Missional Leadership Focus
JOIN THE NEXT Missional Leadership COHORT
The Doctor of Ministry Missional Leadership Focus forms pastors and ministry leaders to guide congregations and communities of faith in discerning their participation in God’s mission within specific contexts. Missional leadership points beyond churches and congregations and asks how we can join God’s work in the world. Faculty mentors accompany you throughout the program and help you maintain a contextual focus as you clarify corresponding research questions. A cohort facilitator gathers the group for worship and group formation while on campus and connects students online between on-campus class sessions, serving as a pastor for the cohort experience. The 2025 cohort will first gather June 2-6 and June 9-13, 2025.
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DISTINCTIVES
The Missional Leadership Focus includes:
- Cohort Mentors A distinctive aspect of this D.Min. program is the use of cohort mentors, who will companion the cohort throughout the program and help students maintain a global and contextual focus as they clarify corresponding research questions. Each cohort mentor will lead at least one online workshop between courses, providing integrative discussions and coaching on research. Each professor teaching a seminar will lead the Friday morning session to help the students bring the work of that course into conversation with the program goals and their own research agendas.
- Research Questions Students in the Doctor of Ministry program's Missional Leadership Focus are required to develop a guiding research question and learn research methodologies appropriate to that question early in the program. This research question will guide each student’s work between courses and will serve to further shape, clarify, and focus the relationship between course work and each student’s ministry context.
About the DMin Program
The D.Min. program allows you to step out of your ministry context to sift through new information and ideas, then step back in to discover how and why that learning matters. At the end of your course work, you will design and implement a project that engages your ministry context in conversation with your work in the classroom.
WHAT DO MISSIONAL LEADERSHIP FOCUS STUDENTS STUDY?
Theology of Missional Congregations
This course lays the foundation for a missional theology developed from within the pastor’s leadership postures, habits, and practices of cultivating environments of communal discernment as their congregation participates in God’s mission in the congregation’s specific context. This course will transition into the identification of a specific research project as the pastor’s embodied setting from within which missional leadership postures, habits, and practices will be cultivated.
Research Methods Seminar
This course will explore and develop the pastor’s research project by refining the research question and identifying an appropriate research methodology within the embodied setting while giving attention to the “lived experience” of the persons and community from within which the pastor will engage the rest of the program. Consideration will be given to defining theological reflection paying attention to developing a practice which allows us to be open to trust God as the initiator and guide of both vocation and call.
Race Response, and Scripture
This course explores authority and interpretation of Scripture with a focus on how race has operated in scriptural interpretation in the United States. Particular attention is given to sociocultural realities that shape the way individuals and institutions approach Scripture.
Pastor as Adaptive Change Leader
This course is a historical, theological, and practice exploration of the role of the pastor as leader of adaptive change. It re-interprets the key marks of ordained ministry—word, sacrament, order, and service—for the new missional context. The aim is one of transition from a focus on the pastor as adaptive change leader into a focus on the pastor’s congregation as missional community, and therefore, the need for an appropriate ecclesiology.
Re-thinking Church: Ecclesiology
How does it look to think about congregations not as communities that have to participate in God’s mission but that already are? What does it look like to think about the church not as a voluntary organization but as a community constituted by God? These are the kind of questions we deal with in this course as we explore the relationships between God’s mission in the world, the church, and salvation.
Practicing Communal Discernment
This course will explore a variety of ways in which the pastor as adaptive change leader can cultivate environments of communal discernment in their congregation for the sake of participating in God’s mission in their specific context. This course will transition from a focus on the congregational environments of communal discernment to a focus on how the congregation’s missional discernment is shaped by a relational engagement with their specific context.
Plunging into the Neighborhood
Building on the previous course’s habits and practices of communal discernment in a congregational setting, this course will take such processes of discernment into a journey of discovery in the neighborhood by using the postures, habits, and practices of community exegesis, by deep listening to the neighbor, building relationships, and forming bi-cultural bridge communities as an integral part of discerning the congregation’s participation in God’s mission in their specific context.
Public Theology and Prophetic Witness
This course will explore what it means to do public theology with an emphasis on reading and understanding the larger operations of power in church, neighborhood, and culture. Understanding that God is actively at work in the world, students will be challenged to explore how they can lead their communities to join in that work of God and to offer prophetic, embodied witness to God’s call to love and justice.
Leadership in the Midst of Conflict and Change
The premise of this course is that engaging conflict and change in productive ways is a crucial part of a community’s discernment process and can lead to a clearer understanding of how the community might participate in God’s mission in the world. Consequently, this course focuses on helping congregational leaders learn how to encourage healthy conflict, rather than the fear or avoidance of conflict, in their particular settings.
Noncredit Seminar
Will be taken online. For students needing assistance in project development. This course is not for credit.
Missional Leadership Final Capstone Seminar
This is a capstone seminar in which students share both their project and final results. This will be a shared evaluation process, in which students offer support and careful critique of themes which will become part of an ongoing dialogue for this cohort and future cohorts. Prior to this, students will complete a three-credit elective of their choice to address a particular theme or aspect related to the question and project they have been developing all along. Faculty who have taught in the program will participate in guiding this final seminar.
Missional Leadership Final Project
The program requires satisfactory completion of a doctoral project and paper which must demonstrate the candidate’s ability to identify a problem, issue, or concern in their own ministry, integrate appropriate theological, biblical, and professional resources, and develop a method for resolution. The doctoral project/paper must reflect depth of theological insight and its positive integration with the practice of ministry.
When do classes meeting?
| Date | Class |
|---|---|
| June 2-6, 2025 | DM300 Theology of Missional Congregations Scott J. Hagley, Ph.D. (Faculty Mentor) W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism, PTS |
| June 9-13, 2025 | DM310: Introduction to Research Methodology Donna Giver-Johnston, Ph.D. Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program, PTS |
| Jan. 5-9, 2026
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DM330 Rethinking Ecclesiology Edwin Chr. van Driel, Ph.D. Directors' Bicentennial Professor of Theology, PTS |
| Jan. 12-16, 2026 | DM340 Practicing Communal Discernment Amy Oden, Ph.D. Professor of Early Church History and Spirituality, Saint Paul School of Theology |
| June 8-12, 2026 | DM350 Plunging into the Neighborhood Scott J. Hagley, Ph.D. (Faculty Mentor) W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism, PTS |
| June 15-19, 2026 | DM311 Race, Response, and Scripture in Community Kimberly D. Russaw, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Old Testament, PTS |
| Jan. 4-8, 2027 | DM361 Public Theology and Prophetic Witness AnneMarie Mingo, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Ethics, Culture, and Moral Leadership and Director of the Metro-Urban Institute, PTS |
| Jan. 11-15, 2027 | DM320 Pastor as Adaptive Change Leader Mary Sue Dehmlow Dreier, Ph.D. Professor, Pastoral Care and Missional Leadership, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University |
| June 7-11, 2027 | DM370 Leadership in the Midst Change Leanna K. Fuller, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Pastoral Care, PTS |
| June 11-12, 2027 | DM380a Final Capstone Seminar Scott J. Hagley, Ph.D. (Faculty Mentor) W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism, PTS |
| Jan. 3-5, 2028 | DM380b Final Capstone Seminar Scott J. Hagley, Ph.D. (Faculty Mentor) W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism, PTS |
| Independent Study | DM390 Missional Leadership Final Project (6 Credits) |
LEARN MORE ABOUT PITTSBURGH SEMINARY’S D.MIN. PROGRAM
Connect with the Doctor of Ministry Office to learn more about our next Missional Leadership cohort. We'd love to have you join us! Apply now to reserve your space in a future focus. Financial aid and scholarships are available for those who qualify. Please note that applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Apply early, and before the priority deadline, for best consideration given a limited number of spots are available. If all spots in a particular cohort are filled, you can apply to be placed on a waitlist.
