3 Reflections from my first Doctor of Ministry Intensive

I just had my first DMin intensive, and I didn't know what I didn't know, but I am more excited than I was before.

Sometimes you don’t know what you are getting until you get it. It’s a little like when you try out a new restaurant or even a new dish at a regular haunt. There’s something that is both anticipatory and, if you are me, anxiety-inducing about this experience. Questions course through my mind. “What will this place be like?” “Will I like it?” “What if I spent all this money on something that I ended up not liking?”

I spent this past week with sixteen colleagues in the Doctor of Ministry Program at Friends University at the Spiritual Life Center in Bel Aire, Kansas (just outside Wichita).¹ This institution and this place are both beautiful to me. Friends University and the Spiritual Life Center have been catalysts that God has used to transform me, easing me into what the with-God life can be like.

It was at Friends that I was in right place at the right time to finally hear and understand what Dallas Willard said in the introduction to Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Life with God