Origins of Transition Into Ministry
Posted by David J. Wood on Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The initial “Transition into Ministry” (TiM) grants in 1999 and 2000 funded a handful of projects in congregational and denominational settings. In 2007, there are 30 projects. When the initiative began, Endowment staff recall, it was informed by the following assumptions:
• The initial years of ministry contribute to a trajectory for pastoral development over the course of one’s ministry. Habits and practices, both good and bad, established in this period have a durable quality to them.
• The experience of the transition from seminary to parish, from classroom to congregation, can be abrupt, untutored, and haphazard. As a result, beginning pastors tend to feel isolated and unprepared, lacking crucial support and guidance when they most need it.
• Often in Protestant church life, recent seminary graduates can find themselves situated as solo pastors in struggling congregations with limited collegial or institutional support. This can, and often does, result in a professional, relational, intellectual, and cultural isolation that can be detrimental to the formation of one’s vocational identity.
• A sustained, reflective, undivided engagement with congregational life and ministry is critical to the formation of pastoral identity and skill.
• The mentoring of young pastors by seasoned and excellent pastors is an important dynamic in the formation of pastoral identity.
• Learning with and from peers in ministry is a significant experience in vocational formation.
To address these realities, TiM programs have developed an approach that is centered in congregational ministry and that depends upon the close collaboration and interaction of congregations, mentoring pastors, and the beginning pastors.
Strategies that integrate these three “players” in various ways have been devised.
Some seminaries require a year-long internship, either through Clinical Pastoral Eduction or a local congregation, and these entail full-time immersion, but then only for nine to twelve months.
The TiM programs, on the other hand, involve at least two years of such immersion and position the pastor as a called pastor in
ministry rather than a student pastor in training.
The key difference between this undertaking and the more traditional approaches to practice-centered pastoral formation found in seminaries—most notably Field Education and Clinical Pastoral Education—is that the TiM program allows for a full-time, sustained immersion in the practice of ministry.
The central, organizing center of one’s daily life is not the academy but the life of the congregation. The principal teachers of ministry are co-participants in the practice of ministry.
Since the first TiM projects were funded in 1999, Lilly Endowment–funded projects addressing the transition into ministry now include more than twenty congregation-based “residency” projects and about a dozen institution- or judicatory-based “first-call” projects.