, … Read more

It’s now "crunch time" as we near our first big deadline for our dissertation projects — Friday, 16 March 2007. T-minus 7 days! We had hoped to be further along than we are but we think we’re still within range of meeting this deadline. 3/16 isn’t actually a hard and fast deadline; it’s more of … Read more

We will occasionally post reports on the progress of our dissertation work. For this first report, we wish we had more progress to report than we do. It has been 5 weeks since our class, and while we always need a break after class, we had hoped to be a little further along than we … Read more

Whew! What a week. The "dissertation-writing and church-based research class" that we took this past week on campus was pretty overwhelming. It was a very helpful week, though, but it is simply the beginning of a long journey that will, God willing, culminate with graduation in May 2008! I wrote earlier this week on Wednesday … Read more

I am posting this while we’re on our afternoon break. As you may know Joleen and I are in Wilmore, KY this week for our ninth and final class in the D.Min. program at Asbury Theological Seminary. This course begins the final 17-month stretch of this journey. It promises to be a meaningful, albeit grueling, … Read more