pat loughery

My paper is done for Overture I at Bakke Graduate University. You can read all the stuff I’ve posted to this blog about this class by following the Overture I tag.

A few statistics can be found in this screenshot of the document’s properties box.

Project papers at BGU contain three major parts.

• Part One is one-page summaries of each book we read for class. In this case, I read 4,175 pages and summarized the 14 books (many of which I posted summaries of here on this blog).
• Part Two is 2-3 pages per day of journaling during the class days. We are to write about what we observed, how we interpreted it, and what we’re going to do about it. I posted my daily journals here on this blog as well.
• Part three is a 20+ page paper that applies something we learned in our class into our local ministry context. It’s highly recommended that this paper be something we can lift and use for our dissertation as well. I’m not sure that I accomplished that as deeply as I’d hoped, but I did explore some topics that I wanted to spend more time in. I looked at spiritual formation in suburbia, looking first at my own history as a church planter in a suburban city, then at the suburban context in general, and then swung around to focus on monasticism, new monasticism and missional orders. I wrote about what each was, looked at what leadership meant in each of those forms of spiritual expression, and then I tried to draw some conclusions for where these forms may help a suburban faith community.

It feels great to be done with this paper and this class, and I think I’ve got a lot of ammunition for what thesis and dissertation time, where I’ll continue to look at practices of spiritual formation from church history for my own local context.

Now, it’s time to go help with kids’ bedtime, and then have a beer to celebrate.