As I have mentioned previously, during these pandemic days when all personal and professional travel is restricted by our mission organization, I have channelled my time and energy toward my dissertation. Due to a heavy travel schedule, it was going to be difficult for me to make much of any progress on my capstone project for my doctorate in intercultural studies. But all that has changed, and for the past nearly two months I’ve been making great strides in transcribing all the interviews I conducted with pastors all over the globe who have graduated from our Pathways Bible training program. Over a year of interviews, and now I’m spending the majority of every day working through them. I finished the transcribing (a bit tedious) and then worked at coding all the individual data units and compiling it into tables that could be synthesized together. I created a master table of all data (145 pages long), and more importantly as I was going through each individual piece of data, I created a master outline so every element that was shared is organized and analyzed and fits into some sort of structure. Whew!

My dissertation chairman seems pleased with my progress. Now the next step is to reflect on all that I’ve gathered and consider how it all flows together and how to structure all the material into a logical means of communicating what I’ve discovered. It has been so exciting hearing from wonderful pastors and ministry leaders about their experiences, ways they’ve grown, challenges they’ve faced, and encouraging them along the way. Now I need to write it up and make it useful not only for our team but for many other organizations who take Western training globally, but who never return after the fact to discern what is being done with the training they offered. What are the various factors that affect how recipients of training process that information? What changes and what doesn’t stick? How can trainings be improved to consider these factors and grow to be more effective in the future? All this still lies ahead, and so I’ll “keep my hand to the plow” and forge on, thankful for this “shelter in place” period.

Pressing on by God’s grace, Eric