For students at Duke Divinity School, field education offers an opportunity to connect theological learning with lived ministry, gaining hands-on experience while discerning their vocational call. For Shirlye Grandy, MDiv ‘27, field education has become a place where her own story of transformation informs her ministry with others.
Grandy serves at Jubilee Home, a Durham-based reentry and recovery organization that provides supportive housing and holistic services for individuals returning to the community after incarceration. Founded in part by Duke Divinity alumni, Jubilee Home offers housing, mental health care, substance-use treatment, employment readiness training, wellness programming, and other resources designed to help residents build stable, independent lives.
"This placement is teaching me how to practice embodied presence, to show up with compassion, humility, and steadiness as residents navigate the fragile work of rebuilding their lives," she said. "I am learning that ministry in this context is less about offering solutions and more about accompaniment, echoing Christ's practice of walking alongside people in their most vulnerable moments."
While classroom learning provides theological foundations, Grandy says field education has revealed how ministry takes shape in the little everyday moments and interactions.
"Jubilee Home is teaching me how ordinary acts of stability, shared meals, consistent routines, and honest conversations become sacraments of belonging for people who have known isolation and shame," she said. "These moments remind me that ministry is not only preached or taught, but also lived, often quietly, in the rhythms of community life."
As a formerly incarcerated person herself, Grandy understands many of the challenges residents face. Her experiences have shaped the way she approaches ministry and deepened her appreciation for what faithful presence can mean in the lives of others.
"My favorite part of my field education at Jubilee Home has been the privilege of doing ministry that is deeply relational and grounded in real lives," Grandy said. "Being able to walk alongside them, without judgment, without hierarchy, simply as another human who has survived the same terrain, has been profoundly meaningful."
Grandy's call to ministry began long before she arrived at Duke Divinity School. During her incarceration, she enrolled in the Project TURN program, a theological education initiative that brings Duke Divinity faculty and students into correctional facilities so that incarcerated students and enrolled Divinity students can learn alongside each other.
"My call to ministry began during my incarceration, when I enrolled in the TURN Program at North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Spring 2020," she said. "My very first class was with Dr. Anathea Portier-Young, and it awakened something in me I did not know was possible: the sense that God was calling me even in a place of confinement."
Over the next three years, Grandy completed coursework through the program and earned a Certificate of Achievement in Theological Education. Receiving that certificate in Duke Chapel just one month before her release became a defining moment.
"Standing in that sacred space, still incarcerated yet being honored as a student, I felt God affirming a calling I had never imagined for myself," she said. "It was the first time I allowed myself to believe that my story was not over."
After her release, Grandy transitioned out of incarceration through Arise Collective in Raleigh and continued pursuing the call she first discerned while incarcerated. Attending Duke Divinity School felt like a natural next step.
"I never thought I would be a student at Duke," she said. "Choosing Duke felt like stepping into a promise God had been preparing me for since that first TURN class."
Her experiences at Duke have expanded her understanding of ministry and helped her connect theology with lived experience.
"At Duke, ministry has become more than service or leadership; it has become a theological practice of presence, justice, and restoration," Grandy said. "My professors have helped me put language around what I lived through—trauma, resilience, community, and grace—and have shown me how these experiences can shape a pastoral identity rooted in compassion rather than shame."
As she looks toward the future, Grandy feels called to continue walking alongside people. She believes the need for that ministry is especially urgent today.
"In 2026, that call feels urgent," she said. "I see so many people navigating reentry, addiction, trauma, and isolation in a world that is moving too fast to notice them."
Rather than seeking to lead from a distance, Grandy hopes to accompany others through their own journeys of healing and restoration.
"My calling is to stand in the gap between who people have been told they are and who God knows them to be," she said. "And that calling matters now more than ever."
Through her field education experience at Jubilee Home, Grandy is discovering what that calling looks like in practice—not through grand gestures, but through the daily work of presence. In accompanying others as they rebuild their lives, she is continuing the journey that began years ago and now shapes her formation as a minister at Duke Divinity School.
