Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is as an accomplished consultant, trainer, curriculum designer, and speaker with 32 years of teaching experience. She earned her Ph. D. in Adult Education Curriculum & Instructional Systems Design at the University of Minnesota.

Pat’s duties as Managing Director of Research are four-fold:

First, she conducts listening, training, analysis, and writing for The Discovery Process, an applied ethnography for congregations, schools, and other organizations who wish to do self-study and participant interpreter research all over North America and in several other countries.

Second, she manages first and second tier research for a large, multi-denominational research project funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc. on the topic of innovating a missional church.

Third, she participates in writing projects with colleagues so that their 15 years of work can be translated into simple knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, skills, and pass-on-able habits that spring from deep theological reflection; she helps to develop user-friendly materials out of this writing for congregational and judicatory use.

Fourth, she assists a team of database designers to place all of the gathered data from hundreds of congregations and other systems into Church Innovations’ massive interactive database, Church FutureFinder, so that it may be used effectively in congregations, classrooms, judicatory, and scholarly circles.

Pat also writes one of Prentice Hall's highly successful textbooks, Business English for the 21st Century, which is used in colleges across North America. She is also working on an interactive CD-ROM text for students and instructors that exposes the system of English grammar and hyperlinks the user among the related parts of the system. This innovative approach to grammar demonstrates her combination of big-picture understanding with feet-on-the-ground workability.