Nurturing Faith
April 28, 2025
DMin Students Answer a Call to Help People Heal and Grow
“For Christians who just want to be faithful, there’s a profound sense of hopelessness and overwhelm because of what feels like the largeness of forms of Christianity that are really harmful.” Rev. Juliet Liu is candid when she speaks about the difficulties pastors face trying to nurture their congregations. As co-pastor at Life on the Vine Church in the northwest Chicago suburbs, she says that she is constantly navigating both religious trauma her parishioners bring through the church doors and a broader culture that has too often made Christian faith synonymous with values that violate Jesus’ life and ministry. Spiritual direction is essential for navigating this gauntlet, so Rev. Liu decided to pursue a DMin at Garrett in a degree track devoted wholly to that pursuit.
The Spiritual Direction DMin track offers students a variety of skills—from discernment models to contemplative practices and trauma informed care—to help pastors and care providers meet people where they are and move them toward deeper faith and connection. “The re-envisioned track delves into the rich historical, theological, and contextual dimensions of global and decolonized spirituality—spirituality that is embodied, grounded in lived experience, and deeply oriented toward justice,” says Dr. Rolf Nolasco, Garrett’s Rueben P. Job Professor of Spiritual Formation and Pastoral Theology, who directs the Spiritual Direction DMin path. “The program’s structure and content are intentionally designed to provide faith leaders with a broader and more nuanced understanding of diverse spiritual traditions, while addressing the urgent challenges of an ever-evolving global landscape in which they live, lead, and serve.” Rev. Liu has found this approach to be one she can readily employ. “Even when harm is embedded in the way people understand their faith and spirituality,” she explains, “We can become a different place so that healing from that harm can happen and we can build something better.”
While many of the students in the program are pastors like Rev. Liu, the degree also attracts chaplains, counselors and other care providers who seek a faith-based approach to nurturing clients’ wellbeing. Laura Jackson is one such student: After more than twenty years of serving in a variety of vocations, from campus chaplaincy to trauma therapy, she entered the program with the hope that it would help clarify the kinds of care to which she felt called and open new professional avenues to provide it. “I’ve held basically every kind of holy listening license,” she says. “But I’m not ordained, I don’t have a parish. I asked, ‘Do you think I should still apply to the program? And Garrett was so encouraging about doing the doctorate as a lay person with a less traditional ministry.’”
Initially, Jackson thought she would focus her DMin thesis about clergy burnout in the pandemic, and how to help pastors find balance. Once she was in the program, however, she started a project examining clergy spouses’ unique role, asking how to better care for their spirits—and found a potent need. “As a clergy spouse myself, I know the distinctive challenges they face. So I switched my topic and began a new one interviewing a dozen clergy spouses,” she says. “The through line between clergy burnout and clergy spouses is that when you work and live right alongside the church as a ministry professional, it can start to feel like your relationship to God and your relationship to the institutional church are the same thing.” She started The Partner’s Path, a non-profit organization that organizes local clergy spouse cohorts, creates online content, and offers workshops to learn new spiritual practices.
It’s not unusual for students’ lives to inform their research projects, the DMin degree program is designed to flexibly accommodate students’ unique passions and questions. For Rev. Liu, it’s led her to exploring how to decolonize Asian-Americans’ faith through group spiritual direction. The child of Vietnamese immigrants who converted to Christianity when they arrived in the U.S. as refugees, what started as a deeply personal question is now helping others find greater fulfillment. “I’m trying to learn the history in how Christianity reached parts of India before the Western Church was established, ways we can grow an authentically Asian Christianity,” she says. “But it’s also helping me make sense not only of my own personal faith journey but the movement of Christianity within my family.” These aren’t questions with simple answers, and the depth of the DMin curriculum has offered room for necessary nuance. “I see the really beautiful effects of Christian spirituality in my family, but also the difficult impacts,” she says. “I’m inspecting that for myself so I can help guide others.”
Regardless of the form that students’ projects take, one of the greatest blessings a DMin offers is a cohort with whom to explore this work. “I met lovely, fascinating classmates from around the country,” Jackson says. “When we had opportunities for mutual spiritual direction, things would happen that were real and very powerful. I’m continually learning the power of authentic connection.” Rev. Liu concurs with that assessment. “The learning we do, we do as classmates. But we’ve also really become friends,” she says. “Connecting as women pastors, especially as women of color, the nature of those relationships have been just as formative as the classroom learning for me.” Modeling the transformational potential of deep connection within the cohort helps students feel the impact spiritual direction can have in their care settings. “An ounce of authentic connection is worth a pound of information,” Jackson says.
At a time when people grapple with both an epidemic of loneliness and a cavalcade of traumatizing forces, that genuine connection can offer hope. “Spiritual direction at its heart is about creating and curating a sacred space where people feel seen, heard, and held as they are—sometimes for the first time in their lives,” says Dr. Nolasco. “It’s where healing begins and where courage to be is quietly reborn—because there is no other place God would rather be than in the concreteness of the quotidian life.” Surrounded by a bevy of siren calls to escape or numb our collective pain, it’s a brave calling to work through it. “I don’t think we can heal without reckoning with the woundedness and injury,” Rev. Liu says. “Spiritual direction offers holy witnessing and companionship where people can move forward because someone is holding that space beside you.”