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The concept of practice helps us better understand how preaching works, as well as how we can teach that practice more effectively. This essay develops a compact but wide-ranging view of practices, reflecting the current scholarly discussion. It also argues that preaching is a particular instance of this larger concept of practices. Understanding preaching as a practice gives new perspectives on what preaching is and allows us to consider how to employ broadly recognized standards of excellence to evaluate particular instances of students' preaching. Further, this essay explores how the teaching of preaching is a practice in its own right. The value of this insight is that it allows us then to explore how the character of the teaching and the character of what is taught can be consonant with one another, and in ways that can guide. This essay is from "Teaching Preaching as a Christian Practice," edited by Thomas G. Long and Nora Tisdale. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.

One of the primary aims of pastoral leadership education is to offer reflective processes that enable learners to surface, critique, and construct different epistemological conceptions of reality leading to more effective pastoral practice. In many pastoral leadership education programs, this type of intentional reflection usually takes place in a mentoring or supervisory relationship as well as in a reflective seminar. In this essay, I describe how I have used the "immunity-to-change language technology" as one type of reflective process for intentional reflection and transformational learning in pastoral leadership education. The results of my research and ongoing use of this educational tool indicate that it can be valuable for enabling change by helping learners expand their pastoral leadership capacities and become more effective in their practice. Given my findings, I conclude that this educational tool could be of interest to other educators who are seeking to broaden their own repertoire of approaches to transformational learning. A version of this research appears in a forthcoming book by the same author, published by Novalis, in Fall 2008.

The challenge of integrating knowledge, practice and vocational identity is a persistent challenge to theological educators. Cahalan describes how teaching two book-end courses in the M.Div. curriculum have opened up possibilities for integration as a process and a goal of the entire curriculum. In the course, Introduction to Pastoral Ministry, students explore six questions in relationship to ministry: who, what, where, when, how and why. In the culminating Integration Seminar, students demonstrate their capacity for thinking theologically about a particular pastoral situation. Through both written and oral presentation, students' ministerial identity and authority are shaped and challenged as they gain proficiency in drawing what they know from and into what they do in the practice of ministry. Integration is also a strategy for theological educators who strive to take seriously the experiences students come with, the settings to which they will go, and what they most need from the M.Div. degree to gain solid footing in practice while also engaging lifelong learning. This essay is reprinted from Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra, eds., For Life Abundant (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008).

Theological educators in church and academy alike continue to ask, "What is formation for ministry?" Dissatisfaction has increased within all participants of theological education – faculty, students, administrators, pastors, and church professionals. Temporarily postponing the "what" of formation, this article explores the dissatisfaction with formation language in terms of one critical dissonance: the improbable quest for a pastoral identity amidst the observable reality of multiple identities, chosen and imposed. A constructive response crafted by identities-in-practice, as configured by disciplined spiritual stewardship, gives both critical and contemplative guidance for a fuller participation by all in Christian formation. Formation then becomes defined with a publicly theological coherence: the "shaping-being-shaped" primarily by the Holy in the worlds mutually configured within improvised, risked service.

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