Advent 2006

Status Report on the Deacon's Home Study Program

The Deacon's Home Study Program has been underway for almost a year.

The courses making up the Program are An Overview of Holy Scripture, A Survey of Church History, Christology from the New Testament to the Present Day and a final section on the Book of Common Prayer, Canon Law and practical matters.

There are now students involved on all of those levels. Two have progressed all the way to the Christology course, which is by far the most demanding, both in time and subtlety. Church History is receiving more attention among the group as they wrestle with the spread of the Gospel among the early Anglo-Saxons and Celtic peoples of the British Isles. The Scripture scholars are deeply immersed in learning how to see the interconnections between Old and New Testament and the over-arching themes that run through the whole Bible.

Some students have worked their way far enough along to be taking on the Church's Doctrine of Christ and His works. (The entire sequence requires students to write 55 papers, totaling some 110 pages.) The process of writing so many essays and doing so much reading on theological subjects has a deepening effect on their understanding of the Faith. New insights and new ways of expression are appearing in their papers as they progress. Since the goal of the Program is to help the students see more in the things they already knew and to help them learn how to learn more in the future, it is clear that they are succeeding in their task.

The work is hard and the students put in many long hours struggling with the problem of how to frame in words ideas they have never known or ones they have known but could not articulate. The students should be pleased with their effort and progress and the other members of the Province should look forward to enjoying the public ministry of these men when they complete their training.

Paul S. Russell, Academic Dean