Matching Donations Boost New Donald Joy Scholarship Fund
Asbury Seminary would like to thank the alumnus that has established a new scholarship named in honor and memory of Dr. Donald M. Joy, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Family Studies, who passed away on June 6, 2020. Dr. Joy taught at the Seminary from 1971 – 1998 and occupied the Ray and Mary Jo West Chair of Christian Education.
The new Donald Joy Restricted Scholarship Fund will honor the legacy of his ministry as a loved and respected professor at Asbury Seminary. All gifts made toward the scholarship will be matched up to $20,000 thanks to a pledge by one alumnus and one member of the board. If you would like to contribute to this scholarship, please click here or use the button below.
“Joy’s writing and ministry,” said Dr. Chris Kiesling, one of his students and now himself Professor of Discipleship and Human Development at the Seminary, “are marked by a high respect for Creation and a passion to mend a broken universe, especially broken people who have lost their way.”
Joy was an ordained minister in the Free Methodist Church. Upon his graduation from Asbury Seminary in 1954, he pastored churches for a few years before being installed as the Executive Editor of Church School Publications for the Free Methodist Publishing House. He served in that capacity from 1958 to 1973. During that time, he completed his PhD at Indiana University, centering on curriculum development with minors in educational psychology and English linguistics. On the basis of research for his thesis, he authored a lay training manual entitled Meaningful Learning in the Church, which served as the introductory field text for the Aldersgate Graded Curriculum among the Aldersgate group of seven denominations.
In 1971 he began a tenure track position in Christian Education at Asbury Seminary. His teaching focused on human and moral development, Christian education, and family studies. His best-known book is Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God.
Joy’s influence reached well beyond his students at Asbury Seminary, broad as that was. He was a frequent guest on James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” radio talk show and served as a consultant to the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Pentagon. Back home in Kentucky, he served a full term as president of the Kentucky Humanities Council.
Among his teaching duties at the Seminary, Joy inherited classes focused on outdoor recreational ministry. He soon discovered that such a class could not be taught in an air-conditioned classroom, and, with the dean’s permission, devised experiences in backpacking and cycling. Seminary students served as trail family leaders for groups of teens recruited from surrounding states. More than just training seminary students in outdoor ministries, these classes served to help teens participate in communities where mutual respect and honesty allowed adolescent pain to be uncovered and redeemed. Asbury grads today, scattered across the world, still carry forward such experiences in leading camping and mission trips and work camps.
Dr. Kiesling, interviewed Dr. Joy about what he would like to see in future generations of Christian educators. In that interview, Kiesling said Joy “observed that the method of God seems always to be to call people into ministry who bear the marks of their culture, transforming them by the blood of Christ and the grace of Jesus, and then enabling them to speak authoritatively to that culture in which they were wounded. Jesus is the prototype.” Joy pointed to Jesus who appeared to the fearful disciples after the resurrection. He spoke peace to them, then showed them the wounds in his hands and side, and the disciples were overjoyed. The credentials for Jesus’ authority, Joy said, were the showing of his own wounds. Christian educators, then, have the privilege of offering their own wounds as symbols of their authority.
Blessings,
Tammy
P.S. Remember, all gifts will be matched up to $20,000!
Support the Don Joy Scholarship
Dr. Joy and his wife Robbie had a profound effective on the ministry that my wife and I have named Desired Haven. Dr. Joys classes and books have been the basis for this ministry as well as how we live within our own marriage ❤️
Jim and Diane Chapin
Class of 1988
gud program