Goin' to Kansas

So, this quarter I have three classes: preaching, ethics, and a class called Church, Ministry, and Culture. This third one is also known as "Plunge." It's a 2 credit class because we go away for two weeks and are immersed in a church somewhere far away. My group is going to Kansas. Not a place I ever intended to go, but there you have it. I'm going with two of my classmates, Jim and Les. One of the interesting things about this church we'll be visiting is that it's a Willow Creek Association Church. Now for those of you who don't know about Willow Creek, it's a mega-church founded right here in Chicagoland, and I visited it last year as part of my Gospel Mission class. Willow Creek was started by a couple of guys who thought church was boring and wanted to make it more interesting and inviting to people who don't go to church. Currently they have something like 20,000 in attendance on a given weekend. The service is a combination of rock music, praise music, inspirational message, and sometimes a dramatic presentation. They have a 7,000 seat auditorium complete with fancier lighting, sound, and video equipment than any theatre I've been in. So I'm very curious to see how this Episcopal Church in Kansas has incorporated the Willow Creek stuff. The priest has asked us to read The Purpose Driven Life before arriving. Sigh...

Ethics has made my brain tired. Today we talked about the imago dei or image of God. We discussed something about how we need to know what God is like in order to know what humanity is like in order to figure out how to apply theology to our lives, or something like that. People speak in English in this class, but I don't seem to follow what they're saying. Actually, a number of classes have been like that in seminary. Funny that we aren't required to take Greek. I think I'd understand Greek better than some of my other classes!