DMIN & Black pastors reach new heights with Indiana Wesleyan ministry program.

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: Here is an article about the Doctor of Ministry program I designed. I created it to be innovative, rigorous and diverse. I am proud that my former doctoral students are now finishing their work and attaining their degrees. They are demonstrating grit (1 Corinthians 15:58) and grace (Colossians 3:13).

by JULIAN WYLLIE, Sep 2, 2016.

A new initiative launched in May at Indiana Wesleyan University is attracting a diverse group of students to the predominantly white school.

According to school statistics published by the Associated Press, 98 percent of students at the private Christian school in 2006 were caucasian. Today, that number has dropped to 91 percent.

The Doctor of Ministry (DMIN) program at Wesley Seminary, which will rotate its concentration each year, began in May with the Transformational Leadership concentration. The other concentrations of the program are Transformational Preaching (starting in 2017) and Spiritual Formation (starting in 2018).

Bob Whitesel, an award-winning writer, speaker and professor, is leading the first phase of the initiative and says the school’s new courses are built to increase racial diversity in enrollment by allowing working ministers to earn a degree while maintaining pastoral positions. Most of the program’s coursework is online, with two additional weeks of residential courses as a supplement.

Whitesel said the program currently has 10 Black students and five female students, out of 19 individuals total.

Charles Thurman, a current student, said the group has already traveled to Atlanta for one of the conference-style classes. The next two stops, Oxford, England, and San Diego, are scheduled for the next phases of the program.

“The residential courses are definitely a plus for networking,” Thurman said, citing the Atlanta trip as a valuable experience for him and other students. Thurman, who is considering writing his dissertation on African-American and multicultural leadership in ministries, said the program benefits by having Whitesel encourage diversity as a key to future success.

Whitesel, who is caucasian, said students in the doctorate program will need to be prepared for the challenges associated with a modern multicultural base of American churchgoers.

“Today’s pastors need more knowledge to make an impact. It’s harder to be a pastor today than it was 50 years ago,” Whitesel said. “We are looking at ways to innovate the church. We are learning how some churches are growing and how most churches plateau.”

Whitesel said taking students to places like Atlanta, England and the West Coast provides a multitude of perspectives about how societal influences will change how a ministry operates. For the Atlanta trip this summer, students visited Ebenezer Baptist Church and learned of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons to large congregations during the 1960s. They also met with Brian Bollinger, the executive director of Friends of Refugees, an institution serving Cambodians, Kenyans, Croatians, Liberians, Koreans and Iranians, among others.

“I wanted to take them to not just churches in Indiana, but churches everywhere,” Whitesel said. “We decided, ‘Let’s all go on a road trip and bring students with us.’”

Another student in the doctorate program, Mark Brown, described himself as part of the Baby Boomer generation looking to learn about prospective churchgoers of various minorities, including the Asian and Hispanic population.

He said he likes the program at Indiana Wesleyan because it helps him balance time as a student and daily work. In his opinion, other programs were not as practical and lacked the unique travel experiences for students.

“If this wasn’t online or formatted the way it is, I would not be able to study at a doctorate level,” Brown said. “I could never stop and live on campus for three years. Other programs either went to the same place three times or nowhere at all.”

Whitesel echoed this statement by saying, “When we started, we wanted to have the best of online. The students can go online and chat about the books and their papers with one another. It’s really this collaborative opportunity. I have one student who posts at 2 a.m., because he works at night and that schedule works best for him. Other students may post at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. in real conversations over a couple days.”

Brown said he didn’t miss having a weekly classroom setting because he, like most of the students in the program, has other responsibilities, such as work and family. He described the current model as a “best of both worlds.”

Read more at … http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/religion/article_df8e86b8-7063-11e6-9149-ab789409de2c.html

MULTIETHNIC & These 10 charts show the black-white economic gap hasn’t budged in 50 years #Washingto nPost

by Brad Plumer The Washington Post,August 28, 2013.

… My colleague Michael A. Fletcher published a big piece … noting that the United States hasn’t made much progress in closing the economic chasm between blacks and whites since the March on Washington 50 years ago.

“Even as racial barriers have been toppled and the nation has grown wealthier and better educated,” Fletcher writes, “the economic disparities separating blacks and whites remain as wide as they were when marchers assembled on the Mall in 1963.”

It’s an excellent story, worth reading in full. It’s also worth charting.

1) The black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as the white unemployment rate for 50 years:

A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that this gap hasn’t closed at all since 1963. Back then, the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks. Today, it’s 6.6 percent for whites and 12.6 percent for blacks.

2) For the past 50 years, black unemployment has been well above recession levels:

“Indeed,” notes EPI, “black America is nearly always facing an employment situation that would be labeled a particularly severe recession if it characterized the entire labor force. From 1963 to 2012, the … annual black unemployment rate averaged 11.6 percent. This was… higher than the average annual national unemployment rate during the recessions in this period — 6.7 percent.”

3) The gap in household income between blacks and whites hasn’t narrowed in the last 50 years:

This chart comes from a recent Census report on income and poverty. Note that just about everyone’s seen a decline in real household income since 1999.

4) In fact, the wealth disparity between whites and blacks grew even wider during the Great Recession.

“The wealth gap between minorities and whites has not improved over the past three decades,” reports the Urban Institute. “From 1983 to 2010, average family wealth for whites has been about six times that of blacks and Hispanics — the gap in actual dollars growing as average wealth increased for both groups.” And the Great Recession exacerbated that gap, as blacks and Hispanics were hit especially hard.

5) The black poverty rate is no longer declining:

Black poverty fell quickly between 1959 and 1969, from 55.1 percent to 32.2 percent. But after that, the drop was slower and more uneven. In 2011, 27.6 percent of black households were in poverty — nearly triple the poverty rate for whites.

6) Black children are far more likely than whites to live in areas of concentrated poverty:

“Arrested progress in the fight against poverty and residential segregation has helped concentrate many African Americans in some of the least desirable housing in some of the lowest-resourced communities in America,” the EPI report notes.

And those poorer neighborhoods have a way of perpetuating inequality, the report points out: “Poor black neighborhoods also have environmental hazards that impact health. A very serious one is higher exposure to lead, which impedes learning, lowers earnings, and heightens crime rates. While rates of lead exposure have been declining for all races, African American children continue to have the highest exposure rate.”

7) Our schools are more segregated today than in 1980

“Although the share of black children in segregated schools had dropped to 62.9 percent by the early 1980s, the subsequent lack of commitment by the federal government and multiple Supreme Court decisions antagonistic to school desegregation have led to a reversal,” notes EPI.

Why does that matter? “Promoting school integration is important because — now as a half century ago — segregated schools are unequal schools,” the report adds. “The more nonwhite students a school has, the fewer resources it has. A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending.”

8) The marriage gap has widened over the past 50 years:

This data comes from Pew: “Marriage rates have fallen for all groups since the 1960s, but more sharply for blacks than for whites. In 1960, 74% of white adults were married, as were 61% of black adults… By 2011, the black marriage rate had fallen to 56% that of the white rate: 55% of whites were married, compared with 31% of blacks.”

Relatedly, the Census recently reported that 52.1 percent of black children are living in single-parent homes, versus just 19.9 percent of white children:

Why does any of this matter? Here’s Pew: “Marriage is considered an indicator of well-being in part because married adults are economically better off, although that may reflect the greater propensity of affluent adults to marry.”

9) Blacks are still far more likely to be uninsured than whites. That’s true for both adults and children:

The chart above comes from a recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which notes that the Affordable Care Act could shrink the gap: “The large majority of uninsured people of color have incomes that would qualify for the ACA Medicaid expansion or premium tax credits for exchange coverage.” That said, a lot depends on how many states decide to expand Medicaid coverage under the new law.

10) The racial disparity in incarceration rates is bigger than it was in the 1960s:

Read more at … http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/28/these-seven-charts-show-the-black-white-economic-gap-hasnt-budged-in-50-years/