Internships
The Theological Seminary has been operating for much of the last two years on a significantly reduced theological faculty – from five teachers in 2005 to three now (we are hoping for a fourth teacher to arrive from Germany this autumn). Our most severe need is in Practical Theology; since we don’t have a person directly responsible for this area, I’ve been asked to direct the seminary’s contextual education.
Fall was filled with calling bishops and congregations and talking with them about the possibilities of arranging an internship in their church; the early winter months were spent working out details. As February was coming to an end, we were able to complete the final step before internship – a short seminar with students to help them in the difficult (and quite quick) transition from seminary student, concentrated on his/her final exams, to congregational intern. In the first weeks of March, then, all 11 students were able to leave for their internship sites and begin what for many of them was the goal of seminary education – on-the-ground pastoral ministry; at the same time, it will be for some of them the most difficult and frightening part of seminary – engaging their theological ideas with ordinary people in the often difficult realities of parish life.
Together with this newsletter, you’ll find a map of the former Soviet Union. There you’ll find blue tacks on those cities where we have an intern, and get a sense of the incredible distances that are a part of church life in ELCROS. From west to east the internship cites are: Odessa (Ukraine), St. Petersburg, Kharkov (Ukraine), Moscow, Volgograd, Kazan, Perm, Astana, Pavlodar (both Kazakhstan), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), and Vladivostok.
Graduate Update
For those of you who have been reading my newsletters for some time, you might be interested in reading about the ministries of recent seminary graduates.
There were five graduates in 2007. One of these, Igor, was from the extension program; he was ordained in the summer and continues to serve in my former congregation in Novgorod. While none of the other graduates are yet ordained, most are engaged in interesting work: Sofia has received grants from the ELCA and German parachurch organizations to work on developing a Christian website for children; Menzer is back in her native Azerbaijan, where, along with her quiet evangelism efforts, she has received support from a Norwegian missionary organization and UNICEF to work with children in at-risk families; Andrey is back in his native Siberia, where he is working for the synod office and the congregation in Omsk as director of educational programs and publicity, and where he also does pastoral work (without ordination – he feels like he’s still too young to be ordained, and has asked his church not to rush things!) Our final graduate, Dmitri, began to serve in Belarus this fall. Unfortunately, Dima has already had to give up this position. While very talented academically and with a very deep sense of the need to make the church more “local,” (i.e., less tied to German language and traditions) Dima’s enthusiasm for church reform was too much for the congregation to which he had come. Regrettably, Dmitri’s case is not unique, and the seminary continues to struggle with finding ways to help its students develop a firm sense of theological identity while at the same time not imposing their views on congregations, even despite the lack of mature, healthy development in many congregations of this church. Dima is taking some time off, and hopes to return to church work in a year.
Classes
This spring I have had the opportunity to teach in areas that I thought belonged already to the past – English (which I am teaching in order to cover a temporary gap in our staffing and which I taught as recent college graduate 10 years ago, but not since) and Systematic Theology (which has been in the hands of my Russian colleague, Anton Tikhomirov, for the past three years). In terms of the latter, this year we’ve decided to add a seminar-style course on the history of doctrinal development, and it has been particularly enjoyable for me as the students (whose academic qualifications are higher now than they have been compared to other recent courses) and I read together classical theology texts and try to come to an understanding of how the church’s teachings developed over time.
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