The excellent graduate of the United Master of Arts in Religious Leadership program:

• has significant introductory knowledge of, and beginning ability to, appropriate for contemporary contexts the Christian tradition in its biblical origins and subsequent major lines of development to its present global diversity of expression;
  
  
• understands the nature and dynamics of the contexts in which she or he, and the faith communities she or he leads, are called to minister;
  
  
• knows herself or himself as a particular person with gifts and yet limits, with global connections and yet a particular location, with her or his own call and yet accountability to a larger community, and has begun to develop her or his own ministerial-theological identity and authority, with a lifelong need for learning and a spiritual life which she or he is equipped to nurture;
  
  
• is able to analyze and evaluate contexts and self, as well as the resources available for ministry in those contexts;
  
  
• is able, out of the integration of faith traditions, contexts, and self, to construct a theology that - with and for the faith community of which she or he is a member - meaningfully names God’s presence and leading in the context; and, out of that theology; and
  
  
• is able to shape a pattern of community leadership that is adaptive, collaborative, pastoral, and transforming as it invites the faith community of which she or he is a member to become a more theologically astute, pastoral, and transforming presence in its context.