Senior Review Pathways Assignment Reflection

1. Artifact Purpose and Rationale:

Pathways Assignments have been a key component of every ministry-degree student’s academic program while in the GST. These required assignments within every GST course have served an integrative purpose, calling for the student to make connections between their experiences, ministry contexts, and their theological education. Specifically, Pathways Assignments have sought this integration across four primary domains: 1) Ministerial Vocation, Identity, & Formation, 2) Theology of Ministry, 3) Practices & Skills Competency, and 4) Theological & Ministerial Integration.

Now that you have reached the end of your program, you have completed several Pathways Assignments that have called on you to engage in these acts of integration. Now it is time to take a step back and examine your work in these assignments, reflecting on the ways you have made connections and how you see your theological education shaping and impacting your ministerial practice. This artifact will serve as a major conversation point during your Senior Review, and will provide both you and your faculty reviewer with a starting point for thinking about your ministerial and theological development. Once this artifact is written it should be posted to the student’s e-portfolio along with the three Pathways Assignments that are the focus of its reflection.

2. Artifact Instructions

1. CHOOSE 3 completed Pathways Assignments to serve as focus of reflection

• • The choice of specific Pathways Assignments is entirely up to you. They can be three assignments that represents your best work, they can come from different disciplines (e.g., one each from a Bible, Theology, and History course), or they can be from different points in your program (e.g., one assignment from early, the middle, and at the end of your program).
  • Whatever your reason for choosing the three Pathways Assignments that are your focus, you will need to explain why you have chosen them at the beginning of your paper.

2. REFLECT on these three Pathways Assignments

• • Your reflection can take any number of directions, but you might consider the following questions as a starting point:
    • What are the primary ways you see yourself integrating your theological education and ministerial practice? How do these assignments reveal your theological learnings are impacting how you understand and carry out the practice of ministry?
    • As you look at the ways these Pathways Assignments connect your theological education and ministry, what vision of ministry arises? What is the understanding of ministry present in these projects?
    • Looking at these Pathways Assignments, what role do you see your theological education having in your ministry?

3. WRITE a 500-800 word paper that explores your reflection on these Pathways Assignments. Your reflection should answer the following questions:

• • As you review your work in these Pathways Assignments, what have you learned about yourself (your primary convictions, your strengths, your understandings about ministry, etc.)?
  • What is your reflection on your work telling you about yourself?

3. Artifact Guidelines

• 500-800 words
• 12 point font, Times New Roman
• Double-Spaced
• Uploaded to E-Portfolio with the three corresponding Pathways Assignments