I did it! And here is what I now know:
Five things I learned in my Doctor of Ministry program
I did it!
After three and a half years of reading, writing, questioning, painting, sitting in silence, and slowly learning how to listen to God, to others, and to myself — I completed my Doctor of Ministry program.
This is not a small thing, and I don’t want to rush past it.
People have asked me how it feels to be done, and my answer is mostly that it feels surreal. I know that I have finished. I know that the work is complete. I know that I defended my project, passed, turned everything in, and reached the end of this particular journey. And still, there is something strange about arriving at a place you have been walking toward for so long.
So, I want to sit here for a moment in the joy of it.
My doctoral project, Artful Awakening: Using Art, Poetry, and Lyric as an Invitation to Embodied Spirituality, was more than a research project. It was a becoming. It asked me to bring my whole self to the work: my body, my art, my questions, my faith, my story, and my own unfinished healing. It asked me to pay attention to the places where I had been moving too quickly, explaining too much, trusting too little, and living mostly from the neck up.
At the heart of the project was this realization: the deeper work of transformation is not only about naming what is broken in the world. It is also about practicing another way of being.
The decolonizing work of Artful Awakening was not only about identifying systems of harm, though that matters deeply. It was about noticing the ways those systems live in us, shape us, rush us, silence us, and teach us to measure our worth by what we produce. It taught me that embodiment is resistance, creativity is wisdom, slowness is faithful, and transformation is deeper than information.
Over these last few years, I began to see how much of ministry, and honestly how much of life, has been shaped by productivity, performance, certainty, and control. I began to notice how often we measure faithfulness by how much we do, how clearly we explain, how quickly we respond, how well we manage, and how much we can hold together without appearing tired. This project invited me to lead from a different place. It invited me to trust the body, honor the imagination, make room for ambiguity, and listen for the Spirit.
I’m still discovering all the ways this research has shaped me. So I’m sure I will have more to share later, but for now here are five things I learned in my Doctor of Ministry program:
1. Embodiment is resistance.
When this journey began, I was tired in ways I did not fully understand. I had become very good at thinking, planning, producing, and doing the next thing. I could tell you what I believed. I could tell you what I was working on. I could tell you what needed to happen next. But if you had asked me what I was feeling, not what I was thinking or managing or trying to make sense of, but what I was actually feeling, I would have struggled to answer.
For most of my life, I had learned to treat my body like a vehicle. It was something to maintain well enough so I could keep going, but I did not really know how to listen to it. I did not know that my body had wisdom. I did not know that tension, exhaustion, breath, grief, desire, and joy could all be ways the Spirit was speaking.
This project helped me understand that there is wisdom in the body that the mind cannot access on its own.
And as a Christian, I keep coming back to the incarnation.
At the center of our faith is the astonishing claim that God did not stay abstract. God did not remain distant, detached, or disembodied. In Jesus, God took on flesh. God entered the world through a body that needed rest, food, water, touch, friendship, and care. Jesus wept. Jesus got tired. Jesus noticed hunger. Jesus touched wounds. Jesus let people touch him. Jesus paid attention to bodies that had been ignored, shamed, excluded, or pushed to the margins.
So, if God chose embodiment, then our bodies cannot be incidental to our spiritual lives.
They are not obstacles to holiness. They are not distractions from faith. They are not just containers for more important spiritual things. Our bodies are part of how we encounter God, how we tell the truth, how we discern what is life-giving, and how we participate in healing.
When I talk about embodiment as resistance, I do not mean it in an abstract way. I mean that so many of the systems around us benefit when we stay disconnected from ourselves. We are easier to manage when we are rushed. We are easier to shape when we are numb. We are easier to exhaust when we believe our worth is tied to our usefulness. A person who cannot feel their own weariness, grief, anger, joy, longing, or desire will have a harder time recognizing what needs to change.
So coming home to the body is not only personal healing. It is spiritual work. It is theological work. It is truth-telling. It is a way of refusing to let productivity have the final word over our lives. It is a way of remembering that we are not machines, minds, brands, roles, or outputs. We are beloved creatures. We are dust and breath. We are bodies held by God.
I learned to notice my breath. I learned to ask what I was carrying in my shoulders. I learned to pay attention to what made me feel free and what made me feel constricted. I learned that sometimes discernment does not begin with a perfectly worded prayer or a well-reasoned pro/con list. Sometimes discernment begins when your body whispers, “This is too much,” or “This feels like life,” or “You are holding your breath again.”
And maybe that is one of the gifts of an incarnational faith: it teaches us that God is not only found above us or beyond us, but with us, among us, and within the ordinary, tender, physical truth of our lives.
2. Creativity is wisdom.
As I was learning to listen to my body, I was also learning to trust my art.
I picked up a paintbrush for the first time in years, and watercolor slowly became a form of prayer. I love watercolor because it refuses to be controlled. You can guide it, but you cannot force it. The colors bleed into one another unpredictably. The water moves where it wants to move.
It was like painting became an embodied practice of surrender. It taught me that not everything meaningful can be planned ahead. Not everything holy arrives in a polished form. Not everything needs to be explained before it can be received.
For a long time, I thought art was something I loved, but not something I could take seriously. I was waiting for someone to give me permission to call myself an artist, a writer, or a poet. I thought there must be some invisible threshold I had not crossed yet, some accomplishment or credential or external validation that would make it true.
But then something shifted. I began to understand that creativity is not outside the life of faith. It is not the extra thing we add once the serious work is finished. Creativity is often how we access the serious work.
At the beginning of scripture, God creates. Before there is doctrine, institution, sermon, or system, there is a God who speaks light into darkness, separates water from land, fills the world with color and texture and sound, and calls creation good. So creativity is not outside the life of God. It is one of the first things we learn about who God is.
And if we are made in the image of a creative God, then our own creativity is not trivial. It is not self-indulgent. It is one of the ways we reflect God’s life in us. It is one of the ways we participate in the ongoing work of creation, healing, and renewal.
That became central to my DMin project. I was not using art, poetry, and lyric simply as tools to make spirituality more interesting. I was beginning to understand them as holy bridges. They are ways of helping us access the parts of ourselves that do not always respond to explanation, logic, or information alone. Art can reach places that thinking, reading, and even praying in traditional ways cannot always reach. A poem can sneak past the defenses we have built around our pain. A painting can reveal what we did not know we were feeling. A song can give language to grief before we are ready to speak it directly. A collage can hold together the pieces of a story that do not yet make sense.
Art creates space for ambiguity, mystery, contradiction, beauty, longing, and truth all together. And that matters because so much of our world teaches us to value only what can be measured, monetized, explained, or produced. We are taught to ask whether something is useful, whether it is impressive, whether it is successful, or whether it can be turned into content or product or proof.
But art resists that.
Art says that something can be meaningful before it is useful. Something can be holy before it is polished. Something can be true before it is fully understood.
In that way, creating became part of the decolonizing work of the project. It helped me resist the voices that told me my worth was tied to what I could produce, prove, explain, or accomplish. It helped me make space for mystery in a world obsessed with certainty. It helped me honor the imagination in a culture that often dismisses wonder as childish or impractical. It helped me trust that the Spirit does not only move through what is efficient, articulate, and easily measured, but also through what is unfinished, intuitive, beautiful, and alive.
3. Decolonizing is also about practicing another way of being.
The word “decolonizing” can sound big or academic or intimidating, but through this project it became very practical for me.
It meant asking: What has shaped us that may not be making us free? What have we inherited that teaches us to move too fast, silence our bodies, distrust our imaginations, flatten mystery, prize certainty, and measure our worth by what we produce? What have we absorbed from church, culture, family, education, and the systems around us that may not reflect the freedom and love of Christ?
And then, maybe most importantly, what would it look like to practice another way?
A way that is slower. More embodied. More honest. More creative. More spacious. More rooted in love. More open to the Spirit.
This project did not answer all of those questions. Thank God. I am less and less interested in projects that answer everything. But it did help me live the questions differently.
It helped me understand that decolonizing work is not only about what we critique. It is also about what we cultivate. It is not only about naming systems of harm. It is also about creating spaces of healing, honesty, beauty, imagination, and belonging. It is about noticing where the patterns of empire live in our bodies, our calendars, our churches, our leadership, our theology, and our expectations of ourselves, and then choosing to practice something different.
That kind of work is slow. It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to tell the truth. It asks us to listen to voices that have been ignored, including the quiet voice within ourselves that says, “There has to be another way.”
4. The church is for transformation, not just information.
This changed me, and because it changed me, it changed the way I understand ministry.
For a long time, I think I understood my role as a pastor primarily as a teacher. I wanted to help people know more, understand more, and believe more faithfully. And I still believe teaching matters. Scripture matters. Theology matters. Words matter. I have given my life to those things, and I still love them deeply.
But somewhere along the way, I began to wonder whether we had confused information with formation. Because Jesus does not only give us something to know. Jesus gives us something to become.
That realization has shifted my vision of the church. I am less interested in programs that simply transfer content, and I am more drawn to spaces where people can encounter themselves, one another, and God in embodied, open, and wondering ways. I am more interested in silence, questions, art, reflection, story, and the kind of mutuality that happens when no one person in the room has to have all the answers.
This has changed how I lead. I am less compelled to connect every dot for people. I am learning to lay the dots down with care and trust the Spirit to guide people as they are ready. That is a different kind of leadership for me. It is quieter in some ways, but it is not passive. It requires courage to release control. It requires trust to believe that God is already present before I explain anything. It requires faith to create space and not rush to fill it.
Honestly, maybe that is one of the greatest gifts of this whole journey. It taught me to slow down enough to listen. The Spirit was always speaking. The invitation now is to listen.
5. I am still becoming, and I am more open than afraid.
Now, on the other side of this degree, I feel different. Not finished. Not fully healed. Not suddenly confident every minute of the day. Not magically free from every old voice that asks who I think I am. But different.
I am more comfortable in my calling now than I have ever been. I am learning to trust God and myself more than I trust the outside voices that have tried to tell me who I should be. I am learning to show up as who God made me to be, in every room I walk into and every space I help create.
Pastor. Artist. Writer. Poet. Spiritual director. Question asker. Beloved child of God.
People have already started asking, what’s next? Truthfully, a nap. Then after that, I am simply trying to stay open to the slow unfolding of whatever comes.
That may be the biggest transformation of all. I am not afraid. I am just open.
Open to the right people finding their way to this work. Open to healing. Open to joy. Open to beauty. Open to God. Open to the light pouring in.
I have no doubt this work will continue to shape me, and I will have more to share later. For now, I’m celebrating. I did it, and I’m grateful!