Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

The DMin in Community Organizing provides you with the knowledge and skills to help direct and focus the physical, theological, spiritual, and moral energies of ordinary people to do community organizing. In this track, you will learn about theories of social change and ethnographic research methods and be taught by experienced community organizers to help you strengthen your work and ministry.

Community organizing is the practice of forging relationships among diverse peoples in order to create long-term strategic and systemic change involving access to power and resources. Beyond organizing for immediate change, the hope of community organizing is to create permanent networks of people that are always ready and able to take action proactively around issues important to them and the broader community. These networks become a moral conscience for the community with the political will and organized power to bring about social, political, and economic change.

Taught by our distinguished scholar practitioners with strong backgrounds in community organizing, students in the DMin in Community Organizing will be trained to:

  • organize and reorganize people inside a congregation
  • organize and reorganize people in a community
  • win on issues important to both church and community
  • do relational meetings
  • undertake a power analysis
  • understand the motivating self-interest different groups have
  • engage in exegesis of biblical texts using community organizing principles

Working collaboratively in the Community Organizing track, students will test current knowledge, create new practices, advance the scholarship of community organizing, and learn skills and ways of thinking and doing that can and will transform ministry. – Dr. Angela Cowser, Coordinator for the DMin in Community Organizing

Doctor of Ministry in Community Organizing (DMin)