After a few months of redesign and restructuring, we are happy to launch the all new experience.mhgs.edu! A few things have changed around here and we hope that they will be offer you a better insight to what happens within the walls of Mars Hill Graduate School.

Along with the new design, we’ve also added some new writers and contributors. We’ll be posting more from them shortly, so keep an eye out for their posts. We’ve refocused our blog to highlight the experiences of MHGS and hope that the stories of alumni, faculty, and students will help share the transformation happening within our walls.

Stay tuned for more posts and grab the RSS feed to keep connected!

From left to right: Kj Swanson, Jeanette White, Paula Womack. Photo by Joshua Longbrake, MDiv graduate, who has more photos on his blog.

Recently, Mars Hill Graduate School sent off another class of students with a meaningful graduation ceremony. Each year, a student from each degree program is chosen by the faculty and student body to speak on behalf of their class. This year, three phenomenal speakers gave us a glimpse of what they learned over the past few years. You can read or listen to the short speeches of each speaker below.

Every year, MHGS hosts a forum for the Master of Divinity students to present their Integrative Projects. These projects are 9-month long studies in a subject that an MDiv student has a passion around and range from biblical study to cultural exegesis to ecclesial challenges. After many months of research, processing, and writing, the final product is a dissertational paper. This year, we proudly participated in the presentation of six MDiv students as they shared their major accomplishment to us.

Below are all six individual presentations along with a link to download the PDF of their papers.

Wholeness
Toward an Agrarian Pastoral Hermeneutic
By David Rice
Download Paper

Place, Embodiment, and Diverse Particularity
Developing Spiritual Practices Rooted in an Orienting Myth of Biblical Trinitarian Theology for Local Communities in a Context Dominated by the Myth of Globalization
By Daniel Tidwell
Download Paper

Why are You Apologizing for Bleeding?
Confronting the Evangelical Embrace of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
By Kj Swanson
Download Paper

Friday, Saturday, Sunday
The Particularity of the Tridum and Its Rhythm for Humanity
By Joshua Longbrake
Download Paper

The Language of Suffering and the Words of Life
A Journey of Grief through Holy Saturday and the Psalms of Lament
By Ben Oldham
Download Paper

Embodying Anglican Theology
Applying the missional Impulse of the Book of Common Prayer to an Urban Context
By Buzz Matthews
Download Paper
Note: Our video camera had some technical difficulties during Buzz’s presentation so this video begins partway through.

This Saturday, Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, stopped by our school while on tour for his new book, Drops Like Stars. Listen in as MDiv student Joshua Longbrake engages him on suffering and the creative process as well as Q&A from the audience.

Mars Hill Graduate School is a learning community located in Seattle and dedicated to transformation through the study of text, soul, and culture. MHGS offers three graduate degrees:

M.A. in Counseling Psychology · M.Divinity · M.A. in Christian Studies

Our students are writers, artists, bloggers, theologians, and counselors who are devoted to experiencing God through relationships. Learn more about joining us in a transformational education today or see when an MHGS conference will be in your city.

Rob Bell on MHGS

“I always like the questions and your responses that come out of this place. I am such a huge fan from across the country. Keep being who you are and pursuing that unique thing…you are an inspiration to lots of us.”

This past week, Dr. Dan Allender spoke at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Dan spoke on the core categories of sin: lust and murder. These aren’t just hyperbole’s but are ways that sin manifest themselves in our lives everyday. The call was to be aware of our own proclivity towards these sins and how to live in freedom of them. Listen to the whole sermon here or download it off of Mars Hill Bible Church’s site.

Dan Allender is the founding president of Mars Hill Graduate School and a Professor of Counseling Psychology. He’s got the greatest stories about fly fishing so be sure to ask him for one.

This November is our first visitation weekend where prospective students can spend a weekend in the life of MHGS. Our hope is to hear your story, and to share our own, so that you may have all the information you need to make the right decision about your professional and educational goals. More importantly, we hope to offer you an experience of Mars Hill Graduate School that will bless and stir your soul.

The schedule includes “classes” from core faculty including Dr. Dan Allender, conversations over coffee with current students, stories from alumni, and many other blessings. The weekend is also a great time to conduct an interview for admission.

Register for the visit today or learn more about the visitation weekend. We look forward to seeing you here.

Whenever a Mars Hill Graduate School student talks about their school here in Seattle, a question about our affiliation with Mars Hill Church is soon to follow.

The confusion between the school and the church becomes all the more problematic when you realize how different we actually are. David Von Stroh explains some of the basic disparities:

Since I find myself having to explain several times a week how Mars Hill Graduate School (my seminary) is not affiliated with Mars Hill Church, I thought it would be helpful to set the record straight. I know, its confusing. We’re both here in Seattle, and started around the same time, took our names from Acts 17, and both have red brick buildings in Belltown. But the similarities drop off there. My seminary, Mars Hill Graduate School, is actually of a very different orientation than is the Mark Driscoll pastored Mars Hill Church here in Seattle. For example. we are very affirming of women in leadership in the church, where Driscoll’s church takes a stance against it. We have a very progressive education, though still very much evangelically-theological. (Though we’re very diverse, there is no “party line” at my school. Everything is questioned. Deconstruction and reconstruction are the norm.) The gospel is most often talked about at MHGS in terms of justice issues and real-world transformation. Poverty issues, sex trafficking, trauma recovery, counseling (pastoral and professional psychology), engaging culture and contextualization…these are all important issues for us. I understand that Driscoll is now of a more fundamentalist orientation, even with his innovative and helpful approaches to missional models of church. Brian McLaren, Dan Allender (one of our faculty), N.T. Wright, Jurgen Moltmann, Richard Hays, Martin Buber (“I and Thou” is probably THE foundational text at our school), Pete Rollins…these would be some of the primary influences at MHGS, whereas Driscoll’s church is probably most influenced by John Piper. The Rob Bell pastored Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, MI is actually far more similar to MHGS than is the Mars Hill Church of Seattle.

It is ironic also that we have the name Mars, being that Mars was the Greek god of war. MHGS has many pacifists, in fact, pacifist/Anabaptist/Mennonite views on war and peace are probably largely in the majority here. The Mars Hill reference, however, refers to Paul’s preaching to the Athenians on the Areopagus (Mars Hill) about the “unknown God”, using a piece of their own religious devotion to begin explaining the story of Jesus.

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While there are many differences between our school and the church, many students are members at Mars Hill Church and find great connection and community through their ministry. Still, it is helpful to know our differences so that prospective students can make an informed decision about studying at MHGS.

David lives in the Rainier Valley and is a student in the Master of Divinity program at Mars Hill Graduate School and worships at Rainier Avenue Church. Before moving to Seattle, David ministered in the slum communities of Bangkok, Thailand with Servant Partners for five years, pioneering new house churches, mentoring Thai leaders, organizing squatter communities for relocation, and consulting micro-business development operations. David loves researching the Buddhist context and pioneering new ways of sharing the gospel of Jesus. His pioneering work on Buddhist contextualization has been published in Communicating Christ in Asian Cities: Urban Issues in Buddhist Contexts, edited by Paul De Neui.

Everything that can possibly be said about blogging and spirituality is already written on the internet somewhere.

Same goes for blogging and politics. And blogging and family. And blogging and anything, really. Blogging is like, so 2004, and analyzing blogging is so 2005, and that means I am four years too late in writing this post…which is pretty standard for how quickly I catch on to trends. At least I’ve stopped talking about the Information Super-Highway (raise your hand if you came of age in 1997).

My husband Jack is never behind on internet trends. Which is why, before starting this post, I asked him what he thought it meant to be “a spiritual person on the net.” I hoped he could give me the 2011 answer and I, for once, would have archived proof of my coolness. Take that, The Future!

Jack got really excited, as he always does when I ask him about the internet, and started speaking in engaging, witty, and fully edited paragraphs about blogging and spirituality. I hate it when he does that. He explained that everything online is instantly open to everyone else’s response, and he called this the “Rapid Feedback Cycle.” You write, you publish, and you skip the process of meditating on your own writing because you already have 36 comments on your post (or, in my case, maybe two). Contrast this with the Apostle Paul, Jack said, who sent off a letter and six months later the church in Corinth was shocked to read that their pastor did not approve of incest and adultery. Imagine if Paul had a comments section at the end of his epistles!

This Rapid Feedback Cycle (oh please tell me someone got here by googling that phrase) is what makes blogging hard for me. What can I say that won’t be criticized, debated, or objectified? Will there be space for my voice before it’s drowned out? Will my writing be my own, or will I numbly absorb the praise and criticism in my inbox? Will my readers know that there’s flesh and a heart and tears behind my words?

I keep these questions close when I blog. I write about normal things, like what I learn at Mars Hill, or the women in my church, or how many moles my Italian ancestry gave me. But before I hit “publish,” I have to acknowledge (at least to myself) that I don’t understand this internet thing. I wish I could see the faces of the people who read my blog, and ask them why they were searching for “celebrity teeth” or “restless in marriage.” I’d like to tell them that I am not very smart and they shouldn’t listen to me, but to please still give me lots of attention and continue reading my blog. It all seems so desperate and impersonal, both on my end and theirs.

And yet, relationship still happens in the rapid feedback cycle. Sometimes I feel a stranger’s humanity as if it was radiating from my laptop. Often, in the security of that private-yet-public blog space, I write words that are truer than even my best friend could coax out of me. I don’t love the rapid feedback cycle (especially now that I know it has a name), but it might be worth dealing with.

Christine is finishing her first year at Mars Hill Graduate School, in the MACP (Master’s in Counseling Psychology) program. She blogs regularly (that means once a month) at madcheshire .

I was at church Sunday morning; a rare occurrence for me these days. As my attention span ebbed and flowed, I heard words in the Pastoral Prayer that caught me—not because they were convicting or inspirational, but because they made me mad.

The pastor alluded to our need to ask forgiveness for paying more attention to email, cell phones, and blogging than scripture, prayer, and service. I am still mad.

It’s not the first time I’ve considered it—the connection between my spirituality and blogging; but that prayer got me to thinking (and blogging—God, forgive me) in a more concise way. The two are not, nor should they be, mutually exclusive. And for me, they have served and enhanced one another in powerful, transformative ways. I would go so far as to say that blogging has become a manifestation of my spirituality—my prayer.

I have known many seasons, frankly many years, in which my spirituality has been sterile, isolated, hard work. It has been taught and understood as a discipline with specific activities and manifestations that somehow mark or define me as a Christian. But blogging has not felt anything like this. It has been a gift. The antithesis of sterile, segmented, hard work, it is messy, integrated, and life-giving. Call me crazy, but this seems far more consistent with what spirituality ought to be about, how it ought to be defined, experienced and “practiced.”

Mary Oliver’s poetry never fails to speak to me, to express something in words and imagery that I otherwise could not. Her poem, Five a.m. in the Pinewoods is no exception. Consider these three lines:

So this is how you swim inward,
So this is how you flow outward,
So this is how you pray.

She captures what blogging and spirituality have become for me: rhythm, movement, breathing, introspection, expression, ever-shifting currents. So this is how I pray; this is my spirituality—articulated and lived: I blog.

Blogging has created this vast and expansive context through which I can express my thoughts. Sometimes they are deeply profound or heart-wrenching. Other times they are silly and irreverent. And often they are just whimsical, hopefully thoughtful collections of what is going on in my head and heart. My blog posts are ways in which my spirituality is made manifest, ways in which I both speak and listen, am heard and spoken to.

“Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.” (David Steindl-Rast)

Blogging invites me again and again to come alive – to live boldly, out loud, and in truth. Blogging is a space in which I can dream, think, imagine, process, lament, and grieve. That is spiritual. That is prayer.

So this is how I pray. Not like the pastor in Sunday’s service—calling me to “higher” forms of spirituality; but in the virtual world, on a screen, through my keyboard, in the heads and hearts of those who read what I write, reaching the eyes, ears, and heart of God, experiencing life—abundantly.

I’m not as mad as I was on Sunday. Writing this post definitely helped. It reconnected me with what I know to be true, what I know brings me life. Indeed, it is my prayer. So this is how I pray.

Ronna Detrick Miller received her MDiv from MHGS in 2004 and then served on staff until March, 2009. She is now launching her own business: Renegade Conversations through which she offers coaching, spiritual direction, consulting, and speaking on ways that women and the systems within which they live and work can be reimagined, recreated, and restored.

I am astonished by the pages upon pages I’ve written for school papers that only one pair of eyes usually ends up seeing.

One time in my undergraduate, after writing a 15 page research paper, I randomly inserted a sentence two-thirds in that said, “If you’re actually still reading this, can you make note of it at the end?” To my amusement, (and embarrassment,) sure enough, the professor wrote, “nice try, I read it all.”

My desire to know that someone is actually reading what I write gets to a core human issue of futility: Does anything I do really matter? If I write myself onto a page, will I be engaged? Will I move anyone? Do I trust that if I’m real when I write, readers will actually enjoy what I have to say?

I sometimes buy into a myth that suggests that everyone else’s lives are invariably sexier and more purposeful than my own. Who would want to read about my life? Speaking from my own experience, to share my own story, no matter how tragic, mundane, or uncool it is– it’s risky, to say the least. Of course there are others who can write, review, and photograph better than me. And yet, I believe that offering small portions of my life to those who desire to read, shows us something of our dignity, humanity, and value.

I have an artist friend who puts her “in process” and unfinished artwork on her blog. Some galleries prefer that their artists don’t present their work in this medium, because in their eyes, it creates a diluted version of the real thing. Which leaves me asking: “what is the real thing?”

I think my artist friend is on to something: it’s about where we are in the process of this thing we call life– When I blog, what I offer is raw, unpolished, and in progress. This is what I’ve found: people are moved.

Jamie is a recent graduate from the Counseling Psychology program. She blogs and shares her photography regularly at her personal blog.