This course integrates sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, and development studies to equip students for contextually aware ministry. It examines how culture shapes human development, how societies form identity and community, and how ministry engages persons in their full social and developmental contexts. Students are trained to perform a double exegesis: to interpret Scripture faithfully in its own world while reading their own ministry context accurately, and to hold the two readings together without collapsing either into the other.

Central to the course is the CONTEXTS method, an eight-move field framework that carries a student from an initial ministry concern through cultural, social, and theological analysis to a participatory, asset-based response — and then to the question most often left unasked, which is who will own that response after the student has gone.