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Voyage to the Next Dimension
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… Participants in the College of Pastoral Leaders continue to look to the Seminary for learning. Heide Ford, a cohort member, joined Voyage to the Next Dimension as she transitioned into a new ministry setting …
VOYAGE TO THE NEXT DIMENSION
By Martha Lynn Coon
Developed over the course of a year, Voyage to the Next Dimension anticipated an in-person launch date of May 2020. Needless to say, the pandemic called forth alternate plans. But for a course that focuses on what Howard Thurman coined “The Sound of the Genuine,” it only took a few Zoom calls and some heartfelt discernment to know that someone, or something, was drawing us on.
Voyage to the Next Dimension is now a virtual course designed to provide intergenerational community and context to address the deep concerns of purpose, vocation, and the integration of soul and role in our daily lives. The course provides an extension to the conversation that draws many people into the life of Austin Seminary: searching, as Frederick Buechner so eloquently stated, for “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
If this question is at the heart of each seminarian’s experience, Voyage to the Next Dimension serves as a vehicle for sharing these institutional values, questions, and traditions with the broader community. This is one of the primary places where EBW connects with those who are not professional clergy. The course is intentionally intergenerational, with participants re-discovering purpose in retirement as well as searching for God’s call on their lives upon college graduation. Job loss, re-entering the work force after parental leave, or just a general desire to engage that special sense of “something more” are all drivers for our participants.
The course material is collated from a wide range of disciplines and sources but coalesces through the metaphor of a sea-faring voyage. The seven sessions and (virtual) retreat incorporate contemplative exercises and more expansive group discussion. Each is designed to stimulate right-brained creative thinking as well as more structured approaches to strategic-planning, as participants consider the next stops on their own Voyage.
The leaders guided us on this experience toward a real action plan that we could use as we thought about who God is calling us to be.
– Bruce Schrott, member and lay leader at 787 Collective; member First United Methodist Church, Georgetown, Texas; participant in Voyage to the Next Dimension
