New Experienced Leaders Cohort to Enrich Fuller’s MAICS Program with the Best of the MAGL

Fuller Seminary is pleased to announce the new Experienced Leaders Cohort in the newly redesigned MA in Intercultural Studies (MAICS) program in the School of Mission and Theology. The Experienced Leaders Cohort within the MAICS will be a similar offering to the MA in Global Leadership (MAGL), which has provided alternative spaces to form mission leaders globally for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, the renewed MAICS, launching in Fall 2022, was developed based on the best aspects of the MAGL.

“We are positioning this new program to take up the banner of cohort-supported adult education in service of experienced missional leaders, which the MAGL carried for so long,” said Dave Scott, associate dean of the School of Mission and Theology. “Even as we finish these last few MAGL cohorts, we look forward to the new opportunities, conversations, and relationships that this new Experienced Leaders Cohort will provide for Fuller, and for the many cohorts of students yet to come!”

The MAGL, which began in 2003, was groundbreaking for its time. The first seminary degree of its kind to be offered almost entirely online, the program proved it was possible to facilitate genuine ministerial and missional formation even when studying at a distance. The program became an incubator for new ideas and best practices for applying adult learning principles and employing dialogical and multidimensional learning that centered students and their real-world ministry experiences, rather than a single professor. The MAGL program was also innovative and extremely successful at implementing a cohort model that allowed students to foster tight-knit learning communities while still remaining in their ministry contexts.

With the reconstitution of the Schools of Intercultural Studies and Theology into the School of Mission and Theology, as well as the launch of Fuller’s strategic plan FULLER NEXT, the time was ripe to reexamine all of the school’s programs. Instead of continuing to offer the MAGL, the faculty decided the program’s successes needed to inform the redesign of all master’s-level programs in the School of Mission and Theology. Much of the student-centered, practice-focused, and globally accessible education that was once the distinctive of the MAGL is now available in all of Fuller’s master’s programs.

Like the other degrees offered, the newly redesigned MAICS moves students through three stages of learning, from shared foundations in the seminary’s five major disciplines––biblical studies, missiology, theology and history, psychology, and practical theology––toward increasingly specific courses that provide in-depth training for students’ particular callings and contexts. The Experienced Leaders Cohort within the MAICS is ideal for those students interested in an intercultural studies degree who already have five or more years’ experience.

Learn more about the redesigned MAICS and the Experienced Leaders Cohort.