Rural Immersion: An Introduction (Or Just What the Heck is It?)

My name is Joy and together with Adrianne, I'll be blogging about my experiences in rural immersion during January term. We are both first years at LSTC (the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago). We are both in the school's master of divinity program, which means that with any luck (and a lot of prayer), we will become ordained ministers in the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) in about 3 1/2 years. In the mean time, we work on discerning exactly what it is that God is calling us to, and learning everything we can, while LSTC does its best to ready us for the ministry.

So how how exactly does this relate to the whole rural immersion thing? Well, during the January term, LSTC gives students the chance to do and experience a variety of things. One of them is the opportunity to learn more about rural life, i.e. get some idea of, if we become ministers in a rural area, just what we might be gettting ourselves into. I feel that God could be calling me to rural ministry so I'm trying to find out everything that I can about it.

We've had class this week, meeting with some great people from the Nebraska Synod, who have have attempted to at least fill us in on some of the basics of their state. (As a result, I am now much more familiar with a map of Nebraska than I ever was before.) They've even been nice enough to take us out to dinner.



Adrianne is third from the left (really, I promise) and I'm second from the right.

Like most any course at this institution, there was some assigned reading, Discovering Hope and Rural Evangelism. I particularly enjoyed Rural Evangelism, so much so that I jabbed my sister several times on the flight home for Christmas, so that I could read her excerpts from the book (last time she'll sit next to me). However, most of this course is about experiencing the reality, an immersion in the environment. That's what me and Adrianne (along with our other brave classmates) will be doing, and the two of us will be attempting to bring at least a taste of it to this blog for your reading pleasure.

So hello and welcome to our blog. Put your feet up and stay a while.