A Message From the Acting Dean
Dear Friends of the Maine School of Ministry,
Welcome!
MESOM currently offers affordable fall and spring courses taught by highly qualified faculty which are designed for adult students who are exploring their own spiritual formation, exploring a call to ministry, as well as ordained clergy seeking quality continuing education, and open to all persons seeking spiritual and educational and enrichment. In addition, as both the vision and reach of MESOM expands, shorter courses will be offered in collaboration with local churches and other justice seeking organizations here in Maine and beyond.
Please feel free to contact me directly for further conversation abut MESOM. I’m always excited to hear about your interests and your ideas about possibilities for future offerings.
Many blessings,
Ron Baard, Acting Dean
FALL 2020 Semester Courses
– Click on One of the Courses Below For More Information and to Register!
Course Description:
Biblical Storytelling is a Fall semester 2020 practice-based course which will provide course participants with an introduction to the art of Biblical Storytelling for use in a virtual worship and world through an experiential learning approach. Biblical Storytelling is a spiritual discipline through which you are invited to deepen your devotional faith and grow in your missional outreach.
Everyone is a storyteller. Each person is a one-of-a-kind creation with distinctly original gifts, therefore, each story that a person tells will be uniquely expressed. There is no one perfect storytelling role model to follow.
This course will survey a number of different techniques for learning and telling Bible stories. Course participants will develop and share their own Biblical Storytelling art through pre-recording and live virtual presentations.
The technology requirements of this class involve being able to access Zoom by computer or smartphone. Technical assistance will be available for the making of recordings if desired. The overall approach for critiquing storytelling efforts in this learning process will be one of affirming the strengths and positives of each attempt. As the strengths of your attempts are affirmed, the confidence and thrill to keep trying grows and gradually any doubts will diminish. Delighting in developing your God-given gifts for storytelling opens the spiritual practice of storytelling to the realm of being a grand adventure as you feel God’s pleasure in the preparation and in the telling.
Class Meetings:
This course will consist of four Saturday meetings from 9:00 am – 3:00 pm which will all be held on Zoom…
September 19, 2020
October 10, 2020
November 14, 2020
December 12, 2020
Course Instructor:
No results.
Course Description:
This course is designed to introduce and deepen your understanding of the part of the Bible that we commonly call the New Testament (NT), the collection of writings produced by early Christians that are derived from, and dependent upon, the Jewish scriptures commonly called the Old Testament. Although the biblical gospels were not the earliest NT writings (Paul’s letters were the earliest), they stand at the beginning of the NT because they tell the stories about Jesus upon which the Christian faith is grounded. We will focus on learning how to read and interpret these gospels against the background of the cultural, intellectual, religious and political world of the first century in which the authors of the gospels lived. We will examine how the gospels reveal both the relationship to, and separation from, first-century Jewish religion and subsequent impact on Jewish-Christian relationships. Certain interpretive tools and methods of reading texts will be emphasized, particularly as they will be important for leading Bible studies or preaching in local church settings. We will also look briefly at the historical processes by which these particular writings ended up in our present Bible, and why other early Christian gospels and epistles did not. Class discussions and student presentations will combine both academic knowledge and practical use of the NT in ministry settings.
All class meetings will be by Zoom. You will be expected to have either a computer, tablet, or smartphone capable of connecting to the Internet and thus to Zoom. The Zoom app is downloadable for free from Zoom.com. I will be issuing the appropriate “invitations” using the Maine Conference’s Zoom account. If you need assistance with the technical aspects of using Zoom, I can help you prior to the beginning of classes.
Class Meetings:
This course will consist of four Saturday meetings from 9:00 am – 3:00 pm which will all be held on Zoom…
September 12, 2020
October 17, 2020
November 21, 2020
December 19, 2020
Course Instructor: