Seminary Update

A couple of weeks ago, I finished my fifth semester as a seminary student, and over the holidays, I received my final grades for the two courses I took. In Congregational Spiritual Formation, the larger of the two classes, I received an A-, and in Personal and Corporate Disciplines, I received an A. This gives me a GPA of 3.90. I am excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, it means that I have thus far been successful in this whole seminary thing. That is significant because one of my primary concerns going in was that I would not have the capacity to succeed at the graduate level while balancing full-time vocational ministry. And second, one of my biggest regrets from high school and especially my undergraduate studies was that I did not fully apply myself to my studies. The result of this was that, when I graduated from college, I missed receiving honors by (as I recall) .03. I will always know that, had I applied myself just a little bit more, especially during the first semester of that Literature course, I would have walked with a cord around my neck (in a good way). A GPA of 3.90, then, is vindication!

That being said, with five semesters down, I find myself in an interesting situation. I have one more semester of core classes remaining, and four electives, to graduation. In other words, I can feasibly graduate by December 2019.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

That said, the next 12 months are going to be a little bit jammed with coursework and such. This coming semester, I will take the final two core classes. On top of them, between January and March, I will be adding an elective entitled Diagnosis and Prescription for [a] Healthy Church. As the name suggests, it will focus on identifying problems in the church and forming strategies to address them. Beyond that, the schedule gets a little fuzzy. My plan currently is to take two other church health & revitalization-related electives as independent studies. One of these will hopefully happen during the second half of this semester. The other will happen after the capstone class during the first week of June. And then I will need to identify one more elective to be taken either as an onsite intensive in August or during the first half of next semester.

All of this said, the schedule for the next year does present a number of challenges. The first is that there is a lot of stuff that needs to get done. The second is that all of that stuff is sort of crammed into the a 12-month sprint to the finish line. Pray that everything goes well. Pray that I do not get buried under an avalanche of stuff to do. Pray that I will get enough rest. But above all, pray that I will keep my priorities straight: God, family, church, school.

Blessings!