Yesterday I met a fellow missionary here at the Grace College Missions Conference who completed his DMin six years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
For the uninitiated, that is a Doctorate of Ministry, the same degree I am currently working toward.<\/p>\n\n\n
A year from now I will have completed my classes and I will be starting work on my dissertation. It makes me nervous to think about it, but probably not for the reason you might expect.<\/p>\n\n\n
Yes, it will be a lot of work and I will have to set and abide by self-imposed deadlines. That will take discipline, but I think I can handle it.<\/p>\n\n\n
My biggest fear is that I will pursue a project that becomes merely an academic exercise, with no real world use.<\/p>\n\n\n
So I asked this guy about the topic of his own dissertation.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
(Probably a question he doesn’t get asked a lot.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
He explained that he had studied three big mission agencies and their training processes for new missionaries. He was looking for connections between inadequate training and failure on the field.<\/p>\n\n\n
He found all three trainings to be severely lacking in substance and believed that many missionaries left their fields for preventable causes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I wanted to know so much more than our time together allowed him to explain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I have seen firsthand the sort of major troubles that can erode the effectiveness of missions. And I have often suspected that inadequate training (and screening) plays a significant role in the sort of conflicts we and so many other missionaries have experienced on mission fields around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n
Unfortunately, whatever this brother discovered in his research has gone no further than a database in his school’s library.<\/p>\n\n\n
What a shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I met a fellow missionary here at the Grace College Missions Conference who completed his DMin six years ago.\u00a0 For the uninitiated, that is a Doctorate of Ministry, the same degree I am currently working toward. A year from now I will have completed my classes and I will be starting work on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8586,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585\/revisions\/8586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}