Strengthening Pastoral Formation initiative grantee Campus for Urban Ministerial Education’s (CUME) mission is to provide a contextualized theological education for urban practitioners in Boston, MA. The center partners with and is informed by the local church as a training partner. This planning grant is meant to help CUME design its programs for institutional learning in ways that would elevate how they engage ministry needs of the city and spiritual formation of ministry leaders in the current, critically evolving context. Specifically, it would enable project director Rev. Dr. Virginia Ward and her team to investigate and design for that context, and thereby refine its equipping of urban leaders through focus groups with key stakeholders.
The CUME team hopes to learn from multicultural, urban practitioners best practices and models which they use in the urban church and various other ministry settings. They also hope to identify the components of current formation practices that do not provide students’ spiritual formation with the requisite multicultural skills and dimensionality. The learning would be used to shape current and future program offerings and to inform the urban curriculum. Tools would also be created and findings published on contextualized urban spiritual formation as resources applicable to varied contexts for current students and alumni. The project is in its early stages at present.