One of the greatest challenges facing the world today is our intolerance of each other’s beliefs and the control waged upon each other in the name of OUR God. We see it within the varying sects of Christianity, we see it reflected in wars erupting across the globe as one group attempts to silence and/or destroy another group’s expression of what God means to them, and we are progressively seeing it take a more and more divisive hold here in our own homeland culture, challenging in the process the very ethics that we as Americans famously set up for ourselves and hold as our collective truths because of the governing powers we have agreed upon. This democracy was founded to embrace all religions, and this ministerial program is set up to allow dialogues relating to these world religions.
Disagreements aren’t new to our world stage; religious intolerance and the ignorance and fears flourishing from that hate has plagued the varying civilizations of power and created wars within them for millennia. We saw it erupt under Roman rule within Judaism once a rabbi named Jesus presented the dogmatic Jewish High Court with new ideas, we saw it in action with the inquisition during oppressive imperial and papal rule, we watched Hitler’s plan for a “master race” devolve into a sinister bloodbath of anarchy built upon the mass extermination of whole groups of people, and we are now seeing what the actions of a few within extremist thought are doing to the world perception of certain middle eastern traditions and ways of living. These examples highlight only a few of the recent and long-past conflicts littering our collective history in the name of intolerance and domination.
SOURCE LEGACY’s Ministerial Program is a World Religions Program because we believe that information and conscious dialogues are the most powerful tools on the planet, a light switch in a darkened room. Where light shines darkness dissipates. It’s a mathematical fact (go into a darkened room and turn on a light if you don’t believe that). Our goal with this program is to provide a studied overview of the influences within the major world religions, highlighting not what makes them different from each other so much as the core truths that in many ways make them in agreement. Each of these world religions began with teachers living extraordinary but human lives who found a way to elevate their own lives and then crafted ways to share that “way” with the many. It’s true of Moses and other of the Judaic prophets, it’s true of Jesus, it’s true of Mohammed, it’s true of Buddha, it’s true of Krishna, and it’s true of many, many others who sit at the top of the world’s religions as beacons of reason and teachers of peace. They were thinkers of systems, and this is a systems course.
SOURCE LEGACY’s Ministerial Program is, thus, an academic overview of the five major world religions that seeks to create and expand dialogues of understanding on the specific topic of the world’s five major religions. Information breeds understanding, and understanding breeds peace. We as teachers of the human heart believe that the role of a minister should be to communicate from the human experience with a foot in God’s world and a foot firmly in our world where inclusive dialogues and spaces of non-judgment always seem to breed acceptance. Think what a world we might live in when we can really do that with each other in every area of our lives. Think how safely everyone would then sleep at night knowing without doubt that God loves us ALL, with no exceptions.
SOURCE LEGACY’s World Religions Course employs multi-media materials, written and electronic, among other teaching tools relating to the five world religions. This program is highly dialogue and project-driven, it requires a commitment to independent study for full efficacy, and it culminates with requirements that take the student out of the classroom and into their community to craft ministries. One of my favorite teachers once said: “If you have an address book, you have a ministry.”
Our educational goal with Source Legacy’s licensure program is specifically to help create an educated overview of the world’s religions as a platform upon which the student’s ministerial career can be crafted. We help stabilize the space for integrity and balance within the core of these dialogues, but the dialogue for the student beyond us continues for life; we merely provide a beginning. A student can spend an entire lifetime attempting to assimilate the meaning of one single passage of one single text of one single teacher within one single religion if that is their choice; we’ve merely selected to take a more time-sensitive approach to licensure within our service-based program for those seeking this particular path.
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