The Emerging Scholars Network has passed some significant milestones over the past year. I’d like to take a few moments to review the past year’s events.

Flourishing in the Academy and Following Christ 2008

Following Christ and the ESN Day Ahead Conference marked a major milestone in the history of ESN. Our plan for a network of future and present Christian faculty was announced at the previous Following Christ, in Atlanta in 2002. While ESN has sponsored and participated in conferences before (perhaps most notably, the 2005 Mentoring Conference at the Macluarin Institute at the University of Minnesota), Flourishing in the Academy was our first national gathering for the general ESN membership. A few important things happened at Flourishing in the Academy.

• More than 80 ESN members met and made valuable face-to-face connections. While ESN values online connections via email, Facebook, discussion forums, our blog, and other avenues, we recognize that there is no substitute for face-to-face relationships. Our moderator, Francis Su, noted that a friendship begun at Following Christ 2002 had eventually become a working relationship, when that new friend (ESN mentor David Vosburg) joined the faculty at Harvey Mudd College. As a result of their friendship and the work of other Christian faculty and graduate students, Harvey Mudd and the Claremont Consortium sent a disproportionate number of delegates to Following Christ. We hope that many more stories like this one will be told at future conferences.

• Our plenary speakers greatly advanced the materials available on ESN’s Four Questions. From the beginning, ESN felt that there were Four Questions that all of our members should deal with, but our resources on those questions varied in its quality and amount. Our speakers — Ken Elzinga, Marc Baer, Mary Poplin, and Ron Potter — took those questions to a whole new level through their individual talks and panel discussions.

• Our workshops provided practical advice for attendees. Led by Christian faculty and InterVarsity staff, Sunday morning’s workshops offered advice on finishing your dissertation, interviewing well, sharing your faith on campus, spiritual formation, and more.

What impact will Flourishing in the Academy have on ESN? Already, we have been able to offer valuable content from the event through our website, and a couple of face-to-face events have been hosted since then. Perhaps the greatest impact has been confirmation of how important it is for ESN members to gather together on a regular basis. We are planning more gatherings in the future, and look forward to telling you about them soon.

Online Content and the Emerging Scholars Review

In August, we launched the Emerging Scholars Blog to bring more timely information to ESN members, to provide links to worthwhile resources on the Web, and to experiment with new kinds of content. My fellow blogger Tom Grosh has written some terrific posts, including a series on Lenten practices.

Then, in September, we published the first Emerging Scholars Review as a way to bring more of our new web content to your attention. Previously, our email newsletter had been pretty primitive by contemporary standards. We hope that you’ve enjoyed the improved format and deeper content. (Note: if you haven’t been receiving the Review, we might not have your current email address. Click here to update your membership information.)

We hope that you’ve been following along with the content we’ve been offering, but if not, here are some highlights from this past year.

Some of the most read articles from the Emerging Scholars Review have been:

• The Calling of the Christian Scholar
• Being a Good Brother: Balancing Our Callings
• A Christian Theology of Mentoring
• The Community of Scholars, Part One (Marc Baer) and Part Two (Ken Elzinga)

Some of our most popular posts from the Emerging Scholars Blog include:

• Randy’s Last Lecture
• Linguistics and Faith
• Preparing for the Lenten Journey
• Are PhDs a Waste Product?

We’ve also recently changed our blog’s schedule and refined its editorial focus. Read the announcement and let us know what you think.

Membership

Membership in ESN continues to grow. As of April 15, we had reached 3,368 members, an 11.7% increase over our membership from last June. Because ESN is committed to seeing the full diversity of God’s people represented in the academy, we began tracking the number of women and ethnic minorities who join ESN in 2006. Out of ESN members who’ve told us their ethnicity, 29% are from nonwhite ethnicities. Women make up about 30% of ESN members, with a greater number of younger ESN members being female, as you can see from the results of last summer’s member survey.

We’ll be sending out another member survey in a few weeks, and I look forward to hearing what our members think about the past year. I hope that God has blessed you, as I feel that He has blessed ESN.