VANDERBILT DIVINITY SCHOOL
Joy E. Bronson, Methodist Students’ Association Chair
Recognizing the need to develop toward new iteration and calling, the Vanderbilt Divinity School Methodist Students’ Association (MSA) has focused the 2017-18 year on engaging in a process of examen.
For nearly a decade, the MSA (which was then the United Methodist Students' Association) hosted Cal Turner Fellows, which were United Methodist students who received scholarships for their learning, engagement, and participation within the school and greater community.Two significant shifts occurred within the past five years: the Fellows programs came to an end and both the school and Nashville community experienced significant cultural shifts. These shifts impacted the organizational rituals that the MSA had developed over the previous decade.
Our faithful response to this impact—to the recognition that nothing remains as it was, and so God calls for our presence and being together in different ways than we have been—has for the past year been to work to assess the purpose, activities, and full make up and body of the MSA. This is all-inclusive of the executive board, the body, and the programs and events that we host.
White maintaining our typical slate of programming—which includes monthly lunch and learns, Friday eucharist service, outreach service projects, and various community gatherings—our focus has been to follow them with the essential questions of examen: As we go forward, how is each event life-giving to our community? How does it invite and create flourishing in our community with the Spirit of God?
As we close our year, we find ourselves prayerfully and faithfully transitioning toward reducing both our executive board and our programming and events so that we might better focus toward understanding our communities’ needs and how we can be of greater relationship and service to and with our Methodist community and the communities in which we live beyond the divinity school.
We honor and celebrate our past and history, and to where they have brought us today. We also look forward to discovering and embracing how allowing old things to pass away will bring us to new life.