The Ministry and Community Engagement Program: A Deeper Look

The intimate co-constitution of ministry and community' engagement is clear in the roots of our story as told in the sections above. However, doing ministry' education in Portland, Oregon, in the heart of what has been named “the None Zone” (O’Connell Killen & Silk, 2004), indicating the relatively' high number of people who do not identify as being a part of institutionalized traditional religions, has very few givens. Doing ministry education at a small school in an era of significant financial and political pressures for colleges and universities (Collins & Clanton, 2018), particularly' private faith-based liberal arts institutions, has very few givens. There is no margin for living on auto-pilot and sometimes it feels like no room to even catch one’s breath. But opportunities still abound, bubbling vigorously below the surface when we have the will and the resources to chase them down or let them rise.

President Cook’s call for WP to embrace our position in the city as an opportunity' to be with and for our city came at a time when the Religion and Christian Ministries Department was undergoing changes. The makeup of the faculty' personnel was changing. And, our focus was also ready to shift. My colleagues and I began to name that we did not conceive of our job as primarily keepers of a tradition, but that we are called to be both memory-keepers and change-makers who look around the corner to perceive and midwife what the possibilities might be for our students in the years to come. We named that our goal is not to ensure the future of an academic program, but to participate in bringing the world we drcam about into being. With our neighbors. As neighbors. Because that dream is not an exclusive or narrow one, it is expansive. It includes our city. In essence, we began to name our wondering that runs throughout this paper: What does it mean to be an engaged institutional neighbor, even at risk of what ministry education has been? This guiding question drove us to study our own work, with a commitment to not do so alone. Resisting aloneness became a marker for our process.