I’m building a course for the fall. MIN 440: Theory and practice of pastoral care. I’ll be teaching on-line, asynchronous, over seven weeks.

Academically, I feel woefully unprepared. As a chaplain, people sometimes ask me, “where did you get your theological training.” And I smile and say, “I don’t have any.”

There are a couple qualifiers to that last paragraph, of course.

First, the people who ask me are people who know about the categories of seminary and graduate school, the hierarchies of M.Div. And Th.M and D.Min. And so on. If you don’t know the arguments, you don’t need to.

Second, I acknowledge that I actually have training in Scripture and pastoral care and church leadership. It didn’t exactly happen in an academic classroom. Instead, I learned frameworks for thinking analytically about texts and for helping people understand ideas in my graduate work in rhetoric. And, starting in middle school, I’ve worked alongside pastors to help church happen. And, starting in college, I’ve been teaching in informal and formal settings, from one unfortunate year helping with 6th grade boys Sunday school, through three academic institutions and a handful of churches. And for the past seven years, I’ve had significant opportunities to learn as a chaplain.

And I’ve written books of prayers, of church seasons, of practical care in death and funerals, and taught courses in Spiritual formation, church management and administration, and most recently, homiletics.

But til now, I haven’t had the setting to pull things together and learn what I know.  And so, between now and mid-October, I’ll be building a class “which considers pastoral care to be the all-inclusive work of the pastor.”

Writing about that course won’t take over 300. But this is my way to let you know one thing I’m working on, to let me have a tiny bit of accountability, and to help me get started back here at 300, thinking with my fingers.