Enthused! \in-'thüzd\:

This summer 14 Candler students are serving in ministry through Candler Advantage, a paid summer internship in conjunction with Candler’s Contextual Education Program.  Over the course of the summer many of these students will be sharing their experiences here on the blog.

As my friend Jonathan explained in the previous post, we are part of the Candler Advantage program this summer. My placement is at Holy Comforter Episcopal Church, a church that has a strong connection with Candler and has hosted Contextual Education 1 and 2 students. It is a mission of the Episcopal Church, meaning it is not a regular congregation (whatever regular means). Most of the people who fill the pews on Sundays and who are involved in church activities throughout the week are adults with mental illness. They live in group homes or are homeless, some also suffer from various addiction issues. It isn’t a “regular” congregation because the members do not support the church financially but congregants are very much a part of nearly every aspect of church life. Holy Comforter also has a day-program called The Friendship Center that has opportunities for all kinds of art projects and two meals twice a week.

I chose Holy Comforter despite not being Episcopalian (I grew up in and also attend a United Church of Christ congregation) and despite having no experience with caring for and working with people with mental illness. I knew that this would be a challenge for me, but I had seen so many of my Candler colleagues fall in love with Holy Comforter, so I wanted in on it. I was still a little nervous as I began coming to worship services and meals, slowly learning people’s names and learning the songs and responses of the liturgy.

The people of my new congregation were not people I normally encountered in my day-to-day life, I would sometimes see people like them in a grocery store or maybe a fast food place but would try and discreetly avoid their gaze and perhaps offer a wan smile if I accidentally made eye contact. I was simply uncomfortable in their presence, unsure of how to interact with them and unsure of what my responsibility was to respond to their mumbling or confusing speech. I knew Jesus wanted me to be with “the least of these,” even if it made me uneasy. I knew this in my head but I still had no idea what it really might mean, or even how condescending that bumper sticker theology might be.

One of the deacons at Holy Comforter asked me how I was feeling after my first few days, if I was beginning to feel more at ease. I nodded, actually unsure of how comfortable I was feeling. He said, “Good, you know Holy Comforter is a place you can really be yourself. It is a place of rest, a place of acceptance.” I realized I had been looking at Holy Comforter too much like my own personal mission to comfort the afflicted. I was focused on caring for people; of responsibly saying the right thing after someone had just told be they were in fact married to a famous celebrity. I had not opened myself up to receive the respite this unique congregation had to offer. I did not have to worry about judgment if I did something wrong in the liturgy or sang off key. I did not have to worry if people would want to talk to me. I didn’t have to worry about my painting looking amateurish- I could just paint.

Holy Comforter is an aptly named church. It is a place that everyone and anyone can go to be welcomed, fed, loved, and respected with an honesty that I do not encounter in many other places in my life. Although it is still an adjustment for me to be with the congregation and I still find myself second-guessing things I do and sometimes catch myself feeling particularly saintly for helping someone with a walker, I have started to open up myself to the rest, freedom, and acceptance at Holy Comforter.

- Megan Worthman

Megan is a rising third year MDiv student and a graduate of Hastings College in Hastings, NE.

This summer 14 Candler students are serving in ministry through Candler Advantage, a paid summer internship in conjunction with Candler’s Contextual Education Program.  Over the course of the summer many of these students will be sharing their experiences here on the blog.

Over the summer, I am working in a local church setting through the Candler Advantage Summer Internship program. This program, in which rising third-year students engage in full-time supervised ministry for ten weeks during the summer, presents a number of opportunities for me. One of these is to preach on a fairly regular basis. With this role, I have been preparing an upcoming sermon for a set of lectionary readings that includes Mark 3:31-35. In the NRSV, this short passage is entitled, “The True Kindred of Jesus,” but I have found that a title such as “Jesus Rethinks Family” would be just as appropriate. Through the words of Jesus, Mark communicates that it is not simply one’s biological relationships, but whether or not one “does the will of God,” that defines who one’s brothers, sisters, and mothers are. I am sure this passage challenged the notions of family of Mark’s earliest readers, as it does ours today.

Just as this short passage challenges us to think anew of what it means to be family, my time at Candler has challenged me to view faith, scripture, ministry, and a host of other subjects in new and meaningful ways. I would like to briefly share some of the ways some of these understandings have changed during my time at Candler.

I still say, as I did before coming to Candler, that scripture is the “word of God,” but I now have new, much richer, understandings of what I mean when I say that. In scripture, we hear a chorus of witnesses, from over the course of centuries, who have sought to express encounters with God. Each word of scripture has been written in a particular historical setting to a particular audience, yet these words still speak to us today.

Similarly, my Candler education has deepened the meaning of “faith” for me. Faith is no longer merely belief, i.e. intellectual assent to a proposition. Faith involves trust, whether belief is possible or not. Perhaps most importantly, faith involves living faithfully.

In seeking to live faithfully along with others at Candler who seek to do the same, ministry has taken on new layers of meaning as well. When I first came to Candler, I saw ordained ministry as primarily involving preaching, with a number of other responsibilities such as pastoral care, administration, and outreach. While I still see each of these as significant components of ordained ministry, I now have a better understanding of how I am called to live out each of these aspects of ministry. Through my contextual education experience, I have seen that ministry involves formation through practices that shape us and give us identity, such as the reading of scripture and participation in the sacraments. However, ministry also involves formation through activities that stretch congregations out of their comfort zone, such as interfaith dialogue, outreach to members of the local community, and programs that teach and encourage faithful environmental stewardship.

Finally, Candler has challenged me to think through what the word “education” means. Certainly, education has occurred in the classroom. However, learning has also taken place in conversations with other Candler students outside of class time. Connections between academic coursework and people’s concrete circumstances have been made through Contextual Education I and II site work. As much as I learned about United Methodist polity in class at Candler, much more was gained simply by travelling to General Conference with other Candler students and professors this past April. Education, like these other things, has taken on a deeper meaning through my experiences at Candler. It is my hope and prayer that by being challenged to think through theology and practices in new and fresh ways, we will all come to new appreciations of what it means to live faithfully in our own time.

- Jonathan Harris

Jonathan is a rising third year MDiv student and a graduate of Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC.

I have been very fortunate to receive quality formation and education throughout my life—from my church and family growing up, from the public school system, from my college, and now at Candler School of Theology.   But, with this said, beginning in college I have had a growing awareness of the ways that education and formation fall short.  For me, these educational failures have occurred when communities create false dichotomies that the students and teachers are forced into: Are you a “head” or “heart” person? Is this “academic” or “devotional”? Do you prefer “theory” or “practice”?  I am interested in creating spaces for education and formation that break down these false dichotomies and seek to bring about the holistic transformation of all people involved, and subsequently the real world.  Therefore, I have been exploring these questions through Candler’s Religious Education Certificate Program.  This exploration includes a Religious Education training retreat I attended which explored digital storytelling as a form of education and formation.  The digital story I created, which is found below, is the product of this 2 day retreat.  In it I sought to respond to the prompt “What is an instance where you learned something significant?” I hope that it illustrates the type of education and formation that has been transformative for me and which I hope to be a part of in the future.

-Eric Rucker

Eric is a rising second year MDiv students from Kansas City.

It’s crazy to think that in a couple of months, I will be facing yet another transition in my life. It seems like only yesterday that I hopped on a plane to fly across the country (literally – from California) to start my graduate education. Personally, coming to Candler was a HUGE decision. In so many ways, it was out of character for me to choose to invest so much time and money into an education that could not guarantee me a set career. And to get up and leave my family, friends and comfort zone to go to the South! What could the South possibly offer me that LA couldn’t? However, I knew that if I chose to ignore the opportunity set before me and refused to take that leap of faith, I would be left wondering “what if…”

Many people have told me that you need to be really intentional about spending time with God in seminary. Doesn’t seem to make much sense right? Shouldn’t it be easier since I will be reading, writing, breathing and living everything God? But it’s true–the academic demand does cause a spiritual disconnect at times. However, my studies here at Candler have also enriched my relationship with God in so many ways. I have been introduced to so many great thinkers, writers, theologians, preachers and the like. The readings that I actually got around to really challenged me to go deeper in my understanding of God and His Word. Similarly, the discussions with which I engaged during classes have also stretched me to look at things in new and different ways. Even though I know that God isn’t calling me vocationally to ministry (whew!), the skills that I have found and honed here at Candler will be an asset wherever I go.

So. Was it worth it? Was it worth getting past my fears and insecurities, of trusting that God will somehow make everything work? Most definitely. This of course does not mean that I have all the answers. Graduation is in 3 months and I still have no answer to where I will be going next. But that leap of faith has brought me to trust in God at a different level. He not only met me here in s-l-o-w Atlanta, but He revealed different parts of Himself to me in the green trees and the curvy one-lane roads and even on the MARTA bus. He answered my prayers for real community and good people in a way that I didn’t think possible. I am astonished at how much God has grown me and stretched me in the past two years. Not only have I learned new things about myself but I have started a journey in finding parts of me that I have lost along the way. To think that I would’ve missed out on all of that…

- Jung Won An

Jung Won is a second year MTS student from Los Angeles, CA and a Student Ambassador.

Candler School of Theology has offered me many opportunities to develop as a pastor.  One of the most formative experiences has been participating in the Emory Global Health Case Competition.  The event, which is funded in part by Candler’s student government the Candler Coordinating Council and other graduate school’s student governments, brings together students from the entire university to compete on teams to propose solutions to a current global health issue.  In one competition we proposed training community health workers and providing farmers subsidies in order to bring relief to the economic and health burdens of tobacco use and production in Gujarat India.  In the other competition we proposed funding food trucks with health food options, community/school gardens, and building capacity around an existing maternal health program to address the issues of childhood obesity in Mexico.  The problems were complex and the teams competing to propose the best solutions found out that solutions were even more complex.

Though neither team that I competed with won the competitions, a few Candler students have been on winning teams and earned the cash prize offered.  Though I am a competitive person this was truly a time when the experience was worth the time investment required to participate.  The interdisciplinary teams were composed of colleagues from the graduate programs in business, law, public health, development practices, theology, medicine, and nursing as well as the college of arts and sciences .  I was randomly assigned to a team in my first competition and was part of a intentionally formed team in my second go round.  In each competition we received the case and background information on a Monday and had until Saturday morning to research, brainstorm, and put together a professional proposal.  On Saturday morning the teams competed against each other with expert judges deciding on the best presentation and navigation of questions following.

In this experience I had my global perspective broadened.  I was able to think about and research how faith based organizations around the world were addressing the issues of people living on the margins.  As a theology student on the team it was often my role to consider people’s responses to programs based on their faith commitments and the overall ethical foundations of our proposed solutions.  Even more importantly I learned how to better communicate with people who have different ways of seeing and interpreting the world.  We all had a different way of talking about justice and health and had to either find a common language or learn each other’s languages in order to effectively communicate our ideas to one another.  I believe this will be an amazing tool for me in the local church as a pastor who believes we should be engaged with community health issues.  Empowering a congregation full of doctors, lawyers, nurses, business women and men, etc. will require knowing how to effectively translate theological themes that inform our involvement, effectively hear what other disciplines have to offer, and then translating that for other members of the congregation who have different vocations all together.

Candler is fertile ground to grow as a student of life and especially as a pastor.  The Global Health Case competition will be one of the things I miss the most about my time at Candler.  There are many other ways to get involved in community health at Candler.  One could do a dual degree with the public health or development programs, go on a trip half way around the world with organizations like International Relief and Development, take courses that introduce the intersection of faith and health, get involved with the Religion and Public Health Collaborative or Interfaith Health Program, or make friends with like minded people from one of the other 6 graduate schools at Emory.  If you are interested in how the church can be involved with community health, then Candler is the school for you.

- Patrick McLaughlin

Patrick is a third year United Methodist MDiv student from Kansas, a member of the Candler Singers, and a Student Ambassador.

As graduation quickly approaches, I find myself reflecting fondly on my time spent at this wonderful institution that I have called home for nearly three years now.  While graduations are always exciting, I find myself feeling particularly bitter sweet about this one.  It is difficult to narrow all of the reasons down to only a few paragraphs, but I will do my best to keep it brief.  Below are the reasons why I am forever grateful that I chose Candler and that Candler chose me:

ONE: The Community.  I began my career at Candler with a bit of anxiety – I was three years out of college, and was unsure how I would fit into the mix at Candler.   Immediately, however, I found my niche.  My fears were relieved within the first month as I settled into classes and began developing relationships with my ConEd group.  Again, those in the Admissions Office warmly welcomed me as I began working with the Student Ambassadors each week and was invited on a retreat as a small group leader.  I was amazed with the sense of community that existed within Candler, both among the students, staff, and faculty.

TWO: The Curriculum.  Since I had been removed from school and had not practiced good study habits for a few years, I was very intimidated by the coursework at Candler and feared that I would struggle in maintaining good grades at such a prestigious institution with such renowned scholars as my professors.  Yet again, I was pleasantly surprised with the willingness of the professors to help and even build relationships with the students.  Furthermore, the variety of coursework offered at Candler is truly remarkable.  Classes such as Old and New Testament, History of Christian Thought, and Systematic Theology could challenge my theology.  And I was able to develop practical skills and lifelong knowledge through courses such as Pastoral Care, Empowering Youth for Global Citizenship, and Vocational Discernment.

THREE: The Contextual Education Program.  This internship program, in my opinion, is Candler’s biggest selling point! I was able to cater my ConEd experience both my first and second year to my vocational goal, which involves youth ministry.  My first year, I did ConEd at the United Methodist Children’s Home (UMCH) in Decatur.  So I worked four hours each week with the youth who were living in this group home, sharing meals with them and leading them in Bible studies.  I would then bring my experiences back to my small group, all of who were also doing ConEd at the UMCH, during class each week.  My second year, I chose to work eight hours each week with a large youth group at a UMC in Decatur.  This experience helped to clarify my calling and even offered me a paid job for my third year of seminary.  God is good!  But having these “internship” experiences fulfilled during the academic year, alongside my other coursework, enabled me to apply the things I was learning in the classroom to my ministry.

FOUR: Summer Opportunities.  Since my ministry internships were completed during the academic year, my summers were free to experience other transformational opportunities.  Among these summer opportunities is the Middle East Travel Seminar (METS), which I applied for and was accepted.  This gave me the opportunity to travel the lands of the Bible with other seminarians for three weeks.  The experiences and relationships that this trip was able to offer me forever changed my life.  My vocational dreams and my personal priorities were made clear and I was able to come home a better person.  Had I chosen a different seminary, I could have missed this once in a lifetime experience.

Ultimately, I could not have found a better match for my three years in seminary.  My life was transformed in my time at Candler and I will forever be grateful for the relationships, courses, and practical ministry experience that I encountered in and through this place.

- Mia Northington

Mia is a 3rd Year MDiv student from Tennessee and a Student Ambassador.

I have now spent four months as a part of the Candler community.  My first impression of Candler has now been confirmed several times over – it is warm here.

My first encounter with Candler was two days removed from a February day in Chicago that refused to climb above seventeen degrees below zero; the sixty-degree weather I encountered in Atlanta seemed downright tropical. That balmy day left an impression – of that you can be certain – but it is not the warmth which left the strongest impression upon my mind. The warmth of which I am speaking characterized the encounters and conversations I enjoyed with many faculty members and several students. I flew back home with the strong impression that Candler is one of the few places I have encountered where people successfully combine the academic study of theology and religion and a commitment to live out their understanding by caring for each other.

This initial impression was strengthened during the summer months as my family and I prepared for our move to Georgia. Two weeks before the moving truck arrived at our door, a routine physical suggested my wife had a serious cardiac condition. Dean Love and several members of our faculty and staff arranged for a temporary place for us to stay and connected us with a desperately needed physician. We are grateful that the feared prognosis was overturned, and while we can’t say we enjoyed going through that experience, we are grateful that those stressful days were the occasion for continued insight into the people who make Candler what it is.

The many formal and informal conversations and meals shared with colleagues and students during the course of the Fall semester repeatedly confirmed my first impression. Candler is a special place. Not primarily because of the ecumenical vision which permits the coexistence of differing theological perspectives, or because of the commitment to influence society through Christian convictions, or for many of the many other values espoused at Candler, but rather because of the very people who hold those perspectives. It is the people who make a community, it is the people who make it warm and welcoming, and I am pleased to be a member of this one.

For those of you whom I have not yet had the opportunity to meet, I suspect it might be helpful for me to briefly discuss my professional role in our community.  My particular contribution to understanding the Christian faith lies in my focus on early Christian life and thought. I hope that my presence at Candler will enable the members of our community to better grasp the earliest ways that those who followed Christ understood and lived out their beliefs.

It is my conviction that having a thorough understanding of the differences and similarities that exist between today’s church and the church of the past will enable a better understanding of one’s own theological commitments, as well as a better understanding of the variegated nature of our churches and those throughout the world. To be specific, I believe that studying the early church should improve your comprehension of today’s Christianity  and your own faith in at least three ways. First, most contemporary theological constructs engage in some way with those of the early church (even if simply to stand in opposition to them). Studying early Christianity should enable you to better understand your own theological commitments and other theological positions advocated today. Secondly, the social, economic, racial, and theological diversity that exists in our churches today is not new. Studying early Christianity should enable you to better understand the people you encounter in your churches today, for you will learn that diversity of thought has always been a part of the Christian tradition, and you will discover that many traditions of thought that exist today have their roots in the earliest church. Finally, one of the primary goals of a theological education is to learn how to interpret and understand Scripture. Studying early Christianity should enable you to approach Scripture with a more nuanced perspective, for the theological debates of the early church brought to light many possibilities surrounding the interpretation of Scripture.

I’m happy to be a part of a community interested in both understanding and living out the Christian faith. I’ve enjoyed getting to know some of you during this past semester, and I hope to get to know many more of you in the upcoming months and years. I particularly look forward to thinking through the Christian tradition with those of you I find in my classes.

I wish you a blessed Advent season,

- Anthony Briggman

Dr. Briggman is Assistant Professor of the History of Early Christianity.  His research interests focus on binitarian and early Trinitarian theology in the Apologists, especially  Irenaeus of Lyons and Justin Martyr, with special attention to the influence of contemporaneous Jewish thought on their theologies.  Briggman’s book entitled The Theology of the Holy Spirit According to Irenaeus of Lyons is now in press (Oxford University Press).

It’s the other way around, isn’t it? A school of theology should teach the aspiring biblical scholar how to read the parables of Jesus with the correct exegetical tools and provide the necessary skills for aptitude in interpretation. While this has been the case for me via a number of exegesis courses at Candler School of Theology, I would also like to use this space to illustrate in broad strokes how my experience with New Testament parabolic literature has trained me to read (perceive, examine, and indeed, exegete) the form, function, and nature of my seminary/theological training.

If the reader will forgive some generalizations, I’ll begin by commenting on a few things that characterize Jesus’ parables before demonstrating their application to my experience at CST. I have gleaned much of this from Steven Kraftchick’s Parables of Jesus course during this semester. First of all, parables are perhaps the best locus for seeing one of the foundational elements of language, namely metaphor. As is indicated in the term itself, a parable casts one (imagined or innovated) reality alongside another. In the case of Jesus’ parables, metaphoricity creates, via fictive (and often extended) analogy, another way of seeing a present reality like the Kingdom of God. Parables also often take the form of a narrative. A story is constructed with particular narrative dynamics, grounded in modes of being and thinking not unfamiliar to the intended audience, and with certain parameters that act to focus attention on one thing or another. An effective parable will meet the requisite cognitive and affective conditions so that the reader/hearer will at first find herself comfortable in the world constructed by the narrative analogy. It will then, either in the body or conclusion, shift typical cultural evaluations of meaning, most often by proffering unanticipated behavior by one or several of the parable’s characters. This shift allows (or perhaps forces) the audience to rethink their present reality in light of the slanted perspective of the parable. This is similar to Kierkegaard’s notion of “wounding from behind.”

The aforementioned characteristics of Jesus’ parables and my meditation on them in and outside of Dr. Kraftchick’s course have helped me to rethink precisely what I am doing and, more importantly, what is happening to me at CST. I have come to see that my training here is more than a 2-year data acquisition program. My relationships here, the coursework, the reading assignments, the papers and projects all cast alongside my vision of life an alternative and fictive account of reality. Furthermore, it is cast in the structure of a narrative. I don’t think in binary. Rather, I recount and contemplate my experiences in the form of story. My participation in Timothy Jackson’s Christian Ethics course begins with a relative feeling of ease concerning my certainty about morality, the ethics of war, Christian character, etc. But it is not long before I find myself “thinking it slant,” being cognitively coerced into reformulating the ethical boundaries of the Christian life. The conversations I have with friends after a day of class take me to the liminal spaces of my theological imagination and I am given a glimpse of an alternative world, wherein the life-destroying and oppressive systems of violent domination have lost their dominion. In short, reading parables has taught me how to read my time at Candler School of Theology and, for that, I am indeed grateful.

- Justin Rose

Justin is a 2nd year MTS student from Florida and a Student Ambassador.

On November 11 I attended Exploration 2011 as a representative for Candler. The conference, sponsored by The General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, is designed to help 18-26 year olds discern their call into ministry, specifically ordained ministry. Over 600 people responded to this opportunity as participants in the event (not counting seminary and General Agency reps and the event planning team). It was an amazing experience to see so many people actively searching out God and the call God has placed on their life. It was also wonderful to learn more about the state of young clergy in the church. One of the speakers shared the statistic that The United Methodist Church, and other denominations, desperately need young clergy; the UMC only has 950 clergy under the age of 35 out of 30,000 total clergy. The church desperately needs young adults who are actively seeking out God in their lives and who are able to help people discern God in their life.

Jon at Exploration 2011

However, what I saw was a lot of young adults who were looking exclusively into missionary work, chaplaincy, or youth/ children ministries. I spent the first 7 years living into my call to be a Military Chaplain, so this observation did not surprise me. It did scare me. We need clergy who will be in ministry to people who are sick, in prison, young, old, citizens who are foreign and domestic. While there is nothing wrong, and great value, with the specialized ministry of Chaplains, Missionaries, Youth/Children’s directors, etc. we need people to lead the local church. The church is the center that brings all of these people into community and dialogue. It is the organization that sends missionaries and chaplains forth, where the space is made for the young and old, and the one place people should be able to go and feel completely accepted.

The church does not always live up to this, and many pastors have become burned out trying to make the church the open, accepting, and welcoming ministry it should be. Young adults see this and turn away from the church, looking to minister in one area, to one population, free of the structures of the church. We as young people of Christ, need to take a hold of the promise that is given in Baptism and Confirmation. A promise that states we are full members of the church, with a full voice. We cannot abandon the church. It is the place where differences are reconciled, and different backgrounds are brought together. If the church is broken we must not run away, we must stand and fix it. We must claim the authority God has given us and lead.

Often I have heard clergy or lay members of the congregation tell young adults and youth that they are the “Future of the church.” At Exploration I saw people who were living that out; I wish they wouldn’t. We are the Present of the church! Along with the people who are leading the Church now we must insert ourselves into leadership. Be the present of the church; if you hear God’s call in your life don’t hold yourself back from finding the strength to acknowledge that call! Don’t run away from the church because of its human faults, plunge in, change what needs to be changed and lift up what is being done right. In order to have missionaries, youth/children’s directors, and chaplains there must be a church to send them. Do not be afraid to take your place, as a Local Pastor, Elder, Priest, or Preacher! Find a place to cultivate those gifts, dive in, be strong, and remember that God has called you and will be faithful.

- Jon Gaylord

Jon is a second year MDiv student from DeLand, Florida and a Student Ambassador.

 -Kenneth Morris

These are the lyrics to one of the most recognizable Southern gospel songs and hymns “Yes God is Real.” Embodied in this song is an attempt to communicate a storied tradition. A tradition rooted in both personal and communal experience that expresses an assurance of the presence of God. How does one communicate the  “realness” of God to others? Or a better question is how does ones story come alive through singing a song?

Before you’re tempted to raise a brow, grimace, or go off into deep theological reflection, I would like to suggest that music, as one internalizes the lyrics, and gives way to the intonations and rhythms not only evokes a emotive or physiological response, but it elicits and communicates ones innermost (experiential) truths.

This was evident in the Black Church Studies Fall Worship Service, spearheaded by Dr. Teresa Fry Brown, Professor of Homiletics and Director of Black Church Studies at Candler. God’s presence began to manifest itself in very distinctive ways as the body of people gathered- some familiar with the songs and rituals of the Black Church, while others were not- began to release their experiential truths into the atmosphere through the singing of hymns and spiritual songs.

I observed from the choir, Shouts of “hallelujah” and “amen”, raised hands, bodies swaying and stooped over, feet thumping, tears flowing, and above all an energetic communication of the “realness” of God within the soul of the community. The program was organized in such a way that we traveled through a virtual archive of the Black Church experiences, covering all from the traditional lining out of hymns, which is a form of call and response; an a capella hymn-singing in which a leader, gives each line of a hymn as it is to be sung, to contemporary praise and worship, communal prayer, and good ole preaching, which on this occasion was from the Baptist tradition. Despite ones cultural or denominational background, by the end of the service one was oriented to a day in life and worship in the Black Church.

Each round went higher and higher as students led us in worship and praise through word, reading, and song. The Voices of Imani, under the leadership of Erica Deloney, a second year MDIV student at Candler really personified their name and communicated the very essence of gospel through their fervent worship and melodious sound. They sang “For Every Mountain” and “The Lord is Blessing Me.”

The Reverend Dr. Marcus Cosby was the elect speaker for the occasion. Dr. Cosby is one of the most renowned and celebrated preachers in the Black Church. A graduate of Morehouse School of Religion at the Interdenominational Theological Center and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Illinois, Dr. Cosby was inducted into Martin Luther King Board of Preachers at Morehouse School of College. Dr. Cosby currently serves as the Senior Pastor of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Cosby preached a very timely word for the student body at Candler. He preached: “The Process of Progress.” Using Luke 5: 1-11 as a central text, Dr. Cosby exhorted us to continue to cast our nets into the deep waters despite failed attempts in the past. He provided three points of reflection that I will delineate below:

Ignore past failures: Be willing to acknowledge and own past failures, but don’t allow them to hinder your progress. Instead of being held hostage by the fear, shame, or humiliation of the past, one would do well to reframe past failures, inquiring of them the critical lessons that are to be gained in the process of progress.

Initiate the possibilities of the future: Try “it” again. Dare to do something that you’ve never done before. Even if it is the same task that one is attempting, try approaching it with a different expectation of the outcome and employ different strategies to accomplish the end goal.

Ignite faith- Anticipate God’s faithfulness. Expect that if we leave the shore (representation of shallow places in ones life) and go into the deep waters that God will sustain and provide for us beyond our wildest imaginations. “If we would dare to plunge deeper into the theological waters in which we are treading, expect that God will meet us there.”

This was a very appropriate message for Candler students as we have survived and come through the currents of midterms only to face the quickly approaching tidal wave of finals. I encourage us to contemplate and employ the things Dr. Cosby suggested above in our attempt to press forward and complete this race with integrity and sanity of mind.

Just as the fisherman, appeared to have caught absolutely nothing, until they connected with and surrendered to the directives of Jesus, let us too surrender to the voice of wisdom, trusting that God will fill every void, and enable us to accomplish more than we’d ever hoped to accomplish.

Press forward with the renewed hope that the race is not given to the swift, or the prize given to the expert, but to the one who endures and has ascertained the necessary skills and knowledge to move forward.

- Ashely Thomas

Ashley is a second year MDiv student from Atlanta and a Student Ambassador.