Drew Update, Week 3

Okay so my final week for my summer intensive is underway. I am taking an interesting class called Thriving in the Digital Age through Collaborative Leadership. This class seeks to evaluate and understand how the Net generation is affecting our ministry and overall culture.

The class really is as exciting as I had hoped it would be. The particular texts for the class have all been read and we all already written our integration paper (a way to prove we've done the readings by writing a paper about them and how they interpret our ministry context). If you'd like a great book to read, find one of these books on Amazon and get it used. They are all amazing reads:

1. The Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church, by Rex Miller.
2. Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect, by Joseph Myers.
3. Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change, Organizations, and Society, by Peter Senge
4. The Equipping Pastor: A Systems Approach to Congregational Leadership, by Paul Stevens
5. Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, by Don Tapscott
6. The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, by Phyllis Tickle.

Seriously those last two books are definitely worth your time.

As for my other assignments, I am partnered with two other classmates for a collaborative writing project. We're working out the details today and the paper will be a 25-pager due on July 31. To help facilitate our conversations, the teacher set up a Wiki site on our Moodle page on the school's website. If I am talking a foreign language to you, a Wiki is a collaborative website that allows for personal interaction and a Moodle is a software program whereby the entire class readings, handouts, and reports are submitted, posted, and read.

As an interesting aside, I have created a special Wiki-site for the Lay Advisory Team, a church group who'll help shepherd me and my DMin project. How cool is that, right?

In any event, my class goes from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM. It is a full day of interaction, lecture, and class participation. I'll let you know all about it as the week comes to a close.

So that's my update. I hope you'll have a fab week and will see you on Sunday when I return.