http://www.staging.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/index/ Transition Into Ministry Weblog en tj@transitionintoministry.org Copyright 2010 2010-02-22T07:41:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/so_what_are_we_learning/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/so_what_are_we_learning/#When:13:14:00Z A new Alban / Transition Into Ministry report Becoming a Pastor: Reflections on the Transition into Ministry has been released. In my the course of my work with the Coordination Program of the Transition into Ministry program, the question I am most often asked is, “What are you learning through this program?” 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. Featured 2008-09-12T13:14:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/rev_laura_mariko_cheifetz_named_director/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/rev_laura_mariko_cheifetz_named_director/#When:07:41:00Z Rev. Laura Mariko Cheifetz has been named director of the Leading Generations initiative at The Fund for Theological Education (FTE). In this newly created position, Cheifetz will connect the growing network of pastoral leaders, theological educators and Christian leaders who have participated in FTE’s programs, which aim to increase the number of gifted and diverse young people considering vocations as pastors and scholars. She will join the FTE staff on March 15. The official announcement is available for download as a Microsoft Office (.doc) file or as a PDF. 2010-02-22T07:41:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/midterms_to_ministry_a_review_by_david_wood/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/midterms_to_ministry_a_review_by_david_wood/#When:19:04:00Z A closer look at this new book from the perspective of someone who has spent a lot of time transitioning clergy. [This article is also available for download in Word and PDF for offline reading.] A Review by David J. Wood of, From Midterms to Ministry: Practical Theologians on Pastoral Beginnings, Allan Hugh Cole, Jr., editor.  Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2008 Over the past eight years, I have had the privilege of serving as the Program Coordinator for Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry grants program.  This work has helped me to see fruitfulness of attending more closely to those who are in their earliest years of ministry.  When this program began back in 2001, “transition into ministry” was little more than the name of a program.  Now, as indicated by this volume, “transition into ministry” has become a category of reflection and inquiry.  This evolution of attentiveness is all good in my estimation.  Midterms to Ministry is a collection of twenty-four essays by those who have been ordained to ministry (the majority from within the PCUSA, several United Methodist, and one National Baptist, and the rest from other mainline denominations) reflecting on their individual experiences of the transition from the preparation for ministry in the seminary to the actual practice of ministry in the congregation.  The book is intended to be a collection of distilled wisdom from those who have already made this challenging transition for those who are themselves in the midst of, or soon to be engaged in, making it.  The result is a collection of essays that fall, roughly, into one or more of the following categories: a personal memoir of one’s initiation into ministry with a summary of lessons learned, best advice for new graduates on how to begin ministry well, a primer for faculty on how to prepare students for this transition, a defense of the distinctive formation gained in seminary, a critique of the seminary’s failure to prepare students for the realities of ministry. While there are “nuggets of wisdom” to be found in these pages, this collection would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand that held the contributors more closely to the editors’ intent.  For example, some write as if their primary audience is the academy and those engaged in the preparing students for ministry (the essays by Jones & Jones, Paulsell, Doehring, and Miller McLemore).  Some barely touch upon personal experience, while others never move beyond it.  The most compelling contributions use the narrative of personal experience as a context for conveying key insights for anyone making the transition from seminary to congregation.  Tom Long’s essay, “The Essential Untidiness of Ministry,” is essentially an argument, with engaging personal anecdotes along the way, for the appropriate regard for the essential curriculum for ministry resident in both the seminary and the congregation.  These domains of learning are not to be opposed or conflated.  Rather, he concludes, “Good ministry is found…where pastors stand with one foot firmly planted in their theological education and the other foot just as firmly planted in the parish, and allow this resulting tension to shape their pastoral practice.” (5) This is all well and good, but Long is short on advice for the transitioning pastor on how one actually succeeds in keeping one foot planted firmly in the shifting sands of congregational life and the other on the more predictable ground of the academy without suffering a serious groin injury in the process.  At the other end of the spectrum there is Will Willimon’s somewhat cranky essay, “Between Two Worlds,” in which he depicts the transition from seminary to congregation as nothing less than an unavoidable collision.  Seminaries, according to Willimon, “labor under a growing disconnect between the graduates they are producing and the leadership needs of churches these graduates are serving.  This disjunction causes friction in and sometimes defeat of [sic] the transition between seminary and church for new pastors.” (277) The remainder of his essay, which should have been the outline for his piece, is a list of ten things every beginning pastor should know.  Classic Willimon. Tony Robinson’s essay explicitly lifts up the skill of “contemplation-in-action,” a theme that speaks directly to the difference between becoming wise through experience and being hollowed out by it.  Several essays (especially by Michael Jinkins and Loren Meade) demonstrate how much learning to be a pastors is dependent upon cultivating an appreciation for the wisdom embedded in the laity and developing the relationships that will mediate that wisdom in the course of one’s pastoral work. The practice of preaching is identified most often as the place of greatest challenge in taking up the pastoral life.  Ray Anderson relates how he “was caught in the headlights, so to speak, by the luminous faces of those who turned toward me seeking the person of God, not merely mental constructs about him.” (29) He goes on to relate how he learned the language of his people without sacrificing the intellectual depth gained in seminary. Stephanie Paulsell makes a wonderful contrast between her experience of writing an academic paper and her experience of writing a sermon.  In the academic paper, she writes, “I lift myself carefully hand over hand up the rungs of my evidence into an argument meant to convince.” In sermon writing, however, “It is more like lowering a ladder into the dark and feeling around until I touch something solid.  Gradually I learn to trust that if I follow a word, a phrase, a connection that strikes me, something wholly unexpected, but possibly worthwhile might happen.” (47) She regards preaching as a mysterious undertaking and experiences it as “the most exhilarating and the most utterly deflating work I’ve ever tried to do.” (47) Narrating her own experience of spiritual and intellectual drought common to those who preach with any regularity, especially to the newly initiated, Paulsell writes, “I fall into a trough and cannot climb out for weeks and weeks. What am I doing?  Why is anyone listening?  What in God’s name can it mean to preach?” (48) For Paulsell, this is not a problem to be resolved—it is an experience intrinsic to the demand of being a preacher.  However, in the face of such persistent questions, more needs to be said about how one remains alert to such questions without being overwhelmed or undermined by them. While many essays touch upon the essential messiness and untidiness of ministry in congregations, there are two essays that give us especially helpful insight into how to rightly appreciate and navigate these quotidian realities.  The first is by Craig Barnes who is one of the few contributors who can lay claim to actually being a pastor in a local congregation (the only other author able to do so is Earl Palmer).  Even though he now teaches regularly in a seminary, Barnes’ primary vocational identity and domain of practice is the life of the congregation—specifically, Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.  His essay, “The Meandering Ministry,” is an account of his journey back to the beginning.  He recalls that his “biggest surprise after leaving seminary” was the dawning realization that “effective pastoral work in a congregation is impossible to measure.” (104) Looking back, he can now see that much of his ministry was characterized by a yearning to escape the ‘meandering’ circularity of pastoral life that he encountered from his earliest days of ministry.  It was not until he left the pastoral ministry for the more ordered, ‘linear’ life of the academy that he discovered how deeply formed he was by and for the peculiar shape of the pastoral life. He now regards his short-lived departure from the pastoral life for the academy as his need for “a break from the meandering ministry” and “really just an effort to think about being a pastor without the bother of actually being one.” (110) I know many pastors embarking on their third decade of ministry who will resonate deeply with Barnes’ loss of wonder amidst the wandering.  He tells us that his return to the pastoral life was paved by a realization “that my calling has been only to wander through the desert with the people I have vowed to love, pointing out the manna and the thin stream that flows along the way.  That journey is never linear or easily measured….watching faith develop is a long, slow, meandering way to spend one’s life.  It is also a far more wonderful life than I could have ever imagined.” (109) One of the reasons Barnes’ essay is so compelling is that he reveals how his transition into ministry was left unresolved for decades and how, only now, in the midst of his third decade of ministry, he is finding his place and making his peace.  It is not accidental that this sense of place coincides with his reengagement with the academy.  What has been lost to the academy and to congregations by the failure of both these domains to make the bridged life that Barnes has carved out for himself such rare achievement for practitioners? The second essay that uses the quotidian reality of pastoral life as its point of departure is Earl Palmer’s, “Sustaining the Pastoral Life.” His essay centers on one of the most important and enduring discoveries he made about ministry:  “Most pastors have been given what I call the gift of time; that is, the privilege of organizing time with more flexibility that those in most other professions.  As each of us knows, however, this gift of time has its own snares, particularly for those who are not self starters, or who allow the hours of the week to confuse themselves into a random jumble of low quality segments.” (181) He then proceeds to advise the reader on how to embrace this freedom from which far too many pastors have sought to escape.  In my experience, a sure sign that a pastor is in escape mode is the claim that he or she has no time.  Palmer helps us see how the ordering of time lies close to the heart of keeping one’s bearings amidst the meanderings of pastoral life and work.  He talks of the importance of thinking, first, in terms of weeks (vs. days or months or years).  Of course, he stands on solid biblical footing here.  He goes on to discuss the importance of cultivating weekly rhythms of work, rest, worship, and play.  Perhaps the moment of in the book where the deep struggle that often plagues beginning pastors is sounded with crystal clarity comes in the final essay.  Reflecting on one of the lowest moments that led to his resignation from his first call, the editor of the collection, Allan Hugh Cole, Jr., relates how he moved from “strong feelings isolation, then to boredom, and thereafter to a kind of vocational disorientation, I became restless in my calling, disillusioned with my pastoral life, and probably a bit depressed as well.” (289) I lift out this description because it witnesses to the kind of struggle I hear often from beginning pastors.  To be sure, many beginning pastors find the pastoral life to be a most congenial, exhilarating, energizing, and captivating experience.  But the kind of struggle that Cole names is not uncommon.  The remainder of his essay, unfortunately, fails to connect his experience to habits and practices that helped him to address this kind of struggle.  The lessons he proceeds to pass along are the importance of maintaining sensitivity to feelings, of developing a theology of suffering and death, and of cultivating a sense of humor.  All well and good.  But, having named so well the valley of vocational despair too many beginning pastors experience, I was ready to learn more of how he navigated his way through. Given my conversations with hundreds of beginning pastors of the past several years, I could not help but hear their voices in the background as I made my way through these essays.  While there was much to be found in these pages that would resonate with them, and while there is plenty of wisdom to draw from these wells of experience, there were several key themes I have heard from beginning pastors that were absent or only addressed in passing.  For example, beginning pastors speak eloquently and at great length about the importance of friendships with peers in ministry and of relationships with mentors.  Only three essays develop this relational dimension at any length and even in those, the talk of friendship and mentors is offered more as advice than as personal testimony.  The unique way the pastoral life interweaves the spheres of public and private, personal and communal, family life and work life, while illustrated in the personal narrative of a few contributors, it is considered at length only by Bonnie Miller McLemore—and even there, her context is the academic life.  Only Palmer takes up the challenge of ordering time.  Sitting with a group of young, beginning pastors a few months ago, they shared openly of their struggle to know exactly what constituted good and productive work given all the things they could be doing at any given point in time.  I think these absences have something to do with the very odd fact that in all but four cases (J. Philip Wogaman is recently retired from pastoral work and William Willimon now serves as a Bishop) the contributors have left pastoral ministry for the environs of the academy or, in two cases, to serve as consultants to pastors and congregations.  Even as I write that last sentence, I can hear the uproar of those ordained for ministry who have left pastoral ministry in local congregations, claiming that their work is no less ministry than that which takes place in the life of congregations.  No argument there. However, I think we can all agree that ministry in the academy is not to be equated with the shape and character of pastoral ministry in the life of congregations.  It would be an odd thing indeed if we called upon pastors, who may have once served in the academy in a professorial role, to reflect on how they transitioned from student to professor.  No, doubt they would have something interesting to say, but it would be odd, nonetheless. Why is it not assumed that a key qualification for reflecting back on one’s initial years of pastoral ministry would not be that one has remained in ministry over the course of ones’ life?  Why should we trust as wisdom reflections on the early years of ministry provided by those who chose to exit that very same practice—some within a very few years of entering it? Left unanswered in every essay, except Barnes, is why these folks chose to leave pastoral ministry.  I would love to see this same group reflect on why they chose to leave pastoral ministry for ministry in the academy alongside a collection of essays by those who decided to remain as pastors in local congregation even though they had at one time or another contemplated a move to the academy. Let me put my cards on the table: For all its goodness (and I do think this volume is worth the read by transitioned and transitioning pastors alike), this volume betrays a deep and pervasive bias in the academy against the capacity of practitioners to reflect meaningfully upon their work.  It is assumed that those who dwell in the academy are the experts when it comes to this kind of reflective work—it requires the work of those formally trained to be ‘Practical Theologians’.  However unintentionally, this volume implies that the pastor who is now 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years in the ministry is the least capable of reflecting back meaningfully upon his or her experience of transitioning from the halls of academe to the terrain of congregational life.  It is a fair assumption that those who have served week in and week out, year after year, in the vineyard of the congregation, are the best qualified to reflect upon their earliest years of ministry and upon how they drew forward into the practice of ministry and extended the formation for ministry they received in seminary.  Is it not reasonable to assume that those many years of practice concentrate one’s reflection rather than clutter one’s perception? Until all our talk about valuing the knowledge that is embedded in practice and embodied in the practitioner expresses itself in genuine regard for the witness and intelligence of pastors, the divide between academy and congregation will persist and deepen.  A Review by David J. Wood of, From Midterms to Ministry: Practical Theologians on Pastoral Beginnings, Allan Hugh Cole, Jr., editor.  Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2008 Over the past eight years, I have had the privilege of serving as the Program Coordinator for Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry grants program.  This work has helped me to see fruitfulness of attending more closely to those who are in their earliest years of ministry.  When this program began back in 2001, “transition into ministry” was little more than the name of a program.  Now, as indicated by this volume, “transition into ministry” has become a category of reflection and inquiry.  This evolution of attentiveness is all good in my estimation.  Midterms to Ministry is a collection of twenty-four essays by those who have been ordained to ministry (the majority from within the PCUSA, several United Methodist, and one National Baptist, and the rest from other mainline denominations) reflecting on their individual experiences of the transition from the preparation for ministry in the seminary to the actual practice of ministry in the congregation.  The book is intended to be a collection of distilled wisdom from those who have already made this challenging transition for those who are themselves in the midst of, or soon to be engaged in, making it.  The result is a collection of essays that fall, roughly, into one or more of the following categories: a personal memoir of one’s initiation into ministry with a summary of lessons learned, best advice for new graduates on how to begin ministry well, a primer for faculty on how to prepare students for this transition, a defense of the distinctive formation gained in seminary, a critique of the seminary’s failure to prepare students for the realities of ministry. While there are “nuggets of wisdom” to be found in these pages, this collection would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand that held the contributors more closely to the editors’ intent.  For example, some write as if their primary audience is the academy and those engaged in the preparing students for ministry (the essays by Jones & Jones, Paulsell, Doehring, and Miller McLemore).  Some barely touch upon personal experience, while others never move beyond it.  The most compelling contributions use the narrative of personal experience as a context for conveying key insights for anyone making the transition from seminary to congregation.  Tom Long’s essay, “The Essential Untidiness of Ministry,” is essentially an argument, with engaging personal anecdotes along the way, for the appropriate regard for the essential curriculum for ministry resident in both the seminary and the congregation.  These domains of learning are not to be opposed or conflated.  Rather, he concludes, “Good ministry is found…where pastors stand with one foot firmly planted in their theological education and the other foot just as firmly planted in the parish, and allow this resulting tension to shape their pastoral practice.” (5) This is all well and good, but Long is short on advice for the transitioning pastor on how one actually succeeds in keeping one foot planted firmly in the shifting sands of congregational life and the other on the more predictable ground of the academy without suffering a serious groin injury in the process.  At the other end of the spectrum there is Will Willimon’s somewhat cranky essay, “Between Two Worlds,” in which he depicts the transition from seminary to congregation as nothing less than an unavoidable collision.  Seminaries, according to Willimon, “labor under a growing disconnect between the graduates they are producing and the leadership needs of churches these graduates are serving.  This disjunction causes friction in and sometimes defeat of [sic] the transition between seminary and church for new pastors.” (277) The remainder of his essay, which should have been the outline for his piece, is a list of ten things every beginning pastor should know.  Classic Willimon. Tony Robinson’s essay explicitly lifts up the skill of “contemplation-in-action,” a theme that speaks directly to the difference between becoming wise through experience and being hollowed out by it.  Several essays (especially by Michael Jinkins and Loren Meade) demonstrate how much learning to be a pastors is dependent upon cultivating an appreciation for the wisdom embedded in the laity and developing the relationships that will mediate that wisdom in the course of one’s pastoral work. The practice of preaching is identified most often as the place of greatest challenge in taking up the pastoral life.  Ray Anderson relates how he “was caught in the headlights, so to speak, by the luminous faces of those who turned toward me seeking the person of God, not merely mental constructs about him.” (29) He goes on to relate how he learned the language of his people without sacrificing the intellectual depth gained in seminary. Stephanie Paulsell makes a wonderful contrast between her experience of writing an academic paper and her experience of writing a sermon.  In the academic paper, she writes, “I lift myself carefully hand over hand up the rungs of my evidence into an argument meant to convince.” In sermon writing, however, “It is more like lowering a ladder into the dark and feeling around until I touch something solid.  Gradually I learn to trust that if I follow a word, a phrase, a connection that strikes me, something wholly unexpected, but possibly worthwhile might happen.” (47) She regards preaching as a mysterious undertaking and experiences it as “the most exhilarating and the most utterly deflating work I’ve ever tried to do.” (47) Narrating her own experience of spiritual and intellectual drought common to those who preach with any regularity, especially to the newly initiated, Paulsell writes, “I fall into a trough and cannot climb out for weeks and weeks. What am I doing?  Why is anyone listening?  What in God’s name can it mean to preach?” (48) For Paulsell, this is not a problem to be resolved—it is an experience intrinsic to the demand of being a preacher.  However, in the face of such persistent questions, more needs to be said about how one remains alert to such questions without being overwhelmed or undermined by them. While many essays touch upon the essential messiness and untidiness of ministry in congregations, there are two essays that give us especially helpful insight into how to rightly appreciate and navigate these quotidian realities.  The first is by Craig Barnes who is one of the few contributors who can lay claim to actually being a pastor in a local congregation (the only other author able to do so is Earl Palmer).  Even though he now teaches regularly in a seminary, Barnes’ primary vocational identity and domain of practice is the life of the congregation—specifically, Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.  His essay, “The Meandering Ministry,” is an account of his journey back to the beginning.  He recalls that his “biggest surprise after leaving seminary” was the dawning realization that “effective pastoral work in a congregation is impossible to measure.” (104) Looking back, he can now see that much of his ministry was characterized by a yearning to escape the ‘meandering’ circularity of pastoral life that he encountered from his earliest days of ministry.  It was not until he left the pastoral ministry for the more ordered, ‘linear’ life of the academy that he discovered how deeply formed he was by and for the peculiar shape of the pastoral life. He now regards his short-lived departure from the pastoral life for the academy as his need for “a break from the meandering ministry” and “really just an effort to think about being a pastor without the bother of actually being one.” (110) I know many pastors embarking on their third decade of ministry who will resonate deeply with Barnes’ loss of wonder amidst the wandering.  He tells us that his return to the pastoral life was paved by a realization “that my calling has been only to wander through the desert with the people I have vowed to love, pointing out the manna and the thin stream that flows along the way.  That journey is never linear or easily measured….watching faith develop is a long, slow, meandering way to spend one’s life.  It is also a far more wonderful life than I could have ever imagined.” (109) One of the reasons Barnes’ essay is so compelling is that he reveals how his transition into ministry was left unresolved for decades and how, only now, in the midst of his third decade of ministry, he is finding his place and making his peace.  It is not accidental that this sense of place coincides with his reengagement with the academy.  What has been lost to the academy and to congregations by the failure of both these domains to make the bridged life that Barnes has carved out for himself such rare achievement for practitioners? The second essay that uses the quotidian reality of pastoral life as its point of departure is Earl Palmer’s, “Sustaining the Pastoral Life.” His essay centers on one of the most important and enduring discoveries he made about ministry:  “Most pastors have been given what I call the gift of time; that is, the privilege of organizing time with more flexibility that those in most other professions.  As each of us knows, however, this gift of time has its own snares, particularly for those who are not self starters, or who allow the hours of the week to confuse themselves into a random jumble of low quality segments.” (181) He then proceeds to advise the reader on how to embrace this freedom from which far too many pastors have sought to escape.  In my experience, a sure sign that a pastor is in escape mode is the claim that he or she has no time.  Palmer helps us see how the ordering of time lies close to the heart of keeping one’s bearings amidst the meanderings of pastoral life and work.  He talks of the importance of thinking, first, in terms of weeks (vs. days or months or years).  Of course, he stands on solid biblical footing here.  He goes on to discuss the importance of cultivating weekly rhythms of work, rest, worship, and play.  Perhaps the moment of in the book where the deep struggle that often plagues beginning pastors is sounded with crystal clarity comes in the final essay.  Reflecting on one of the lowest moments that led to his resignation from his first call, the editor of the collection, Allan Hugh Cole, Jr., relates how he moved from “strong feelings isolation, then to boredom, and thereafter to a kind of vocational disorientation, I became restless in my calling, disillusioned with my pastoral life, and probably a bit depressed as well.” (289) I lift out this description because it witnesses to the kind of struggle I hear often from beginning pastors.  To be sure, many beginning pastors find the pastoral life to be a most congenial, exhilarating, energizing, and captivating experience.  But the kind of struggle that Cole names is not uncommon.  The remainder of his essay, unfortunately, fails to connect his experience to habits and practices that helped him to address this kind of struggle.  The lessons he proceeds to pass along are the importance of maintaining sensitivity to feelings, of developing a theology of suffering and death, and of cultivating a sense of humor.  All well and good.  But, having named so well the valley of vocational despair too many beginning pastors experience, I was ready to learn more of how he navigated his way through. Given my conversations with hundreds of beginning pastors of the past several years, I could not help but hear their voices in the background as I made my way through these essays.  While there was much to be found in these pages that would resonate with them, and while there is plenty of wisdom to draw from these wells of experience, there were several key themes I have heard from beginning pastors that were absent or only addressed in passing.  For example, beginning pastors speak eloquently and at great length about the importance of friendships with peers in ministry and of relationships with mentors.  Only three essays develop this relational dimension at any length and even in those, the talk of friendship and mentors is offered more as advice than as personal testimony.  The unique way the pastoral life interweaves the spheres of public and private, personal and communal, family life and work life, while illustrated in the personal narrative of a few contributors, it is considered at length only by Bonnie Miller McLemore—and even there, her context is the academic life.  Only Palmer takes up the challenge of ordering time.  Sitting with a group of young, beginning pastors a few months ago, they shared openly of their struggle to know exactly what constituted good and productive work given all the things they could be doing at any given point in time.  I think these absences have something to do with the very odd fact that in all but four cases (J. Philip Wogaman is recently retired from pastoral work and William Willimon now serves as a Bishop) the contributors have left pastoral ministry for the environs of the academy or, in two cases, to serve as consultants to pastors and congregations.  Even as I write that last sentence, I can hear the uproar of those ordained for ministry who have left pastoral ministry in local congregations, claiming that their work is no less ministry than that which takes place in the life of congregations.  No argument there. However, I think we can all agree that ministry in the academy is not to be equated with the shape and character of pastoral ministry in the life of congregations.  It would be an odd thing indeed if we called upon pastors, who may have once served in the academy in a professorial role, to reflect on how they transitioned from student to professor.  No, doubt they would have something interesting to say, but it would be odd, nonetheless. Why is it not assumed that a key qualification for reflecting back on one’s initial years of pastoral ministry would not be that one has remained in ministry over the course of ones’ life?  Why should we trust as wisdom reflections on the early years of ministry provided by those who chose to exit that very same practice—some within a very few years of entering it? Left unanswered in every essay, except Barnes, is why these folks chose to leave pastoral ministry.  I would love to see this same group reflect on why they chose to leave pastoral ministry for ministry in the academy alongside a collection of essays by those who decided to remain as pastors in local congregation even though they had at one time or another contemplated a move to the academy. Let me put my cards on the table: For all its goodness (and I do think this volume is worth the read by transitioned and transitioning pastors alike), this volume betrays a deep and pervasive bias in the academy against the capacity of practitioners to reflect meaningfully upon their work.  It is assumed that those who dwell in the academy are the experts when it comes to this kind of reflective work—it requires the work of those formally trained to be ‘Practical Theologians’.  However unintentionally, this volume implies that the pastor who is now 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years in the ministry is the least capable of reflecting back meaningfully upon his or her experience of transitioning from the halls of academe to the terrain of congregational life.  It is a fair assumption that those who have served week in and week out, year after year, in the vineyard of the congregation, are the best qualified to reflect upon their earliest years of ministry and upon how they drew forward into the practice of ministry and extended the formation for ministry they received in seminary.  Is it not reasonable to assume that those many years of practice concentrate one’s reflection rather than clutter one’s perception? Until all our talk about valuing the knowledge that is embedded in practice and embodied in the practitioner expresses itself in genuine regard for the witness and intelligence of pastors, the divide between academy and congregation will persist and deepen.  2009-04-20T19:04:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/easters_consequences/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/easters_consequences/#When:14:13:00Z Did your Easter sermon say anything? Unlike most of you reading this, I was not leading a congregation in worship this past Sunday.  I was with my wife and daughter spending a few days on the coast of Maine.  Easter Sunday morning, we attended a local Episcopal church. The Priest, in his homily, was afraid to say too much about Resurrection--and instead waxed on about the flowers, the chocolates, the signs of Springtime, the festal foods, the music--including the good ‘ole Baptist hymns they sang at the community sunrise service (which made me wonder--as a Baptist myself--Why is it that Episcopalians always sound condescending when they talk about Baptists?  Perhaps for the same reason that Baptists always sound derogatory when they talk about Episcopalians...but I digress).  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.  Blogging 2009-04-15T14:13:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/preaching_in_tsunomic_times/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/preaching_in_tsunomic_times/#When:16:26:00Z Preaching in a time of waiting. “We are like vacationers on the beach just before a tsunami hits.  All we see is that the ocean has receded and suddenly there is a lot more sand.” I came across this image in the New York Times this past summer in the midst of a review of the new hit AMC series, “Mad Men.” The image has haunted me ever since—especially as the dire warnings and predictions of economic depression mount. It does seem that the cultural sands are shifting and things seem eerily quiet as we wait to see where all this is headed or what is headed our way. As the Sundays of Advent approach, it seems there is much to be considered and reconsidered.  There is much apocalyptic talk out there these days and, as you well know, that is the language of Advent. Advent 1 Mark 13: 24-37—What is the meaning of wakefulness, alertness in times like these? Advent 2 Mark 1: 1-8—How do we hear and respond to the voice(s) crying in the wilderness of our day? I Peter 3: 8-15—“Since all these things will be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness?” Advent 3 John 1: 6-28—What does it mean to be a witness testifying to the light? I Thess. 5:12-28—There is no better passage to look to for instruction on what is required of us in the living of these days Advent 4 Luke 1: 26-38—In that time, in this time, in every time…the posture required of us: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Preaching is always heard best when it resonates with the anxieties and concerns we bring with us into the sanctuary.  But that is just the first step.  Preaching must also seek to in corporate those concerns and anxieties into the larger and longer story of the good news.  This is not to trivialize or minimize the present crisis, but to use the present crisis as an occasion for seeing our lives anew in light of the gospel.  That is not easy or simple.  2008-11-28T16:26:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/pastoral_conversation_at_its_best/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/pastoral_conversation_at_its_best/#When:16:46:01Z Pastors discuss their struggle with “free” time in their lives in the ministry. I had a very interesting conversation with a group of younger pastors—all of whom where in their first years of ministry in local congregations.  We were talking about the things they are still trying to figure out about the pastoral life.  One of the principal issues they raised had to do with how they spend their time.  What was so interesting about this part of the conversation is the direction it did NOT go in.  They did not fall all over themselves talking about how busy they were.  They did not go on about not realizing how much time it takes to do this job.  This was not because these folks were not busy, earnest, or deeply dedicated to their ministries.  Quite the contrary.  What they acknowledged in the course of our conversation, albeit reluctantly, was how much “free” time they have on their hands.  By “free time” they did not mean they were without something to do.  Rather, they were describing the experience of being free to choose what they were going to do without anyone demanding that they must do so and so.  It was part and parcel of the aloneness that is so much a part of the everyday life of a pastor—especially in “solo” pastor congregations. The went on to acknowledge that when they did do what they determined needed to be done, it was more often than not unclear if they had done anything worthwhile.  They all agreed that one of the chief tendencies in dealing with this lack of clarity and “freedom” was to overcompensate by “working” overtime.  This was the first conversation I have been in with a group of pastors where the burden of the freedom and the reality of aloneness that constitutes the architecture of everyday life in pastoral ministry was freely acknowledged and talked about openly.  This interaction reminded me why there needs to be much more conversation about self-regulation and self-generation when it comes to ordering one’s life and work as a pastor.  Furthermore, it was a reminder why pastors talking together truthfully and transparently is so crucial to the cultivation of excellence in ministry. 2008-11-24T16:46:01-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/preaching_economics/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/preaching_economics/#When:15:15:00Z Are we responding to the economic crisis from the pulpit? The economic crisis we are in has been ballooning over the past couple of months.  I have yet to hear a sermon that addresses the anxiety that is raging these days.  A few weeks ago I was in a congregation, a large evangelical congregation.  The text for the day was from Philippians 3, where Paul proclaims his re-valuation of all things that matter in light of knowing Christ—his embrace of suffering the loss of all things, prized things he has now come to count as dung.  Not a mention of living faithfully midst the turbulence of the times when assets can so quickly become liabilities.  Last Sunday I was in an Episcopal congregation on the coast of Maine.  The Lectionary text was from Matthew 25, the parable of the Talents.  Rather than picking up on the condemnation of burying assets for safekeeping out of fear rather than investing them wisely (even if conservatively), the Rector chose to reflect on the Collect of the day which pointed to the exhortation to read Scripture.  I have been in an American Baptist Church not too far from my home for two Sundays—not a mention of things economic. It seems we, the Church, have much to answer for in these times and certainly much to speak to.  At the very least we have to confess that we have cooperated with this debt-based economy.  Our readiness to address finances tends to coincide with our need to pledge the budget for the fiscal year to come or to ramp up for the looming capital campaign.  The connection to debt and sin is unmistakable in the New Testament, particularly the Gospels.  In the mind of Jesus, there was a correspondence between the experience of enslavement to sin and the experience of indebtedness.  This does not necessarily lead to an equation between debt and sin—but it does provide an interesting point of correlation worthy of exploration in a time when the dangers intrinsic to debt are being elaborated on as never before in the society at large. If you have a sermon (perhaps one you preached or you heard) that addresses the current economic crisis in an effective, evocative way, send it along ( dwood56@earthlink.net ) and we’ll post it on the site.  Preaching economics is always important…but especially in these times. 2008-11-19T15:15:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/funereal_confessions_and_professions/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/funereal_confessions_and_professions/#When:23:17:00Z Thoughts and reflections about death, dying, and the funeral business. A Confession: over my 25 years of ministry I have harbored a low-grade aversion for Funeral Homes and Funeral Directors. This has nothing to do with an avoidance of death. It has everything to do with the abdication of the church when it comes to the aftermath of death. Corpses, coffins (or the preferred term, according to my Funeral Director colleagues, “caskets”) and graveyards (or, less offensively, “cemeteries”) have become the domain of Funeral Directors and their Homes. All too often, the message delivered from these death experts was, “We’ll take it from here and call you when we need you.” This feeling that I was treading on someone else’s turf was made all the more plain when the Funeral Director handed me the honorarium he (and it was a “he” with one exception in 25 years) had negotiated as part of the funeral package.   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/. Blogging 2008-04-21T23:17:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/cancer_and_pastoral_care/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/cancer_and_pastoral_care/#When:15:37:00Z Some reflections on providing pastoral care for those living and dying with cancer. Cancer is one of the most critical pastoral care issues a pastor will face in ministry.  To say “cancer” is to invoke an incredibly diverse and unpredictable field of situations that require a capacity for improvisation by anyone seeking to be pastorally present.  My mother died of cancer in March of 2004.  She was 75.  For me, it was the first time I was in a situation of caring for someone very close to me who was dying for whom I was not “Pastor.” As you can imagine, it was one of the most formative experiences of my life.  Naturally, I drew upon my many years of experience of being pastorally present to cancer patients.  And yet, I gained a whole new perspective on what it is like to be a family member in that situation.  For the final weeks, we did home hospice which was an education in caring for the dying like none other. Last night I watched a good portion of the PBS program, The Truth About Cancer.  I would recommend it, highly, to anyone in pastoral ministry seeking to grow their understanding of what it means to live and die with cancer.  Here is the link that will allow you to view it online. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/takeonestep/cancer/video-ch_01.html This program would also be an excellent resource to use in an Adult Education class in a church school program. There is a follow up commentary with Linda Ellerbee and several physicians—they are all cancer survivors.  It is also very good.  You will find the link to this program,Take One Step: A Conversation About Cancer with Linda Ellerbee, on the site listed above. This kind of learning is never done. 2008-04-17T15:37:00-06:00 http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/on_being_and_becoming_a_pastor_how_does_anyone_learn_to_do_this_job/ http://www.transitionintoministry.org/index.php/site/on_being_and_becoming_a_pastor_how_does_anyone_learn_to_do_this_job/#When:14:49:00Z How does anyone cultivate the competency sufficient to the complexity of pastoral life?  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. Blogging 2008-04-16T14:49:00-06:00