A Curveball and a Crossroads

From time to time, we write a post which is more than mere entertainment, because we know there are kindly folk about who pray for us from time to time. This is one of those posts.

Oxford has many good and excellent things to commend it. Mark has arrived home from a lecture or a seminar stimulated and refreshed such that one can almost see his brain ticking. There are many great people here, both at Wycliffe, church and other colleagues Mark has gotten to know, not the least of which is his supervisor.

One negative would have to be the administration. Attentive readers would have noticed that we are sometimes even slightly sarcastic regarding the administration.

And this is where the curveball comes in.

Oxford has recently changed the rules regarding its admission into the doctoral studies programme, insisting on a Masters (done at Oxford) with a certain grade to be obtained in each piece of assessment. This in itself is fairly standard practice now in the USA and nothing to get too excited about.

However, as you may recall Oxford releases none of the grades for any piece of assessment until after the next academic year has already commenced. So, if you don't make it into the doctoral programme you don't find out until its too late to apply to another university.

Being pessimists, and having heard stories of, shall we say, unusual criteria used on examinations/essays (a recurring issue everywhere in humanities where marking is less quantifiable than for mathematics), we decided several months ago to apply to a few other universities around the place just in case. As it happened, this was providential as it proved remarkably encouraging during a rather tough time. For example, Oxford told Mark his proposal for doctoral studies was insufficiently original. Three other universities found it sufficiently original and sufficiently interesting that they have made serious efforts to make contact with him. One potential supervisor couldn't take him on because of an existing high supervision load, but actually made the time to meet with Mark and talk about his proposal and his options so he '...didn't fall through the cracks'.

As it happens today we received a formal offer from one of the best places to study early Church history in the UK: Durham university. It has a large group of early Church history lecturers, including some with impressive reputations through to some up and coming young scholars. It looks like an exciting place to study early Church history and theology.

All they want from Mark is for him to finish the Masters he is currently working on.

So, we have to decide what to do. This is where the crossroads comes in.

For those of you who generously pray for us from time to time, please join us in asking God for a wealth of wisdom to make a good and right decision which honours him. And join us in thanking God for answering our prayers to open a way for Mark to do doctoral studies here next year.

Oh, and for those of you who are interested, this hasn't been a wasted year. Mark has had a good chance to be acquainted with much of the literature and one of the key texts in the original language. His dissertation will provide the context for the key theologian he is studying. That is to mention only the things which have direct bearing on the final doctorate, but there have been many other benefits also.

So, we may be off to Durham. Or we may stay here in Oxford.

At least we aren't moving countries this year. JMB