Posted in Calling
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
October 06, 2007
Encouraging the Young in MinistryImagine a church where virtually all the clergy leaders are older adults, a church increasingly unable to connect with emerging generations and youth culture, a church with fewer and fewer children and youth. Unfortunately, we don’t have to stretch our imaginations very far to envision this scenario. Recent research by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership reveals that less than 5 percent of United Methodist elders are under 35 today, compared to 15 percent in 1985, and over 20 percent in the early 1970s. This trend is consistent with many other mainline denominations.
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Posted in Calling
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
October 01, 2007
In our Vocation and Culture feature, Patricia Hendricks asks pastors and other leaders to imagine what it might be like to engage young people in discussions where they, not we, supply the agenda. This, she posits, is where the Spirit of God is leading the church. Perhaps imagination and surprise are things most needed in our life today as the body of Christ. More than anything, we seem to be aware of the dilemmas and double binds that dog us, individually and collectively. We feel a great need to pass on the treasure of faith to young people, but, instead, they come to us bearing their own story of spiritual pilgrimage and asking us to recognize the Christ already active in their lives.
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Posted in Calling
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
July 26, 2007
Mentoring Success in Congregations: It's Multi-Vocal
Highlights from Congregations as 'Multivocal' Mentoring Cultures: Comparative Research among Three Protestant Denominations" – a study by Penny Marler (Samford University), Charles E. Stokes (University of Texas, Austin) and Kristin Taylor Curtis (Samford University).What makes for strong mentoring congregations for those discerning a call to ministry?
A recent survey conducted by the Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence at Samford University highlights several characteristics. The Center asked for responses from Southern Baptist (150), Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) (174), and Episcopal Church (62) congregations in Alabama.
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Posted in Calling
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
July 21, 2007
If you can imagine yourself doing anything else, you shouldn't pursue parish ministry." I recall hearing this more than once when I was considering parish ministry, and it gave me serious and long pause. After all, I could see myself serving quite well without being ordained. I eventually concluded that this type of thinking unnecessarily elevates ordained ministry over lay ministry. If I'm going to take the ministry of the baptized seriously, there is no reason for me to put my own perceived call on a pedestal. The call to ordained ministry is not separate from our call as baptized
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Posted in Calling
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
July 16, 2007
Ministry Inquiry Groupsby Adolf HansenSt. Luke's United Methodist Church - Indianapolis, INPreparing Children for the InvitationBy Susan JohnsonHyde Park Union Church - Chicago IL
Ministry Inquiry Groupsby Adolf HansenSt. Luke's United Methodist Church - Indianapolis, INWhen I became a member of the St. Luke's staff in the fall of 2003, the senior pastor asked me to take responsibility for meeting with those who were discerning their call to ordained ministry. At the time, there were five. Three had already applied to seminary and two were thinking about it but none had started the denominational process for candidacy. Then, as I was getting acquainted with people in the congregation, I met three additional members who were interested in exploring ministry, though ordination was not the only option they were considering. As the year drew to a close, I remembered that the expectation in the United Methodist Church was for a pastor to meet with an inquiring candidate for nine sessions. I did the math and immediately realized it would take 72 individual meetings to fulfill this expectation.
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Posted in Calling
Scholar-in-Residence
July 11, 2007
In a collection called The Book of Questions, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda asks "Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world?" I encountered this line in 1993 while I was a youth pastor preparing to take a group of North American teens to the Atacama Desert in Chile for their first international mission trip. Emily, then 16, grasped this line and refused to let it go. It became the group's oft-whispered mantra.
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Posted in Calling
Senior Pastor, Plymouth Congregational Church, Lawrence, KS
July 06, 2007
The longer I have been in ministry, the more I have wondered about "passing on" parish ministry to the next generation. Will the church have an ample supply of pastors for the church's future needs? Where will these pastors come from? As I had been active in my local church as a youth (my grandfather was a Congregational minister) I realized my experience there helped to shape and form my own call to ministry. This experience, coupled with common sense, told me that the local church has been and will continue to be the place that "plants the seed" for people to hear the call to ministry.Our success in raising up future leaders will depend, in part, upon our capability to articulate a radical idea of call - that is, a call shaped by and surrendered to God.
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