Theme Four: Increasing Access Some More

The fourth theme is related to the need to again increase access to higher education to our neighbors and partners who desire it. Our continued practices and commitments led us three years ago to engage in another intentional season of listening both to those who have served as critical partners over the years and to new crucial voices, digging deeper into our inquiry about what it means to be an engaged institutional neighbor in practice. We asked: Is what we are do/ing accessible to the people who need or desire it most? Out of this listening, we made another set of revisions to make our ministry education program more accessible. This change was less a content shift and more one of modality to offer classes on Fridays only in half-semester intensive blocks (what we internally call “Friday School”) and, in doing so, we took the opportunity to also rename our major to more accurately capture what it is and does: Ministry and Community Engagement. We have come to name our realization and conviction that ministry does not occur apart from community engagement and, therefore, ministry education cannot either.

This most recent shift reflects what we have discerned together with our neighbors to make what we do accessible for those beyond traditional 18-22 year olds to include leaders who are already working in ministry without a degree, and/or leaders who arc interested in and need ministry training and are not ready or able to commit to a full degree program at this time. Some of these are people who have been our community partners in the journey along the way. Portland has a wealth of creative people. Educational structures, including standard online models, have not always been accessible to them. We recognize that mutuality cannot be achieved if our partners cannot have access to the education they have helped to create.

There are both losses and gains in our new model. We hold to our commitment to make it matter—to not get lazy in our answers to: So what? Why do we exist? What does what we are doing actually do in the world? For whom? Toward what? And to not do this work alone.

We do not think of ourselves as gatekeepers, but as neighbors. We do not think about what we do as isolated, for it is not. We think of ourselves as an educational partner of the good work in our region. This extends beyond our Ministry and Community Engagement program to include other areas of our general education curriculum as well. It weaves in and

What Does It Mean to Be a Neighbor? 175 out of the larger institutional commitment to be active participants in and with our urban context and our theological heritage that says we cannot love if we do not know what life is like for the other. We have learned a lot. And we still have a lot to learn.