The work of ministry rarely happens only from behind a pulpit.
As an M.Div. student and Lipe Leadership Fellow, Daniel Phebus, M.Div. '27, is spending his summer at Boone United Methodist Church, a large rural congregation in North Carolina's High Country with four Sunday worship services across two campuses. He is preaching, attending meetings, learning about pastoral care and discipleship, talking with church members and community partners, and observing the rhythms of a congregation led by the Rev. Dr. Ed Glaize.
Mostly, though, he is meeting people.
"My field ed experience here at Boone UMC has put faces to all the hypothetical people that I will be ministering with and that I learned about in the classroom," Phebus says. "It grounds me in the local church. It helps remind me what I'm doing it for."
At Duke Divinity School, field education places students in ministry settings where classroom learning meets the daily realities of serving congregations and communities. Through supervised placements, students learn what it means to care for people in real places with real needs.
Phebus feels called to pastor in the local church because he says it’s what formed him—the local church and its people. “I wouldn't really know Jesus or be a student at Duke Divinity without the local church. I've been supported and affirmed through my whole life because of the work of the local church,” he says.
A Call Grounded in Generous Orthodoxy
That sense of vocation has been with Phebus since childhood. Growing up at Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis, Tenn., he remembers hearing a sermon at age 7 that gave him his first sense of a call to preach. He remained deeply involved in the church through college, eventually serving in lay ministry and as a delegate to his annual conference.
After his home church disaffiliated from The United Methodist Church, Phebus began asking deeper questions about faith and the church. He ultimately applied only to Duke Divinity School, drawn by its commitment to "generous orthodoxy and unity in diversity."
At Duke, he has found that diversity to be an essential part of theological education—to learn more about Christ from the different people around the classroom. It’s so valuable, says Phebus, because ultimately, this time is meant to be spent doing more than accumulating knowledge. It is about learning how that knowledge matters when a person is sitting across from you.
“In my time here, I learned to see God in the familiar and the foreign, to be comforted and surprised by the Gospel, and to continue to seek learning about our Risen Lord in the Scriptures and in my neighbors,” he says. “Every time I enter a classroom or read another very long assignment or try to make my way through an exegesis paper, I’m reminded that I’m doing it alongside of many others and that we are doing it for real people, in the local church.”
Church Rooted in Community
Phebus’s placement in Boone helped grow his understanding of what ministry can mean. Through the field education Communities of Learning program, Phebus has met with nonprofit leaders, government agencies, social workers, and community organizations across Watauga County, learning how the church can participate in the life of a community without trying to duplicate what others are already doing.
"It's helped me expand my understanding of church," he said. "The church is not just a group of people who sing some old songs and read a pretty cool book on Sunday morning, but people who are part of the community, people who live in a real place that has real difficulties. The church can actually be an asset for the community in which its planted and give good things back.”
Understanding the various ways that large churches can give back to the community is especially important to Phebus as a Lipe Leadership Fellow. The fellowship prepares students for leadership in large congregations, and Phebus hopes to serve as a lead pastor of a large church after graduation. Boone United Methodist has given him an opportunity to observe that kind of leadership in practice.
But he is interested in large churches for reasons that go beyond counting the number of people in the pews.
"The large church calls people from across difference to gather, to hear the same story, to receive the same sacraments, to make sense of the same life that they're living, and to understand that people who are in the same town might be living a different story than them, and to connect across lines of difference," he says.
Connecting Preaching and Pastoral Care
Glaize, Daniel’s field education supervisor, has helped him see how that happens through the ordinary work of pastoral ministry. From Glaize, Phebus has learned about the various roles of pastoring a large church and about the many other people whose work makes congregational life possible.
Phebus describes Glaize as someone who has modeled pastoral leadership through both teaching and example.
"One of the great things that Ed has reminded me of is that pastoral care is really part of the name of the game," Phebus said. "I've learned the intersection of preaching and pastoral care—that preaching and pastoral care inform one another."
Most of all, he has learned to listen.
"There are painful ways to learn things, and there are less painful ways to learn things," Phebus said. "And I found that being curious and listening to people who have done it before is an infinitely less painful way of learning and being formed."
The commitment to inclusion and the conviction to listen echoes what Phebus says is one of Duke Divinity School's defining gifts.
"What I really find the most special about Duke Divinity School is it's a place that's committed to a generous orthodoxy and a warm-hearted, ecumenical spirit," he said. "It's a place where you'll experience Pentecost."
And for someone preparing to spend his life serving a local church, that sense of community is everything. It’s the whole point.
"It happens on a local level," Phebus said of the church's work in the world. "One person at a time, one heart at a time, one cup of coffee at a time."
