While I have never had trouble responding to that question, I now have something to put in folks hands that will be far more effective than the few points I could make in a brief conversation.

An “Alban Institute Special Report” on the transition into ministry has just been published and is now available for wide distribution. The report, Becoming a Pastor: Reflections on the Transition into Ministry, is co-authored by James P. Wind, President of the Alban Institute, and myself.

If a copy of this report has not come across your desk, I encourage you to request your copy today. You can do so by downloading the PDF version here (4.2MB). You can also request hard copies (while supplies last) directly from the Alban Institute.

To read the report in online, or for further conversation about this report, we encourage you to visit the Becoming A Pastor website which has been developed specifically for this special report.

Steering clear of the Resurrection was sort of where Mark’s account, this year’s Gospel, leads us.  “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

I fear too many sermons said nothing of any consequence this past Sunday...not true, I am sure, of the experience those congregations represented by the readers of this note.

My friend, David Dragseth, Pastor of Lake Park Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, sent me a copy of his sermon.  I think if I had been sitting in his congregation, I would have had a very different experience than I had in my pew this past Sunday.  Reflecting on the fear that seized those who came to tend to the body of Jesus on that First Easter morning, David proclaimed:

On the Sabbath so long ago, Mary and Mary and Salome had it all figured out.  Death ruled the day. 
This was the way of things.  You learn the rules and you play things the way death wants you to play them.
You come, you anoint, you dress it up, you pay your respects, and then you move on. 
Your human capacity to change anything is severely limited by death.  You can t do much. 
You are going to die too someday.  Know your place.

But then, then, this figure stands there in a white robe and says a few little words that scare the hell out of your nice little worldview. . .
He is not here, He s been raised.

And all of the sudden you’re scared. 
Because this illusion you ve been living for so long that you don t matter, this untruth that you really don t make a difference,
this opiate that your actions can t reform the world, this delusion that the world will never really change,
this heresy that we can t make the world a more loving place,
this suffocating and stifling societal sickness which says that our institutions and our governments
and our family systems and our relationships can t change or don t matter,
this entire culture of death and dying and negativity and despair, this massive stone of it is all is all declared a lie.

Roll the gargantuan stony untruth of it all away. . . death does not rule.
Life rules.  And because of that every one of your actions, every day, every hour, every second, will remain forever. . .
Your life is destined to be lived, no matter how much you try to kill it off. . .
your life pulsates forever. . . and that, my Easter friends, is an enormous responsibility. . .
are you scared yet?

Thank you, David D.  A reminder that there is so much of consequence to be said in Easter’s wake. 

We’re a long way from the time when the deacons of the church would gather in the parlor of the home of the deceased to prepare the body for the wake and the burial in the church yard. The history of the rise to dominance of Funeral Homes and their resident Directors is a fascinating one—at least from the standpoint of a pastor.  

Tracy was in his mid forties. Healthy, robust, outgoing, and full of adventure. He ran his own excavating business and was the master of the earth-moving machine. In the introverted culture of rural Maine life, his extroverted nature was a breath of fresh air for this extroverted leaning pastor. The call came to my cell on a Saturday afternoon. The signal was weak, but strong enough to pick up the trauma unfolding on the other end of the line: “Tracy’s dead!” It was Becky, Tracy’s wife of more than twenty-five years. She could barely get the words out. She went on: “He was crossing the road on his snowmobile and he was hit broadside. He’s dead.” The following Wednesday, the day eventually set for the funeral, was Ash Wednesday. The season and the magnitude of this death for the congregation and the small town as a whole made me bound and determined not to follow the assigned script for funereal practice I had been inducted into decades before. I had only arrived the year before to be the Pastor of this small Baptist congregation.  

To make a long story short, we set up a vigil at the church. There would be no wake at the Funeral Home. This time, the church would keep watch and become a sanctuary for the dead and the grieving. The sanctuary was cleaned from top to bottom and flowers were kept to a minimum. The afternoon before the day of the funeral, the Funeral Director delivered Tracy’s body to the church where it was received by the deacons. The casket was placed in the sanctuary with a Christ Candle at the head of the casket. That evening hundreds of people filled the sanctuary and visited and lingered with the family and each other. This little church had not seen this kind of life in living memory. 

When the wake was done, the congregation remained. All through the night, the candle burned and parishioners came and went, sitting reverently, praying fervently, keeping faith with Tracy. This continued right up to the time of the service the following day. The building never felt the same after that night. The church experienced a kind of awakening to its place in the community. To this day, I believe it was a transformative moment.  

This particular way of doing things did not become a practice in that congregation. However, services at Funeral Homes for members and related others became a rarity. They were almost always housed in the sanctuary. 

All that to say, I am learning to be more constructive in my critique of Funeral Directors and their Homes. The critique begins at home. What does it mean for the church to reclaim its ministry to the dead and the grieving? That’s the question pastors and congregations need to answer.  

Let me end this post with a positive turn toward the Funeral Director and his/her profession. I point you to a Frontline documentary entitled, The Undertaking, which aired on PBS in October, 2007. This program features the life and work of undertaker, Thomas Lynch and is based on his critically acclaimed book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. The book and the film combine for a wonderfully redemptive chronicle of the life of one undertaker. It was a reminder of the how good that profession can be and how much better we as pastors need to become at undertaking our role with the dead and the grieving. You can download the program from iTunes for $2 or watch it for free online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/undertaking/view/.

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.

It is my intention to post to this blog at least weekly.  The content will vary depending on what I am reading, doing, and reflecting on that week. 

At the center of my attention will be the issues and concerns of those who are in the early years of ministry.

That leaves me with a pretty wide field of relevant topics.

I encourage you to make use of the StreamCast guides that will help to orient you to the landscape of the site.

Welcome!  And let us know what you think.

• 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.

The first five years of parish ministry set an entire ministry. The habits, the inclinations, the dispositions, the way of understanding vocation is set in those first five years, and it lasts. (1)

That core belief—or a similar variation—is at the heart of four denominational initiatives that focus on new clergy as part of the Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry program. While the initiatives vary in format and approach, they share a commitment to helping new clergy learn to develop the disciplines, understandings, and relationships needed for a lifetime of healthy parish ministry.

How the programs are structured, how they have supported their participants, and what they have taught their sponsoring organizations are described in the following pages. As you read these stories of success and hope for a new generation of ministers, consider the following questions offered for reflection:

What challenges do you see new pastors facing as they make the transition from seminary to parish ministry?

What ways can you imagine that you and others—in denominational bodies, clergy groups, seminary communities, and congregations—could provide new clergy with concrete opportunities for support and development?

What are the benefits of having new pastors whose first experiences in parish ministry are healthy, productive, and nurturing? Who is affected by these benefits?

How might what is learned through these programs for new pastors be adapted to help others?

Bethany Fellowships
Making the Transition from Seminary to Parish Ministry

The Bethany Fellowships is a program for new pastors within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who are making the transition from seminary to parish ministry. Each year eight to 10 new fellows join the program and make a four-year commitment to a combination of semiannual retreats, peer support and accountability, and mentoring.

Over time, the Bethany project has gone through an evolutionary process. “We began by thinking that we would place a couple of recent seminary graduates in larger congregations,” said Don Schutt, who coordinates the program. “Our denomination does not have that many large churches, and we had some difficulty finding senior pastors who had the time to serve as mentors. After two years, we realized that an in-house residency was not going to work for us.” As a result, the decision was made to invite a certain number of new pastors to meet in a larger group twice a year at retreats held in metropolitan areas.

Each retreat begins on a Monday evening with worship. The fellows then share where they are and what they hope for from the retreat. In addition, each fellow shares a prayer request, about which the group then prays.

On Tuesday, the group visits a lively congregation in the area, usually a mainline congregation, but some have been evangelical megachurches or emergent congregations. The fellows learn about the congregation’s ministries and programs and hear about staff members’ work.

On Tuesday evening, a guest speaker leads a discussion of a topic that relates to a book the fellows read prior to the retreat. “We tend to focus on books that deal with practical skills,” Schutt said, “rather than something too intellectually heavy.”

The fellows then enter into 24 to 36 hours of silence during which they are free to pray, read, take walks, or sleep. On Thursday morning, they come out of silence and worship together. Afterwards, they break into small groups to debrief the experiences of the week. Thursday also includes free time and some type of party for the larger group. The retreat closes by noon on Friday.

Five seasoned pastors serve as mentors for the Bethany Fellowships program, both at the retreats and by telephone between these gatherings. Group e-mail and a blog site provide points of connection for the fellows as well, and a site visit by a mentor is arranged for almost every fellow.

One of the critical learnings that has emerged from the Bethany Fellowships, Schutt said, is the power and importance of peer support. “We have learned that the transition from seminary to congregational life is not easy,” he said, “and that new pastors need as much support as possible without curtailing their freedom to fail. Working in a congregation tends to be an isolating experience, but this program helps the fellows see that they’re in this together.”

Program participants have developed a level of camaraderie and a depth of interaction that have surprised program leaders. One fellow described the program as the “most nourishing, prayerful, and supportive group I have ever encountered. Being a pastor is such a lonely vocation that one begins to wonder if anyone else out there could possibly understand what it’s like. At the retreats, we realize that we have a whole network of brother and sister pastors who have been in the valleys we find ourselves in, and more importantly, have found their way back to a place of wholeness, health, and even resurrection.”

Another fellow said she feels “normal” during the retreats. “How wonderful it is to gather with other new clergy who are walking much the same path as I am,” she commented. “I often feel that the job I do is so utterly different than that of others around me that it is nice to come and be with others—ones to whom I don’t have to explain everything—ones who understand immediately.”

Another critical learning, said Schutt, has been that new clergy, despite all of their training and background, still have a need for spiritual formation. “We remain committed to including a large block of time for silence and reflection, as well as an opportunity for spiritual direction, during each retreat,” he said. “We want to help the fellows understand that prayer is critical for sustaining one’s life in a congregation.”

The fellows’ diversity also has provided opportunities for learning. The 50-50 gender mix, the participation of people of color, and the group’s theological diversity provide differences of perspective that are helpful, Schutt said. The opportunity for fellows from Disciples and non-Disciples seminaries to get to know one another also has been positive, he added.

In thinking about the future of the Bethany Fellowships program, Schutt said he and others within the Disciples of Christ believe it is critical to help develop viable, sustained pastors—especially in light of the national trend within the mainline of new clergy dropping out of parish ministry. Schutt said program leaders are grateful to the Lilly Endowment for providing the initial funding for the program and hope to raise private funds so that they can continue it “as a way of sustaining a new generation of pastoral leaders.”

First Parish Project:
Learning to Serve the Small Congregation

The First Parish Project is a national, ecumenical program of colleague support, leadership development, and spiritual growth for clergy serving their first appointment or call in a small-membership congregation. The program is hosted by the Hinton Center, an agency of the United Methodist Church’s Southeastern Jurisdiction.

The Hinton Center, located in Hayesville, North Carolina, offers small-membership churches a variety of resources and services. The center also developed the Colleague Covenant Forum, a program providing clergy with the opportunity for fellowship, support, spiritual formation, and renewal.

When Delmer Chilton joined the center as coordinator of spiritual formation ministries, he began to brainstorm with others at Hinton about how they might support young pastors. “My sense was that most young pastors grew up in urban or suburban churches that were program or corporate size,” he recalled. “They also did their field education in similar congregations. And most of their interaction had been with people their own age. But 90 percent of first calls are to chaplain- or pastor-size congregations in smaller settings with older members. That can result in culture shock and isolation.”

The First Parish Program, which Chilton directs, grew out of those brainstorming conversations. It targets pastors who are under age 35 and serve congregations with an average attendance of no more than 100. It is open to new pastors from all denominations across the country.

Each group within the program includes 20 to 25 participants and meets from Monday through Friday six times during an 18-month period. Although the largest percentage of participants are from the United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Methodist Church, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, other participants represent traditions ranging from Orthodox to Unitarian Universalist to Christian Reform to Metropolitan Community Church. “We’re not here to convert people or to change their theology but to learn about the act of being in ministry,” Chilton said.

During each gathering, the group worships together and spends two hours a day in small groups. The group also explores a specific topic—such as the personal life of a minister and spiritual disciplines, family systems theory, pastoral identity and public role, transitioning leadership from corporate to spiritual, congregational involvement in the community, or how to maintain colleague support throughout one’s career. “We focus on self-care, Chilton said, “because what you learn about that almost always works and never becomes out of date.”

Each small group also participates in a weekly chat room between meetings. Some of the alumni chat rooms are still going.

“We are trying to teach young clergy not to be lone rangers,” Chilton explained. “Without peer support, they can crash and burn or make stupid mistakes. One of our participants said, ‘I would have quit without this program.’ Clergy don’t have supervision as other professions do, so there’s not that protection.

“At a minimum, we can be a place where pastors can appropriately talk about what’s going on in their lives and congregations. We hope that the participants will learn to form their own groups. We try to teach them that wherever they are, they can be intentional and proactive about finding support. If they can’t form a group, they can find a spiritual director or go to a pastoral care center for supervision.”

In reflecting on the program, Chilton said he is amazed by the quality of the people entering ministry today. “We’ve been hearing that the prestige of ministry is down and that there is not the same quality of candidate,” he said. “That’s not what I’m finding. Today’s new pastors are as good, if not better, than those 30 years ago when I entered ministry.” He also expressed amazement at the deep devotion of these young pastors, along with concern about the financial challenges they often face. Many of these pastors, he explained, finish seminary with a debt of $30,000 to $40,000. “I have to believe that this debt contributes to the drop-out rate that we’re seeing,” he said. “These young pastors are facing this debt while also caring for their families. At the same time, it’s becoming more and more difficult for small-membership churches to pay what is needed by their pastors.”

It concerns him, too, that denominations are making it harder to get through the ordination process than it needs to be. “We are sending a double message when we say we need more young clergy and then make it so difficult to navigate the process—often because of denominational politics,” he said. “I hear stories from people who are good pastors but who went to the wrong seminary for their annual conference or are too ‘whatever’ for their specific synod. We need to be working with and encouraging these young clergy rather than treating them like political volleyballs.”

As part of the First Parish Project, Chilton visits each participant’s congregation twice. During those visits, members of the congregations often tell him that the program has helped their pastor to be more comfortable and confident. Some congregations share that they have never had a pastor stay so long. Chilton said he tries to help those congregations see themselves as teaching parishes that have a wonderful opportunity to help shape a ministry.

Company of New Pastors
Fostering Excellence among New Presbyterian Pastors

The Company of New Pastors is a vocational formation program designed to foster excellence in new pastors within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) by deepening and sustaining the cultivation of their theological vocation.

The initiative grew out of a commitment by the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship to help pastors be agile, imaginative people of substance in faith and life, explained Sheldon Sorge, director of the program. The hope, he added, was that a pastor’s renewed passion and love for God, the church, and the world would affect the entire congregation.

Participants enter the Company of New Pastors program at the midpoint of their seminary experience and continue for four years after seminary graduation. The program has an ongoing nature so that participants can develop relationships that allow deep conversation and engagement.

Since its inception, the program has involved 300 people—250 new pastors and 50 mentors. The program currently includes students at eight Presbyterian seminaries. (Two additional Presbyterian seminaries are ready to join the initiative, and conversations are taking place with several non-Presbyterian seminaries.) Seminary faculty members who are ordained pastors convene their “companies” on a monthly basis to share in prayer and theological study of the Presbyterian ordination vows. All seminarian groups meet together in the fall for a national consultation at the denomination’s national headquarters.

Upon graduation, the participants are reconfigured into regional groups, which are convened and led by pairs of experienced pastors. The curriculum for the four years beyond seminary focuses on the “theological underpinnings of the Lord’s Day service,” Sorge said. Attention is paid to significant theological works, as well as to preaching and worship leadership. Most participants, according to Sorge, say the program has had a dramatic effect on their preaching and worship leadership.

Another participant explained that “finding space and opportunity to sharpen my own theological understandings and sharpen my own sense of theological vocation is a great blessing—not only for me, but I hope it empowers and enables me to go back to the parish and allow the people there to understand the world around them in terms of the language of faith.”

Between gatherings, participants follow daily disciplines, including scripture reading, prayer, and study of the church’s confessional resources. “The disciplines that I learned inform me daily,” said a former participant. “I think my ministry would be completely different if it were not for these disciplines.”

Initial research on the program, according to Sorge, shows that its participants are staying longer in their first calls. After the first call, new pastors often are left on their own, he said. In order for there to be ongoing discernment and renegotiating of the call, he added, people need to talk—as they are able to do in the program’s “companies.”

“Our program also helps those new pastors who go in starry-eyed and then have problems arise,” Sorge said. “The group provides friends who can help you discern whether it’s a toxic call and staying too long will kill you or whether you need to hang in there, work your way through whatever it is, and not run from it.”

One of the surprising learnings from the program has been the unexpected sense of renewal among the mentors. “We selected people who embodied the graces of fruitful, faithful ministry and have been about it for awhile,” Sorge said. “So we were stunned to discover that they have found the program to be revolutionary for themselves. They report that it has made a huge difference in their own ministries.”

The program, he noted, also has been significant for the large group of people who have graduated from seminary but are not ready to be called to pastoral ministry—whether because a spouse cannot relocate or the candidate has not passed the ordination exams or completed the ordination requirements. It takes nine months after seminary graduation for half of the people who want a pastoral call with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to receive a call, Sorge said.

“This is a critical period,” he said. “How do you keep the call alive when you feel that you’ve been left on the bus or that you’re viewed as damaged goods? This program has become a significant way of helping people hold to their call. Some of our best pastors have come from this pool of people. This makes our program distinctive since most first-call programs are for people who already have a call. In our polity, the passage from candidacy to first call can be a lonely passage. Our program provides a community to help people work through it.”

Members of the congregations the participants serve have provided strong affirmation of these new pastors, Sorge noted. They report that they perceive the participants to be good or very good pastors and positive representatives of the denomination. They also have described the new pastors as being open to concerns and new ideas, and remarkably able to affirm diverse groups of people.

Sorge said the denomination is working on a funding plan that will enable this program to continue beyond the life of the current Lilly grant.

Residency in Ministry
The Power of Pastoral and Congregational Mentoring

The Residency in Ministry program, now concluded, was an initiative of the North Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church. The program placed new clergy in “mentoring churches” within the conference for a two-year residency.

Charles Johnson, the program’s director, said the program design team had decided that the mentoring churches should be large enough to have multiple staff. The senior minister would serve as a mentor for the resident, and a group of lay people from the congregation would form a mentoring group. The conference would provide salary support for the resident, and the congregation would provide housing, office space, continuing education, and benefits.

A new seminary graduate, recruited for the program because of promise, would then be matched with one of the mentoring churches and would serve there as a resident for two years. The resident would be free of a specific portfolio of responsibility so that he or she would have an opportunity to become familiar with the full gamut of pastoral functions.

Johnson met with the residents in a monthly covenant group experience that included Bible study, outside resource people, and spiritual sharing. During these group times, the residents “let their hair down” about their problems and what they were learning, Johnson recalled. As a result, they developed strong relationships.

During the program’s six-year life, 10 residents were placed in nine congregations. “We saw it as an experimental program that would help us learn about how new pastors can get a good start for a lifetime of service,” Johnson said. “We came to the conclusion that we had done that learning, so we are not going to continue the program.”

The learning has included feedback from participants in the program. Several of the residents bonded so well with the congregations where they served as residents that they stayed on as associates. Others moved on to new appointments.

One resident who was appointed to a congregation that was planning a building expansion said, “I felt so comfortable in that setting. My mentor and I had worked all of it through, so I had the right skills.” Another’s appointment was to a conflicted congregation. “The program prepared me for this situation,” the resident later reported. “I would have failed otherwise.”

The program also helped the conference learn the importance of identifying and affirming congregations that pride themselves on their ability to “train” young pastors, Johnson said. As a result of the program, the conference’s district superintendents have been asked to give serious attention to identifying these types of churches.

“Our denominational system of appointments can engender resentment,” Johnson explained. “Sometimes congregations become adversarial to their pastors because they don’t know how to be adversarial to the conference. When we put brand new people into those situations, they ask themselves what they did wrong and question their ability. If they can get a start in a place that is supportive and mentoring, then they are safe to make the normal mistakes of a new pastor.”

The program also resulted in learning about the importance of mentoring for new clergy. Johnson said the conference’s Board of Ordained Ministry has a process in place for bringing new persons into ordination. The process, which lasts three to four years, includes a mentoring piece, a covenant group piece, and a writing piece.

“Doing mentoring well will make some people lifelong pastors,” Johnson said. “The mentoring relationship has to be between people who are close geographically—not 200 miles apart. We hope to begin to put a mentoring process in place that’s more effective and to work more intentionally with covenant groups. By doing that, we will let young pastors know that we really want them in ministry and want to help hone the innate skills they have for a lifetime of service.”

Johnson noted that the program also allowed the conference to do some things outside the box of United Methodist polity. The bishop and cabinet agreed to allow the program’s leadership team to identify the candidates for the residency program and then to bring them together with the participating senior pastors and congregational mentoring teams for a day-long discernment process. The bishop and cabinet then approved the assignments recommended by the team out of the discernment process. “It was a tremendous gift to our program to be able to try a cutting-edge approach to staffing,” he remarked.

Johnson also recalled that early in the program’s development, the developers received questions from other United Methodist conferences. Johnson then learned that other conferences were beginning to call their probationary process for ordination candidates a “residency in ministry.”

“They were using the terminology, but not the process,” he said. “I hope that we can help redefine the probationary process and change it so that it truly becomes a residency in ministry—not just another name for the same old process.”

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(1) James Small, coordinator, Office of Theology and Worship for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), from Company of New Pastors, dir. Vernon Leat, prod. Blake Richter, DVD, Office of Theology and Worship, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 2006.

(Note: It is also available, formatted for printing, both in Microsoft Word format (.doc) or PDF.)

Thoughts on the Transition into Ministry Program

February 28, 2005
Indianapolis, IN

Unpublished address by Daniel Aleshire
Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada

I want to share some thoughts with you from my perspective at The Association of Theological Schools about Transition into Ministry. 

1. The programs that you guide and the perceptions you have about transition into ministry are likely influenced by your own transition into ministry. 

Mine came after seminary and graduate school, when for a variety of reasons, I felt that my work should begin in the congregation. I remember about four months into the pastorate of Bergen Baptist Church in northern New Jersey that the semester didn’t end, the congregation didn’t change, there were no grades, and the work was not going to start fresh next week. Higher education is an environment where life comes in four-month blocks. I could stick out a professor that I didn’t like because I knew the course would end. All the work came to a certain and clean stop every four months. There was a clear indication of achievement at the end of the four months in the form of grades. And after a short break, everything started fresh: new professors, new courses, all with limited carryover from the previous semester. Work in school has a wonderful pattern of frequent and clear endings and beginnings and often nice breaks in between. In the congregation, the people didn’t change every four months. My first Sunday, a somewhat troubled member of the congregation (about whom I had been counseled) was the first to greet me at the door after the service and told me my sermon was “the worst damn sermon” he had ever heard. (It wasn’t that good, but I have heard enough bad sermons myself to think there is a lot of competition for this distinction, and I hated to have won it my first Sunday in the pulpit!) Four months later, this man was still there and not much more impressed by my preaching. And other than him, the grades the congregation gave were so ambiguous that I was never sure how I was doing. In the fifth month, nothing was all that new. School can provide an addictive world of clear time frames, frequent changes, regularized opportunities to start all over again, and limited carryover from the previous four months’ work to the next four months’ work. 

My transition from school to pastoral ministry was from a kind of work at school in which I was in the driver’s seat: deciding how much of my time would be invested in what, what work I would do, and what time of the day I wanted to do it. As a pastor, I was much less in control of when I did what and, on more than a few days, what I did at all. 

If you are like me, these kinds of experiences stay with you—I remember that first year in full-time parish ministry with more clarity than I remember many of the other years of work since then. 

2. School-based theological education is deeply influenced by the ontology of “schoolness”— and the nature of a school defines a lot about the kind of learning that is possible in a school. 

A school provides an environment that is very peer oriented. There are people in the class with you, more peers than professors. They are friends and, at times, competitors, but a school is a community of peers.

A school gathers people in what should be safe space so that there is room to explore new ideas and embrace new information. A school is responsible for providing space that is inviting, welcoming, and open. A school deliberately seeks to remove potential threats. 

School-based learning is typically highly controlled. A course begins with a syllabus that tells students what they should read, when they should read it, what they should learn from it, and how they should be able to demonstrate their learning from the assigned readings. The map is clear, the objectives are stated, and the course is set. The completion of one course is linked to another, under a carefully proscribed curriculum. There are many variables, of course, but the center of “schoolness” education is very articulated, focused, and orderly. 

Schools divide work into orderly units so faculty can gain sufficient expertise in an area and the work of the school can be organized. Disciplines grow up in schools as a way of providing the internal structure necessary for the school’s work to be done well. The work of a school orders material for students, distinguishes one kind of material from other kinds, provides a reasoned and organized exposure to it, and sequences that exposure to enhance student learning. 

Schools and classroom-based education are particularly suited for learning that emerges from information in books, teachers, and human interaction. It is very good for the assimilation of material, for relating material in one subject to another. It is ideal for the pursuit of the kind of intellectual work that explores ideas and imagines new combinations and interpretations of ideas. 

Schools are absolutely superb at certain kinds of learning. If you want to exegete the Greek text, go to a school, take baby Greek, then intermediate Greek grammar, then exegetical courses. If you pay attention and learn your lessons, you will be able to exegete a Greek text. If you want to learn the history of the church, go to a school, take a course on early Christian origins and New Testament, then Patristics, then church history prior to the Reformation, then church history post Reformation, and top it off with a history of your part of the Christian family. If you have studied your lessons, you will know a great deal about church history at the end of your school experience.

3. These programs for Transition into Ministry, as best as I can tell from reading your reports, assume that theological schools do reasonably well what schools were designed to do. None of these TiM programs have a single strategy to introduce new pastors to basic theological concepts, to the history of the community of faith, or to the grand narrative of the biblical text. If you are working with the graduates of ATS member schools, you can typically count on their knowing these things. TiM programs are seriously engaged in providing the kind of learning that schools, by their fundamental character, are not very good at providing. 

4. Transition into Ministry programs serve two significant educational functions. 

A. The first is to help students with the cultural adjustment from school as their primary work environment to a ministry setting as their primary work environment. If the school is basically a peer oriented environment, then pastoral work, especially for new graduates in small congregations, is typically not peer oriented. If schools gather people into a safe and welcoming space, then ministry often throws them into spaces that are as likely to be threatening and unsafe as warm and welcoming. If a school divides work into orderly units, then ministry contexts confound work into chaotic and disorganized patterns. If schools are particularly good for the intellectual work necessary for the acquisition of material from books, then ministry settings are particularly good for intellectual work that calls for discernment across a wide range of individual and organizational ambiguities. If schools invent disciplines to organize work, then ministry contexts have a way of smashing disciplines apart because the categories don’t hold up in pastoral practice. 

B. The second purpose of these kinds of programs is to guide the kind of learning that occurs best outside of school environments. Roger Shinn, in an essay now many decades old, wrote that “… perhaps the most significant education cannot be programmed. There are times of shaking foundations, times of trauma, times of revelation that bring new apprehensions of the life and the world. Often they are the very experiences that civilized and compassionate education tries to spare people.” (1)

Congregational and other ministry settings create the environment for a different kind of learning. They help students learn to think more clinically, administratively, organizationally, and interpersonally. These settings don’t teach novice ministers how to “apply” what they learned in school. Rather, these environments evoke different “intelligences” and students engage in a different kind of intellectual work. It is intellectual work that deals with the kind of wisdom that accrues from practices, from skills that get better with repetition and reflection, from perceptions that are informed and enriched by coaching. These lessons are not learned well in a classroom; in fact, that can’t be learned in a classroom. I remember the first time in ministry when I left the joy of new parents at the hospital delivery room to go to the funeral home. The emotional shift was so real I can still feel it. How does one learn to transition from celebrating birth to grieving death in two miles? However it is learned, it is not by applying something that was learned in absentia in a classroom. It is an altogether different kind of learning. Pastoral work is a constant variation around certain themes, like jazz. (2)

It is not the kind of music that is played by learning to read music, then playing the notes. It is improvisational, and improvisational playing requires both knowing the tune and how to vary from the tune. One learns to play this kind of music by being a very good musician, by knowing the tune, and by practicing how to play using improvisation. 

5. Why are these TiM programs needed? I realized, in thinking about these relatively new programs you have been inventing, that the Christian church has survived for a couple of millennia without them. So, why do they seem so needed and promising at this time? It is the combination of two factors. The first is that theological students have gotten older and older. And while older students bring significant gifts to ministry and typically extensive experience in the church, they don’t bring many remaining career years for religious leadership. American religion needs younger candidates, as well, which brings us to the second factor. The current generation of younger seminary students seems not to have as much experience in the church as we remember other generations of younger students to have had. Some younger students have been involved in church their whole lives, but many have not been. They come out of seminary without the church equivalent of “street smarts.” They graduate from schools that tend to focus on more denotative ways of knowing and enter ministry contexts where the primary way of knowing is connotative. They need “church smarts,” and schools—even very good ones—are not very effective at teaching that kind of “smart.” It takes a context of practice and engagement for this kind of knowing. 

6. The main point of these reflections is that good ministry requires more than one kind of knowing, and different kinds of knowing are most readily engendered in different kinds of educational settings. For ministry, those educational settings are ministry context and school. Neither setting—the school nor the ministry context—should feel guilty that it is not educating the way that the other setting is educating. Each setting, if it is doing its work well, provides a powerful educational venue for a kind of learning that is crucial to effective ministry. My hunch, as an educator, is that each environment most effectively educates when students are immersed in that environment for sustained periods of time. I also think that the multiple kinds of education that are needed are most effective when each educational setting deeply respects the contribution, educational capacity, and intelligence of the other.

7. I am from the “school” side of things, and I cannot tell you what I think congregational educators can do to make theological education more effective, but I do have a list of things that I think schools ought to be working on. 

• I think schools need to work on the disciplinary structure by which we do our work. The current structure makes little sense except in a theological school and for the work of theological school teachers. The disciplines of practice radically alter how the theological content is organized, and we school teachers need to think about disciplinary structures— or at least educational practices related to the disciplines—that better serve our students. 

• Theological schools need to value the range of “intelligences” that good pastoral work requires and examine how we can cultivate as many as possible as deeply as possible. 

• As schools work on the unending project of the curriculum change, we need a better appreciation for the kind of needed learning that is not readily attained in the classroom, and to figure out how to free some time for students to have greater exposure to the environments that facilely teach this kind of learning. 

• I also think that school-based educators need to learn how to distinguish among levels of quality in other than classroom performance and to use this information to make better decisions about admissions and more effective interventions during seminary. 

I had wanted to share the following text with you in Indianapolis, but the evening was growing late, and I had already overly taxed David Wood’s “suggestion” of 20 minutes. The text is from ATS accrediting standards and summarizes the overall goal of the theological curriculum, as we understand it at ATS. It is not always, if ever, attained, but I want you to know what we are striving for:

In a theological school, the over-arching goal is the development of theological understanding, that is, aptitude for theological reflection and wisdom pertaining to responsible life in faith. Comprehended in this over-arching goal are others such as deepening spiritual awareness, growing in moral sensibility and character, gaining an intellectual grasp of the tradition of a faith community, and acquiring the abilities requisite to the exercise of ministry in that community. (3)

If the schools could give you recent graduates like that, I think TiM programs could make them into pretty good pastors.

Footnotes:
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1) Roger Shinn, “Education is a Mystery,” in John J. Westerhoff, ed., A Colloquy on Christian Education (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1972), 19.

2) Max De Pree, long-time trustee at Fuller Theological Seminary and chair emeritus of the Herman Miller Company, wrote a book several years ago called Leadership Jazz in which he argues that all good leadership is jazz-like and improvisational. I think the image is especially useful for understanding pastoral practice. 

3) The Association of Theological Schools, “4 Theological Curriculum,” 4.1.1, Bulletin 46, Part 1, Standards of Accreditation (Pittsburgh: ATS, 2004) 54.