Congregations Project Each year, the ISM Congregations Project brings together leadership teams from selected congregations from around the country for an ecumenical Summer Seminar. During their week in New Haven, they work on projects that deepen and extend their ministries in areas related to the year’s theme. Later, they serve as resources to other leaders of communities in their own regions. Last year’s theme was Keeping Time/ Life Passages, and eight congregations participated in rich exchanges. The 2012 Congregations Seminar participants. Photo: Amanda Weber.
Berkeley Divinity School
W
ith Creativity and Passion, Berkeley Students Are “Out Ahead”
O
ne of the things that most impresses me about the students of Berkeley Divinity School is the degree to which their creativity and passion puts them “out ahead” of the institutional frameworks within which they are learning. Sitting on my desk as I write, for example, is an issue of The Living Church from last October with a lead story about Andy Barnett ’12 M.Div. and his Theodicy Jazz Collective, which premiered its “Canterbury Jazz Mass” at Canterbury Cathedral this past summer. The mass is a milestone for a collaboration of musicians who have provided innovative, edgy, improvisational worship music in any number of churches. Or there is also on my desk the fall issue of Crux, the news magazine of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. It contains an essay by Otis Gaddis III ’12 M.Div., a founder of the Episcopal Evangelism Network (EEN), on his vision of missional development. Describing the process of such evangelistic attentiveness, Otis remarks, “Your listening ears become the soil for the word that is already there.” A few pages later there is also a story about graduating M.Div. students Adrian Dannhauser and Matthew Lukens and their commitment to progressive evangelism.
By Joseph Britton Dean, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale
Andy Barnett ’12 M.Div. and Theodicy Jazz Collective performing “Canterbury Jazz Mass” at Convocation and Reunions 2012
One need not look to the media to find evidence of student initiative, however. Day-by-day as the students preach sermons in chapel, I am frequently astonished by the breadth of the vision they are casting for cultivating a deeper faith commitment within the Episcopal Church, and for reaching beyond its institutional bounds with a gospel-centered message of meaning and hope. Each year as commencement nears, and the faculty have to make their decisions about prizes for graduating seniors, I find that after a year of hearing students preach in chapel the hardest prize to settle on is the preaching prize, because there have simply been so many fine sermons. Or in another context, I am amazed on Wednesday evenings during the Berkeley Community Eucharist at the power of the cre-
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