Dr. Beck's background at the University of Michigan has been in teaching religion, developing the curriculum in Studies in Religion, and working extensively on publications in biblical studies, including the Anchor Bible Series, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, Wm. B. Eerdmans Biblical Commentaries, and others. For many years now, she have also served on the Board of Directors of ETS, including the Academic Affairs Committee. She has worked hard to develop an exceptional and broad education program at ETS, one that will serve our student community well and will offer educational opportunities to challenge our diverse student body and our faculty.

In her teaching at ETS, she strives to strengthen our understanding of the Bible, the foundation of our faith, and to discover and discern the wide range of truths as they apply to us today. The men and women portrayed in the Bible were inspired to action through their faith in God. They have become our role models, highlighted by Jesus Christ, who lived in humility and based His teaching on the needs of His people, modeled on the founders of the faith, including Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, to whom he refers repeatedly in His teachings. The inclusion in His ministry of women, the sick, the lame, the poor, the downtrodden, the outsiders is the inspiration of the new faith that became Christianity.

After eight years of teaching metro-Detroit children in primary grades and junior high Dr. Benson began teaching adults. In church adult education settings she taught scripture, theology, and spirituality. While completing her dissertation, she taught theology and spirituality in a formation program for young Catholic religious and in a sabbatical program for Roman Catholics from around the world. Listening to the women and men on sabbatical these three years opened her eyes to concrete reality beyond the oceans. The personal and cultural richness they shared touched her deeply and challenged her to stretch her horizons.

In August of 2005, she began teaching at ETS as associate professor of spirituality. She loves teaching mature adults in an ecumenical setting and feels called not only to impart knowledge but to raise consciousness regarding the connection between faith and social issues including the plight of Earth today.

Dr. Beverly began his ministry at the early age of six as the son of a Baptist preacher in Indianapolis, Indiana. After serving in the US Army, he earned his BA, MA, MDiv., and DMin degrees. Since his ordination as a Baptist minister at the age of 24, he has severed several churches including: Riverside United Methodist, Stone of Hope Nondenominational Church, and Grand River American Baptist Church. Aside from parish ministry, he has had a career in pastoral care and counseling serving as a hospital chaplain, a Clinical Pastoral Educator, a pastoral counselor, marriage, and family therapist. He is a past president of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) and currently serves as Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Ecumenical Theological Seminary as well as conducting CPE. He is the author of The Places You Go: Caring for Your Congregation Monday Through Saturday.

Dr. Beverly is married to the Rev. Billie Beverly and has five children and ten grandchildren. He writes music, poetry, and plays.

Dr. Kenneth E. Harris is the founding pastor of the Detroit Baptist Temple, where he has served for the past twenty eight years. Dr. Harris is also the founding director of the UMD program at ETS, and currently serves as Professor of Biblical Studies and Urban Ministry. Dr. Harris formerly served as the Education Chair of the Council of Baptist Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity. He also served as Vice-Chair, Membership, of the former Metro West District, Boy Scouts of America. Dr. Harris also currently serves on the Board of Directors of Franklin Wright Settlements in Detroit as Board Vice-President. In 2006-2007 he served as Co-Chair of the Finance / Procurement Committee of the Governor's Transition Team for Detroit Public Schools.

He has been married to the former Ruthie May White for the past 38 years. They have three daughters: Keedra, a former ETS employee, who is with the Lord; Karisa (B.A., M.S.W., M.A.C.E.); Kenita (B.A. and current M.Div. student). He enjoys playing golf and enjoys spending time in the kitchen creating meals for the family.

For more than thirty-four years, Dr. Henderson has had the opportunity to serve God through pastorates in seven Christian Methodist Episcopal congregations in the states of Alabama, Kansas, and Michigan, respectively. Presently, he serves as the founding pastor of Resurrection Christian Center. In addition to serving as a pastor, he has served as a teacher and pastoral leader in church discipleship ministries and institutes that were sponsored by various Methodist congregations and several Baptist congregations. His ministry has included roles in the development of the Edmonds-Carr Nonprofit Housing Corporation, being an Adjunct Hospital Chaplain, and serving as a Theological Field Education Supervisor.

In 2004, he was invited to ETS to teach and to direct its theological field education program, which is known as Ministry Practicum. One of the rich qualities of this vocation that he really loves is the diversity of its faculty and staff. Another aspect of his calling is teaching and learning from his students who come from various traditions within the Church, as well as, from diverse ethnic communities throughout the state of Michigan. Finally, a very significant part of hid calling has to do with his constant advocacy for the intentional integration of spiritual or theological theory/principles with ministerial and/or ecclesiastical practice as the minister and the congregation look critically and honestly at the church's mission against the landscape of devastating social, political, educational, economic, and justice issues that manifest themselves daily in the life of our various communities.

Dr. Annemarie S. Kidder is an ordained Presbyterian minister (PC USA) and has been teaching courses at ETS since 2006. Born and educated in Germany, she came to the United States as a Rotary scholar to study journalism. She has earned degrees from the Academy of the Arts in Berlin (M.A.), the School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri (M.A.) and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville (M.Div. and Ph.D) with an emphasis in Systematic Theology and New Testament literature. For more than ten years, Dr. Kidder has served Presbyterian churches in Michigan and Ohio, and she has previously taught courses in philosophy, ethics, and Bible at various colleges. She is the author and translator of several books on the New Testament, historical theology, and the spiritual disciplines. Her works include translations of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, namely Pictures of God (First Page 2005) and The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God (Northwestern University Press 2001), Women, Celibacy, and the Church: Toward a Theology of the Single Life (Crossroad 2003), and The Power of Solitude: Discovering Your True Self in a World of Nonsense and Noise with a foreword by Eugene H. Peterson, author of The Message (Crossroad 2007). She is currently working on a history of private confession in the church, a translation of writings by Karl Rahner, S.J., and Christian mystical theology. She is also engaged in the area of worship, theology, and the arts, such as the visual arts and movies, and she translates and writes hymns.

At ETS, Dr. Kidder teaches courses in New Testament, the thought and history of the Reformation and the so-called Counter-Reformation, biblical theology, and theologians of the Reformation.

Dr. Oscar King, III is the pastor of Northwest Unity Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. He has served in the United States Air Force Civil Engineering Corps. He has accomplished wide array of community and economic development projects as well as serving on the board of trustees for St. John Hospital. He has been on the faculty of Ecumenical Theological Seminary since 1999. He is currently the first vice-president of the Baptist Council of Detroit and Vicinity.

Dr. King is married with two adult children.

Dr. Mabee was born in Orlando, Florida, on March 17, 1943. His early upbringing and education was in rural Missouri. He spent 6 months in Istanbul, Turkey, during his 12th year, while his father worked for the U.S. State Department. Sixth through eleventh grades found him living in suburban Washington, D.C., and moving back to rural Missouri in time to graduate from High School. His college years were spent at Truman State University, interspersed with a life-changing year as a foreign exchange student in the Ruhr Valley, West Germany. After graduating with a degree in philosophy and religion, he entered Dubuque Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) and achieved the MDiv degree in three years. From there he moved on to graduate school in Claremont, CA, graduating in 1977 with a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies. His first teaching position was a two-year post as assistant professor of religious studies at Radford University, Radford, VA. After that, he served for 11 years as chair of religious studies at Marshall University, Huntington, WV. His Detroit years began in 1988 with involvement as part-time campus minister at Oakland University.

He has authored two books on the special problems associated with reading the Bible in the American cultural context. He was the co-founder of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, an international organization dedicated to the study of the thought of Rene Girard. His current research interests include the development of a mature Christian response to the "post-nuclear" society, and developing a new linguistic grammar for more productive dialog among the world's great religious traditions. Highlights of his current involvement with ETS include helping to organize and work with the new ETS seminary intern program that utilizes the ETS environment as a laboratory for enhanced urban ministerial experience. One of the key components of the ETS MDiv degree for him is increased appreciation for what is "real" and "practical" in Christian ministry. It has been a joy to utilize that prospective as a jumping off place each year as he annually joins the faculty in trying to affirm and embody our commitments to the city in the way we study our Christian tradition.

Born in Tallin, Estonia, Dr. Olaf R. Lidums spent his early childhood in Upsalla, Sweden, and youth and college years in Chicago (immigrated in 1950). After graduation in 1965 from Luther College, Decorah, Olaf entered Wartburg Seminary, in Dubuque, Iowa, after a year of discernment while working as a social worker in a nursing home. Dr. Lidums received his MDiv and was Ordained in June, 1970. Over his 37 years of service, Olaf has served in a variety of congregational ministries, such as town and country, suburb, and three different urban churches in the Detroit area.

He pursued graduate studies in counseling psychology and received his M.S. in Counseling (1977) from U.W.-Whitewater, after which he worked as a Pastoral Counselor for LSS-Wisconsin for 6 years. Half of his 37 years have included other specialized ministries such as directorships in social service, homeless, hospital and addiction treatment ministries. After a long bivalent academic journey between PhD studies in psychology and DMin study at ETS, Olaf focused in on his dissertation work in the practice of trinitarian spirituality and received his DMin from ETS in 2003.

Jim Perkinson is a long-time activist and educator from inner city Detroit, where he has a history of involvement in various community development initiatives and low-income housing projects. He holds a PhD in theology/history of religions from the University of Chicago, is the author of White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity and Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion, and has written extensively in both academic and popular journals on questions of race, class and colonialism in connection with religion and urban culture. He is in demand as a speaker on a wide variety of topics related to his interests and a recognized artist on the spoken-word poetry scene in the inner city.

Jim is interested in using a broad array of interdisciplinary tools to investigate the way socio-economic position, racial presupposition, and gender perspective already inform our values and orientation to life long before we begin to grapple with questions of identity, ministry or spirituality. He is particularly concerned to understand the way white supremacy, as an effect of colonial Christian practices, continues to be reproduced in mainstream Western cultures. In addition, he explores how the creative forms of cultural resistance developed by marginalized groups can critically challenge Christianity today. These concerns figure in both his academic writing and the performance poetry that he produce as a necessary adjunct to teaching. Becoming at least bi-cultural in communication skills and poly-rhythmic in spiritual practice is fast emerging as a requisite capacity for Christian leadership in a transnational world. And the need for a pedagogy adequate to such a demand is his consuming passion.

Jonathan Roach has severed as the Director of Library at Ecumenical Theological Seminary since 2002. He is a member of First Congregational Church of Detroit and a graduate of the Congregational Foundation for Theological Studies. He holds a MDiv from Ecumenical Theological Seminary and MLIS from Wayne State University. Jonathan specializes in research on the religious history and development of Detroit. He speaks and teaches on this topic for many different religious and social groups.

Jonathan is married to the Rev. Dr. Esther Roach and they live in downtown Detroit.

Dr. Anneliese Sinnott has been Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean and Professor of Systematic Theology at ETS since 1996. Prior to that, she directed the Master of Divinity Program here at the seminary. In addition to her work here, Dr. Sinnott has been a frequent presenter at local, regional and national gatherings on a variety of topics and has contributed several articles to published works. She values the opportunity provided by ETS to guide others in learning in a multicultural, ecumenical environment. She believes that the task of a theological seminary today is to assist students in a discovery, examination and articulation of the Christian faith, both in the language of their own tradition and in dialogue with others as well as to effectively minister in the church and world of the 21st century.

Dr. Anneliese Sinnott was born and received her early education in Chicago, Illinois. Following her graduation from high school she became a member of the Adrian Dominican Sisters in Adrian, Michigan. Her early years as a Roman Catholic sister were spent teaching elementary school and music. She came to Michigan to attend seminary.

Dr. David Swink is currently the pastor of Chilson Hills Baptist Church in Brighton, Michigan where he has severed since 1979. He also served as the associate pastor of First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Michigan and as Assistant Minister at St. Michael's Church in Dumfries, Scotland. He is active in the American Baptist Church of Michigan and in his local community.

Dr. Swink's responsibility at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary is to help prepare persons for one of the most difficult vocations in North America. As a pastor in a local church, David knows first hand the importance of continuing spiritual formation. He emphasizes beginning and continuing a daily practice of the classic spiritual disciplines and learning how to listen for God's guidance in the ordinary aspects of life. David is the married with two adult daughters and a grandchild.

Born in Minnesota and raised in North Dakota, Douglas J. Tracy responded to God's call to ministry while still in high school. Upon graduation from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, he has served Presbyterian congregations and regional governing bodies in the the midwest and in Pennsylvania. During his first pastorate, Dr. Tracy discovered his deep love for educational ministry in the church, which became the primary element of his service to Christ and the Church. His doctorate, from Columbia University in New York, focused on the foundations of Christian formation. He joined the faculty at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in 2002.

He teaches courses in Christian education and in Presbyterian history, polity, and theology. He is married to Saundra J. Tracy, who serves as president of Alma College in Michigan. The Tracy's have two grown children and two grandchildren.

Completing a Doctor of Ministry degree is an exciting adventure. Working on a doctorate requires inspiration, dedication, and grace. By generating new knowledge about how to do ministry better, candidates are making a valuable contribution to creating a fairer, kinder world.

For the last five years I have had the privilege of sharing that adventure with a number of bold and persistent doctoral candidates. What a wonderful calling! I am thankful to the Ecumenical Theological Seminary for allowing me the joy of journeying with people who have carried on the seminary's mission by explored better ways to reach congregants, increased sensitivity to cultural difference, and more avenues to social justice.