SWBTS Class of 2014

It's official.  I start at SWBTS on May 14th. I'm taking an i-course which is a one week class that takes a month to complete.  It's an elective called Ministry to Older Adults. So far, I am enjoying the reading and I'm looking forward to the class.

When this class is completed I will be over half way finished with the degree. Yes, half.

I was accepted into the Advanced Track degree program which reduced the total hours from 64 to 55.  Credit for what I have already done which is nice.  Then they accepted 23 hours from my degree at DBU.  That part surprised me and makes me believe this was the right thing to do for the Lord to make my path so clear.  So, after this class I only have 29 hours to complete.

Many of the hours required will be in theology.  This Fall is going to be a tough semester for me, but it's what I need to do.  Once I have this Advanced Master of Arts in Christian Education degree I will have met the requirements to apply for the DMin program at DTS.  I have a couple of faculty members at DTS supporting my decision to apply so I think it should go well once I have done my part to prepare.

Pray with me for endurance and wisdom.  It's going to be a hard two years!

Stay at Home

"Recently I read Kristina LaCelle-Peterson's book, Liberating Tradition. She said some thought-provoking things about how history has impacted our view of womanhood (and manhood).

In chapter five, Peterson gives us a short history of the "Traditional Marriage." As you read the following quote, consider how the Industrial Revolution has attributed to our Christian view of womanhood. For example, is it possible our interpretation of "man as the provider" and "woman as the homemaker" is tied to a historical event rather than our Bible?

Before the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no “traditional family,” if by that term we mean the husband going off to work while the wife stayed home. There was no place for the man to go off to, in fact, since before the Industrial Revolution 90 percent of the population in this country lived on farms. In the agrarian model, everyone worked and everyone’s labor was integral to the family economy. The man might sell or trade his corn at the market, but the women might sell or trade her butter, churned from the milk that she labored to retrieve from the family cows. The man might spend the winter fixing farm utensils and the woman might spend hers making cloth and sewing the clothes that the growing children needed to keep warm as they walked to school, but they would be gathered at the same fire as they did their respective tasks. No one was said to “work” while the other “stayed at home.” They both “worked” and “stayed at home.”

…With the development of factories and a market economy in the early nineteenth century, however, production began to move outside the home to a significant degree. First, textile mills and food factories began to replace work that had been the responsibility of women in the home, and soon factories expanded throughout the economy. Not only did this change the location where various products were made, but it also changed the basis on which the economy functioned. Now people were paid in cash for the work that they did away from the home, rather than for the materials or foods produced at home.

When that happened, people’s assumptions about marriage and family, and even masculinity and femininity, changed dramatically. Masculinity became linked to earning money and providing for one’s family financially; in fact, ideally he would earn enough money to have a wife who stayed home rather than having to go to work in a factory or take in laundry. Having a wife “at home” was a significant marker of having achieved middle-class status, since in the lower classes both men and women have always had to work." By Jackie Roese