Curriculum

Transforming leaders to help transform the church requires an intensive training program.  Ministerial training shifted from an apprenticeship model to an academic model over the last 200 years.  Our goal is to couple intensive theological reflection with active mentoring in the context of a teaching congregation.  Our internship program will share some elements with the CPE model, except that it will be a sort of “church pastoral education,” with interns engaging in deep, personal sharing as they interact with the staff, congregation and one another.  Pastoral character and integrity will be explored as we consider the practice of ministry.

The pastoral staff and members of Church of all Nations will share with the interns what we are learning in constructing a vital mainline congregation of many nations, cultures, languages, generations and denominational backgrounds in a church with no ethnic majority.  This will include:

1. Weekly staff meetings.
2. Semi-monthly intern meetings, once with the senior pastor, once without.
3. Monthly one-on-one meetings between the senior pastor and each intern.
4. Monthly session meetings.
5. Various lectures, conferences and discussions with cutting-edge pastors, professors and leaders from the Twin Cities area and from around the world.

In light of these interactions and hands-on learning opportunities, the interns will engage in study related to pastoral leadership, missional theology and the ministry of reconciliation.  The curriculum is fluid and always changing, but books read thus far have included:

• Anna Carter Florence, Preaching as Testimony.
• Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa.
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
• Cornel West, Race Matters.
• Curtis DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey & Karen Chai Kim (eds.), United By Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race.
• Darrell Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church.
• Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship.
• ______, Ethics.
  
• Elie Wiesel, Night.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
• Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership.
• ______, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society.
• Jennifer Harvey, Karin A. Case & Robin Hawley Gorsline (eds.), Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need to Do.
• John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.
• Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
• Mahatma Ghandi & Judity Brown (ed.), The Essential Writings.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. & James Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.
• Stanley Hauerwas & William H Willemon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony.
• Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles.