Greetings from Glen Eyrie, near Colorado Springs, Colorado! It has been a very busy three weeks. The first week of the Beeson experience this year was a preaching class, led by Dr. Ellsworth Kalas. That was great. The next two weeks we worked on our dissertations and took the second half of the "how-to-write-a-dissertation" class, led by Dr. Verna Lowe of Asbury University. That was interesting. Most of us are not used to dealing with statistics, so Dr. Lowe had to treat us with kid gloves and walk us through very gently.
We arrived in Colorado last night (Saturday, Aug. 14) and made our way to Glen Eyrie, which is the home of the Navigators. This is a beautiful place. Today has been cloudy all day, but it is still amazing. God does some pretty cool stuff, and the Rocky Mountains are close to the top of the list, in my opinion.
This morning several of us attended First UMC Colorado Springs. We went to their 9:30 a.m. Crossroads Service, which was started by Rev. Bob Kaylor, a Beeson Pastor in my cohort, several years ago when he served as Associate Pastor there. It was a good service with some solid preaching. It was good to be in the house of the Lord.
The picture in this post is of a rock formation here on the Glen Eyrie property. This property belonged to William Jackson Palmer, a successful railroad owner in the 19th century. In the 1950s the Navigators bought it, making it their headquarters and a retreat center. We are staying at the Oaks Lodge.
The reason we are in Colorado Springs is for our Advanced Church Leadership Class, led by Dr. Russell West. Dr. West is quite the creative guy and we are definitely in a non-traditional class experience. It has not all unfolded to us, yet. He put us into two teams to compete to see who can best discern the spiritual and cultural story of this area to best develop a missional approach to reaching this particular community. We will then be equipped to analyze our own ministry settings with our leaders order to equip our churches to do Kingdom ministry in our unique cultural settings.
We're only at the beginning of the process, but so far, I think this has great potential, not only for my learning, but for what we can do with this at Christ Church in Lexington, Kentucky!