Category: Perspective Online

As senior pastor of First United Methodist Church in Gladewater, Texas, David Lee doesn’t have a schedule that allows him to attend seminary full-time on campus. He tried an online program at a respected theology school, but it didn’t quite click. Then he discovered Perkins’ Houston-Galveston Extension Program. It proved a good fit.   

“I need the convenience of an online program, but I didn’t enjoy engaging online with people I’d never met,” he said. “With the hybrid approach, you really do get to know people in the program.” 

Lee, 31, enrolled this fall, taking advantage of the newly-launched hybrid format of Perkins School of Theology’s Houston-Galveston Extension Program. The program allows students to earn the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) in three years, or Master of Arts in Ministry (M.A.M.) degree in two years, completely on-site in Houston through a groundbreaking distance-education approach.   

Like Lee, many other students found the new model appealing. Forty students enrolled in Houston in the Fall of 2018 – four in the Master of Arts in Ministry (M.A.M.) program and 36 in the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree program, representing about half of the incoming class of M.Div. students overall at Perkins’ combined campuses.  

Houston-Galveston Extension program students take nine (9) credit hours, or three courses, each semester and attend three semesters (rather than two) per year —which was the way the program was originally designed. Students are required to be physically present for 20 hours of face-to-face instruction—10 hours at the beginning and end of each semester—per class.  In addition to these three hybrid courses, other courses will be offered in one-week intensives, typically in the January Term or Summer. Students who successfully complete each of these courses in the regular sequence will earn the M.Div. degree in three years and the M.A.M. degree in two years. 

The Extension program has been in place since 1995, but in February 2018, the Association of Theological Schools approved the new model, which waives the Dallas campus residency requirement. Before, Houston-Galveston Extension students were required to complete at least eight courses—the equivalent of one year of the M.Div. and one-third of the M.A.M. — on the Perkins-SMU campus. 

“The new format is a big draw for many students,” said Hugo Magallanes, director of the Houston-Galveston Extension program and associate professor of Christianity and Cultures. “Students who are employed full- or part-time can attend seminary. It’s helping reduce the strain on students’ time and money while providing quality instruction from Perkins’ full-time faculty.” 

That was the appeal for Megan Twyman, 21, who works as a teacher and tutor in Shreveport, La. Having recently married, she did not think seminary was an option. 

“I had to keep my job to pay the bills,” she said. “I knew I felt the call to ministry, but I thought it would have to wait until we were more stable. God had other things in mind, though.” 

The launch of the Houston-Galveston program full-time hybrid program changed her mind. She enrolled this fall as an M.Div. student with hopes of becoming an ordained elder in the Louisiana conference.  The format proved a good fit for Twyman’s learning style.  

“As an introvert, I like being able to soak in a lecture before responding to my classmates,” she said. “Introverts often do not get to become engaged in discussion in the classroom setting like they do in the hybrid program.” 

Magallanes notes that, while convenient, the online portion of the program is demanding.  

“It’s not easier than face-to-face classroom work,” he said. “Typically, students have constant interaction with each other and the professor by way of forum conversations. In an in-person classroom, a few students might earn a good grade without participating in class.  You cannot get away with that in an online classroom.” 

However, Twyman said, she doesn’t feel isolated. 

 “I have a group of five people that I talk to almost every day, through group message about assignments,” she said. “We lift each other up, and I love to see them in person during face-to-face sessions.” 

Top Profs

Over the past few years, David Kim, 30, has listened as his wife, Danielle, talked about classes at the Houston-Galveston campus with well-known Perkins professors such as Ted Campbell and Billy Abraham.  Danielle will graduate in May; now David is taking classes from those professors, too. He’s studying through the hybrid program while working part-time as director of communications and community ministries development at Aldersgate UMC at College Station.  

 “Those professors are there in Houston teaching,” he said. “Just being able to talk to Ted Campbell, hear his jokes, observe his thought processes – it’s amazing. That’s one of the things I find really important in this program.” 

While some hybrid programs lean heavily on adjunct faculty, Houston-Galveston students regularly receive instruction from Perkins professors, who also teach full-time students who attend on campus in Dallas.  Many of the faculty members have completed a course in online teaching through SMU’s Center for Teaching Excellence. Teaching the three M. Div. courses this fall are Campbell, Leslie Fuller, and Dallas Gingles, who is campus manager for Houston-Galveston.  Students also do coursework in Spiritual Formation (taught by Ruben L. F. Habito, Perkins’ Director of Spiritual Formation and Professor of World Religions and Spirituality, and the Rev. Mary Tumulty, Faculty Facilitator) and participate in internships, coordinated by Isabel Docampo, Co-Director of the Intern Program, Professor of Supervised Ministry, and Director, Center for the Study of Latino/a Christianity and Religions.

The launch of the new hybrid format this fall coincided with a move of the Houston-Galveston administrative offices to Houston Methodist Hospital, making it the only U.S. seminary located in a medical center.  Students have access to books and materials, now housed in the hospital’s library, and through the partnership, the Houston-Galveston campus will offer a one-week intensive in bioethics in January.   

The new location also capitalizes on a number of Methodist connections.  Perkins alumnus and Executive Board member Charles Millikan (M.Th. ’71), who was involved in founding of the Houston-Galveston campus in 1994, is Vice President for Spiritual Care and Values Integration at Houston Methodist and also holds the Dr. Ronny W. and Ruth Barner Centennial Chair in Spiritual Care.  Millikan notes that the hospital’s senior chaplain, BJ Hightower, was among the first students to enroll in the Houston-Galveston campus program, earning her M.Div.

Residential classes, spiritual formation and community engagement also take place in the program’s three partner sites: St. Paul’s UMC and St. John’s UMC in Houston, and Moody Methodist Church in Galveston. 

This year’s incoming class comes from the Houston area as well as Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Florida and other parts of Texas. The average age of students in the program is 40. 

“Generally speaking, the program tended to attract older students, but now because of the online portion, the program is attracting more younger students as well,” Magallanes said.  

Full-time Students

Another advantage of the hybrid format: students can now choose to attend full-time at Houston-Galveston, which was not an option until now, and those in degree programs are eligible for scholarships. 

 Dallas Gingles, who is a Ph.D. graduate of Southern Methodist University, adds that the hybrid launch coincides with another milestone for Houston-Galveston – the selection of Cynthia Fierro Harvey as the 2018 recipient of the Perkins School of Theology’s Distinguished Alumnus/a Award. Harvey, now bishop of the Louisiana Episcopal Area of the United Methodist Church, was one of the first graduates from the Houston-Galveston program, earning an M.Div. in 1999. She is the first graduate from the campus to receive the recognition. He expects similar great things from the incoming class of students.  

 “I’m incredibly impressed with this class; they’re all hard workers,” he added. “The hybrid launch effectively changes the program to a full extension campus, where you can get everything you need for a degree here, without having to go elsewhere.  

To Learn More

Prospective students interested in learning more about the Houston-Galveston Extension Program are invited to this information session: 

Houston-Galveston Information Session
Tuesday, December 4
7 – 8:30 p.m.
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
5501 S Main Street
Houston, TX 77004

Please register at smu.edu/Perkins/visit/insideperkins 

Individual visits to both locations may also be arranged. 

For additional information or questions, contact Stephen Bagby, Director of Recruitment and Admissions, at sbagby@smu.edu or 214-768-2139. 

 

By Mary Jacobs, a Dallas-based freelance writer and former staff writer for The United Methodist Reporter and the Dallas Morning News.

After reading a book about the history of slavery, Brian McLaren was haunted by this image: Southern slaveowners in the antebellum South, sitting comfortably in the church pews on Sunday mornings, hearing the words, “You are forgiven.”   

The image shows how Christian worship has the power to save or destroy the world, he said. And going forward, he believes the path to destruction is straightforward: “Just keep worshipping exactly as we’ve been worshipping since 1607 … and just keep worshipping exactly as we’re worshipping now.” 

McLaren shared that warning at Perkins’ Fall Convocation, which brought about 135 alumni, ministers, laypeople and others to the campus of Southern Methodist University Nov. 12-13. With the theme “JustWorship,” the program featured speakers and workshops, a resource fair, and worship. 

Several worship experiences were offered throughout the program, including opening and closing services at Highland Park United Methodist Church, a labyrinth walk, a Taizé service, and a Worship Under the Stars event on Monday night (moved indoors due to inclement weather, but still moving and inspiring, according to attendees.)  

“Worship was truly the highlight of the event,” said Priscilla Pope-Levison, coordinator of the program and Perkins’ Associate Dean for External Programs & Professor of Ministerial Studies.  “Participants got to see the breadth of worship experiences, and each illustrated this idea of bringing together both loving God and loving neighbor.”    

Monday Night Plenary

The centerpiece event was the Monday night plenary at Highland Park United Methodist, “How Can Worship Save or Destroy the Planet?” featuring McLaren and Sandra Van Opstal.  

McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian whose most recent book is The Great Spiritual Migration: How The World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking A Better Way To Be Christian. Van Opstal, a second-generation Latina in the U.S., is the Executive Pastor at Grace and Peace Community on the west-side of Chicago and author of two books on worship, The Mission of Worship and The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World.   

Both stressed the formative power of worship – for good or for evil. 

“We’ve got to take a hard look at the role worship plays in forming us as people,” McLaren said. “Otherwise, our worship simply serves as a chaplaincy to an extractive and exploitive economy.”   

Van Opstal cited the words of Amos 5:22-24 as a clear warning against the idolatry of empty worship.   

“God is saying, ‘I despise your religious festivals. Away with the noise of your songs,” she said. “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” 

Church worship services can steer people toward becoming healers, or plunderers and killers, McLaren said. 

“We’ve got to face the fact that while we’ve been worshipping happily – this world has been treated like a trash dump,” he said. “The cries of the poor have gone unheard, and the power of the super-rich has increased. Christians have done these things Monday through Saturday and then gone to church on Sunday …. where worship just lifts them up and gives them more confidence to keep doing what they’re doing.”  

McLaren decried harmful beliefs related to the environment, such as, “Jesus is coming back so we might as well use it all up.”  

“It gives us permission to dominate and exclude to the harm of other living creatures,” he said.  

He also took issue with phrases often heard in church worship, such as, “Give us the lost.”   

“Give other human beings to us as our possessions? Define everybody else as the lost?” he said. “That renders other human beings as subhuman.” 

Growing up in a conservative evangelical family, McLaren said that he came to realize that he’d never heard a song that simply sang the words of Jesus.  

“It’s almost like our worship insulates us from what he said,” McLaren observed. “Worship tries to make us feel good rather than be good.” 

Van Opstal sparked laughs of recognition when she opened her talk by singing what sounded like a familiar contemporary hymn: “I’m coming back to the heart of worship, cause it’s all about me, Jesus./It’s all about me and how I feel about you, Jesus.” 

“Our worship is all about intellect and intention –not about action,” she said. “We have words. So many, many, many words.”   

Worship cannot exist without embodying justice, Van Opstal asserted. Living in proximity to communities that are historically exploited, she has witnessed the sorrow and the hopelessness that exploitation creates. Worship should foster solidarity with these communities.   

“It has nothing to do with the carnival of multi-ethnic diversity,” she said.  “It’s about solidarity with those who suffer.  If we don’t do that, there will be more raping of the planet and we’ll just go on singing and building buildings and feeling pretty good about ourselves.”   

Van Opstal noted that North American Christians are still in the habit of sending missionaries out to the rest of the world, but instead, she says, the example of Christians in other parts of the world can teach North Americans.   

“Ninety percent of the world’s Christians are not in North America,” she said. “They have something fantastic happening in their churches. We have an entire generation of people who are wondering, ‘Where are the churches?’  Well, that’s where they are.”   

She mocked conferences that advocate superficial changes to worship – changing the style of worship, changing the color of the sanctuary – in hopes of bringing young people back to church.  

“You cannot slap a coat of paint on idolatry and fool young people,” Van Opstal said.  “What is happening in the global church in our so-called under-resourced communities is actually the gift that can save the world.”  

Kent and Susan Roberts, members of Highland Park United Methodist, found the words of McLaren and Van Opstal provocative and inspiring. 

“Sandra Van Opstal was just fantastic,” Susan Roberts said. “I don’t like praise music, and I’ve always wondered, ‘What’s wrong with me?’  She articulated why I don’t like it — it always felt so empty.” 

“The program opened up a world of possibilities for expanding the repertory of ways to experience Christianity,” Kent Roberts said. “Sometimes I get frustrated. But this felt like a door opening.”   

The convocation served as a good reminder of the church’s potential, according to Shandon Klein, a full-time Perkins student in the M.Div. program and Assistant Director of Welcoming at First United Methodist Church in Richardson. 

“It was a reminder to keep our eyes on the prize,” she said. “Not to just feed into the institution of the church but also into the movement for change.  You can build up your church and keep it in your own little box, or you can use the institution to literally promote change in the world.” 

2019 Convocation 

Plans for the Fall 2019 convocation were announced at the event.  Featured keynote speakers will include Rick Steves, the travel TV host, a guidebook author and devout Lutheran, who will speak on “Travel as a Spiritual Act;” Celestin Musekura, president and founder of African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries; and Samira Izadi Page, founder and executive director of Gateway of Grace. The event will take place November 11 & 12, 2019, on the campus of SMU.

Wesley Heritage – United Kingdom Immersion, 2019

Perkins alumni/ae and students are invited to travel to the birthplace of Methodism with the Wesley Heritage-UK Perkins School of Theology Alumni/ae Immersion program (July 10-22, 2019), led by Dr. Ted Campbell and the Rev. Connie Nelson. Participants’ understanding of John Wesley, his contribution to Christianity and his time will be enriched as the group tours sites in Oxford, Epworth, Bristol, and London. View the immersion flier, with detailed information, here. View complete itinerary here.

Women of Color Scholars at AAR-SBL 2018

Two Perkins alumnae were among the 2018 Women of Color Scholars who met before the annual meeting in Denver of the American Academy of Religion, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature:  Sun-ah Kang (M.T.S., 2013) and Raquel Feagins (nee Cajiri) (M.Div., 2007).  Started in 1988, the Women of Color Scholars program has provided financial, intellectual and personal support to United Methodist women of color pursuing doctorates in religious studies at seminaries and universities across the U.S., with the primary goal of increasing the number of women of color on faculty at United Methodist seminaries. The program is administered by the Office of Loans and Scholarships of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (GBHEM.)

Dental Mission

Perkins alum Zak Kaping (M.T.S., 1994) helped coordinate a music/dental mission in July, which brought dentists and volunteers from Dallas to Phungyo Baptist Church, a church in Kaping’s homeland in Ukhrul, Manipur, India.  Kaping is pastor of Northwest Terrace Baptist Church, a new church start from Northlake Baptist Church in Dallas. His son, a dental student in Dallas who will graduate in 2019, also pitched in.

This was the first dental mission ever to serve this city; the dental team saw more than 300 patients in five days of work, all of whom were seeing a dentist for the first time. The team presented dental hygiene information, removed some un-restorable teeth and filled many cavities. Providing the dental care were two dentists, Dr. T. Bob Davis of Dallas, recently recipient of the 2018 American Dental Association (ADA) Humanitarian Award, and Dr. Bob Meyer, Executive Director of the Christian Dental Society, along with three senior dental students from Texas A & M College of Dentistry of Dallas: Pan Kaping (Zak’s son and Senior Class President at the school) and two classmates, Leke Olowokere and John Ratliff. Assisting the dental team with sterilization and supplies management were Diane Meyer and Dr. Davis’s son Creth.

Musical performances by Dr. Davis were also part of the program. The mission team overcame many obstacles to deliver a new grand piano to the community. Zak Kaping also restored an old WWII vintage army vehicle for the occasion.

“It was an adventure and a challenging opportunity to encourage a lot of fine international Christians in their own home city,” Davis said.

Santa vs. Advent

A column by the Rev. LyAnna Johnson (M.Div., 2015) recently appeared in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette in Worcester, Mass. Titled “Keep the Faith: A complicated relationship with Santa,” Johnson’s tongue-in-cheek commentary contrasted Santa Claus as a symbol of consumer Christmas with the Christian understanding of the holiday. “As I started going to church as an adult … I found out about Advent, the season of hopeful anticipation before Christmas,” she wrote. “And that’s when my relationship with Santa went south.” But don’t worry, Santa wins her heart in the end; read her column here. Johnson serves as pastor at Simple Church Worcester, a United Methodist congregation in the New England Annual Conference.

 

 

 

 

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