On Being and Becoming a Pastor: How does anyone learn to do this job?

By David J. Wood

It was only two weeks in my entire ministry at a small Baptist congregation in New England, but several years later I still remember them vividly. Packed into those 14 days, it seemed, was the entire gamut of pastoral life:

A young couple with two small children told me they could no longer live together as husband and wife, and unable to cope, the husband checked himself into the hospital. A middle-aged single woman sought my counsel as she tried for the first time in her life to come to terms with the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager from her alcoholic father. Two key lay leaders informed me they could not attend church anymore because of a conflict they were having with a third lay leader. An older member was in the intensive care unit of the local hospital, struggling to stay alive. A cell phone company delivered a proposal to locate two small micro-antennas in our bell tower. The finance committee reported that our giving had fallen about $10,000 behind where it should be, making the lucrative cell-phone antenna proposal even more appealing. The starting time for Sunday worship service was changed from 10:45 to 11 a.m. And, within the span of a few days, my three children returned to school; my wife went back to her teaching position; and my unmanned car rolled the length of our driveway, careened down a 40 foot embankment and crashed into a tree. The insurance company declared it a total loss.

Looking back, I’m struck not by how unusual those two weeks were, but—with the exception of the runaway car—how typical, even routine. They illustrate the range of situations that can suddenly arise in any pastor’s life. They show the ways in which pastors constantly negotiate situations that are intensely private, yet public; personal, yet corporate; urgent, yet trivial. Unmentioned of course, are the constant demands of preaching, preparing and leading worship, office administration, sustaining one’s own spiritual life, and collaborating with lay leadership to carry out the ministry of the congregation. Successfully negotiating these realities—responding, interpreting, witnessing and leading appropriately—is a complex task, one that raises some interesting questions:

How does anyone learn to do all this?  How does anyone cultivate the competency sufficient to the complexity of pastoral life?

As essential as formal education is for pastoral ministry, the seminary alone could never have delivered me to a congregation as a competent practitioner. A class on the quotidian life of pastoral ministry would have been a yawner. What conditions foster the learning of the skills, intuitions, capacities, habits, and wisdom so crucial to pastoral competence, even excellence? As coordinator of the Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry (TiM) Program for the past five years, I am convinced that some fundamental conditions must be in place if pastors are to acquire the competencies necessary for excellence in ministry.

Since 1999, when Transition into Ministry was launched, the program has grown to more than 35 projects in congregational and denominational settings. Nationwide, recent seminary graduates are serving in more than 20 TiM pastoral residency programs in a variety of mainline congregations. In another dozen programs in the TiM initiative, young pastors in their first call are brought together in seminaries, denominational offices and other institutional settings to study and learn from each other and from seasoned pastors about the actual practice of ministry. In all, more than 700 young pastors have participated in the TiM program. Together, through their feedback, they have taught us much about the conditions essential to the teaching and learning of ministry. The following are some of the most important of those lessons. 

Pastoral peer relationships are critical to a good start in ministry.

Conventional wisdom has long recognized that beginning pastors need mentors, usually a “seasoned practitioner” capable of walking alongside a novice and sharing the wisdom that comes with experience. But this focus on the importance of mentoring (usually emphasized by those who see themselves as mentors) has kept us from recognizing the importance of peers. We have tended to view peer relationships as something that supports but is not essential to learning. Those who study professional education and formation, however, are increasingly convinced that the quality of learning that occurs among novice peers is equal if not superior to the learning that takes place in the context of supervision and mentoring. In the TiM program, our participants consistently tell us how important pastoral peers were to their learning and growth as pastors. Indeed, they identify those peer relationships as one of the greatest benefits of their TiM experience. Peer relationships provide a unique context for self-knowledge and practical wisdom that deserves the full support and encouragement of denominational and congregational leaders. Dominated by the “lone ranger” model of ministry, my generation of pastors thought competition was the principal way pastors related to one another. Our TiM participants give me hope that we are cultivating a generation of clergy who are better able to collaborate with their peers in ways that help to sustain pastoral competency over the long haul.

Without the time, space, relationships and resources for reflection, immersion in pastoral ministry cultivates only skills of survival and not excellence.

This may be more hunch than empirical claim, but I believe that how new pastors learn from and through the actual practice of ministry is perhaps the best predictor of what kind of pastors they will be. Most new pastors come out of seminary with enough common sense to negotiate their way into the field of practice and develop the requisite skills to get by. The brighter and more confident they are, the more likely they are to learn quickly how to perform well. But if that learning does not take place in an open system of relationships that fosters opportunities for critical and truthful reflection, then new pastors will almost certainly be set up in their ministry to become increasingly detached from the deepest part of themselves. It is no surprise how many pastors begin to falter in their vocational lives after 15 or so years of reasonably competent ministry. Some flame out in dramatic fashion, others survive on the job, living with a growing, unmistakable sense of detachment and inauthenticity.  Absent the context for reflection, experience is a lousy teacher. If my hunch is correct, if reflection is indeed vitally important to practice, then congregations and denominational bodies are doing untold damage to the formation of pastoral leadership by their failure to cultivate the conditions essential to such reflection.

Laity can play a positive role in pastoral formation.

Too often, congregations see themselves as recipients of well-formed pastors rather than co-participants in pastoral formation. To most laity, seminaries form pastors and pastors serve congregations. Although the congregation is clearly the context where pastoral formation happens, the role the congregation plays in that process is often cast in negative terms. The TiM congregational residency programs, however, created a different dynamic between pastors and laity, one that has repeatedly shown the powerful role that congregations can play in the teaching and learning of ministry. In the TiM residency programs, laity are called upon to contribute directly and explicitly to the mentoring of beginning pastors. As a result, laity typically become highly invested in the success of pastoral leadership across the board. Their mentoring opens up a new level of mutual understanding and appreciation between laity and pastors. When I visit the TiM residency congregations, I always meet lay leaders who express deep appreciation for the program and for how it helped them understand the role of pastoral leadership in a whole new way. Pastors, both residents and permanent staff, tell us the program has prompted a new conversation about pastoral leadership in the life of the congregation.

Mentoring is best conducted in shared practice.

Those who have had the most to learn in the TiM program have probably been the seasoned pastors who have served as mentors. Many of them have served on and over pastoral staffs for years. All say they have grown from their mentoring experience as they taught ministry in and through the context of practice. Nothing, it seems, concentrates your attention on what you do and why you do it like having someone watch you, hoping to learn by observing your practice. Many of our mentors say the experience forced them to reflect on their own practice of ministry in ways that have measurably increased their own competency. Serving as a co-participant with residents in the practice of ministry can make for an interesting mentoring relationship. In mentoring, the mentor’s performance is just as open to critique and reflection as the mentee’s. Together, the mentor and resident create a context for mutual discovery and learning that is especially fruitful. In the context of shared practice, the traditional dyadic, hierarchical model of mentoring tends to become, instead, a matrix for shared learning. 

To date, the academy has been the primary source of most efforts to prepare pastors to learn in and through the actual practice of ministry, usually through such programs as internships and field education. These efforts have been and will remain crucial to preparation for ministry. What we have lacked, however, are the forms and practices for teaching and learning ministry beyond the academy, opportunities rooted squarely in the context of congregational life and in the lives of seasoned and increasingly excellent practitioners.

In an article about the state of the professions, Howard Gardner and Lee Shulman, frequent writers about the professions, identified one of the primary hallmarks of professional work as, “the ubiquitous condition of uncertainty, novelty, and unpredictability.”

“While much of professional practice is routine,” they wrote, “the essential challenges of professional work center on the need to make complex judgments and decisions leading to skilled actions under conditions of uncertainty.” (“The Professions in America Today: Crucial but Fragile,” Daedalus, Summer 2005, p.15)

Such a description is surely true of pastoral life. The challenge for us is to develop the conditions for the kind of teaching and learning sufficient to the demands inherent in the field of pastoral practice.

The Rev. David J. Wood serves on the staff of the Fund for Theological Education as the coordinator of Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry Program. He is an ordained American Baptist Pastor and has served congregations as a pastor for the past 25 years.

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