Finally…After 10 years. It is finished!
About 2:30 pm on Wednesday, April 14, after an hour or more of questioning for my oral exam, I returned to the Google Meet screen, following their deliberation, to hear Drs. Neal Windham and Barney Wells greet me with these words: “Congratulations, Dr. Ramsey.”
Wow. Finally… after 10 years… it is finished. I started the long journey of my Doctor of Ministry studies at Lincoln Christian University in January of 2011. Just after my classwork started, during the fall of 2011, we knocked down the back of our house, and over the next four years, rebuilt the addition (53 weeks without a kitchen!). Exhausting years. Following my classwork, I was stuck. I had an impossible time choosing a topic/issue and the right ministry context (the vehicle) to study, address, and execute a practical ministry project that would not only meet my requirements but be beneficial to me and the Church. I didn’t want to dismantle any of the classes that I was teaching because they were structured the way I wanted them. I looked for other issues and contexts but to no avail.
Finally, an opportunity came about that I could dive in and finish this long journey. My great friend and colleague of 30 years (at both Central Church of Christ in Streator, IL and at LCU), Bob Monts, retired. With an already overloaded schedule, I begged the Dean to let me teach Bob’s old class, Evangelism, Discipleship, and Faith Development, so that I could complete my degree. Time was running out! Using the Discipleship and Faith Development portion of the course for the scope of my project, I asked the 22 Christian Ministry students for their consent to participate as my “guinea pigs” to be participants in my study. They all agreed. We learned a lot.
The Dmin is a practical ministry setting doctoral degree so I developed 26 sessions that would serve as the focus on my research. I gave them a pretest on the first day of class and then compared their answers to the posttest, their Discipleship Strategy assignment at the end of the curriculum. The rest was up to me to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize my learning to determine how effective the curriculum I developed was in preparing Christian ministry students to craft a Discipleship Strategy for the future churches in which they would serve. The primary focus of the curriculum was to aid 21st-century disciples to grow from a certainty, fixed, rigid, and often rented faith to a confident, flexible, anti-fragile personally owned faith. [You can read it HERE. Just note that it often reads like a recipe or a phone book!]
And it passed. I passed. Finally. Whew.
This also marks my 20th year of teaching at LCU. I never dreamed that when I reluctantly agreed to come to teach here that I would, first of all, love it as much as I do, and secondly, I would have stayed as long as I have. But I have loved every bit of it. It is because of the incredible community that LCU is as well as the incredible students that I have had the honor of teaching (and really learning with). With that said, here is the last paragraph in the Acknowledgments section of my 200-page project paper:
“Thank you to the twenty-two students of CM315 at Lincoln Christian University who walked through this journey of learning about Discipleship and Faith Development with me (and are the subjects of this project) during the Fall 2020 semester, as well as to all the students for the last twenty years who I have learned with, as they helped shape my thinking, interpreted the crazy drawings on the whiteboards, and served as a sounding board through discussions that forged the ideas for the curriculum that was ultimately developed for this project. It has been an absolute honor to be a very short part of your long journeys with Jesus. Thanks for being a part of mine.”
With all of that said, I have always hated titles in the Church and among learners in a community. We are one in Christ. I will not be using that title but prefer to be simple called Rondel. But boy it does feel good to have that checked off my list!
