You are here: Home > News > The Harvest January/February 2008 > KSM dean

Grosso will lead revamped diocesan education offerings

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

	The Rev. Andrew Grosso

New life has been breathed into the Kansas School of Ministry with the appointment of the Rev. Andrew Grosso as the school’s dean.

Bishop Dean Wolfe has tapped Grosso, 40, canon at Grace Cathedral, Topeka, since 2004, to oversee the school’s ongoing redevelopment.

“I could not be more pleased that Andrew Grosso has accepted this important responsibility,” Bishop Wolfe said. “Andrew brings to this ministry a deep spirituality and enormous intellectual gifts. He will develop an exciting new vision for the Kansas School of Ministry that honors the traditions of the past but prepares to meet the new challenges of ministry in the future.”

Getting a revamped KSM operating is one of the top goals for Bishop Wolfe and the diocesan Council of Trustees.

No classes have been offered since the spring of 2006, when KSM suffered financial difficulties and had to suspend its monthly residential classes. The school was created in 1997 with a two-pronged purpose — to provide classroom and ministry education for those seeking ordination, and to offer lay people an in-depth educational experience.

Grosso said he welcomes the chance to be involved with education at the diocesan level. “Theological education is very much at the heart of my ministry,” he said. “Apart from assisting the community during worship, I don’t think there’s anything more important I can do as a priest than help others grow in faith and equip themselves so they can take up the ministries to which they are called.”

Before his ordination, Grosso taught graduate and undergraduate classes in theology and philosophy. He has a doctorate in systematic theology from Marquette University and is a published author.

Grosso said his first task will be to organize a working conference this spring that will focus on KSM’s renewal. He said he plans to gather clergy and laity who are involved in theological education in the diocese to examine the school’s mission and structure.

“We are not going to accomplish everything that needs doing in the area of theological education with a ‘quick-fix’ strategy,” he said. “Preparing people for ministry needs to be done in a way that is responsive to the presence and activity of God in our midst.

“This means that our efforts must be informed as much by prayer and worship as by anything else. What we’re after looks less like a program and more like a cultivation of a way of life.”

Grosso said that while a new plan for KSM emerges, attention must be paid to the needs of those starting the ordination process this fall. He said the school likely will design individual programs of study for those ready to begin right away.

He believes the school’s long-term efforts also will focus on expanding educational opportunities for those engaged in a wide range of lay ministries, as well providing quality continuing education for clergy. He noted that as the cost of attending seminary rises and seminaries cut back their course offerings, dioceses are forced to rethink how they prepare people for ordained ministry.

50 graduates

KSM began in 1997 under the leadership of Dr. Jacqueline Snyder of Wichita, the school’s first director. She was succeeded in 2001 by the late Archdeacon Jim Upton. The school sponsored a two-year program of studies, with students in residence in Topeka one weekend a month during the academic year. It focused on education, pastoral care training and creation of a student community of support.

KSM had been started with a grant from an anonymous donor that paid about a third of the school’s costs. Student tuition paid another third, and the rest came from the diocesan budget.

The grant money was exhausted by the end of the 2005-2006 school year, and at the time Upton said it would be difficult to ask students to assume that extra expense.

There were 50 people in the eight graduating classes since the school started. Of those, 26 were lay people who have not gone on to be ordained, 20 were ordained as deacons, two were ordained as priests under the old Canon 9 process (also called local priests) and two were ordained as deacons but since then went to seminary and were ordained priests.