DMiss Update

In between doing loads of laundry and watching soccer, I spent part of the morning yesterday before church charting the way forward with my DMiss program.

For those of you scoring at home, I now have just 26 days until my annotated bibliography is due, and just 54 days until the first draft of my 50 page, 100 source literature review is due.

Writing that, I may have just soiled myself a little…

As you know, I’m focused on inter-gender partnerships in mission, and it’s time now to dive deeper into what others have written about the qualities and characteristics that make such partnerships work well.

So in the name of keeping you updated, at the same time providing some accountability for myself, here are the next five books in my DMiss queue. The plan is to digest these this week.

1. Partnership: Women & Men in Ministry by Fran Ferder and John Heagle. From the back cover: “the authors develop a cogent rationale from scripture, theology and the social sciences for changing the dominant male-female stereotypes in order to construct a viable structure for collaboration in ministry.” Good thing, because I always like my rationales cogent…

2. Equal to the Task: Men and Women in Partnership by Ruth Haley Barton. I read this ages ago, but it’s time for a fresh look.

3. Bound and Determined: Christian Men and Women in Partnership by Jeanene Reese. Incidently, when you input that title into amazon, you should also input the author’s name. Otherwise, you’re in for quite an interesting selection of romance novels…

4. Becoming Colleagues: Women and Men Serving Together in Faith by Carol Becker. From the amazon page: “Through stories of mixed-gender teams in religiously affiliated settings-including congregations, agencies, educational institutions, and other faith-based nonprofit organizations-this book explores nine change factors critical to ensuring that men and women work together in mutually supportive ways.” Sounds fantastic.

5. Building Unity in the Church of the New Millennium edited by Dwight Perry. This one looks interesting. It’s a collection of articles about how the church can overcome barriers ranging from race to class to gender.

There you have it. Now either get copies and read them along with me, or cheer me on this week!