Vocation
- Developing a sense of God’s mission within yourself, your contexts, and your communities
- Developing a capacity for deep, intentional listening within yourself, your contexts, and your communities
- Lifting out your heart’s greatest joys in the context of the world’s greatest needs
- Recognizing and developing your own strengths, gifts, and experiences
- Defining and highlighting your own limits, growing edges, and lack of experience
- Developing emotional and spiritual, health, and well-being
- Working on thoughtful servant leadership, humility, and resilience
Identities
- Exploring the shape, contour, and origins of your theologies and personal worldviews
- Learning to critically examine those theologies and personal worldviews in order to better understand the Other and build a wider frame of reference in Christian public leadership
- Developing a sense of what it means to engage pastoral, community-based, and/or other types of professional leadership, especially through one-on-one examples
- Developing a sense of what it means to engage in teaching, writing, communications, pastoral care, mission development, youth leadership, social work, arts, and/or other types of professional roles, especially through one-on-one examples
- Witnessing how your mentor lives into their own emotional and spiritual health and well-being
Skills
- Building a knowledge base of theology, language, behavior that enhances the worth and dignity of others:
- Understanding theology as a foundation for intercultural relationships with others
- Developing skills of empathy and verbal/non-verbal communication with others
- Crafting attitudes of curiosity, respect, and openness toward others
- Learning how to engage in respectful silence and learning
- Taking on the skills of a professional pastor:
- Preaching
- Teaching
- Leading worship
- Planning services and events
- Providing pastoral care
- Engaging in visitation
- Connecting with the congregation’s contexts and communities
- Evangelizing by personal, theological, and ethical example
- Understanding issues of stewardship and financial administration
- Taking on the skills of a professional community-based leader:
- Coordinating programs
- Supporting stewardship and writing grants
- Working on marketing and publicity
- Mapping assets and building networks
- Facilitating service-learning
- Reaching out to campus settings
- Building partnerships with congregations
- Learning to teach, write, publicize, develop mission work, support youth, provide social services, make art, etc.
- Developing healthy models of emotional and spiritual well-being
- Developing intercultural competence and ability to bridge across difference to proclaim the Gospel
- Ensuring that your skills can support you as an emerging, valuable Christian public leader
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