“What is God’s dream for you?”

It’s this question that guides Dr. Lisl Paul, director of contextual education at Garrett, as she works with students to find the best contextual education placement for them. Asking, and then hearing theanswers, is also Dr. Paul’s favorite part of her job. When she asks, two things become obvious: the great breadth of God’s dreams for the ministry of the church and the very particular gifts that each student brings.

“For many years now, Garrett has encouraged, supported and undergirded students interested in ministry across the spectrum of what we would consider traditional ministry practice: within a parish, chaplaincy, spiritual care or clinical care,” she said. “But we have also supported students who are already practicing within a specific field and are looking to integrate their faith. We’ve had students who have been birth doulas or who have done art and music as their contextual education placement. We’ve had students in the ecology field, racial justice, child advocacy, queer studies—all across the spectrum. Our understanding of ministry practice is whatever allows you to deeply integrate your faith into your work in the world.”

This understanding of ministry and the diversity of contextual education experiences at Garrett have evolved over the last couple of decades, Dr. Paul says, along with a growing “desire on the part of the public to integrate their faith into their everyday lives.” During these years, full-time, traditional ministry positions have become less common. In response, schools like Garrett expanded their understanding of what ministry might be and what theological education can do. Dr. Paul herself not only shares this broader perspective but has lived it as she moved from being a pastor and campus minister into motherhood and work on the founding board of an immigration advocacy organization before coming to work full time at Garrett.

“Getting a Doctor of Ministry degree here at Garrett helped me to discern what my gifts and graces were and where I wanted to live that in the world,” she said. “And it just so happened that I was asked to be a peer group facilitator for the contextual education program here at the same time. Then there was an opening for the associate director position, and I’ve now become the director. It’skind of a winding path, but every single part of my vocational journey — the pastoring in a church, the campus ministry, the non-profit work, my mothering — all of those pieces have led me to a place of finding my vocational home.”

In her current role, Dr. Paul works with well over one hundred students at any given time — 126 at the present moment — across four degree programs at various stages of finding placements and completing contextual education requirements. While Master of Divinity students prepare for ministry in a variety of contexts through the two semester Field Education course, Master of Arts in Theology and Ministry students engage in a semester of contextual education that facilitates their research through methods like ethnography or participatory action research.

Contextual education for the Master of Arts in Pastoral Care and Counseling (MAPCC) and the PhD in Pastoral Theology, Personality and Culture (Clinical Track) has also changed over the last years, as MAPCC clinical track degree director Dr. AHyun Lee describes it. In 2022, Garrett began to offer a chaplaincy track of the MAPCC degree that requires two units of Clinical Pastoral Education,completed at a hospital or another appropriate site. At about the same time, shifts in the curriculum meant that clinical counseling students, who had previously completed clinical training through the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy in Chicago, could apply for internship positions at a variety of counseling centers. This change gave students the opportunity to choose sites based on supervisors, populations served, or therapeutic approach. The diversity of training possibilities also reflects changes within the field of pastoral counseling, which has become more responsive to the realities of widespread trauma and a desire for a broader range of therapeutic approaches.

For Dr. Lee, the heart of Garrett’s clinical education is not simply professional skill-building—it is formation. “Theology is not just added on top of psychological training,” she says. “We’re forming public theologians who can integrate theology and psychology in real relationships. Clinical education gives students a structured place for deep reflection as they learn that they themselves are part of the instrument of care. They become more self-aware, more grounded, and more ethically accountable. Clinical education isn’t just about learning skills; it’s about formation.”

While the details of contextual education may have changed over the years, both Dr. Lee and Dr. Paul attest that this focus on integrating theology and practice is nothing new. In fact, the clinical emphasis, the diversity of the faculty’s theoretical perspectives, and the strong connection to the work of the church were all reasons that Dr. Lee chose Garrett Seminary for her own PhD work. As faculty, she can imagine ways that Garrett’s program might continue to evolve as it more fully supports a diversity of students, perhaps through developing clinical sites of its own or a pastoral theology center that could more fully resource the local church. This could expand access, strengthen mentoring and deepen partnerships with congregations and the wider community.

Like Dr. Lee, Dr. Paul also sees the breadth of contextual experiences made possible through Garrett as an expression of the school’s longstanding values. “It speaks to our underlying vision for ‘the thriving of the church and the healing of the world,’” she said. “The thriving of the church cannot occur unless there’s also thriving input from outside of the church walls. Otherwise, we just become an insular institution that ends up navel gazing, right? And the healing of the world cannot take place unless the church is involved in that healing directly. Those two things need each other.”

“Deportability disciplines people to be silent.” When I heard Dr. AHyun Lee speak these words in a 2025 AAR/SBL panel presentation about clergy sexual abuse, you could feel the collective intake of breath. Much has been written about how federal raids stoke fear in immigrant communities, and still the scholarship from Garrett’s associate professor of pastoral care, theology, and psychotherapy illuminates untold tragic dimensions of this unfolding horror. In her recent book, , Dr. Lee details how clerical abuse in immigrant churches affects victim-survivors’ own psychology and sense of belonging. Speaking shortly after federal killings in Minneapolis, however, she powerfully articulates how the ongoing violence creates circumstance that make abuse more likely. “Deportability is always in the room,” she explains. “An abuser can simply imply, ‘If you speak out, you might lose everything.’” By deportability, Dr. Lee means living under the constant possibility of detention or deportation (regardless of your legal status)—an ever-present vulnerability that shapes choices, relationships, and risk.

A crucial facet of Dr. Lee’s work is her careful attention to the myriad reasons why victim-survivors often do not report their abuse, and how external systems can make that choice fraught with peril. Churches are often a center of migrant life, offering physical support as much as spiritual sustenance. “New immigrants sometimes stay in the pastor’s house until they can find their own housing. The church offers language translation, small groceries, sometimes even sponsor people’s visas,” she notes. “To speak up, you might lose all your resources, your connections, your community.” There’s also a potent desire, when policymakers label all immigrants as criminals, for the wider community to be perceived in a positive light—something that reporting abuse can threaten. “Often, the victim-survivor wants to protect their people,” Dr. Lee reports, “to emphasize, ‘we are a good community, we are good citizens.’”

The psychological factors that complicate reporting run deeper than concern for communal perception. When , people practice invisibility as a form of safety. “Deportability isn’t just a threat to people who are undocumented, it affects the whole immigrant community,” Dr. Lee says. “Even if you’re born here, there’s a fear you will be criminalized or detained, that you might experience violence just for running a stop sign.” In those circumstances, people become well-practiced at not being seen. “People connect being safe with being invisible,” she continues. “It’s better to hide, it’s better not to speak. That’s much safer than making noise.” That’s why it’s not enough to ask victim-survivors to report their abuse. “If visibility is dangerous, how can you tell someone to speak with a police officer?” she asks. “To engage the legal system becomes a threat.”

All this shapes the way Dr. Lee teaches students about trauma-informed counseling. An increasing number of students come to Garrett seeking careers as licensed clinicians, and it’s essential to name these often-unseen dynamics. “The best resources we can offer victim-survivors are not ones that force them to trade safety for help,” she says. “Many times, asking a victim-survivor to come forward isn’t about protection, it feels like asking them to bear the cross by themselves so that we can change things.” A fuller understanding of what shapes immigrant life is essential to provide ethical care. “You must make sure you are attuned to their immigration status, sensitive to how the legal system impacts their job, shapes their decisions and choices,” she notes. “Particularly when you’re working with an undocumented or a mixed family, reporting is never simple.”

And there are limits to what care providers can offer when broader systems are deliberately . “Abusers and unjust systems will benefit from silence when you discipline people into invisibility,” Dr. Lee notes. As the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously put matters, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Again, those unjust wheels extend far beyond undocumented people and their families. “Immigration policy impacts everyone. In Minneapolis, for example, people aren’t going to church because they’re fearful about what’s going to happen if they leave their homes,” she observes. “They lose that experience of belonging for the cramped safety of invisibility.”

All of this is especially tragic because of the immense blessings that immigrant churches bestow. “They can be the one place where people feel refuge and safe against the dominant culture,” Dr. Lee describes. “Some Korean immigrants spend the week in physically demanding, often invisible work—laundry, dry cleaning, cleaning, or other service jobs. Church can be one of the few places they feel fully seen: greeted by name, speaking their language, and showing up in their Sunday best—reclaiming dignity after a week of being overlooked.” Clergy sexual abuse adds ongoing pain as that place of refuge becomes a place of harm. “When church becomes abusive, there’s so much betrayal and fear,” she notes.

Obviously, clergy sexual abuse could and likely would still happen even if the U.S. had more equitable immigration laws. It would, however, be easier to confront and create institutional systems that mitigate the potential for abuse and facilitate victim-survivors telling their stories without fear of reprisal or state violence. “Even with more just policies, churches still need to do the hard internal work,” Dr. Lee concludes. “We need ways to report abuse that don’t run through the pastor, and we need trained lay leaders who can put real safeguards in place—especially around counseling, private meetings, and situations like rides or housing. We also need trauma‑informed, whole‑person support and trusted partners—immigrant‑rights groups and culturally competent pastoral caregivers and clinicians—so victim-survivors have options for safety and belonging without being pushed into the legal system or forced to give up their culture or faith.” But this work will take deliberate effort, and it is unlikely to succeed or even take steps forward when U.S. federal policy is designed to stoke fear and criminalize visibility—forcing people to trade silence for survival.