Say the name Palm Beach, Florida, and it is likely to conjure images of one of the United States’ wealthiest enclaves, with resplendent homes lining the Atlantic Ocean, luxury cars, and golf courses. That is one side of this mid-sized county north of Miami. A few miles west, on the mainland, sits West Palm Beach, an urban community with a very different character. Here, significant numbers of recent Hispanic, Haitian, and South American immigrants, along with historically Black neighborhoods with a complex, centuries-old history in Palm Beach County, paint a different picture.
Census data show median household incomes in those westside neighborhoods between roughly $27,000 and $53,000, with owner-occupied home values averaging $200,000, compared with east Palm Beach’s $2 million-plus ceiling.
Jonathan Grenz, Ph.D., has been a member of the faculty at Palm Beach Atlantic University School of Ministry (PBA) for 19 years, serving as the founding director of the M.Div. program and, since 2017, as dean. He has fixed the School of Ministry’s sights on the pastoral needs of some 3,000 local churches in Palm Beach County. Typically small in congregants and in resources, they gather in churches, storefronts and homes, often led by pastors for whom pastoring is a second job. Many serve immigrant congregations and the descendants of West Palm Beach’s pre-Emancipation African-American community.
“It’s very entrepreneurial in nature,” said Grenz, who also holds MBA and M.Div. degrees. “Someone starts a church, and they’re focused on a very specific group: typically small, independent churches, and maybe more Pentecostal and charismatic.
“We saw there was very little here when it comes to theological education. We asked: ‘Can we create something that’s more contextual? Why not build on their skills and gifts to provide a livelihood?’ And this is where we went from the term ‘bi-vocational’ to ‘co-vocational’ to acknowledge the overlap.”
With that insight, PBA developed an interdisciplinary concentration in Community Transformation and Chaplaincy (CTC) within its mixed-delivery M.Div. program. The concentration integrates trauma-informed care and spirituality, organizational leadership and Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).
PBA also offers a fully online M.A. degree in Community Transformation and Chaplaincy. Classes are offered over two years, comprising course work and a residency program leading to eligibility for board certification through the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE).
Palm Beach Atlantic has been suported in its vision by the Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow initiative in each of its first three phases. Last year, it received a Large-Scale Collaborative grant that will support the new CTC program, encompassing an M.A. in Community Transformation and Chaplaincy, an M.Div. concentration in CTC, and related graduate certificates.
“The program reframes and expands the work of chaplaincy,” Grenz said. “We are helping pastors connect livelihood and calling. We want to be on the forefront of expanding the view of chaplaincy, and the spaces where chaplaincy takes place.”
In Situ Ryan Gladwin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Ministry and Theology, chair of the Theology Department and CTC’s director, overseeing the nascent chaplaincy program. A Palm Beach County native, he returned to Florida and PBA’s School of Ministry in 2014 after earning his B.A. at Messiah College, M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School and Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, and serving on the faculty at Messiah’s Philadelphia campus.
He is spearheading the Clinical Pastoral Education chaplaincy program, which currently enrolls about 50 students (a cohort of 10 students – the largest class to date – graduated in May). The CPE is the standard for chaplaincy training, involving 300 hours of on-site chaplaincy and 100 hours of instruction. Classes are offered synchronously online, with eight-week courses that meet live each week. This, Gladwin noted, allows students from South Florida, the United States, and international settings to remain embedded in their own ministry contexts.
“Our average student is about 45, and most are students of color,” he said. “We have a lot of African American students, islanders, and Haitian and Latino students. It looks more like South Florida.”
This fall, gladwin will oversee the launch of the Living-Learning Project, opening a facility for a half-dozen M.Div. students who will be embedded in the Historic Northwest neighborhood. A primarily Black neighborhood, Historic Northwest splintered during the desegregation era of the mid-20th century, when well-intentioned busing efforts stripped the schools of their cohesive role as centers of community, Gladwin said.
“The facility we hope to have is right next to the two oldest historic Black churches in West Palm Beach. They’re actually older than the city of West Palm Beach,” Gladwin said. “It’s a center-point of what we mean by community chaplaincy. We want the students living there in intentional community, doing co-curricular activities along with their studies, working with local churches and placements there.”
Gladwin works in tandem with Emma Feyas, the associate director of the CTC, who contributed to the writing of the Lilly grant proposal and now manages five staff members and the day-to-day operation of what she terms “a very demanding program.” Students (average age 45) are often in second-career occupations, working and raising families.
The School is helping pastors connect livelihood and calling, rather than treating paid work and ministry as separate lives.
Feyas holds a B.A. in Ministry and Biblical Studies from Ouachita Baptist University, and completed her M.Div. at Palm Beach in 2019. She held positions providing settlement services to refugees before taking her current post at PBA in 2022. She manages a broad portfolio of administrative duties, ranging from recruitment, enrollment and advising to arranging clinical sites, organizing chaplaincy-related programming, workshops, and an annual professional conference.
“An M.Div. already is a large degree, and we have to explain to prospective students that the CPE component is another significant commitment,” Feyas says.
Feyas has observed that the meaning of chaplaincy in South Florida is still emerging. “We refer to chaplaincy here as the ‘Wild West,’” she said. “Broadly speaking, the term already is very fluid; it seems to be even more extreme in South Florida. We have a good number of hospitals that don’t have chaplaincy or spiritual care at all. Hospice care is the only space that requires bereavement. And so usually that’s done through chaplains or spiritual care. Everything else is really varied.”
The school is responding by creating standardization for training all students, ensuring they have opportunities in multiple locations to gain experience, and working with placement centers to develop standards for chaplaincy.
“…impactful and profound” Maya Pinhassian arrived at seminary with a lifetime of cross-cultural and interreligious experience, a military and public-service background, and a desire to help people. She is, she said, finely attuned to conversations with God.
A first-generation American, her Jewish father was Israeli; her mother was Muslim. She said her mother exposed her to different faiths that “helped me understand people in a very deep way. I believe God made me for my ministry.”
Her path to her ministry calling was indirect: six years in the U.S. Air Force, a B.A. in global studies and a graduate degree in international relations, human trafficking work, a firefighter. She eventually found her way to the Lutheran Church through what began as a secretarial job.
“I wanted to help people,” she said. “That job at the church ended up being the way I learned who God is. After four years, I was going into seminary at PBA.”
The experience was formative: “CPE is the most impactful and profound class I’ve ever taken. Learning in that environment, the perspectives in the curriculum, the way we prayed, the spirit I felt, the inspiration of the faculty are incredible.. They taught me not just theology, but also how to feel the Spirit, the living Word.”
